Robert Dunsmore kicks off our Meeting of the Future campaign by discussing what it means to him to look forward in the MICE industry.
MEETING OF THE FUTURE
"I really don’t know what will happen, but as a creative, I’m OK with that.
Like a design brief or a research project, this campaign is a process. A consultation, and consultations involve crowds, so I’m going with the crowd.
Our crowd powered approach is our foundation for inclusion. Crowds have more skills, crowds spread things and crowds can instigate change with breath-taking speed. Crowds in this case are event people, and they know so much they are a secret superpower.
Better sources give better thoughts, better questions lead to better answers, better habits grow better results. Learn more, the edge is in the inputs, the understanding of your communities, and how to be more beautifully human.
Unleashing the power of meetings with the power of us is an opportunity. I hope we get closer to the power of purpose - and crowdsource how to build community, flexibility, identity, and empathy into the culture and infrastructure of meeting futures.
COMMUNITY
I like to think of this as the human perspective, the evolution of meeting culture. Embrace the human issues of belonging and behaviour and the accessibility, sustainability, and likeability of the meeting of the futures.
The experience of work has evolved, work from home, office or mobile has become increasingly interdisciplinary. Domestication of the meeting environment is normality - sets participants at their ease - a meeting can be a space of both comfort and inspiration.
FLEXIBILITY
Maybe think of this as the infrastructure perspective. The evolution of the physical meeting space, formats and maybe even technology.
Technology, now everyone brings their own, is all we need the cloud?
Prompt and response. We increasingly live in a world of prompts. Text to content, text to visual Ai, or voice to Ai. Each begins with a human issuing a “prompt” action the “response” action will shape around.
Might this follow as the format for meetings of the future? A meeting space like a Google homepage. So simple, so elegant. The blank white space, a changing logo hidden in plain sight. A world of complexity hidden beyond the utilitarian simplicity of a letterbox in anticipation of a human prompt.
Then boom, everything you need for this moment is there. Versatile and super-simple.
IDENTITY – BY DESIGN
The purpose perspective, the evolution of meeting personalisation. This will embrace purpose as a reason for the meeting futures.
Should we add a meeting identity. A little holistic personalisation in the composition of the meeting space to support the spirit and character of the meeting purpose to resonate engage participants.
Articulating your meeting client’s identity is about inputs and knowing your client’s community in detail and could optimise your space use and often simplify it.
WELLBEING – BY DESIGN
This is very much what this project is about, a listening perspective and the evolution of meeting empathy. Embrace issues of societal change in our belonging and behaviour, the accessibility, sustainability, and likeability of the meeting of the future.
Improving the health of a meeting space will improve the wealth of ideas, radically enhancing meeting attendee performance and productivity.
Audiences and delegate behaviour has changed and will continue to evolve, I’m OK with that."
