VIRTUAL WORKSHOPS

 What’s changing in the world and how can we take advantage of it?

Up to two months ago, most of us were quite reluctant, to put it diplomatically, to consider anything else than a presential approach when planning to run a workshop where we expected interaction.

After a couple of months of increasing quarantine throughout the world, while it’s still expanding in the Americas, some countries are being very cautious in the opening steps they’re undertaking.

The situation will get better, but it will take a very long time until people will trustfully travel for business again. ADP (Aéroports de Paris) was saying that they will need to regain the trust from the traveler, and that it could take until end of 2021 …

So with every week passing by, I believe more and more that what’s happening today is here to stay, it’s not just a phase. And the world we knew before, will never return (and this is not all negative).

We are facing a situation where virtual work, which does not always mean working from home, will become the new norm.

We are facing a situation that requires all of us to be flexible, to make fast decisions, to revisit the situation regularly, to be pragmatic and to rely on others, as we all have fragments of the answer in our hands.

We are facing a situation where delivering value virtually is of essence.

We are facing a situation where our customers and partners are going thru the same COVID disruption, the sense of urgency is generalized.

We are facing a situation, where collective intelligence and collaboration are of essence.

Hence, coaches are facing a situation, where one needs to transfer his/her presential expertise into a virtual mode, well knowing that it will not be a simple copy and paste operation.

To start with I’ll share some findings from an initiative, we started beginning of March within the Innovation Team of the IS division @Firmenich

Despite all the changes, the basics are not going away:

We will want and need to run the same types of workshops as before, from team meetings thru to strategic meetings and also customer meetings. And the way we will measure the success of those meetings, remains exactly the same as before COVID.

The critical factors of success also are due to remain the same, the preparation is a lot more complex than for presential workshops, as one has to take care of

·     a whole technology dimension that was not before

·     And a “gamification” side to make sure one will not loose his public after 90 minutes.

In the picture below you can see in more details which dimensions one needs to take into account when organizing workshops

To that end we have based on our experience developed a hands on training aiming at conveying everything you need to know in order to organize, execute and consolidate a virtual workshop (e.g. roadmap development, new services/products/processes, strategy development, business modeling, co-innovation, …) This training would aim at junior or more experienced coaches.

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coaches  #remotecollaboration #remotework #remoteteams #innovationculture #designthinking #workshop

Contact Bettina or myself

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