Back in the day, inceptions were an elaborate song and dance. In my role as a consultant, I’d travel with my colleagues to a client's office in another country. We’d team up with some onshore colleagues and work out of a room in the client’s office. The client representatives themselves would travel from all across their country for the inception. Since we had to make the most of travel and the fact that we’d made our client book off space and time, we’d cram a bunch of sessions and workshops into this synchronous time together. Not all sessions were essential to starting the project. They could wait, but we’d go “Oh well, why not!”. 

Remote inceptions lower the stakes for an inception. You’re not travelling and no one else is. You’ve not blocked space on a client site. Now you can focus on the most important questions you need to answer to start your project. Everything else can wait. Not too bad, eh? You can now be quite radical about how lean you make your inception. My colleague Paulo Caroli wrote an entire book on lean inceptions - use that as inspiration.