“Last week was frantic. It’s so good to slow it down this week.” said a participant in our interactive Zoom event (Creating Connected Teams in Times of Remote Working) on Tuesday. She shared how last week involved getting systems and connectivity and physical working space sorted out, (hats off to the IT departments everywhere who made this happen). She went on: “This event wouldn’t have made sense for me last week.” This week was different. Her focus was turning from self to other, from home office to team.
We are moving up Maslow’s pyramid
from immediate shelter and accommodation needs, to security and relationship. Our aim was to explore how to hold the context of remote working, virtual meetings, and the anxiety generated by COVID-19 AND how to connect and function as a team to deliver results to customers.
Rather than replicate offline meetings online (that would be a cruel blow indeed), we are discovering that this new, virtual paradigm is the opportunity to
Create better results from fewer, shorter, more intentional meetings.
We have always been clear on our purpose: to support purpose driven leaders, teams and organisations to thrive. When the context shifted from in-person to remote, from face-to-face to virtual, we simply shifted how we do that.
Yesterday we used Liberating Structures to create, in the words of participants:
Calm, focus, positivity, connection, and intimacy.
Yes, intimacy. In a virtual environment. People know what they need and they know what they want. Our role as facilitators is to allow the team to discover what it knows, its collective intelligence, and to support them to create what it needs.
The calm, focus, connection, creativity, and intimacy that was created is vital for ideation, scoping ideas, concepts and projects, generating strategy for operating in our new COVID-19 world, planning and organising activity, problem solving, resolving conflict and having difficult conversations – everything a successful team needs to do to thrive in a VUCA world.
