In a world where virtual connection is now routine and often valued for its speed and convenience I have been reflecting on why face‑to‑face engagement still feels so different. Even as partnerships increasingly form and flourish across screens, there remains something uniquely powerful about being physically present when trust is being built or a collaboration is evolving. That difference is worth exploring.
Over the course of my career, I have been fortunate to shape partnerships across continents, often with teams far from the UK. Virtual interaction kept us aligned, but real progress frequently began in the moments when we were able to meet in person. Returning recently from South Africa prompted me to look back on these experiences and consider what face‑to‑face engagement offers that virtual connection struggles to replicate and why those moments stay with me long after the meeting ends.
I have tried to cast my mind back over a number of different connections with a number of different partners over the years and focus on the learning that afforded me and my team at each point in time.
First, foremost and most recent must be our engagement with Open Box in Cape Town, South Africa. As an organisation we have had a great relationship with Open Box for just over five years, spending time with them on a number of key projects that impact on the backbone of our data and system architecture. Open Box is the truest example of family style culture that I have ever witnessed and therefore being part of that for a few days not only created new and deeper relationships but gave us all chance to see this culture in action and consider how we could emulate it in the future.
Time spent with so many of the teams at Open Box has built a new level of connection for us that means we can benefit from how the teams work together and be part of that connectivity as we plan a major upgrade of our backbone system for later this year. Perhaps more importantly though is how we now have a plan that sees us really move from trusted partnership to co-conspirator in the success of delivery and a real belief in how much the team, the entire team, cares for what we want to achieve in 2026.
I have been lucky enough to visit Microsoft in Seattle on two occasions. The sprawling complex out at Redmond is inspirational even as a physical place to visit. On both occasions we were spending time with Microsoft as much to understand the art of the possible as to see how we could work differently with Microsoft. Despite the size of the organisation over the years I have made real friends of some of the key team and have been able to stay connected in multiple roles. I believe spending time with the people who are at the heart of key decisions has placed organisations I have represented at the forefront of new thinking and how it can add value to what is being sought as the intended outcome of innovations and collaborations. Healthcare of the future and retail in a digital first world were the themes of my visits and on both occasions, we were able to quickly take learning and build it into the approach for our futures as soon as we made it back to home. Fast learning face to face is possible and the relationship built to take the learning and apply it for value as quickly as possible feels like the key outcome for both visits.
Time with IBM in Boston and the York campus near New York was such an impactful experience on both occasions. These visits were linked to us presenting as a collaboration at huge global events, putting the brand of the organisations I was working for at the time on a global stage, not to show off but to seek thoughts, views and collaborations to enhance still further the value we were collectively trying to achieve. In New York I worked for a major retailer at the time, together with IBM we had delivered what the CEO described as a ‘heart and lung transplant’ to the systems that supported almost every transaction of the organisation, celebrating this together was a way not just of rewarding the team but also of offering up our collective lessons learnt and ways of working for others to benefit from. The IBM York campus is a place for anyone to really consider not the near future, but what is over the horizon. When collaboration becomes education, deep learning of what to prepare for then face to face definitely worked best.
Last year our partner Baringa invited us to come to Bulgaria to meet their newly formed near shore team and consider how we could benefit from accessing this capability. The benefits of doing this as a face-to-face engagement was as much about giving us clarity of the culture they were creating as it was about meeting the team physically. Adopting a much more start-ups feel and culture in Bulgaria than the usual rather corporate feel of London was something they wanted to show us as a way of indicating what the future could look like. As I reflect on these visits we simply would not have been able to see or even believe the benefit that this change could bring to us.
Working with TCS in a huge partnership across many jurisdictions globally meant that time in India with the team was an absolute must. This engagement was not about the future but also a little bit about protecting the past. Outsourcing is an art in of itself, asking TCS to support over three hundred stores across the UK and Ireland had been quite the ask particularly during the pandemic. We needed to find ways to help the teams in India to understand what the pain points for colleagues were and how our customers needed them to be present for all types of transactions. We built a replica store in India, shared the branding, products and colleague and customer profiles so that our colleagues offshore could get a stronger feel for the way the brand was perceived and how the needs of colleagues and customers could ‘manifest’. We spent 10 days in India in two different centres, our goal was to help them rebuild a relationship that was becoming a little unstuck, and in those 10 days we did it. The key TCS leaders are people I turn to now regardless of global location, one outcome of the visit was a the cocreation of the organisations first ‘Pace Centre’ in the head office in Nottingham. The centre became a UK and Europe centre for innovation for both TCS and the organisation I worked for cementing a future focus on ‘the new’ of digital technology in healthcare and retail. This would not have happened if we had not spent this time together rebuild personal and corporate trust and a belief in the future and the value we could collectively deliver.
My role now sees us partner with an organisation called iTransition who have a global presence but support us from Poland. The organisation is made up of teams of people often disrupted by global conflict in regions nearby in recent times. Spending time with the leadership allowed us to plan at a pace I am not sure we would have managed done entirely virtually. I think in this case the visit allowed us to build trust and belief in the skills of people we had previously seen in the background of delivery and certainly cemented an absolute respect and friendship with our most important contact in the team. A bit like TCS too it gave us chance to explain what it was our organisation needed from the team, delivered first hand we really moved at a new pace after this.
Two other visits come to mind, a long time ago I was asked to visit Qlik in Moscow to give them a view of how were using their technology in clinical research across the NHS. In this case this was about sharing best practice to benefit a wide and rich set of users. A hard visit to make work due to language barriers but a partnership that benefited the UK significantly for years.
Last on this little global journey of experiences was a visit to Intel in Atlanta, this was the opposite to Qlik and the Moscow visit. This was our chance to see and hear and go away with the applications of Intel partners to healthcare in Ireland and see how we could adopt and adapt digital for the good of clinical teams and patients. Being face to face with some of the most accomplished technologists in the world gave us access to new thinking we would have never been able to create over a video line I do not think.
There you go, a series of partnerships created over the last 25 years where I genuinely believe without applying the effort to make these visits physical, we would have not been able to achieve the benefits and therefore the value we needed to. They take time out of the diary, they take effort sometimes to build the relationship, but I genuinely believe that over the years they have given me a return on investment above and beyond what it takes to make it work.
Worth also adding though, we want to work with people we know and trust and dare I say it even become friends with, this happens when you share experiences, have some fun and work together to achieve shared goals, so much easier to instigate face to face.