Reaching the closure of its Polio EOC Africa project, Voluntary Service Overseas engaged IPK to design and facilitate an online reflection workshop. We adapted methodologies such as open space or Round Robin online and used the QiQoChat platform to enable the VSO team leverage its collective experience and harness lessons learned worth staying within the organizations to future implementations.

IPK was approached by Archaeology Switzerland and the Swiss Information Centre for Cultural Heritage to help them bring their bi-annual national conference online. We jointly re-designed the programme which was previously planned to be held face-to-face. We designed a stunning cutting-edge online platform for 400 participants to meet, exchange, learn and brainstorm together in a series of presentations, panels, workshops and a beautiful marketplace.

Encouraged by a face-to-face facilitation training that IPK held for the ITU, the ITU Telecommunication Development Bureau (BDT) approached IPK to design and provide a training on how to adapt meeting and workshop designs and facilitation to the new conditions in a post-pandemic era. The training, stretching over a full week (and of course delivered entirely online) combined considerations of how to structure and schedule a process adapted to the virtual realm with planning instruments, role distributions and eventually an overview over different online tools which can be weaved together into virtual platforms fit to deliver engaging online events.

In organisations, a valuable step to encourage knowledge sharing and exchange of learning is to hold Retrospectives. Inspired by the world of ‘Agile', it’s an opportunity to pause, reflect and consider the past experiences and how these impact future intentions and steps. Having worked with Swisscontact in a myriad of analogue-virtual hybrid workshops, this Community of Practice Retrospective took place completely in the virtual realm, bringing together timezones 12 hours apart. The Retrospective took place across 3 days, and synchronous time together was limited to 3 hrs per day, with short breaks every hour. On either side of the synchronous space, participants engaged in asynchronous remote activities. When designing for such a process, we see time and treat it as much more fluid. What activities do we reserve for time together, for discussion, and what activities can take place before or after. We are proud to work with Swisscontact providing our design, facilitation, mentoring and coaching experience to support their virtual workshops and onboarding sessions.

Due to COVID-19, the UN Systems Staff College (UNSSC) could not hold its annual Learning Managers Forum in the same manner they used to. Hence, IPK mentored the responsible team to design and facilitate an entirely virtual forum, with eight sessions over two weeks. IPK helped create a logical yet natural flow of events and activities, build collaboration platforms ensuring a high degree of interaction and co-creation between participants, write detailed scripts for every session for facilitators and technical drivers etc. Activities included a virtual inspiration fair, fishbowls, innovation exercises, collaborative group exercises etc. The social aspect of participants gathering in an informal space was of high importance in this process, too. The skillful knitting-together of multiple technical platform created an ecosystem for participants to be fully engaged at all times.

Support to a newly formed team of six in a remote working environment to clarify their team’s advisory role and "playing field” as well as internal role distribution and communication processes. This team process also included individually debriefed Persolog behavioural assessments of each team member, and two team sessions to explore opportunities for individual and team growth and development.

This remote process spanned across six two-hour virtual sessions. We supported 25 participants with developing best and worst case scenarios for the implementation of the second half of their programme. In doing so they were able to identify strategic priority focus areas and implementation guidelines for reviewing and designing the implementation of their remaining programme interventions.

To enable a large number of programme managers to design new proposals in complaint ways, the Development Programme of Swisscontact has conducted a hybrid process combining training elements with knowledge sharing, mentoring and joint design sessions. IPK has supported SwissContact in designing the overall process as well as individual sessions, has created workplaces and agendas and has facilitated these events, some of which have been highly complex in terms of agenda design and process, combining many different tools, working in constantly alternating constellations (with plenaries, sub-groups, etc).