Great feedback from a "surprise" hybrid workshop

A painstakingly planned in-person strategy and design workshop turned into an impromptu hybrid workshop when I discovered 8 of 18 participants would be joining remotely TWO DAYS prior to start.

We scrambled to make sure the online experience was engaging and that we were bringing the room and the phone together to collaborate and discuss. Over three days of workshops, we had consistent feedback that it was the best part of their days, the funnest meetings they'd had, really engaging, and—my fav comment—they were doubtful at first but learned a lot about the process and the topic area.

They key for us was just committing to making the online experience first class instead of trying to pull them into the room, so we did a lot of group activities where one group was online with an online facilitator and the another group was in the room.

I'm really glad we leaned into online activities for our remote participants. Not only did we get a ton of fantastic outputs from the workshop, the participants were really clear that their experience was stellar as well.

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