Future Shaper AIPC – Meet the World, See the Future.
In July this year our Senior AV Project Manager had the privilege of attending the AIPC Future Shapers program as part of the annual AIPC Congress in Shenzhen China at the Shenzhen World Exhibition Centre.
The Future Shapers program selects emerging leaders from member organisations around the globe and sets them up on a six-month course of professional development with the goal of producing a white paper to address an industry issue. This culminated in an intense on-site workshop to craft the whitepaper into a conference presentation and live pitch the AIPC Congress on our findings.
This excellent program exposed the Future Shapers to the real-world scenario of working with an international group of stake holders to craft and develop a critical idea into a working brief that could be adopted by industry.
Simon said "On this journey we were supported by high quality business and product specialist/mentors who helped us focus and hone our working methods to produce the best result.
For anyone considering career steps to senior management or an executive level, this program was an invaluable experience. Having the time to absorb and meaningfully engage with global industry experts and work closely over an externed time frame with industry peers was a highlight for me.
While I do have extensive experience in events, there are challenges I’ve discovered inside the convention business that are unique to this setting. Meeting colleagues from centres on the other side of the world who can instantly empathise and speak to these unique issues, share their solutions or even just a battle scar or two helped to provide me a refreshing context to these challenges.
Seeing the scope of the global network of convention centres, talking with their leadership and hearing about similar problems, advantages, roadblocks and solutions provides an incredible perspective on how to review my own personal position when things get tough.
For me it helped to bring into scale some of issues I tackle on a day-to-day basis leaving me feeling less isolated, providing the opportunity to reflect with peers that the analysis and decisions we are making in the trenches do parallel to global work practices facing similar unique issues of conventions.
A key learning for myself is that Te Pae, despite being on the edge of the map, is a leading exemplar to the global industry on what a sustainable convention centre looks and operates like. This is a perspective I have brought back into the office to help us support and celebrate that, what for us, may be a standard work practice, is providing an inspiration to the industry, clients and delegates globally. Our story matters.
The Future Shapers program provided a process to look up and view the convention industry on a wider horizon. It gave me the opportunity to stand with an incredible group of peers and pitch a real solution to the actual industry leaders. It wasn’t a practice run; it was necessary process of the putting our own ideas to very real issues faced by industry and tabling what we think the next steps will look like.
Our hosts in Shenzhen, China put all this sentiment into a whole other context. The special economic zone of Shenzhen is an incredible approach to building the future.
Shenzhen is truly a cyber city, embracing e-vehicles and every form of digital integration. The city felt safe, quiet, clean and technically seamless. At times it was a bit overwhelming, where sheer the speed of development and mesmerising scale of the city constantly reset your sense of what is possible.
While many in the west may not know much about Shenzhen most of us will have something in our homes designed and built in Shenzhen, as the locals proudly pointed out “Shenzhen is the factory of the world!”.
Shenzhen and its vibrant people truly provided a lens into a future where mega cities are clean and green with invisible technologies make things safer, simpler and faster.
Within in all of this, one of my reflections from the AIPC Congress, is that the convention industry like many industries is feeling sensitive to change. The balance of the world is shifting in new noticeable ways. The rules of trade are changing, the challenges ahead are of a new dimension. Conventions centres are metaphorically global citizens; their purpose and mission are part of celebrating multi-cultural and international values. In that light the facility of the convention industry is more essential than ever.
So, while we are always facing unknowns, leadership is about meeting these moments with tenacity, vision, skill and hopefully some grace.
Attending the congress and being part of the Future Shapers program showed me that there has never been a more important time to connect, to reach out, to overcome the challenges and work together."
