If knowledge is power, learning is a superpower. Learning is the oxygen of knowledge. We found that out when economies around the world ground to halt. In parallel, we have spent the last number of months investing in research to support our education strategy. If you could have any superpower, which one would you choose? How about learning everything you want right away, with photographic memory and crystal clear, while being rationally razor-sharp?
Also, learning is the oxygen of meetings. How do we keep learning alive as a superpower? What do we want learning and knowledge to look like? How do we write a new future for the meetings and event industry and make it a good one together?
Many of us spend years educating ourselves and learning. Knowledge is held high. The reason is celebrated. Logical intelligence is refined. And, of course, it’s still like this: Anything is possible. It will be fine. Only we dare to continue to believe that everything is still possible.
At the same time, we live in an era where a new set of questions changes the classic routine matrix we have lived with for many years and generates new lenses that may enable a versatile perspective on complexity. What do you choose then?
Unfortunately, the perspectives we are facing right now have not coincided into a broader standard, more integrated theory of how and why relationships work the way they do. We see intense contradictions in many countries, we see economies begin to kneel, and completely new map sheets emerge, and ecosystems become more and never more straightforward, only more complex.
The digital experiments we are currently undergoing with more and more webinars of very varying quality mean that we have forgotten that there have also been face-to-face meetings in the past that have not given us new perspectives or new knowledge at all. Bad, ignorant, ill-prepared lecturers do not get better because the meeting with them is digitised.
The way forward is already here. It’s just a matter of daring to see what happens and we have to go out into deeper water and look in more places to find the pearls that are out there after all.
During 2020, our world of learning has expanded. We have discovered many new possibilities to learn more thanks to a couple of well facilitated and produced webinars with thought-provoking content. We have developed our networks, strengthen already strong relationships, and we have entered new collaborations with people we, so far, have only seen in Zoom meetings.
The way forward is not so different from the way we just walked. It only contains ten times as much analysis of the world around us. And more books to read, such as Humankind – A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. There is lots of new knowledge to absorb on the path where new learning strengthens our superpower.
