The Elephant in the Zoom





"Necessity is the mother of invention" – proverb

Many companies have experimented with the idea of remote working as the technology to enable it has slowly matured. But suddenly, a global pandemic has forced companies all over the world to rapidly and fundamentally change their way of working to preserve some productivity. As many have observed, "working from home" is starkly different from "being forced to work from home during a pandemic", and we think there will be a journey ahead to become fully productive in this new context.

We've never believed that creating a Radar remotely was possible, and yet here we are — this is the first Radar we've ever produced without meeting in person. Many of the proposed blips spoke to the pressing need to enable first-class remote collaboration. We didn't want to ignore the elephant in the room and not comment on the crisis, but doing a good job of remote-first collaboration is a deep and nuanced subject and certainly not all of our advice would fit in the Radar format. So alongside this edition you'll find a podcast where we discuss our experiences in creating the Radar remote-first, a written experience report including advice on remote-first productivity, a webinar covering tech strategies in a crisis and links to other ThoughtWorks materials, including our remote working playbook. We hope that these materials, together with other internet resources, will help organizations that attempt to navigate these unknown waters.