Jan 27 2021 69 mins
Today, we are talking about creative pivots and the Event Design Collective has been shaping the way towards better events. The whole events industry got massively disrupted and we want to ask Ruud Jansen about the state of the union of events: The Switzerland based Entrepreneur Ruud Janssen has been an innovator and game changer in the Hospitality and Meetings & Events Industry since 1994. With his business partner Roel Frissen he co-created Event Canvas methodology and with an evergrowing community, this collective aims at creating common language for Meetings & Events.
Ruud shares with us with story of growing up in different countries around the globe and experience a variety of cultures with a fascination for learning languages.
For him the event canvas is what sheet music is to musician. A way to decode and collaboratively understand that the goal of an event is to create a certain change within the stakeholders and ultimately create value.
The power of a piece of paper lays in the context that people can relate to it and how memories and stories used to be shared, the printing press allowed the further spreading and learning of the past knowledge beyond verbal storytelling. The event canvas takes the gut feeling that we all have and makes it more accessible and visible.
In the process, that I have gone through as well to be come a Certified Event Designer, there are certain challenges as a team but this process showcases once more that if you are learning together, you are staying together as the curious way of learning something also bonds synapse and at the same time powerful human connection are built.
Nobody likes to change but in the present moment we need to get digital dexterity to stay on top of our game what Ruud accomplished with his team through continuously testing, prototyping and setting a certain standard. (e.g. a spare modem!!)
He stays motivated through learning and in his mastermind practise he appreciates the work of Paul Rulkens and his theme of strategic quitting.
An interesting way to discover the digital pivot is for Ruud that awareness that the from home facilitation allows him some 60-70 days due to no travelling. He recommends to use these times for new experiences and not doing more of what has already been done. HIs master decompression hack is the alphorn which also helped him to become a more reliable member of the local musical community.
He recommends to hack your own creativity in talking and listening to inspiring persons and explore unexplored spaces together with them. Meanwhile, he loves these adventures, there is also some highly systemic parts of his life e.g. the rhythmic clock of his dogs.
The main chance of events from an organisational perspective is as well that is gives an outside person a DNA of the company - a gradient of the abilities and on the long run, events can be also viewed as "living organism" with a certain human note to it - meaning that events that have happened for more than two decades might be in a mid-life crisis with the need to reinvent and other events going through a teenage phase or are still in a diaper-start-up mode. It is interesting to discover the rejuvenation potential or at least stay young at heart.
For the online facilitation, it requires some ability to improvise and think three steps ahead, but at the same time one hack is to point out upfront that "if we don't break anything, we aren't experiencing" hard enough as a kind of jail free card with connotation to celebrate failure.
More information about the Event Design Collective with great free resources www.eventdesigncollective.com
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