It was actually pretty good.
All right, the room was tiny, only slightly bigger than my cubicle back in the office, and in the basement. Of course, Edinburgh is a strange town like that - basement on one side can often be second storey on the other side, but this was just a basement.
As soon as the event started I was worried. We were told that after each session we would have to change seats so that we didn't interact with the same small group for all the tasks. I wasn't expecting tasks. It ended up not being too bad though and by the final day I was actively participating despite having no actual experience in the subject matter.
Certainly the work group idea was very useful - almost all of the presentations had an interactive part "Any ideas as to what we did next?" "What could have caused this?" which meant things settled into your head better than just listening does. The final day was pretty much a single exercise. We were introduced to an oilfield and had to suggest how it could be developed. Once we had our ideas we were told how it actually was developed and split into teams based on our 'experience'. Each team was given a limited set of data and told to solve the production problems. Once each team reported the teams were shuffled so that at least one from each original team was in each new team and we were asked to make a proposal for the future of the field.
Absolutely brilliant.
As an added bonus, I got to meet up with an old pal who I hadn't seen since the end of 2001. Anne and I used to travel together when we both lived in Edinburgh. Once I moved to Troon we used to meet up once a week for lunch and gossip. However she changed job as the commuting was taking too much out of her (100 miles a day). It was good to catch up and natter on about the old place.
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