Collaborate better and save the world: team communication in times of crisis

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, also known as February 2020, my personal and professional life consisted of being together and communicating with other people face to face. I gave talks at conferences, business coaching sessions in my client's offices and professional training in the classrooms and in universities. I traveled all around United States, my home country, as well as around the world, working to bring teams together so they could collaborate and perform at their best. I served them as a teacher and facilitator by going to where they were, physically drawing them into a room with each other to help them create the magic their teams can achieve together.

The week of February 18, 2020, back in those olden times, was a particularly frantic one, I realized as I look back at my calendar. I started with some on-site coaching with a client near Boston, Agile software development coaching, leadership consulting, and a hands-on software coding dojo. It was a busy day, but I wasn't done yet. I had to talk to deliver for professional group in Providence, Rhode Islands that night. The next day, I traveled to Seattle for an afternoon of agile training at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The day after that, I taught an all day high-performance team building class for the same group. It was great working with the foundation. They were collaborating with another consulting company to build a better website for their stakeholders, their donors, medical researchers, healthcare workers, and so on. At the same time, they were planning for future projects, looking at problems they could solve in the world proactively, still unaware of the impacts the brewing global health crisis would have on the foundations priorities and plans. While it seems crazy now that it traveled 3,000 miles to teach a class face-to-face, it was how it worked and what I did. Indeed, it was what we all felt the project deserved in order to help a new team gel around a vision of what they wanted to accomplish together. We were looking forward to creating something great. I finished up that busy week in Arizona with a day of Agile Business Skills training and a red eye flight back home to Boston. I haven't worked out how many miles I covered that week in total. While it was quite fragmented in terms of location, it really wasn't that unusual. I always want to give my best energy, attention and focus to the clients I work with. That means being there with them in their office anywhere in the world.