How stories flowed at a virtual offsite
Before 2020 the majority of my talks and workshops happened in-person. Then of course the world changed and just about everything moved to a virtual environment. Today 90% of my training occurs online.
Yes, there’s something special about gathering together in person, and I miss some of that buzz. Yet I continue to be impressed by the magic that can happen via Zoom or Microsoft Teams. Not being physically in the same room is no barrier to engagement, collaboration or creativity.
This week I had the privilege of running a storytelling workshop as part of an offsite for Sally's team, comprising 67 people from an area that reaches from eastern Europe to Latin America. Sally wanted to organise a responsible offsite, keeping both carbon emissions and costs down. The result was a three day experimental virtual offsite, with participants in seven office locations around the world - the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Mexico and Brazil - plus others joining remotely from home.
During my workshop I set the participants a breakout task. In groups of ten, they created a story that had to pass my ‘Cappuccino Test’: namely simplify a complex topic using a story that could be told to a friend over coffee. I was bowled over by the creativity, the quality of ideas and the stories that flowed from each of the groups during the session.
Over the years I’ve run memorable storytelling sessions at company offsites. Around the fireside in a Jacobean library of a country house. A hotel in the foothills of the Bavarian alps. In the garden of a village pub in Surrey. Now I can add this memorable offsite to my list, one where the furthest I had to travel was to my attic.
The offsite was a testament to the power of technology as well as to the resourcefulness of humans when we put our minds to it. Thank you to the MELA marketing & communications team at Ericsson who committed wholeheartedly to the task at hand and brought joy and energy to a Wednesday afternoon in an attic studio just outside London.
