Looking back at seven and a half* editions of Bringing your meetings and workshops online: Confident, Creative & Convincing! we can say, ‘Wow, what an incredible journey.”
A journey with many unexpected turns. We learnt a lot on the fly. And we have the ‘proof of the pudding’: Online workshops work.
It started with a crazy dream.
We, Nadia and Corinne, wanted to collaborate around the globe without boarding an airplane. We wanted to show how human connection can be strengthened and nourished even when ‘only’ collaborating remotely. Our motivation was inclusion, diversity and a contribution to the reduction of the carbon footprint. We wanted to travel less ourselves and saw potential for others to do so too while still having meaningful meetings and workshops and experiencing strong collaboration. We always had the climate on the radar.
Throughout 2019, the idea of doing ‘something online’ was bouncing back and forth between the two of us.
We developed first rough ideas over coffee chats on Zoom and joint brainstorming in Slack.
In September 2019, we got serious, we launched an inquiry process with friends and colleagues. We wanted to find out about their current online practice and understand their needs and challenges.
Based on this encouraging harvest we sketched out our prototype. We vividly remember the day in November 2019, when we sat on the floor in Corinne’s apartment shuffling post-it notes with the key take-aways from our conversations. We were looking for patterns and the red thread for our workshop narrative. The “3 Cs” confident, creative and convincing in our title were born.
On 31 Jan 2020 our invitation went viral. We offered 16 special friendship tickets in the hope to attract enough curiosity so we could run our first workshop.
We wondered: Is the problem big enough?
The boost came from elsewhere.
We got some unexpected acceleration.
Covid-19 was swapping over from China to the rest of the world. Cases were exploding in Italy moving up north to the rest of Europe A new word was hanging in the air: ‘Lockdown’. On March 10, the day after the MP of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, announced the lockdown we held our very first online session. Fully booked.
From there on we were flying. Metaphorically.
What followed were seven more editions and an amazing boost of meeting online. There was lots of goodwill in the air to experiment. And gratefulness for what was possible.
All in all a harvest we could not have imagined; the collective learning curve was steep. What stood out for us was the human and creative side of bringing workshops online.
After wondering from time to time if people would still be interested in another edition of our training, we got it:
Online is here to stay.
Having a meeting, workshop or training online is no longer plan B. Coming together online is a choice and a grown-up option of how to collaborate.
And collaboration is a channel richer.
It is not online or in person. It is both. This opens up the possibility of combining the best of synchronous and asynchronous work, moments of in-person and online collaboration. We can plan processes, inclusive, flexible and creative.
We are grateful that we dared to put our idea out into the world and that we invested into our dream. We are grateful for all the people who joined us and all our network partners who supported us in this amazing journey. We have been incredibly lucky to meet so many wonderful people along our journey.
A big thank you!
*We just started our 8th edition on August 30.
Image by TeeFarm from Pixabay