The cards provide the language.
The conversation does the work.
Every workplace has two versions of itself. There’s the official version, with its organisation charts, strategies and carefully defined roles. And then there’s the version everyone actually experiences: the unwritten rules, the meetings that create three more meetings and the people quietly keeping everything running.
We kept noticing the same behaviours everywhere we went. Different organisations, different industries, entirely different people, yet remarkably familiar patterns. So we started giving them names.
You’ve met the Good Ideas Fairy, whose brilliant ideas tend to become someone else’s problem. You’ve survived the Seagull Manager. You’ve probably thanked your lucky stars for the Cat Herder holding it all together. And every now and then, you’ve witnessed a Unicorn appear, sprinkle a little magic and somehow make the impossible happen.
You can picture them already, can’t you? You might even recognise a little of yourself.
What started as a bit of fun became surprisingly useful. Once we’d named a behaviour, we could recognise it instantly, compare stories and spot it elsewhere. Better still, recognising the same patterns meant we could draw on what we’d learnt in other organisations: what worked, what made things worse and how to approach familiar challenges without starting from scratch.
Eventually, we thought there might be a game in all this. And because the internet loves cats, cats it was.
Corporate Cats grew from there. By putting a cat on the table instead of pointing at a person, we give people room to laugh, disagree, share stories and talk about things that might otherwise go unsaid. Sometimes it’s just a good laugh. Sometimes it sparks a conversation that changes things.
Once you can name a pattern, you can start talking about it. And once you can talk about it, you can start doing something about it.
This master guide provides the foundations for those conversations. We hope you enjoy playing Corporate Cats as much as we enjoy designing it.
