Who wants to be an eventprof?
Being an event professional in the current climate is like living in a quiz show - where the rules keep changing. Please welcome your host, M&IT Expert Robert Dunsmore.
Events are emerging from a dystopian spiral - and the bounce back might deflect anywhere.
This uncertainty is the biggest problem facing eventprofs right now. Squid Game at least has childish, if chilling, rules to rely on. Whereas for event organisers, every event is now an experiment.
I’m a creative, so my style is to face a problem with questions to make sense of things. What if the next normal is more like a new quiz show where winning is less about the answers - and more about asking the right questions?
Here’s your first starter for 10...
Sense of identity
Who are you, what do you do, what is your purpose?
Your identity is now in the present, not the past. To paraphrase the historian Marc Bloch “we are more sons and daughters of our time then of our fathers”. A maxim never truer than now, and now even truer of our audiences.
Identity is about making sense of your purpose. Your purpose is the reason people use you, and in these times, it can motivate you to develop and grow. A purpose is shareware too. A shared purpose that feels right to you, colleagues, clients, and your audience is a shared bond.
Sense of leadership
Can you be a leader or follow the leaders you need now?
Leadership is about the future, making sense of the choices we make. Could our event industry use this opportunity to re‐assess and re‐invent the physical and mental preparation we offer our employees and colleagues? It would make a stronger, better industry.
Should our event industry use this opportunity to re‐assess and re‐invent more accessible, more sustainable, more likeable events?
Sense of safety
Feelings are facts, so how can you make our visitors and audiences feel safe?
In a crisis, competition swiftly turns to collaboration - and we have learned from recent experience that collaboration is our superpower. As we experiment, we must measure, record, and publish the results to stand, share and deliver to world leading standards.
Our events industry is at the beginning of a decade of exponential change. It may have started in uncharted disruption but as we gradually, suddenly, inevitably bounce back, we have chance and a choice to chart how it ends.
This is an opportunity for a new economy - and for the events industry, a greener, fairer, smarter, and safer economy.
Sense of community
Is community the right “C” word?
One big thing is made from many small things. A single car is made from 30,000 components. I spoke at The Meetings Show in October ‐ one event made of hundreds of hosted buyers, thousands of visitors and exhibitors and tens of thousands of recorded prescheduled appointments.
It’s so much more than community, your big event is made of decentralised bitesize clans, clubs, combos, companies, crews, coteries, cliques, concordances, collaborations, concomitances, and connections.
We may have smaller events, and larger events made of smaller events. Small is ok if your event is a zoomable asset; zoom in and the small stuff can tell more of a story than the big stuff.
Sense of next
Can you be an ideas factory?
The next normal means new ideas to generate a constant supply of “next” to deal with the constant demands of the future. You are going to need extreme innovation and rapid idea generation ‐ you are going to need to be an ideas factory.
The bounce back will deliver more congestion, and more competition for audience attention. A clear context design for your event will cut through all the noise and connect to your audience, with deliciously snackable bitesize content personalised for each clan, club, and crew.
In our next normal, context is for everyone ‐ content is hyper-personal.
Sense of team‐age angst
Do you have age concern?
Does your team have an age divide or an age dividend, do you have the right balance of youth and experience, do you have prophets and heroes, old and new skills for digital and in‐person events?
Now is the time to embrace new young talent, willing specialists that can be swiftly trained to become generalist members of an ever more able team. Teamwork skills are the asset that keeps on giving. A team approach is a foundation for inclusion. Teams have more skills, teams spread things and teams can instigate change with breath‐taking speed. Teams empower the individual.
The experimental nature of today’s events call for the instant loading up of skills before entering every new event area. One constant is the event's success will always be dependent on a small team of human heroes or in some cases certain individuals – in this case it could be you.
Multiple identities
What is the next normal, and the next, and the next after that?
If it is a quiz show, the next normal is the most complicated game show ever, because it is about constantly dealing with the future, and constantly dealing with new audiences, new expectations, new identities.
Our events will have to identify with our audiences, and they with us. Culture is everything; the rest is infrastructure and culture is the energy for growth in our bounce.
Our events must take on a cultural identity. We must engage, act, and deliver in such a way as no one feels excluded from a common culture of belonging. Every attendee can find the language and symbols of their own identity at an event that touches them and they in turn can touch back.
In parallel, our attendees should be able to add new content or new ingredients to the event that will assume greater importance as the event develops their sense of belonging. Our audiences join our events, but we join their behaviour, and that behaviour drives belonging.
Life, events, everything is a giant quiz show. It’s all about the right questions.
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