A week after our Barcelona off-site ended, I'm still processing what we built together. This felt different to other events organized before – not because of the venue or the programming, though both were exceptional, but because of something harder to plan for: the energy every single person brought to making it work.
I want to reflect on what happened in Barcelona, not as a post-event summary, but as a look at what makes distributed teams actually function when you bring them together. Because the success of an off-site like this doesn't live in the agenda or the logistics. It lives in the willingness of 350 people to meet you halfway.
The invisible architecture
Before I get to the experience itself, I need to recognize the people who built the invisible architecture that made everything possible. Our organizing teams—internal and external—put months of thought, care, and genuine soul into this event. Every detail, from the flow between sessions to the evening programming, reflected an understanding of who we are as a company and what we needed from this week.
Our agency partners navigated the complexity of coordinating across multiple countries, time zones, and cultural contexts without making it feel complex to the people attending. That's the mark of excellent event design: when the hard parts are invisible to participants, allowing them to simply show up and be present.
But what I really learned is that no amount of planning creates the atmosphere we experienced. That came from something else entirely.
The ordeal of showing up
Let's be honest about what we asked people to do. We asked team members to travel internationally during a season when weather can be unpredictable. We asked parents to arrange childcare for a full week. We asked people to leave their routines, their comfort zones, their regular responsibilities, and show up in a foreign city for an intensive work event.
This isn't a casual ask. When you're an adult with real responsibilities—families, mortgages, lives that don't pause just because your company is having an off-site—traveling like this is genuinely difficult. There were flight delays. There were concerns about the weather. There were a thousand small anxieties that come with coordinating complex international travel.
And yet nearly everyone was able to come. Not just physically, but with incredible energy and an openness that transformed what could have been a logistically complicated week into something genuinely memorable.And for those that weren’t able to, we missed them and appreciated their remote participation and support shown throughout the week.
I've always known we had talented people. After Barcelona, I'm certain we have something rarer: people who understand that the experience you have is shaped by the attitude you bring.
Grace beats perfection
Organizing an event for 350 people across multiple countries is inherently complex. We're a geographically diverse, culturally diverse group with many moving parts. Despite exceptional planning, a few things went slightly wrong—as they inevitably do with events of this scale.
What struck me wasn't the absence of problems, but how people responded when something didn't go perfectly. No drama. No complaints. Just understanding, flexibility, and genuine grace.
There's a version of this event where small issues become focal points—where people fixate on the thing that didn't work rather than the ninety-nine things that did. We could have had that version. Instead, we had a team that understood the complexity of what we were attempting and chose to focus on making it work rather than identifying what wasn't perfect.
That choice—to be kind and gracious when things don't go exactly as planned—is what separates functional teams from exceptional ones. It's also what made the week sustainable for everyone involved, including the people trying to keep everything running smoothly.
The quality of presence
During our conference sessions—Mapping Our Next Chapter—I watched something I hadn't fully expected. People were genuinely present. No phones out during presentations. No half-attention while mentally drafting responses to Slack messages. Just full engagement with the strategic conversations we'd gathered to have.
This seems small until you realize how rare it is. In our normal remote work, everyone is managing multiple channels of communication simultaneously. That's necessary for distributed teams, but it fragments attention. Having 350 people in a room, fully focused on the same conversation at the same time, created a different quality of dialogue than we can achieve remotely.
The ideas that emerged during those sessions—the cross-departmental connections, the strategic insights, the collaborative problem-solving—happened because people chose to be fully present rather than performatively attending while their attention was elsewhere.
The patience for collective effort
Some moments tested that presence. At one point, we attempted a group photo of 350 people at an incredible Barcelona location. People stood in the wind, on stairs, for about forty minutes while we coordinated the logistics of that many people, multiple buses, traffic delays, and the technical requirements of actually capturing the shot.
It would have been easy for people to get frustrated. Instead, everyone maintained their patience and good humor. No complaints. Just an understanding that coordinating this many people is genuinely challenging, and that the result—the documentation of all of us together in this moment—was worth the process.
We got an amazing photo because people were willing to endure the slightly uncomfortable process of creating it together.
The willingness to participate fully
What really moved me was watching people participate wholeheartedly in everything, even things that might have felt outside their comfort zones. We set up a glitter station during one of our evening events—admittedly a bold choice for a professional gathering. People could have declined or participated minimally. Instead, they happily put glitter on their faces and bodies, embracing the slightly ridiculous joy of it.
We played music from all over the world, reflecting our geographic diversity. People danced to songs they'd never heard before, in styles that might have been unfamiliar. There was no self-consciousness, no standing on the sidelines waiting for "their" music. Just openness to experiencing something new together.
When you organize an event, there's always a worry: will people think this is silly? Will they participate grudgingly? Will they show up physically but not emotionally? Barcelona answered those questions definitively. People showed up not just willing to participate, but eager to make every element work.
What this reveals about teams
Here's what I've been thinking about since we returned: the Barcelona off-site didn't create our team culture. It revealed it.
The patience people showed during logistical challenges reflects how they approach obstacles in our regular work. The grace they extended when things didn't go perfectly mirrors how they handle mistakes and setbacks in projects. The full engagement during conference sessions demonstrates the intellectual curiosity they bring to strategic conversations. The willingness to participate wholeheartedly in unfamiliar activities shows their openness to new approaches and ideas.
We didn't become a great team in Barcelona. Barcelona showed us what we already were when we're all in the same space together.
But it also showed us something about what we can build going forward. The energy in Barcelona—the collaboration, the understanding that we co-create our experience for each other, the recognition that attitude transforms outcomes—that energy doesn't have to stay in Barcelona.
Carrying it forward
No venue, no food, no production quality—no matter how excellent—creates the atmosphere we experienced without the willing participation of every person who shows up. The best event design in the world can't manufacture genuine connection, intellectual engagement, or joyful participation. Those things only emerge when people choose to bring them.
That's the real lesson from Barcelona: we shape our experience of work together. The quality of our collaboration isn't determined solely by our tools, our processes, or our organizational structure—though those matter. It's determined by the energy we bring, the grace we extend to each other when things don't go perfectly, and our willingness to show up fully even when it's difficult.
The team that traveled to Barcelona—that stood in the wind for group photos, that danced to unfamiliar music, that stayed fully present during strategic sessions, that brought incredible energy despite the ordeal of getting there—that's the team I want to build with going forward.
Not because Barcelona was perfect, but because it showed us what's possible when everyone commits to making something work together. That commitment, that willingness to meet each other halfway, that's what transforms a distributed team into something exceptional.
Thank you to everyone who made Barcelona what it was. The memory of that week—and more importantly, the understanding of what we're capable of creating together—will stay with me for the rest of my life.
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