by Janus Boye
These are uncertain times, so allow me to start this community update by thanking you for being part of our shared journey.
Adapting Together has been our 2020 theme and it's all about going forward better. It’s human nature to adapt, but needless to say, the year has been quite tricky and challenging for most. Also for us as community organisers, but still, our continued learning doesn't need to stop.
COVID19-friendly team building exercises as led by Christina Mumm from Nuuday at a group meeting held in Kulturhuset Islands Brygge in Copenhagen. A few weeks after our meeting, Frank Jensen the Lord Mayor of Copenhagen, used the same venue to announce his resignation due to sexual harassment allegations.
Since our previous community update back in July, we’ve thankfully managed to keep the momentum going and certainly worked hard to stay relevant in strange and surreal times. We’ve faced quite some obstacles, but managed to do group meetings around Europe, virtual sessions with our North American members and even managed to do our in-person conference in Aarhus.
Follow me for a look behind the scenes at the last 6 months.
Learning and networking during a pandemic
Let’s start with the peer groups. To be honest, when I now think back to the planning we made in July, it felt like smooth sailing at the time. The peak of the 1st wave of the pandemic was behind us in most European countries, going to meetings was not that unusual, tourism was resuming and even business travel was coming back, although from an unprecedented low.
Still, COVID was a part of the equation and we had to find ways to accommodate the new 1.5m economy. We managed to launch 2 new groups: Design Leadership in Aarhus and Digital Leadership in Copenhagen. Both were off to a good start and we are planning to launch more local chapters in 2021. Welcome to new members such as Aarhus University, Ambu, itelligence, Stibo DX and Ørsted.
Mads Nørlyk from Jyske Bank kicked off the design leadership group with a fascinating deep-dive into motivation.
Besides the two kick-off meetings, 17 peer groups meetings were held around Europe during August and September.
What were the major themes, you might ask?
That’s hard to answer as we cover a wide set of topics from automation to communication to customer experience and corporate innovation just to name a few.
Still, if you pressed on, I would say Adapting Together.
Let me explain: Our meetings still have agendas, we still start on time, and as always try to finish a few minutes early, but what’s really changed these past months is that our meetings have become a bit more human and a bit less corporate. We speak a slight bit more about feelings than in the past and I think we take a step further in terms of building genuine and meaningful relationships.
Here’s an example topic from the agenda for the corporate innovation peer group which met in Zurich in September: Unclear requirements are not a new thing, but given the current circumstances, how do we best avoid wasting time and energy on going in the wrong direction?
The inspiring session was led by one of our Swiss members and she shared some of the emerging patterns that make or break success. Our conversation in particular focused on buying into the vision (the "why") coupled with open and honest collaboration.
Innovation, and really any change project, can seem like a long journey. A never-ending journey. As one of our Italian members said at another meeting: "The solution of the past, is sometimes the problem of the present".
A picture says a thousand words, so here’s an impression from the informal and outdoor part of the CMS Experts meeting in Split, Croatia.
An impromptu conversation about a specific problem between our members Ivo Lukac and Cristoffer Crusell. You might think you know what you want, but...
Among the new members in the CMS Expert community are open source project TYPO3, WordPress agency 10up and also UK-based digital agency Studio 24.
Studio 24 did the widely covered website redesign project for the W3C. Accessibility was a big theme in that project as you can see in the embedded tweet. I shared some of the project insights in this post: What can we learn from the W3C CMS selection process.
As you can tell from the photos shared so far, it’s also been a series of meetings, where we had to seek out alternative meeting venues.
In the past, most peer group meetings were hosted by members, so we have visited the offices of Carlsberg in Copenhagen, Hapag-Lloyd in Hamburg, Google in Zurich, Zeiss in Jena, WHO in Geneva, Rabobank in Utrecht, Pan Macmillan in London, Mercer in New York City and the list goes on. But due to the rules in COVID-times, most companies haven’t allowed external guests and groups of say 10, so instead we’ve done our best to support museums, small co-working spaces and other inspiring venues.
In between the group meetings, we continued our popular series of member conference calls with about 2 each month. Here’s four of the calls to give you a taster of what we’ve covered during the past months:
Usually, the calls are recorded, so that if you missed it, or wanted a recap or even share with a friend, you can go back, grab the slides and even hear the call at your convenience.
Finally and as in Q2, hybrid meetings were commonplace. Given the right technical equipment and some facilitation, it works quite well.
From our Future Workplace peer group meeting in Hamburg in September, where Sophia Zieger from software vendor Staffbase gave a hybrid presentation. As you probably decipher on this slide time is still money :)
Boye 20 Aarhus conference - our 16th annual international conference
As November drew nearer, it became evident that we couldn’t exactly do the conference as in the past. We had to redesign it for COVID times and we also had remote attendance from our global community.
Program planning was tricky to say the least with travel restrictions, working from home, company policies not allowing conference participation and just to make things fun, we had a brand new venue and covered a few new topics.
During October, it often felt liḱe one step forward, followed by one step backward. We had a few signups, new confirmed speakers and then we also had more lockdown, new restrictions and cancellations.
Lise Tarp Hansen is a communication consultant at the City of Aarhus and she had a really interesting session on how to engage the youth in Aarhus in everyone’s hate topic: COVID-19
Still, we managed to pull it off and the Boye 20 Aarhus conference was indeed a different one. Another great learning and networking experience, but also with masks, physical distancing, fewer international participants and a conference day that finished at 10pm when restaurants and everything else closed due to COVID.
Christian Vandsø Andersen from LEGO talked about leadership in a complex world at the Boye 20 Aarhus conference - it was a no slides session, but he did bring this big illustration.
We had 4 packed days with 13 different conference tracks. Too many sessions to mention them all, but a few of my personal highlights were:
Steven Pemberton giving his keynote on the evolution of memory
Aneta Chodor-Kjeldsen from Maersk in Copenhagen on building and using a design system
Driving Innovation in Vestas - the everyday lives of corporate entrepreneurs as shared by Line Briesemeister, Innovation Portfolio Manager
Marc Paczian from Dropbox in Hamburg on Virtual First - A New Way To Work After COVID19.
Keynote on The Evolution of Memory by Steven Pemberton from the Netherlands. Or was it really about why cats lick themselves?
Ulf Gaardstad who runs co-working spaces in Aarhus on The Quest for Inspiring Workspaces
As in past years our photographer Ib Sørensen attended and you can browse the remarkable photos from the conference.
Videos have been one of our missing ingredients in the past years, but this year our conference team member Miriam Guttmanova also found the time to create some really good and brief interviews. There’s two Youtube playlists for you to enjoy:
Key lessons learned & things to consider for 2021 - as shared by conference speakers
What I love about Aarhus - for those of you considering making the trip in 2021
One of our speakers, Lasse Rindom, also used his video in a popular LinkedIn post as shared below.
Finally, I would say Christine Søndergaard Ravn from Nuuday captured our conference planning and perhaps all of 2020 with this slide - Things are not always easy. Her presentation was also appropriately titled - An Agile Journey on a Very Large Scale.
A big thanks to all our conference partners, speakers and participants for making it happen!
There’s more to learning and networking
During the years, we’ve always tried to strike the right balance between creating the trusted and confidential space, and on the other hand encourage sharing openly, so that others, including non-members, can benefit.
The story as shared in the tweet below is one example, where Technology Director James Luscombe shared their adventures with Gatsby, Kontent and Netlify.
Joining us from Canada, Mark Demeny also shared a thought-provoking guest post on Why Are Most Organizations Stuck Solving The Same Content Problems As 20 Years Ago?
We’ve also continued our popular Expert of the Month series, where we get to know some of the friendly people in the community a bit better. Here’s from the past months:
November: Pernille Rahbech - an Aarhus-based communication freelancer
October: Lisa Mo Wagner - a Berlin-based product manager from Berlin
September: Mads Norlyk - he’s the Head of UX at Jyske Bank
August: Gurdeep Singh - leads the Robotics Center of Excellence at insurance firm Tryg
Besides writing, there’s naturally also reading. Aino Corry was a keynote speaker at the Boye 20 Aarhus conference and managed to finally publish her very first book titled Retrospectives Antipatterns. Congratulations!
We have also enjoyed the informal coffee meetings that we've held from time to time. We’ve done quite a few, but far from as many as we would have liked. Still, there’s the possibility to do good old phone calls and naturally also video meetings, where we regularly have informal conversation on career possibilities, tricky projects and do our best to both help, offer friendly advice and make connections to others in the network.
Finally, it really made our day, when Norwegian Enonic, recognised our work and included us on their list of Top 5 communities for digital leaders.
2021 - here we come
We are big fans of planning and usually as the holiday season has been approaching, the calendar for next year has been filled with new initiatives.
That’s not the case this time. Our focus for 2021 is on delivering excellent learning opportunities in our peer groups and conferences. Even with a vaccine now being deployed, we’ll probably do hybrid meetings for the foreseeable future.
There’s still plenty to do with our existing groups, including staying on top of the topics. So while we might launch just a few new groups here and there, we’ll primarily focus on serving the themes and markets where we are already present.
We know our members have high expectations when it comes to being a part of a community, and we’ll work hard to deliver. Sometimes it’s by finding that new speaker, often it’s meeting again to strengthen the relationship, other times it’s bringing back someone to ask the same question as in the past — but as 2020 has shown, the answer might not be the same.
Once again: Thank you for being a part of it!
If you are not already a part of our community
Why not become a member today? Members enjoy benefits such as:
regular member conference calls
access to our peer group meetings
discount on our conferences
More from the behind the scenes
Read more about our history in these past community updates
Towards 2021 looking for answers (July 2020)
Making progress fighting with fog (March 2020)
Towards 2020 and the next chapter (July 2019)
The story of Boye & Co (August 2018)