The day South Australia closed its borders, Jarrard O’Brien had scheduled a big, important strategy planning session for the SA Commission on Excellence and Innovation in Health (CEIH).

Very senior participants; a complex agenda; a vitally important organisational goal – pre-crisis, this was the sort of meeting you’d absolutely have refused to run over Zoom.

But Jarrad didn’t have time to wait to get the participants in the room. Instead, working with HFL, he ran the day-long strategic planning workshop as multiple virtual “episodes” across a fortnight, with structured reflection and data gathering between each.

These virtual workshops, Jarrad found, were actually more effective than physical meetings. How?

To find out, CEIH’s Executive Director of Human Centred Design, Jarrad O’Brien, was interviewed by our Principal Consultant Kirsty Allen.

They discussed:

• The three critical design changes that make virtual strategic planning more effective than physical

• Which activities work better virtually – and which should remain face-to-face

• Whether virtual meetings make some forms of corporate decision making easier – and if virtual is the future of decision making.