I\u2019m in the country side in Slovakia today. I took my 15th flight (this year) to get here. I will leave on Sunday. And there is no guarantee that I will ever see the people I will have met here again. I\u2019m starting to get tired of this pattern.<\/p>\n
For the last ten years of my career I\u2019ve been invited to invite-only retreats, conferences, get togethers around the world. From Doors of Perception 2006 in India, FooCamp 2008 in Napa Valley, Microsoft Social Symposiums 2009 & 2010 in Redmond and New York City, retreats with fo.am<\/a> across Belgium, the Salzburg Global Seminar<\/a>, and this week Holis<\/a> retreat, the opportunities to spend time with a bunch of strangers have increased. But the events themselves always leave me with a sad taste in my mouth. Why do they rarely feel productive? Here\u2019s what I think happens: A professional retreat is neither work nor the Club Med. It sits uncomfortably between getting something productive done and fun. It\u2019s not as much fun as going out to the pub, nor as much work as going to work. It\u2019s a no man\u2019s land of work and play. So often it retreats into play (heavy late-night drinking) and no work. It\u2019s easier that way. Easier to organise, easier to coordinate, and easier to justify as \u2018networking\u2019 to whomever is funding it.<\/p>\n I think that\u2019s a shame. Considering my personal relationship status I should value the opportunity to do heavy drinking with strangers but I don\u2019t. I\u2019m older and much more interested in the productive potential of working with strangers. It\u2019s what the internet promised us back then: remote work, remote teams, random international connections. The idea was that you could make work with strangers happen much more easily. But that\u2019s not what we have now.<\/p>\n If you think of big global events like the Milan Furniture Fair or CES (the Consumer Electronics Show), the reason why so many people decend on the worst place on earth (Vegas, not Milan) is because they know something will come out of it. They\u2019ll learn something new related to their work. They won\u2019t have to explain what they do to others, they\u2019ll collect a few useful contacts, a few business cards and they can interact with people at their leisure. They can get lunch when they want, grab a drink with whoever they connect with, stay up as late as they like with whomever. They\u2019re in control of their immediate and professional needs. Judging by the number of conferences around the world, this works really well. It\u2019s about a targeted definition of work and the fun is optional.<\/p>\n In a private get together, the less overlap between people, the smaller the group needs to be. But the need for organic conversations increases. <\/strong>Things feel like glue in these smaller events. More time at dinner, more time around drinks, more time at breakfast. People need much more time to invite people into their world, explain their field\u2019s lingo, acronyms, professional culture, KPIs, families, background. And the organisers have to understand that this doesn\u2019t, in itself, bind people<\/strong>. But it\u2019s important for people to start to imagine what it might be like to work with someone. Putting people in a room to listen silently to someone speak on a stage doesn\u2019t achieve this. Giving people 45 mns to an hour for lunch doesn\u2019t achieve this. Getting people to work in the evenings doesn\u2019t achieve this. Getting people to \u2018workshop\u2019 something together for 45 mns then change tables doesn\u2019t achieve this. Getting people to \u2018speed date\u2019 conversations doesn\u2019t achieve this. It\u2019s incredible the amount of formats that exist within the culture of event organisations that actively hinder cross-disciplinary interactions.<\/p>\n It\u2019s interesting to meet different people from different backgrounds, but it\u2019s not meaningful unless it\u2019s actuated. It\u2019s lived, and something is built, a project is started, people visit each other after, people connect year after year. Doing this as an event organiser can mean putting on the same event for years with the same group of people. Or running a salon, or starting a school or an art collective. That\u2019s why the Bauhaus was so successful. A school acted as a gathering place for a motley crew of teachers to build things together over decades, starting new schools, working together abroad.<\/p>\n This is why most of us do our best cross-disciplinary work inside of work itself. <\/strong>It\u2019s why we start companies, so we can work with each other, get to know each other, get to understand each other deeply.<\/p>\n Is it because we think that out of play comes work? Sometimes. But not often these days. We all reached Dunbar\u2019s number a long time ago, and really meeting people is now too easy, too disposable. If I had a dime everytime someone sent me an email with the subject line \u2018Intros\u2019 which never turned into a meeting, well, I\u2019d be a rich woman.<\/p>\n Many event organisers don\u2019t care about this, but as a participant, a content provider (speaker) and a community leader (London Internet of Things Meetup<\/a>) I obsess about this.<\/p>\n The big problems of today and tomorrow require lots of people to come together and take a multi-disciplinary productive approach to solving them. Especially problems like climate change, world hunger, world peace, all these supposedly \u2018wicked problems\u2019 require people to work with each other across many different fields and make things together. They require deep long conversations to help build bridges and to lead to solutions. They require events where there is a clear vision, a clear theme, and people are put in teams and can organise themselves and their time as they wish, as long as they make something and show it to others.<\/p>\n I believe every event is capable of doing this. And I think we should actively ask for this to happen. <\/strong>Life is too short to just spend it drinking late at night with people you could be changing the world with.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Let\u2019s get together and call ourselves an institute: or how people coming together isn\u2019t\u00a0enough. I\u2019m in the country side in Slovakia today. I took my 15th flight (this year) to get here. I will leave on Sunday. And there is no guarantee that I will ever see the people I will have met here again.… Continue reading Let\u2019s get together and call ourselves an institute: or how people coming together isn\u2019t\u00a0enough.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet-of-things","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p41XhY-EB","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2517\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The larger the group, the more overlap there needs to\u00a0be.<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Unless someone has a context to build something right there and then with someone from a different field, it\u2019s not a meaningful connection.<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Why then do we keep being invited to events that are not interested in people building things together?<\/h4>\n