Insincere apologies for a wince-inducing pun (on this occasion my need for wordplay trumps any sense of what’s right and proper in a headline). Babel has indeed been on my mind. Let me explain. IoIC is a member of FEIEA, the European Association of Internal Communicators, which next year celebrates its 60th anniversary. Every year, FEIEA stages the FEIEA Grand Prix awards competition, which attracts entries from across Europe and which culminates in a ceremony hosted in one of the member countries. Alongside the ceremony the host association also presents a seminar on a suitably panEuropean theme. For the third time in seven years (we just love to throw a party) IoIC played host to FEIEA’s autumn events, choosing Internal Communication Crossing Cultures as the seminar’s umbrella theme.

For IoIC, Super Thursday was among the most ambitious things we’ve attempted in recent years, with five distinct events delivered back-to-back in a single day, including a ceremony to recognise this year’s crop of ‘30 under 30’ rising IC talent. We started with our annual Communicator of the Year (COTY) lunch. Presentations to the ‘IoIC Icons’ of internal communication followed. This year’s internal COTY award was made to Oxfam’s Saskia Jones and the overall COTY 2014 title to Justine Roberts, founder of Mumsnet. Reflecting the Mumsnet credo in her acceptance message, Justine gave her view of the direction of travel for communication, “Broadcast’ doesn’t happen any more. Now, everything is a dialogue, everything is a conversation. Everyone has a say now.”

After that, the afternoon got distinctly European with the start of the seminar. By this stage the balance of Brits to continentals (because we are all Europeans, despite current political currents) was about 50-50 in the room. Delegates came from throughout Europe, from the A in Austria to the Z in Switzerland and the Czech Republic, from Germany and Denmark in the north; Slovakia and Slovenia in the east, from Portugal and Italy in the south, to we British from the west. Not forgetting our Eurostar visitors from France and Belgium.

FEIEA’s business language is English and the European IC community’s proficiency in our mother tongue was audible around our one-day tower of Babel as pairs and groups and table-wide discussions shot the multinational breeze. At this point the beauty of the occasion became apparent as the seminar’s culturecrossing theme was realised not just from the seminar stage but right across the body of the room. True, there was some ‘broadcast,’ because we’d engaged our speakers to share their insights, but arising from the stimulus that they provided, everything did indeed become a conversation and everyone had a say.

In case it’s unfamiliar, the Tower of Babel appears in the Bible’s Book of Genesis, “The Lord came down to see the tower which the sons of men had built and said, ‘Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them. Let Us go down and confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.’”

Reading that, I wondered, ‘What kind of a god wouldn’t want people to understand each other?’ As Buzz Lightyear might say, “I don’t believe that deity’s ever been to communication school!”

Time to end it there. There’s always room for the last word but I’ve said enough for one year. So I leave it to the delegate from Telekom Austria who said when stepping up to receive the FEIEA Grand Prix class winner’s trophy for the best IC event for 2014, “Making internal communication is not just a job. It’s a passion.”

Steve Doswell is chief executive of IoIC