By Janus Boye
At the beginning of my career, a bit over 20 years ago, disruption was not just buying books online. It was also new ways to organise, new ways to do marketing, new ways to sell and pretty much everything was being questioned, at least by the digerati.
Fast forward to 2020 and 4 months with a pandemic truly has changed everything. A fast forward both in terms of work habits and technology adoption. It seems a safe guess in strange and surreal times that we probably haven’t seen the bigger impact just yet.
Having built a community on meeting in person made our past months tricky to say the least. Back in mid-March, I shared our latest community update on Making Progress Fighting With Fog. That’s what it felt like with uncertainty in the air like never before.
Community is more important than ever
In the initial weeks of the pandemic, things first got quiet. Personally, it seemed we were all just trying our best to understand and cope with the new reality.
For almost a decade, I’ve preached:
‘The answers are out there’.
As a community, we’ve been put to the test trying to find answers. How could we best respond and be there for our members?
Looking back at the past months, what happened in our small corner of the world was perhaps not so different than many other workplaces: A fair share of forced experimentation. Some things went better than others. Generally our attitude has been to try to be more friendly and helpful. Empathy as the operative word.
Informal networking dinner in Hamburg after a meeting in our Future Workplace peer group
The feedback from members and friends alike has unequivocally been that as we have embarked on a journey to uncharted territory, the need for a community is not only still there, but even more so than before. Exchanging experiences and meeting in person is equally human, valuable and a key to unlocking new opportunities.
Our friends at The Community Roundtable validated this in their annual survey on the state of community management: Communities change the world is the fitting title of their latest research.
What happened in Q2?
As we entered April, we made the difficult decision to postpone the Brooklyn conference to May 2021. Thanks to our conference partners for being both understanding and supportive. We look forward to next year, where the Brooklyn 21 conference will be held at the Brooklyn Historical Society.
During May and June, things got busier than ever, as we held virtual meetings for our North American members, more conference calls for members than ever and also shared more insights on our blog.
It is unfair to highlight just a few, but for the purposes of illustrating the variety in what we covered here’s a few examples:
A virtual reflection with Mathias Jacobsen where he introduced us to the reflections and we did it as a group. Read more: Reflections Are Not Only A Tool To Change Yourself
A virtual workshop on ‘Experience Design, Narratives, and Point of Views’ with award-winning immersive storyteller Michaela Holland. The preparation was to bring a chair that does not roll or spin! It was a memorable experience for sure!
A kind of virtual keynote with Sree Sreenivasan who challenged us with his talk: The World Has Changed. So How Are You Going To Change?
A new grand compromise in content management, where Preston So from Oracle looked to fields as diverse as geology and motivational psychology and expanded our sights to dimensions beyond the static web to forge a new grand compromise
One of our communication groups meet in Aarhus, Denmark at the beginning of June and had a good session at the water front.
Besides doing virtual meetings, we were thankfully also able to meet in person throughout Europe. Such a great feeling to meet members and to experience how our unique approach to learning and networking still both makes sense and is genuinely helpful to the participants.
Introducing: Hybrid peer group meetings
Before COVID, our attitude was pretty much that either you were in the room or you did not participate. That had a certain value in terms of confidentiality, intimacy and building relationships.
Today, hybrid meetings are the new normal. That means people in the room and a few others joining us remotely.
It introduces new challenges, like where to look when someone is presenting virtually. Also, how to keep everyone engaged? Personally I’ve found that for this to work well, we need to have more fleshed out agendas and certainly stricter time keeping for the sessions.
Those of our meetings which were held with the proper equipment, generally worked really well. One benefit is being able to connect guest speakers that we would have normally had to fly in. Still, it’s clear that the conversation and relationship building continues in the breaks for those in the room, while those participating remotely don't have that dimension.
At the Future Workplace peer group meeting in Oslo, we were joined by Jonathan Phillips from the UK for a session on 6 emerging workplace topics
In June and the beginning of July, we were able to meet in person in Denmark, Norway, Germany and Switzerland. Hopefully we’ll be able to add more countries soon.
Looking towards 2021
Is the worst behind us? We are certainly not post-COVID as these lines are written.
On a German train heading north after a peer group meeting in Munich
It’s clear that we now have big regional differences. Many of our members are in Denmark, Germany and Norway where going to in person meetings was exotic in during June, but have now reopened their offices.
Today in Denmark there’s no real usage of masks, you can go to watch football with thousands of spectators, there’s live concerts and other events, so while it’s not the same as before and there’s some physical distancing and improved hygiene, it’s far from the level of lockdown as still experienced in some regions.
Launching new peer groups are always a milestone and we’ve planned two new group launches during August in Denmark:
For our annual conference in November - the Boye 20 Aarhus conference - we’ve moved the event from the Women’s Museum which was a popular but crowded venue in 2019, to a cultural centre called Godsbanen with more space. There’ll also be a few new tracks to go with our new groups.
In looking for answers, let me turn to Gerry McGovern, who has been writing his New Thinking column for over 20 years. How far have we come in these past 20 years? He recently tweeted:
I don’t think management is stupid, but it does look like we still have a very interesting journey ahead of us.
What will you do?
Questions can help us make sense of it all, in particular when we can digest it together. Nicolas Bondarenco from Geneva was a guest star in one of our Oslo meetings and he asked this excellent question which unlocked a really interesting discussion and wealth of insights:
"What did you learn when you were confined that you believe was not possible before in your organisation?"
As I said in the opening: The answers are out there.
Thanks for being a part of our friendly and helpful community. If you are not already a member, please do consider joining us.
More from the behind the scenes
Read more about our history in these past community updates
Towards 2020 and the next chapter (July 2019)
The story of Boye & Co (August 2018)