Train tracks & team rituals

Hello, hello

I’m writing this from a packed six-person train berth. Knee to knee. Laptop balanced on my lap. No air conditioning. No Wi-Fi. Somewhere between Berlin and Warsaw, halfway through a six-hour journey. And funnily enough, I couldn’t be more content.

I’m spending two weeks exploring whether I can combine deep work with slow travel and meaningful collaboration. The route: Amsterdam → Berlin → Warsaw → Vilnius → Lithuanian countryside → Latvia → 🛳️ → Germany → back to Amsterdam.

I’m using this time to tackle long-term projects I’ve been putting off for months, reflect on how I want to work, and host an in-person workshop with a team in Vilnius.

Is this remote freelance work at its finest? We’ll see. I’ll let you know when the experiment ends. If you’re curious to follow along, I’m sharing more personal reflections and travel notes here.

One of the projects I’m bringing to life during this journey is a Remote Team Culture Handbook (name pending). It’s a resource designed to help remote teams connect more intentionally, not just within teams, but across the whole organisation.
Rituals, prompts, and frameworks to strengthen connections across silos, functions, and regions.

As part of the process, I’d love to hear from you:
What helps you feel connected to the wider organisation?

(* It’ll take just a couple of minutes to complete. Thank you in advance 🙏)

Later this week, I’ll be in Vilnius running a 3-hour workshop with a cross-functional team working on a city-wide planning initiative. The focus? Co-designing their large-scale online stakeholder gatherings.

Yes, it can feel a little counterintuitive to run an in-person workshop to design better online workshops. But this is exactly how online and offline touchpoints should work: in tandem. In this case, the deep work is happening together, in the room. Sketching, challenging assumptions, training new muscles. So that when we move online, it’s not just functional, it’s human.

Curiously connecting,
Always,
Perle

P.S. I’ve just opened up my calendar for drop-in facilitation coaching sessions. These are relaxed but focused 1:1 calls on Friday mornings, designed for facilitators, moderators, or leaders who want to build confidence, get practical ideas for designing workshops and gatherings, or refine their own way of showing up in the room.