Part 1

Introduction

States along the Gulf of Mexico experience some of the most frequent and destructive natural disasters in the country, including flooding, drought, tornadoes, and hurricanes. As impacts from climate change and more intense weather events affect the region, the increasing toll that it takes on infrastructure, and in turn on the people of the Gulf region, cannot be ignored. Record-breaking storms and weather events are occurring more frequently, and the costs associated with repairing the damage and rebuilding towns and cities has steadily increased. In 2020 alone, the United States faced 22 extreme weather events that each cost the nation more than $1 billion.¹ In the face of new realities of extreme weather events and the need to adapt to a shifting normal due to climate change, the nation must look for new ways to invest in society’s infrastructure systems so that we not only rebuild from disasters but also systematically incorporate the elements of prevention, mitigation, and resilience into planning efforts.

The current state of infrastructure in the United States is in poor and failing condition.² The Gulf states, which produce, refine, and transport much of the nation’s oil and gas, are no exception. The roads, bridges, inland waterways, and ports that transport goods from abroad to every corner of the country are in disrepair. Hurricanes, combined with storm surge, rising sea levels, and record rainfall have damaged infrastructure beyond roads and bridges. Water distribution systems, communication networks, and power generation and distribution systems are too frequently knocked offline by these and other weather events and cause serious suffering and harm. Communities, small businesses, hospitals, and schools have been destroyed or deemed uninhabitable due to storm-induced flooding. And oil spills, both the catastrophic disasters that make front-page news and lesser-known oil spills that can last for years or decades, continue to release toxic chemicals from privately held wells and pipelines, harming the environment and people’s health.

The bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA, P.L. 117-58), which has the potential to address long-overdue improvements to our roads, bridges, railways, and ports,³ provides a generational opportunity to fix not only dilapidated infrastructure but also the way in which we prioritize the projects that we fund. Currently, the federal government aids in rebuilding existing infrastructure, often in ways that do not prevent future infrastructure failures. A new, better integrated, more forward-looking approach is needed, prioritizing projects that protect against future climate threats, enable our communities to be successful, and fairly and equitably protect lives and property for a safer future.

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¹ Fact Sheet: The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal, The White House. URL:https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/11/06/fact-sheet-the-bipartisan-infrastructure-deal/. Accessed Nov 6, 2021.

² U.S. Infrastructure Grade, ASCE’s 2021 Infrastructure Report Card URL: https://infrastructurereportcard.org/infrastructure-categories/. Accessed Nov 6, 2021.

³ Fact Sheet: The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal, The White House. URL: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/11/06/fact-sheet-the-bipartisan-infrastructure-deal/. Accessed Nov 6, 2021.

Government agencies charged with making the most of this generational investment and other investments in infrastructure are confronting large and challenging tasks.⁴ Projects that may have been approved previously but are waiting for funding may need to be reevaluated to see if they are in line with new priorities. Decision-making agencies must also develop new frameworks to decide which projects to fund and which not to fund. Recognizing that agencies, states, and communities might benefit from a neutral convener, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, a science and evidence-based organization helping to address these challenges, decided to launch an initiative on infrastructure investment prioritization by convening a workshop on November 15, 16, and 18, 2021, aimed at trying to address these complex issues focused on infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico region.

PROCEEDINGS ORGANIZATION

This proceedings is organized with, first, a description of the workshop format and processes in Part 1. Part 2 addresses the projects and the prioritization, and provides a description of the observations and key takeaways from each scenario-based discussion and from the capstone discussions, where the thinking was brought together. Part 3 focuses on the prioritization framework, especially the criteria that participants applied to the projects and how they think about how the pieces relate. Part 4 briefly describes participants’ comments on the workshop, and on possible next steps to follow the workshop for both framework development and implementation. Appendix A presents the takeaways by domain. Appendix B lists all of the project ideas. Appendix C, written by Eleanore Douglas, describes the prioritization framework. Appendixes D, E, and F outline details about the workshop agenda, speakers, and participants, respectively.

Key takeaways from this workshop were cultivated at three levels of specificity: workshop-wide takeaways, scenario-specific takeaways and high-priority projects, and detailed takeaways and the comprehensive list of projects. To make it easier for the reader to find the takeaways, these categories are described in more detail below, along with guides to where they can be found in the proceedings.

1. Workshop-wide Takeaways: Workshop-wide takeaways include the nine key takeaways organized under three topics: (1) the necessity of community engagement, (2) the need to overcome long-standing obstacles, and (3) the need to move into the future. The topics and takeaways are mentioned in the Summary and expanded upon throughout the body of this proceedings. Another workshop-wide takeaway is the prioritization criteria that were developed and form the foundation of a prioritization framework for selecting projects that will increase infrastructure resilience in the Gulf region. They are located in the Summary and elaborated upon in Part 3. Appendix C includes an explanation of the background research and rationale for the approach to developing the criteria and corresponding framework.

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⁴ Although the largest allocations in the IIJA are for dedicated programs, like bridge replacements, the IIJA also has billions or tens of billions of dollars for more cross-sector or integrated programs that provide grants to improve resilience or prevent harm. Furthermore, the IIJA is only a piece of infrastructure spending by federal, state, and local governments and the private sector.

2. Scenario-Specific Takeaways and High-Priority Projects: Scenario-specific takeaways are trends and key ideas that emerged across multiple domains, specific to either the hurricane or protracted oil spill scenario. There are 23 scenario-specific takeaways, and they all map to the three topics listed above under Workshop-wide Takeaways. High-priority projects are those projects within each domain that either garnered the most votes across all macro-criteria or garnered an atypically high number of votes in a single macro-criterion. There are 46 high-priority projects. All of this information is located in Part 2.
3. Detailed Takeaways and Comprehensive Project List: Detailed takeaways are ideas that emerged in individual domains on individual days and even in individual exercises and were emphasized by workshop participants as being particularly important. There are 84 of these more granular takeaways, and they are listed in Appendix A. The complete list of all 306 project ideas that were identified during this workshop is in Appendix B.

All of the takeaways reflect comments and discussions at the workshop. Takeaways are presented as having been said by workshop participants. Readers should not regard these as carrying the weight of recommendations from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The views cited are not necessarily consensus views of the group, and the group was not composed to meet National Academies’ standards for study committees that make consensus findings and recommendations. The takeaways do reflect key ideas presented or discussed by one or more workshop participant(s), so the material presented here could be considered suggestions coming from informed individuals in the process.

CONVENING A WORKSHOP

To help prioritize among possible investments to improve the resilience of built infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico region,⁵ the National Academies convened a diverse group of experts for a 3-day interactive workshop in November 2021.

The purpose of the event, Investing in Resilient Infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico Workshop, was to support the National Academies Gulf Research Program (GRP) in demonstrating and refining a process to help inform recommendations for prioritizing infrastructure investments across sectors and anchored in the Gulf region and its energy industry. The workshop had four main objectives:

1. Use two scenarios—a hurricane and a protracted oil spill—to start discussions on infrastructure vulnerabilities
2. Identify and prioritize projects or investments to reduce those vulnerabilities, thereby strengthening infrastructure resilience in the Gulf region
3. Identify criteria that would drive infrastructure investment decisions and prioritization

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⁵ There are many different definitions of infrastructure in use today. This workshop focused on the built environment, including human-fabricated physical structures and interventions in the natural environment. Social infrastructure is supported by these investments, and although it may require its own major investment, it was outside of the scope of this workshop.

4. Define criteria that will form the foundation of a repeatable prioritization framework for infrastructure investment decisions through cross-comparison of insights from each of the two scenarios

The workshop also introduced three policy questions to guide discussion:

1. What choices would maximize resilience return on federal investments in infrastructure and promote equity, fairness, economic effectiveness, and other goals and requirements?
2. How can we overcome obstacles to making the best investments in infrastructure?
3. How can we mitigate against private infrastructure assets becoming public liabilities?

Approximately 50 infrastructure, oil and gas, petrochemical, emergency management, and Gulf region experts from federal, state, and local governments; industry; non-governmental organizations; and academia participated in the 3-day workshop. Half of the participants joined Day 1 on November 15 for a set of in-person exercises focused on a hurricane scenario; half of the participants joined Day 2 on November 16 for a set of in-person exercises focused on a protracted oil spill scenario. The groups were split to ensure that they were small enough for every attendee to participate substantively and that appropriate expertise was represented in each group. Exercise materials included detailed scenario descriptions and chains of adverse events that could likely result from each scenario. Participants reviewed and updated that information, discussed vulnerabilities related to each scenario that impact local infrastructure, and then brainstormed and prioritized projects to address those vulnerabilities. They also discussed their considerations in making prioritization decisions. All participants joined Day 3 virtually on November 18 for a set of capstone exercises that compared and built upon ideas discussed in Days 1 and 2. See Figure 1-1 for an overview of this plan.

Discussion and information collection was structured around four domains:

1. Oil, gas, and petrochemical (abbreviated as petrochemical) industry functions
2. Other infrastructure functions

3. Society’s needs
4. Environmental protection

These domains, elaborated in Figure 1-2, provided a useful mechanism to organize inputs and feedback. On Days 1 and 2, participants joined small groups designed to include experts with diverse backgrounds, and all participants rotated through all domains. On Day 3, participants joined small groups composed of experts with similar backgrounds, and they spent their time in a domain that closely aligned with that background.

SETTING THE CONTEXT THROUGH KEYNOTES

The National Academies arranged for three keynote speakers to provide context for this event. Jason Tama, White House National Security Council Director for Resilience and Response, gave opening remarks during the first plenary session of the workshop. He opened the talk by noting that the timing of this workshop could not have been better; many factors that are fueling a “robust and certainly long-overdue dialogue on resilience.” Specifically, Tama noted that we, as a nation, have been tested multiple times this past year, witnessing vulnerabilities in our infrastructure and being forced to reconsider what resilience is. These events, along with international and national-level developments such as the 2030 Strength and Resilience Commitment, adopted by the NATO allies at the 2021 Brussels summit,⁶ as well as the signing of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, add momentum to—and provide resources for—efforts to build infrastructure resilience.

Tama pointed to the importance of spending the soon-to-be available IIJA funds “with resilience in mind” to build “safer and more secure and more resilient systems that Americans can rely on in times of crisis.” When considering recovery, he encouraged participants to think of investment ideas that would help the nation “bounce forward” after incidents, so communities end up in a better place than they were previously. His perspectives on what can be learned from 2021 about resilience and what factors ought to be considered in infrastructure investment projects include the following:

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⁶ See https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_185340.htm?selectedLocale=en.

• We have a shared responsibility to achieve collective resilience. Tama pointed to the various supply chain shortages Americans have been grappling with since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic as a testament to the interconnected world we live in. The inability to produce or successfully source medical supplies, microprocessors, and fuel can impact critical infrastructure sectors and our national security, and be the difference between life and death. Only through collective resilience, which will require a “shared responsibility across all aspects of our society,” will we be able to strengthen our infrastructure and thus, our communities.
• Resilience should account for cascading impacts. Tama shared a few examples of how our growing interconnectedness—be it through data, power, equipment, or people—has amplified cascading impacts during incidents. A ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline leading to fuel shortages in parts of the United States is a prime example of how a compromised IT system can have cascading impacts on other sectors of the economy. Power outages during Hurricane Ida impacted communications, oil and gas production, transportation, recovery operations, and more. Historical droughts and rising temperatures reduced our ability to generate hydropower and meet power demands, and they worsened wildfires. Tama encouraged participants to consider different approaches to resilience that will minimize cascading impacts within and across sectors.
• Striving for equity in infrastructure investments is essential. Tama spoke to the importance of working toward equity in infrastructure investment projects that will make disadvantaged communities more resilient, as they are disproportionately impacted during incidents and by the costs of recovery.
• Establishing a common understanding of resilience can help drive action. In concluding his remarks, Tama noted that “resilience is an easy buzzword word to throw around … but we really need to be able to translate that to action.” He asked the participants to develop a common definition for resilience and implementation principles that would help the government, private sector, and communities make actionable decisions to achieve the best possible outcomes.

Participants also heard remarks from Lt. General Thomas P. Bostick (U.S. Army, retired), Chairman of Bostick Global Strategies and a National Academies Steering Committee member. He opened by sharing insights about his time with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, where he advocated for a systems-level approach to infrastructure investment. He noted that resilience is not achieved by focusing on individual projects that treat parts of a larger system, but it is achieved by focusing on what is best for the system as a whole. He noted the importance of talking about resilience in exact terms to achieve actionable and measurable results. Without defining resilience and understanding the math, science, and engineering behind systems, the efforts to strengthen our infrastructure will be futile.

General Bostick also emphasized creating something that future generations would benefit from. He shared that only recently, in light of worsening natural disasters, has the conversation shifted from investing in protection systems to investing in resilient and risk reduction systems. He gave notes about what makes systems resilient, why resilience must be prioritized, and the importance of stakeholder engagement in decision-making. Some of these insights are summarized below:

Resilient systems should bend, but not break. Engineers design systems with a certain functionality to perform a desired goal. When planning for system risks in the past, the conventional wisdom was to not let risks cause a disruption to the system. While a worthy goal, General Bostick noted that it has proven to be counterproductive in light of recent incidents and the rising costs of recovery. By introducing resilience into the equation, engineers can make systems absorb the inevitable disruptions without breaking the system; systems should recover by adapting from the lessons learned and increase their functionality and be much improved.

• There is a balancing act between protection systems and risk reduction systems. General Bostick shared the example of how the Hurricane and Storm Damage Risk Reduction System (HSDRRS), which was built after Hurricane Katrina, helped reduce flooding during the 2011 flood compared with the 1927 flood that damaged the same region. With unlimited resources, engineers would have worked to prevent the flooding altogether. With limited resources, however, General Bostick noted that we will have to make pragmatic decisions on where we can protect and where it is better to reduce risk.
• Stakeholder engagement and priority setting in infrastructure investment projects is crucial. General Bostick shared his experience of working with outraged and battered communities after Superstorm Sandy, where key stakeholders were not involved or engaged in the prior infrastructure investment decision-making processes. Depending on the level of investments made, some communities fared better than others. Highlighting again the point about limited resources, General Bostick noted that “you’re always going to need to set priorities and those priorities will leave people out.… They’re not going to be any happier after the disaster, but if they’re part of that decision to say, ‘this is where we’re going to spend our money,’ then we’re in a much, much better place.”
• He issued a call to broaden the concept of systems. General Bostick concluded by encouraging the participants to broaden what we include in systems and to go beyond a specific sector or industry. Systems should account for “all the other impacts that keep people from living their day-to-day lives.” He acknowledged that this would be a difficult undertaking because it requires many stakeholders, but by working together, we can create something “that will make all the difference in the days ahead.”

On the final day of the workshop, Marcia McNutt, President of the National Academy of Sciences, delivered the opening remarks. She began by recognizing the passage of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which will invest more than one hundred billion dollars per year in infrastructure, giving our nation a rare opportunity “to improve the lives of our people for the coming decades and beyond.” But the resources must be spent wisely and effectively, because even with these funds it will be impossible to execute every necessary or valuable infrastructure project. McNutt then shared her perspectives on some challenges to infrastructure investment that came up during Day 1 and Day 2 of the workshop, which are summarized below:

• “Improving equity in outcomes is imperative.” McNutt acknowledged that communities of color have been disregarded in discussions of resilience for decades and suffer disproportionately more from hazards than other communities. Going forward, we must be inclusive and continue to invest in these communities, because “infrastructure is not a set-it-and-forget-it issue.”

• “We must bridge the gap between our vision for the future and needs of the present.” When designing systems, we need to account for future needs and emerging risks, and implement appropriate solutions now before the window of opportunity passes. As McNutt pointed out, “We cannot invest looking in the rear-view mirror.” This will involve reducing red tape; harmonizing national, regional, and local interests; and overcoming structural and systemic challenges to how we currently approach infrastructure investments.
• “We need to build back better to prevent legacies of failure in each natural disaster.” Infrastructure investments are front and center in everybody’s mind after natural disasters have just occurred, and the easiest way to recover is by rebuilding what was destroyed. We must break out of this cycle by continuously investing in infrastructure when necessary and rebuilding in a way that allows systems to withstand shock as well as lessen harm to communities. Only by anticipating problems ahead of time and integrating lessons learned into our infrastructure investments can we build resilience.

THE EXERCISES

The National Academies sought to provide unique value from this workshop by maximizing discussion and interactivity. To accomplish this, the majority of time spent throughout the workshop was dedicated to a series of exercises in small groups organized around the four domains described earlier in this proceedings. As noted previously, on Days 1 and 2, the same set of exercises was conducted, and each focused on a different scenario: Day 1 focused on the hurricane scenario, and Day 2 focused on the protracted oil spill scenario. On Day 3, all participants focused on a set of capstone exercises that were scenario-agnostic, in order to compare and build on the takeaways from the previous two days.

The Prevention and Preparedness Exercise

The Prevention and Preparedness (P&P) Exercise was the first exercise held on Days 1 and 2. Participants used chains of adverse events that could likely occur in each scenario to prompt thinking and brainstorming of actions, projects, or investments that could prevent these adverse events from occurring in the first place or help the Gulf region prepare for and become more resilient to them or other events if they do occur. Workshop designers identified these chains of events as part of the scenario development prior to the workshop and displayed them on large poster boards. There were four boards for each scenario; each board represented one of the four domains used to organize workshop discussion and information collection. See Figure 1-3 for a sample board representing the Petrochemical Industry Functions domain for the hurricane scenario (Day 1).

Workshop designers divided participants into four small groups, intending to create groups of experts with diverse backgrounds. Each group reported to its first domain, where it was met by a facilitator and a scribe. The facilitator invited participants to first explore the entire board, reviewing the chains of events. Participants were invited to add adverse events to the chains of events preprinted on the boards, if they felt something important was missing. A few adverse events, impacts, and connections among them were added to the boards. Different participants gravitated to different areas of the board, which was expected and welcomed,

typically driven by their areas of expertise and/or interest. Next, the facilitator asked participants to think about actions, projects, or investments that, if taken, would prevent these adverse events from happening in the first place or mitigate their impacts if they do occur. All projects were welcomed—as in some cases, a half-formed project idea may be better or more important than a fully mature idea—being “shovel-ready” is only one consideration. The readiness or maturity came up later when technical merit and feasibility were considered. Participants wrote down project ideas on self-adhesive notes and attached the notes directly to the board. The facilitator led discussion about the projects, attempting to elicit additional detail and inputs from other small-group members. After 20 minutes, the small groups rotated to the next domain and repeated the same activities. They also had the option to discuss and build upon projects suggested by previous groups. This exercise continued until all participants rotated through all domains.

This exercise was not conducted to provide a definitive or authoritative list of projects, and it did not seek consensus among the workshop participants. It allowed for the brainstorming of project ideas for further consideration and to be used in subsequent workshop exercises aimed at understanding what participants believe is important in making project prioritization decisions.

The Prioritization Exercise

The second and final exercise conducted on Days 1 and 2 was the Prioritization Exercise. Participants prioritized the projects brainstormed during the P&P Exercise using five prioritization macro-criteria: Environment, Economy, Society, Resilience,⁷ and Project Governance. Workshop designers selected these macro-criteria after an analysis of other frameworks, best practices, and National Academies priorities, as detailed in Appendix C.

Participants remained in their small groups from the P&P Exercise, and they rotated through all four domains one more time. Upon arrival at a new domain, facilitators reviewed the boards, now populated with the projects that had been brainstormed by all groups earlier that day for the given domain.⁸ Then the facilitator assigned each small-group participant a different prioritization macro-criterion and asked, “Which three projects provide the most value for, or have the greatest positive impact on, that criterion?” Participants cast their votes using different colored chips; they could assign more than one chip to the same project. (See Figure 1-4, a graphic that was available in hard copy to the participants during this exercise, outlining the five macro-criteria and corresponding chips, for more clarity about this exercise.) Then the facilitators prompted discussion, asking participants to explain their choices and most importantly, explain what factored into that decision. What aspects of that criterion were important?

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⁷ All of the criteria connect to resilience, and resilience is a key overall objective. The resilience criterion highlighted here was meant to prompt participants to rank the project according to its contribution to overall resilience, including adaptability and prevention of failures and exposures to physical harms. The criteria are elaborated in Figure 1–4 and Part 3.

⁸ Prior to the Prioritization Exercise beginning, facilitators consolidated redundant projects, moved projects to more applicable domains when appropriate, and removed ideas that were not projects but rather observations.

How did participants break the criterion down? Facilitators asked the participant assigned a given macro-criterion to lead off the discussion for that macro-criterion, and ultimately opened discussion to all participants on all criteria. Participants also shared when they felt other important prioritization criteria should be considered outside of the five predetermined macro-criteria. Finally, facilitators asked participants to weigh the relative importance of the five macro-criteria for the given domain when prioritizing potential projects. Participants assigned 100 percentage points across the macro-criteria, considering whether the macro-criteria should be weighed equally or whether some are more important than others, and if so, how much more important. Participants provided feedback using a handout provided.⁹

The Capstone Sessions

All participants joined together virtually on Day 3 for a series of capstone sessions and exercises to further build out and refine a set of criteria that would form the foundation of a prioritization framework for infrastructure investments. They compared outputs from both scenarios, elaborated on key criteria, and reexamined that key criteria in light of feasibility and project risk.

For Day 3, workshop designers organized participants into new groups; this time, intentionally grouping participants with similar backgrounds and expertise together and assigning the group to a domain that aligned to its expertise.

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⁹ The workshop designers and the National Academies recognize that there are shortcomings of simple linear weighting schemes. For example, they do not allow for contingent weighting (project B is only valuable if projects A and C are implemented at the same time). But the process and results are more about prompting the discussions and identifying issues than the actual scores.

The first session was the short Capstone Project Prioritization exercise. Workshop designers had analyzed the votes cast on Days 1 and 2 of the workshop, identifying approximately 12 high-priority projects per domain. Projects became part of this high-priority group either because they received the most votes across all macro-criteria or because they received an atypically high number of votes in one particular macro-criterion. During the first session of Day 3, each group prioritized the set of 12 projects for its assigned domain, using an online ranking tool that showed the compiled results of individual submissions in real time. Then facilitators led discussions to understand how participants went about making their decisions, priming them to think once again in terms of prioritization criteria, which would be the focus of the three subsequent sessions.

Next, participants moved into the longest session of the day, the Prioritization Criteria Review Exercise. Workshop designers had aggregated the sub-criteria—the elements of the macro-criteria identified by participants as important to their prioritization decision-making—during the Prioritization Exercise on Days 1 and 2, organized by domain and by macro-criteria. Approximately six sub-criteria per macro-criterion emerged as relevant to all domains; between zero and three additional sub-criteria emerged as key to each macro-criterion per individual domain. Facilitators presented participants with all sub-criteria for their domain (see Figure 1-5 for an example), and participants identified the five sub-criteria that they believed were most important in each macro-criterion category. Then they engaged in a detailed discussion to elaborate on how they defined each sub-criterion for the purpose of prioritizing projects that would increase infrastructure resilience in the Gulf, and why they felt the sub-criteria were especially important.

The Prioritization Criteria Feasibility session was the third session of Day 3. This was largely an open discussion about the feasibility of incorporating various prioritization criteria into a prioritization framework. Facilitators asked participants to think through impediments to feasibly applying these sub-criteria during the prioritization processes—for example, impediments resulting from legal, financial, time, and data constraints.

The capstone sessions ended with a session entitled Project Risk and its Impact on Prioritization Criteria, a brief discussion about project risk and what implications that has, if any, on the prioritization criteria discussed so far. Facilitators selected three high-priority projects from the morning’s Capstone Project Prioritization Exercise that were clear and covered a range of topic areas. They asked participants to brainstorm risks to the projects’ success and mitigation strategies to address those risks. Finally, the groups discussed whether any of those risks suggested new or modified criteria that should be included in the prioritization framework.

THE SCENARIOS

Workshop designers prepared detailed scenario narratives to help prompt project brainstorming and prioritization considerations by participants during the workshop. They provided these narratives, along with executive summaries capturing key highlights of each narrative, to participants before the workshop as read-ahead materials. The following are the executive summaries that were provided, offering highlights about these notional events.

THE HYBRID FORMAT

The hybrid format used for this workshop—which mixed in-person and virtual sessions—successfully enabled workshop designers to collect substantial and high-value outputs, and the 1-day gap between the second and third days of the workshop allowed sufficient time for analysis and distillation of Day 1 and Day 2 outputs to set up for Day 3. Participants provided positive feedback on the hybrid format during the hotwash at the conclusion of Day 3, which was a session focused on evaluating what went well and what should be adjusted if this type of workshop were held again. By holding Days 1 and 2 in person, participants had an opportunity to forge new relationships and take advantage of the energy created by the dynamic interaction of a group of dedicated experts brought together by a common goal. By holding Day 3 virtually, participants’ time was respected, allowing them to travel back to their homes. It also accommodated the individuals who, due to either personal or professional conflicts, were not able to participate in an in-person event. By utilizing online collaboration tools, Day 3 discussions and inputs remained rich and insightful, ultimately achieving all of the workshop objectives.