Leslie Budd on... conferences

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The big industry conference jamborees are seen by many companies as the social and business events of the year.  If you're in the mining industry, you'll flood into Kalgoorlie to enjoy its delights, swap gossip, engage in curricular activity, do deals, and generally reinforce your perception of your company and yourself and exhibit yourself to the world.  But there’s a problem with these big jamborees.  They tend to produce and reinforce a fixed mindset between insiders and outsiders.  They often do not challenge themselves because there is an industry ‘speak’, an industry view and indeed a whole industry culture, which can be impervious to change or shocks or creative and innovative ways of thinking.  Perhaps many of these participants would be better off going to their local jazz or literary or film festivals to find out about self-evidence stories of a larger world and possibly the true meaning of metaphor and its relation to reality.  The bottom line is that if you want to break out of an industry mindset, you have to break away from the industry. 

That’s my view.  You can join the debate with The Open University.