Hey Reader,

In a break from normal programming, today I'm not answering a question from a reader. Instead I shall indulge your curiosity and give you an insider look at how The Curious Tribe Global Gathering unfolded last week in Barcelona. This was our first in-person event and although I had a feeling it would be good, you just never know what will happen on the day.

Let's have a look at what happened, shall we?

(Spoiler: it was bloody AMAZING)

What we set out to achieve

Twenty of us flew into Barcelona for our first ever in-person Global Gathering. We had members travel from the US, Canada, Germany, Estonia, Scotland, Switzerland, Ireland and the UK.

I had three objectives for this event:

1. Connect people who often work in isolation
2. Create space for real peer-to-peer learning
3. Deepen relationships in the community

Everything I planned had to serve at least one of those objectives. I picked Barcelona for the event location because it ticked all the boxes for warm weather, great food, easy travel and somewhere none of us live, so it would feel like a destination experience as well as a work event.

Tuesday: drinks reception on the rooftop

We kicked off on Tuesday evening with a drinks reception on the rooftop of The Hoxton, with the Sagrada Familia in the distance. The sun was shining, the cava was flowing, and for most people in the room this was the first time meeting each other in person. Some attendees have been in the Tribe since December 2023 and had only ever spoken on Zoom or in Circle, so watching people find each other and hug for the first time was genuinely lovely. It set the tone for the whole gathering.

That was the moment I knew this was going to be good, I didn't need to create any ice-breaker games or prompt people into conversations... it all happened by itself, quite easily and quite naturally. Quite the feat given that so many of us are deep introverts btw!

Wednesday: the full day

Wednesday was our content day, and it was designed to be the opposite of every dull conference I've ever sat through. We were in The Apartment at The Hoxton which had a few different rooms we could use, one of which I set up like a big living room with sofas and armchairs in a semi-circle. It was designed to feel relaxed and like a space you would sit with friends… this was on purpose to help people feel safe to speak, to maximise the level of psychological safety which in turn would help people get real help with their challenges and problems.

We kicked off in the morning with a photoshoot. This event was sponsored by Blink who not only gave their financial support to the event but also provided us with a content creator to capture everything - talk about generous! Ben was our fab photographer and videographer for the day and in the morning he took LinkedIn headshots for anyone who wanted one. I thought would be a nice freebie to offer attendees; it's something useful to them but it wouldn’t cost us any extra money or effort. People came down a little early, had a quick check in the mirror and got a fresh professional photo to take away.

I opened the day with a welcome speech, profusely thanking everyone for coming and several times asking if this was real life or if I was in a dream haha! I gave an impromptu history of The Curious Tribe, from the day I opened the doors to “The IC Accelerator” in December 2023 with 11 members to today a community of 80+ comms pros under the name The Curious Tribe.

Our first tribe-led session of the morning was hosted by Deanna Zabel and Laura Kennedy who gave candid insights and stories about leadership comms. They focused on how to land messages with senior leaders, build credibility with the C-suite, increase your influence, earn your seat at the leadership table using data and metrics and how to get past the dreaded imposter syndrome. This was an incredible start to the day and set the tone for a very open, honest day where people weren’t afraid to talk about the hard stuff and not just the things that go well.

Next up we had a fireside chat to explore a real-life case study, Gary McLaughlin talked us through how he did a DIY channels audit in his organisation. He didn’t have any budget to hire someone to do it, so in true Gary form he got stuck in and did it himself. He talked us through his approach to gathering and analysing data, how he framed it to leaders, the kind of changes he made as a result and how it’s all unfolding after. Props to Gary for the lovely props his daughters made (pictured below) and for the hand-outs he brought for attendees to remind them of the power of asking good questions! Little did we know Gary and I would turn up in matching outfits btw hahaha!

Next up we had the powerhouse that is Julia Pillwein who led a session on building an internal comms function from scratch. Julia works for Deel where she is their first-ever internal comms hire, and she was the first IC hire in her previous 3 roles too! She gave us a very candid look at how she approaches coming into an organisation from the outside, what kind of things she’s looking for, how she thinks about getting the foundations right and very generously she also shared her takes on how to avoid the mistakes she has made along the way.

After that it was time for lunch, we took an hour to eat and chat and relax and begin to digest some of what we had heard in the morning.

After lunch we played a game I invented called “Guess The Badass” where people had to guess which one of these women has a black belt in taekwondo?? Our Secret Badass Catherine Kernot then got us all in a circle doing some taekwondo moves together, complete with loud shouting. It felt bloody great!

Next up was everyone’s favourite session of the day, the small group masterminds. Earlier in the morning, I had handed out mastermind sheets and asked everyone to write their name at the top along with one problem they were really stuck on and wanted help with. Then we passed the sheets around the room; if you read someone else's problem and you thought you could help, you wrote your name underneath. We kept passing them until everyone had their own sheet back, with a list of names of fellow tribe members who'd offered to help them work through their problem.

While everyone was at lunch, I sat with all the sheets and used them to put together the mastermind groups for the afternoon. I matched people based on who had a problem and who would be most helpful to them, so that the groups weren't randomly thrown together but they were thoughtfully designed.

I split everyone into groups of six and people went off for just over an hour to pick each other’s brains, get real-time help from peers and get some real practical advice they could bring back to their work. And I couldn’t help but notice the change in energy after the masterminds; I could see people’s shoulders had dropped, people were smiling, there was a real sense of RELIEF in the air. People explored problems they'd been stuck on for months, and now they had ideas they could try the following week. That's exactly what peer learning is supposed to do, and it was quite incredible to watch it happen in real time.

Btw a few attendees have already asked me whether we can do online peer group masterminds throughout the year, and the answer is yes. I'm going to set up virtual masterminds inside The Curious Tribe in the coming weeks, this is going to be a brilliant addition to our community to provide more peer-to-peer support as well as deepen member relationships.

After the mastermind sessions we had just two bits left; first up was Jess Albone and Gemma Pike who led a session on employee listening. Gemma shared her story of working in a company that had gone through enormous change with employee layoffs and leadership resignations and an org restructure, and she built out a careful listening strategy designed to build and restore trust in the company. Jess shared her experience of setting up a listening approach with frontline workers in Currys where she set up “Stores Talk” which was a huge success in which employees felt listened to and managers were able to implement really good positive changes based on employees ideas.

And finally, myself and Sue Fay had a conversation about crisis comms, drawing on Sue's 30 years of experience handling some of the trickiest comms moments you can imagine. Sue talked us through her hair-raising experiences of dealing with colleague deaths after a helicopter crash, a reputation scandal in a hospital, a company going bankrupt. Sue is a gifted storyteller and she was able to bring everything to life and share practical, useful takeaways to help you prepare for a crisis and stay calm when it hits.

You’ll notice that every single session was led by a Tribe member. That was deliberate. I did not want to invite outside speakers because why would we need them? We have so much expertise in this group, and the whole point of the gathering was peer-to-peer learning. Thank you to all the tribe speakers who spent a lot of time and energy preparing and delivering really useful, helpful, practical insights and ideas. I appreciate you so much.

We wrapped up at around 4.30pm so that people had time to recharge, decompress, doom scroll and shower before the evening activity.

The silent disco

And at 6.30pm we all met in the lobby, a bit nervous but also excited to do some physical exercise and begin the night. I had booked a Silent Disco Walking Tour for an hour – they picked us up at the hotel and danced us to the restaurant where we were having dinner. This was so unbelievably fun and hilarious, I knew this would be good but it was so so much better than I could ever have imagined.

Dinner

We finished the day with a long dinner together at a local restaurant. Twenty of us in a private room, eating and drinking and laughing, and the noise in that room was something else. By the end of the evening it didn't feel like a group of people who had only met the day before. It felt like old friends. The dinner was also hilarious btw because none of the wait staff spoke English and they just kept bringing out random plates of food and putting them down in the middle of the table. We had plates of scallops, croquettes, Iberian jamon, tomato toast, patatas bravas… it was endless. And that was only the starter haha! Everything was so tasty and the night was just good fun.

Evaluation – how did we do?

Before everyone went out for the silent disco, I asked everyone to fill in a quick paper-and-pen pulse survey, and here's what came back.

Nearly everyone scored the event 10 out of 10. Two people scored it 9 out of 10, and one of those was because they wanted more time, not less. 100% of attendees said they would recommend the gathering to another Tribe member.

This gives us an almost unbelievable NPS score of +100!

The most common piece of feedback was that one day wasn't enough, and that people wanted more time together, more time to digest the content and more space to talk to each other between sessions. That's really useful and it's already shaping how I plan future events.

Are you coming to the next one?

The Global Gathering is going to be an annual event for The Curious Tribe. Places will be limited so that we can keep the same small event vibe where people can easily make friends and help each other with their comms challenges. I’ll be aiming for a max of 40 – 50 people at next year’s event and it will likely take place in another sunny European city in April 2027.

But honestly, the gathering is just the cherry on top. The Tribe runs all year round with regular live events, peer sharing sessions, on-demand resources, masterclasses, group coaching and a community of 80+ ambitious comms pros around the world who actually get it and want to support you.

If you're tired of figuring it all out alone, this is your sign to join us.

Join the tribe

Are you the next member of The Curious Tribe? 👀

Thanks for reading and stay curious,

Joanna

PS This event was everything I hoped it would be, actually no that’s not true, it was far far better than I could have ever thought and I just had the best week of my life. Huge mega thanks to our sponsor Blink who brought my vision to life!

Find me on YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn and check out my book​

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