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CMP SERIES CERTIFICATION MADE POSSIBLE
You Will Cross Boundaries
Devin Fidler Research Director, Technology Horizons Institute for the Future › iftf.org › @devinfidler
What every professional should know The back- drop of the work environment over the next decade or so is shifting toward greater compu- tation, greater automation, and greater what we’ve been thinking about as outsourcing, but it’s becoming much more important than that. It’s possible for me to, for example, contract somebody to work for me in, say, Russia, and get a project from them by the end of the day. That kind of truly borderless work arrangement. When you take that as the starting point, a lot of the work skills that really jump out as critical moving forward are more soft skills, more interpersonal- relationship–based. The other side of that is, for the computational shift, if you’re being deluged with all of this information, the ability to just man- age what it is you’re thinking about without getting distracted — that is also privileged.
Masters digital tools — and knows when and why to deploy them.
Job 1 for planners: helping curate that info It’s figur- ing out the right information to present and the most striking way to present that. From the meet- ings space, it’s no coincidence that the last decade is really seeing the rise of graphic facilitators and graphic recorders. That’s a great way to take a lot of information that’s thrown at people and to put it in a form that’s more intuitive in many cases, more fully digested. It’s a great example of applying cognitive load management directly to a meeting setting.
Plucks the most rel- evant and valuable content from a rising tide of information.
Be prepared for virtual content There’s no ques- tion that some of the function of live meetings can be virtualized. The pure content is easy to deliver over a data line, so anything that’s based on just pure content, the delivery is being commoditized. You have to think not in terms of [the technology] we have today. It’s getting good, but it’s still buggy. If you Skype, for example, it still will lag and we’re still looking at a little 13-inch screen or something. We’re not engaging with an actual media form that’s anywhere near similar to talking to some- body face-to-face. But that’ll be extended out, so if you go 10, 15 years from now, display technologies are in the works for much bigger, much cheaper [systems]. We’re well on that curve.
44 PCMA CONVENE JUNE 2013
Be prepared for live meetings There are all these other things that aren’t the content that meetings also provide. It’s difficult to have that serendipi- tous networking in any kind of virtual stage; it’s difficult to establish that initial rapport. We use all of our senses when we meet somebody. You’re getting the whole feeling for somebody when you form real professional bonds, so if the emphasis is on creating these connections, is on experiences to the degree that you’re not a content platform but a stage for experience, then it’s difficult to replicate that online.
Where to look for opportunities If the real value of meetings going forward is the experience and the interconnection, then [industries] where there is discord — say, in emerging areas where they don’t have these legacy associations that have been around for two, three generations, [so] they don’t have the social system in place yet — then meetings are going to be how that’s built. The good news is there’s still very much a place for meetings, it’s just not as content-centric.
— Christopher Durso ×××××××
‘That kind of truly borderless work arrangement. When you take that as the starting point, a lot of the work skills that really jump out as critical moving forward are more soſt skills, more interpersonal- relationship–based.’