This is the remote:af origin story, where it comes from, the people behind it and the steps we took to lay the foundations of what remote:af is today.
It's fairly widely agreed that 2020 was a rough year for a lot of organisations. During the height of the pandemic, our Founder, Andrew Blain observed that the practical challenges companies faced wasn't especially new. The scale may have increased but the solutions to most of the tensions generated by various lockdowns and strategic pivots weren't new. Still the techniques and methods to solving these challenges we often;
To solve this, Andrew gathered a flexible cohort to compile, build and test a library of tools businesses could use to navigate rapid change. Initially this was predominantly focused on how teams could best adapt to working remotely. Over the 12 months to follow, the toolset expanded to handle organisational design, strategy, planning and governance.
In late 2020 we had a foundational structure for what would become known as remote:af. This included ~20 tools, some fairly rudimentary training material and live experience using most of the tools in different organisations navigating lockdowns during the pandemic.
The next step was to introduce the tools to a wide range of early adopters who would prove (or disprove) that this approach would span diffirent cultures, industries and countries.
This is how remote:af started. While some of the co-authors and early adopters have moved on to other amazing projects, their contributions to the earliest stages of remote:af have set the tone for the ongoing development of the toolset.
If you'd like to learn more about what remote:af is, then check out this blog by Tony Ponton.
