The SeeArts Podcast #17 🌟 Change, Frame, Protoype 💫 with Ruud Janssen on the Event Canvas

 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

#EventCanvas

Transcript

Fabian Seewald: 0:02

2020 has been a challenging year for the arts. But there's been also some great projects and some new trends emerging. With Ruud Janssen, we're going to discuss the future of events, current trends for the online facilitation and I hope to inspire you in this episode. Welcome to the SeeArts podcast, we build a bridge between Arts and Business want to inspire you to see art. There we go. Welcome to new episode of the SeeArts podcast. And today, we're learning about creative pivots and the future of the events industry. And after big pleasure to welcome Ruud Janseen. Ruud is, the co founder of the event design collective based out of Switzerland, he brings out immersive online learning sessions for the event Canvas methodology. And he's been a game changer and maker since 1994, for the whole hospitality and event industry. And I'm really excited to learn more about his creative pivots, how he faced challenges this unprecedented times of the corona crisis, and also give us an outlook about what will be the future of events? What did he learn? And also, what are the next steps and how can we do better online events and when we can finally get back into real life. So a warm welcome to Ruud all the way from Stuttgart to Switzerland. Where about in Switzerland?

Ruud Janssen: 1:40

I'm in Oberdorf, Basel Land, and it's snowing outside. It was minus six this morning when I walked my dogs. And it's it's getting really chilly here in January. So we're bracing for some serious winter weather. Welcome Fabian it's a it's a pleasure to to join you and to be on your podcast.

Fabian Seewald: 2:06

So great. Well, in order to kick start, we always want to get to know you a little bit better. How did you get in the event industry? How did you grow up? And and what is your current mission that is driving you forward?

Ruud Janssen: 2:19

Wow. Well, you already revealed my age, because you said I'm gonna change ringer since 1994. If you would ask my parents, I have no idea what they would say. But I grew up in the Netherlands originally, and then moved to a number of different countries over time. So I lived in France for a while I got parachuted into a French school not speaking a word of French. So I got the speed course on learning French in less than six weeks. Then I traveled with my parents to the Philippines to the Far East. And live there for five and a half years is that's where my pidgin English comes from. And then I live in the US for a while. And then about 10 years ago moved to Switzerland. The travels revealed two things to me. The first one was that my name doesn't travel very well, especially my first name in French and in English, it means something very different from in Dutch. But you know, you're given a name and you live with it. I did also right from the get go was very enchanted by the whole atmosphere of what international travel does to the mind and does to your family. We as a family grew very close because we were in a changing context all the time.

Fabian Seewald: 3:47

What's your what's your dad a diplomat? Or why were you traveling? traveling so much like every five years like a total new countries also like something like I have two small kids that I imagine to be challenging: On the one hand, it's like the biggest learning because it gets to know so many cultures, not just by vacationing in them, but also like really diving into this culture way. Yeah.

Ruud Janssen: 4:07

So so my dad worked for Philips electronics, and because it's a multinational company he was traveling to different places in different roles. So, we always enjoyed as a family to travel, you know, as a family and to live in countries for a certain amount of time. But you also realize that, you know, things are slightly transient or you know, you if you live somewhere for two years, and then you know, another three years or five years or whatever, you learn to adapt to new environments quite quickly and to you know, settle within that new context. I think that's a learn the language, you know, which is very often one of the most tedious things especially as we grow older, you know, learning French and English for me was not a big problem because I was very young, but learning German, you know, has been much more of a challenge for me. So originally, I decided to become a hotel. Yay. So I went to hotel management school, you know, living in different countries, we also got to relocate. And sometimes we lived in hotels for extended periods of time. And I think it rubbed off on me that I really enjoyed the sense of family that people have when you are living in a hotel, I think there's a thin line between working and living in a hotel, which is also the danger of that profession. You know, it can be a profession, where it's all time consuming, and very intense. Especially when you have young kids, you know, you know, what it's like with a family. And so I did that for, you know, about a decade and a half, which I really enjoyed. But also saw that , what really made a difference in these hotels, were the events that came to the hotels, right, so you have a fixed context, and then different teams bring events to those places. And within the same context, you have to keep fulfilling a different want or need for that specific event, or event owner. And very often from the tipof the nose of the team, I could tell like, Okay, this team is gonna put on a very, fill in the blank event, right? mediocre poor, phenomenal, right? It could be anything, but very often, you sense that very quickly by talking to the team or meeting them kind of what the event was going to be like. And I think it's that coding and decoding that got me fascinated about events. And I then went on to working for a PCO company, professional conference organizer, Association management company, that their marketing for a while on a global level. And did you know we did large scale events, so big Association events, and, and really saw the scope and scale of large scale events. And, you know, it takes a village to pull off a regular event, but it takes, you know, a city large scale event, and the bigger the event, the smaller the bandwidth for tolerance of change. right or the more you have to create a funnel or a tunnel of like acceptable deviation of what you agreed upon, in order to keep it safe and to make sure that it's functioning what it's supposed to do. And so you really kind of, you know, are able to build a perimeter around what the event should deliver on. Which also focused my attention to the fact that so many people are spending so much time at events. And unfortunately, our world has an abundance of mediocre events. And if there's one thing I hate in life that I've learned over time working in five star hotels, and you know, appreciating quality is that mediocracy is omnipresent. And I'm on a mission together with our team to rid the world of mediocre events.

Fabian Seewald: 8:03

That is a mission statement. And so yeah, I already introduced a little bit that event design collective. 2019, I got to know that event canvas methodology. Tell us a little bit more, how did you then came up with the idea? When I first saw it, it reminded me a lot of the business model canvas, tell us a little bit how you connected the dots from your passion of getting rid of these mediocre events and really putting out experiences that make a change? Because that's what what you in a way frame? Would they then decide collective?

Ruud Janssen: 8:43

My co-founder Roel Frissen and I have - when we dabbled into using the business model canvas, and I first came across it when I met Alex Osterwalder in Vancouver, 10 years ago, when the world education conference, I was on the international Board of MPI. And he came into the board and talk to us about, you know, the Tower of Babylon and the types of how to articulate how businesses create value and how value propositions are brought to the market. And, you know, a very simple way of decoding how businesses work. And I find it terribly fascinating to kind of wrap my head around that. But it took a while. It took me probably a couple of months, maybe a quarter to two quarters. And then we started applying it, because I think by application, you start to learn how something works. And so we applied it within the business model of you know, MPI and how it functions in different areas. In our volunteer leadership role for MPI on the international board, and he had just put out the book and we started reading it and we already had a think a longtime hunch that, you know, there must be a way to create better events or to design better events, but we really didn't know how to do that or what was required to make it happen. And the business model canvas kind of gave me a deja vu of what you know, sheet music is to musicians, like you could be a fantastic musician without knowing how to read sheet music. But if you want to scale what you do, if you want to improve the quality, if you want to record it for posterity, whatever it might be, sheet music comes in terribly handy, you know, when you're composing, or when you're trying to communicate something to other people in another place playing another instrument, right. But it does require quite a bit of skill. First of all, to be able to code and decode a piece of music onto sheet music, or from scratch with just a couple of lines on a piece of paper, composing something that you know, might have a shelf life. And the fascination for that is, I think, you know, we all have the same, you know, 12 notes we play with at least, you know, they started off with less than the Gregorian music, but by the time we're in today's music, if you count the official chromatic scale, but look at the amount of music that comes out of those 12 notes, you know, analog or digital, it doesn't matter, you know, music was way ahead of events in terms of going digital, right? I remember seeing Herbie Hancock, on a Sesame Street episode explaining to kids, you know, how you can sample music and how digital music can now you know, enter into the analog world. And this was, you know, way before the internet even existed, right? You can probably find the YouTube on on video on YouTube. And I recommend you to look back at it because the deja vu we're having an event is a very much a deja vu that other kind of parallel worlds have gone through already. Right? It's, it's nothing revolutionary, we're just late to the game.

Fabian Seewald: 11:48

Yeah, that that's a standard. But it's, in a way, it's true that like, we were all expecting rather like a gradual shift. And then through Corona, it all got accelerated so much that currently, we look at the the pictures from past events from 2019, the early events that we still could realize 2020, and it just feels surreal. So many persons stuffed, too, packed into a room and these things and dread now, on one hand, there's a big yearning to to get these people back into a place. But on the other hand, like all these safety concerns, and like just the vaccine that's getting started, they're is still certain way, a certain way to go. But the good thing is like the methodology that you created, it works like it does not require people to meet in person, it's rather like, what what is an event? That's the question, and how does it create value, be it in person, be it online, be it hybrid?

Ruud Janssen: 12:44

And the same goes for a piece of music or, you know, for anything for that matter? You know, some are insignificant and mediocre and will never be remembered, and others are epic, you know, what's the difference? You know, I think that's that's like an endless fascination, I think if you have an appreciation for, for the creation of something or for the manifestation of something, I'm sure that the very best pieces of music were never written down at first, but were later, you know, reconstructed and noted down so that it could be handed down to different generations, right? At first, everything went from memory, just like songs or stories, right. But ultimately, people invented the printing press and started writing it down. And you know, Gutenberg created something that could then take away the handwriting. And before you know it, we have PDF readers and ebooks, it's, but the essence is the same. It's the same thing. And so what we've tried to do, back in 2014, we launched the event Canvas, after, you know, we'd like to think about a year of thinking, but it's probably more like 20 years plus a year thinking, you know, having mold through all this experiences to then say, how could we decode the way that an event creates value? And how could you create kind of a cheat music for events, so that teams of people can compose together and create events deliberately, without first having to deliver them, but actually think about them first, before you go into delivery mode. And that's what the mental model that we saw from the business model canvas that fits on a single piece of paper works really well. It gives you a common language to talk about something. And it gives you the opportunity to point your finger at something on that, you know, coded map. And then that's something you're pointing at is the thing that changes or that moves, right. Some people like to call that innovation. It's an overly used word that some people you know, just use because I think it's, it sounds interesting, but innovation is nothing more or less than being able to point out the thing that changes and being able to articulate what, how it then creates value. And I think in events, many things are done from the guts you know, from gut feeling are. But everyone that's involved has a different perspective. And you know, it takes a village or a city to pull off an event. So it is really important to get everyone on the same page so that you know what narrative you're trying to create from which stakeholder perspective and if you know that, then you can actually deliver a much better event. Because you can take away all this stuff that doesn't add value. So you can simplify it, and you can strip it from the non essential, which ultimately makes it better, right, all of the best quality things that I've seen, have less and not more.

Fabian Seewald: 15:39

Yeah, like the simplicity, but like to make it really, in a way simple, accessible. That's, that's the hard journey. And it can totally agree that like, when you pointed it out that taking a bit more time to really think and profoundly get into what do you want to achieve the event from all different perspectives, it is so at the core, because sometimes, it just happens also requested, we're getting it that everything feels already so set. it's really stepping back and looking from a broader perspective onto what you really want to achieve and align this and then there are so many agencies in between and getting like the people that met Well, on the one hand, the people that you design the event for those the participants, and the people that do something on stage to bring them together. And then from there on, articulate you pointed out, articulate the change and articulate the change that's really core because an event it's it's there to to create some it's not just in the best case, it's not just there to entertain them that might might have a change. How do you find or what is is an event and how does it create value?

Ruud Janssen: 16:51

Well, like you say, simplicity is complexity resolved. Right? So that's, that's a quote that somebody wrote down at some point in their life. And I think it's, it's a phenomenal choice of four words. And when I was, you know, watching, you know, knowing what you guys do, what do you do, for example, is a great example. Right? So, I was just watching the video where you know, people have an appreciation for the organic movement of the DUNDU puppet. And at some point in the video, you reveal kind very suttle that there's puppeteers behind it each holding multiple. I don't know what you officially call the tools that you use, but because how many of you are there behind the puppet to make it function?

Fabian Seewald: 17:40

It's always five even like for the giant it's always five.

Ruud Janssen: 17:44

So I'm sure that you found that, you know, you probably tried with four or tried with six, but five is the number right, it's like,

Fabian Seewald: 17:51

For like a human kind of figure: it's, we have some kind of like synchronous movement of the arms and the legs. And then there is one middle part - one center. And so that's why we came up with five. Currently, there's a construction of a new puppet going on, which will be a bit higher. And we might need more puppeteers, because it's getting more and more complex. On the other hand, like the human movement, talking about that, it's also something super complex, we take it for granted, because we do steps the whole time and kind of, it's also like taking it apart and then making it simple and beautiful again, that's our, our task when we when we bring them to life.

Ruud Janssen: 18:28

And I think that elegance is is the art of stripping away the non essential, keeping the essence rather than the essence is in the movement, it's in the, you know, what gives it humanity, although it's an inanimate object, five humans can drive its behavior, right? Maybe if you look at event design, it's no different, right? If you get five people together to think about our events, create value for a specific set of stakeholders. Even if they don't know the stakeholders, they can make a very human Event design, and because their collective brainpower, you know, takes away a large part of the bias and enables people to really create something together. You know, I think that's one thing that I've seen is, you know, event design, not being a solo sport, it's something that you always need to do as a team. You do need people like yourself, you know, you're you're about to become a certified event designer. That element within it means that you can facilitate a group of people to create an event, right, much like a composer might not play the instruments might not play the violin or the timpani, but can interpret the narrative that's on the piece of music and then orchestrate how it gets brought to life. And I think that's, that's very much kind of the role of a facilitator of event design. It's the enablement of a team of people to systematically come to a specific Human output, which the effort of doing that shows in how the event ultimately manifests itself. Granted, you can make fantastic event design and still do a very lousy event, right? So, good event design doesn't always mean a good event, you still need the power of delivery and execution you need, you need the skill and the art, you know, artisanship of people who know how to deliver an event. So the one doesn't replace the other, it actually is a precursor to the other or, you know, a post cursor, so to say, of interpreting what went well, and what didn't go so well, and how you could improve that for a future iteration. And I think this is were rehearsing and practice and scripting and narrative and all of the things that I mean, it's nothing new, right, Fabian? I mean, this has been happening in theater since I don't know how many, you know, decades, centuries, probably. And so the parallels make it so interesting.

Fabian Seewald: 21:05

Totally. Well, looking at the process that I've gone through in the certification, it has also like it is, in a way event design thinking because you really map out what are the personas? Who are the different stakeholders of the event, then also, what I get to know through through design thinking when I was conducting workshops at the HPI? Is these empathy maps that you really dive into? Like, you empathize with them, you think like, what what do they expect from the event? On the other hand, as well? What are their pains? And how can we? How can we actually resolve that And the same thing is also something that I learned it works only as a group, because sometimes we're so focused on our own perspective. And there's again, like the the correlation with DUNDU that we have this meeting point of forces, and that it shows that we reached a point in time where only the collective intelligence will bring out the next new steps, there might be some, some metrics that give new impulses that are standing in front of a crowd, but it meets the crowded needs, the larger groups need this, this really creative teams, and this co-creation spaces to bring out new things. And that was i what i what i could also experience during during the sessions we had, that sometimes you're still too fixed on your position, and then through other persons, you can you can widen this horizon that's so amazing about about the methodology.

Ruud Janssen: 22:38

It's, I mean, it's an enabler, right? So I mean, everyone knows that if you learn together, you stay together, right? So your best friends are probably people from university or school or people that you've met along the way, and you've gone through some kind of an experience together, sometimes a short one, sometimes a long one, I think we become better and better over time to also maximize like short experiences to become very deeply rooted. I think that that's what good design can do. But the fact that learning together, you know, if you fire the synapses together, and they bond, literally not just in your brain, but in somebody else's brain at the same time, creates and creates a very powerful connection between people. And ultimately, you know, behavior change, nobody likes to change their behavior. You know, if you say, Oh, I'd like to change your behavior from here to here, you know, most people will be no, thank you, right. So that's not the wording that you use, or it's the mechanism, but it's not how it works, right. And I think that's what's so important about, you know, in the process that we have, there's, there's three things that you do, the first one is, you know, consciously articulate the change, then you create a frame, a designed frame of all the restrictions that you have. And only after you have that, from at least two perspectives, two stakeholders, sometimes even many more, only then can you, you know, lay those on top of each other, and then figure out, Okay, what kind of experience journey or instructional design, you know, we kind of figure that as a timepiece. So it's almost like, as if sand would go falls from the top part to the bottom part. As a result of going through a series of experiences, you learn things, right. Either by experience or instruction, and ultimately, any experience gets converted into a kind of learning, right? So and so it's either skills or knowledge or attitude learning or people learning that happens during that amount of time. And, you know, I just brought my daughter back to the airport as he said, she's doing her master's degree, you know, there it takes two years right or in a bachelor's degree, it could take four years or but sometimes in a in a curriculum are like in the learning and event design certificate program. It's three intense. days together, designing a project that someone's brings. And then going back for six months and doing the same thing with your own team to prove that you can do that, and submitted back for peer review. So it's very collaborative. It's also highly systematic, which gives people a sense of comfort. You know, I think if there's a process, you can trust the process and trust the team, with a lack of process, everybody has a different opinion as to what you should do, and it just becomes mayhem. Right, it's chaos. And you know, that I think we live in a world that's extremely in need of more collaboration and ability for people to orchestrate things together. Because if you can do that, then you can take away differences or take away biases. You know, take very diverse thinking, and make what you do very inclusive of the needs of those specific stakeholders that you have in your mind.

Fabian Seewald: 26:12

And from these four areas of learning that you

have mentioned: 26:14

skills, knowledge, attitude, and people learning. What do you think is currently the most challenging one to facilitate online? Because I feel like the shift in event has been pretty traumatic. What do you think it's currently for the events that you've been assigned? Look at what's the most challenging one to really facilitate? If there is what I do to facilitate to bring out to people that they say I had a great attitude learning, I had a great people learning on this one, do you think like there is a major one that that currently has been maybe neglected? Or is it always the fusion of of all of them that that makes the event the way it creates value?

Ruud Janssen: 27:01

It's a good question. This morning, I got a reminder on Facebook of our 2019 cohort in San Diego State, you know, that went through the program. And, and somehow these things don't happen by coincidence, you know, Facebook's algorithms know exactly kind of how to trigger things in time, right? Which memories are active or fade over time. And so I think there's order and sequence and how people are ready to to change. But you need to figure that out. So you don't know, right from the get go. I think one skill that we're seeing, dramatically required is what I like to call digital dexterity, right? The ability to, you know, be ambidextrous, you know, in, in everything. I mean, it's, it's about, let's say people that went to the live program, let's let's take that example. And I think you were in in a program where some people had done the live program, and some people just went directly into the online program. If, in hindsight, we asked them, you know, which learning was better, right? Because we wanted to assess whether what we've delivered, you know, works. And so literally, our net promoter scores which go from minus 100 to plus 100. And, and the why question that gets asked after the question, you know, as a result of having attended this event, how likely are you to recommend it to a colleague or a friend, people give a score from zero to 10. And every one that gives you the nine or nine or a 10 is a promoter and everybody that gives us seven or lowers the motor. So, the plus 61 means that there's 61% more promoters on than demoters. That's our average score, let's look like a benchmark of what we want to achieve. In our online programs, our NPS scores have been higher than in our offline programs, which amazed us because we're like, you know, it feels like a limiting experience for us, in some ways, right? Because you're not. You're not in San Diego for three days and literally on a campus designing under a palm tree, you know, having, you know, going for sunset cocktails at the Cannonball club overview in the Pacific Ocean. That's an experience, right? I find it hard to replicate something like that online. But the attitude learning that happens, no, let's put it this way, when people went back and had to do their projects, right, so it was all fun Kumbaya, we were in the room in San Diego and designing under a palm tree, wearing your sunglasses in January. But then when people had to go back to their teams in their offices, or maybe geographically dispersed teams and had to design with them online, right using mural and using the same paper but in digital format on your screen. The skill it requires to facilitate people online is different from facilitating people. Live, right? It's not more difficult or easier, it's just different. But people did find that they were lacking that skill after maybe the three day live program. Whilst having gone through the three day online program, all of the things that we were doing, were using the same toolset that you would use in the six months after that. So actually, you got more learning done in those three days, in relatively less time, right? Because there's a five hour day of instruction in our three day program times three is 15 hours, versus 24 hours in the offline live program. People get distracted more easily. offline. Right? Yeah, the level of focus is less, the level of focus is less, but the, the concentration, duration that you can consume from people is also less, right. So you have to, you have to funnel and pinch kind of the learning into a smaller bracket of change, which requires something different in the instructional design, right? Back to the digital dexterity. And there's a certain basic skill set you need to be able to operate, right. There's also a basic set of equipment or stuff, right that you need, you need a proper camera, proper audio, maybe two screens, you need a proper internet connection, you need all of these basic parameters. In order to to do that. It's almost like your digital health, right? I was just telling you yesterday, after seven years, my dear old modem, you know, crashed and burned. And you're at a loss, right? Because you have to go back to your 4g signal on your mobile phone. And then you realize the difference of what it is. And I can have all the backup cameras, microphones, cables, computers that I want. But if my essential connection over there, you know, melts down because I don't have a backup router in the house. And if you're listening to this podcast, and you don't have a backup router in your house, get one, right. It's only you know, it's it's worth the investment. Because if you go offline, it's not very handy in today's world. Anyway, long story to say, is there? Is there a priority in any of the four? Yes, there is, I think just like in my story with the router, right, I can have the best computer and four cameras and the best microphone on the planet. But if my essential connection at the beginning doesn't pull through, there's a critical path that your learning goes through, right. So sometimes you need to start with skills, right and get that done or a piece of knowledge, right? Sometimes you need to start with some attitude learning because some people will not, you know, pick up a new skill until they have to right example. Our team in January, thought of themselves as pretty dexterity as you know, as having a high level of dexterity in digital. Because we were facilitating zoom calls from time to time with teams of people that went through our classes. If you compare that to the digital dexterity, that's now here in January 2021. And that very same team, which in quarter, two of 2020. We put a lot of internal training, testing, stretching, learning skills, knowledge, attitude, people learning all of those four, to build a digital dexterity to a certain level, which also included maybe upgrading your internet connection and your computers and your cameras and your microphones and your lighting and everything that goes along with it. So it's always an orchestration of multiple things. And I think if you lived through it, if you've experienced it yourself, it's much easier to retrace the path of what it takes to get to that place. The problem is once you know something, you forget how difficult it was to learn it. Right? If you ask my kids, you know, when I speak French, I can dream in French or in English or in Dutch, or now even a little bit in Swiss German. But if if you now need to learn it from scratch, like my kids have to learn it in school, it's much more difficult, but I forgot how steep the learning curve was when I was eight and got parachuted into a French school to pick up you know, within three four weeks, like the full vocabulary of an eight year old going to a French school. So yeah, so it's interesting that you know, learning paths are different for every people, every type of person that depends on your what you know, before your, your, you know, plasticity are willing to learn how stretchable is your brain and how much are you, you know, and how much the student lives in you. Right? Because you know, this one saying that I saw when we do our program in Amsterdam, we stay at the student hotel and I have this you know, they have these bags they give you which says: " May the student in you live forever", right? Or there's another one that says "May the student and you never die", but I prefer the first one. And so because the ability to learn continuously i think is a is a is a gift and it is until when you don't have it or lose it or see it, you know, perishing and other people that you're kind of like, Whoa, that's scary.

Fabian Seewald: 35:11

I think it comes along with a mindset. There's this term of fixed mindset and growth mindset. And I think these last 10 months really challenged our mindset, not just our heartbeat in a way, but also our mindset that we there have to upgrade our technology, but also what kind of events and experiences can can happen online. When I was listening to a podcast interview of you, you also mentioned that for an event attendee to experience for a regular event, how we used to have them starts when they're packing their suitcase and getting on a plane. So it's like, you come into a different environment. Right now, I think that might be a challenging point that right now we're, we're event hopping, we can be on CES today, we can then get some other learning. And it's all in our finger tips and kind of like doing these jumps and being like, ready with our mindset there. But also what you mentioned, like sometimes all of these travel have been maybe as well, some kind of distraction, maybe we're more we could be more focused right now, the question is, is it always about being super focused, because there's always this life, work life balance, integration of flow, whatever you you might call it, but I think that, at least for me, I think there has been as well a challenge, and it's an ongoing challenge to say, okay, on what to focus and having the right mindset to stay, to stay hungry in these in these times.

Ruud Janssen: 36:36

And I think it's part of the digital dexterity. Alright, so at least, what I'm experiencing over time, I mean, you know, we've we've always done a lot of zoom calls and use murals and stuff for the last, I would say, 10 years. So that hasn't really changed, what has changed, that's something that got taken away, which was, you know, the, you know, the physical travel in January, we used to go to San Diego for the last five years and deliver a three day program and then do a program in Las Vegas and usually went skiing in between Utah, that experience of spending time, you know, like with my colleague Roel, for instance, where we would travel for the week, or that that is, that's taken away from the equation. which technically means, you know, if you take away our travel days, we have 60-70 bonus days this year, right, of not being on planes or in transit. But when you're in transit, you're also thinking you're also, you know, you're doing different things, your body works differently. And I think you have to, I think you have to retrain how you do the thinking and how you spend that 60-70 days, it's very easy to fall in the trap of just spending it doing more of the same thing. And this is one of the reasons why we have, you know, now started this EDC mastermind with a guy called Paul Rulkens, who's our kind of like, how would I call that sometimes he refers to it as executive babysitter, which I don't know if that's the right term. But it's almost like he is he's providing learning for us as a team, but also of people that are, you know, really interested in speak the language of event design that then become part of a core group who learn how to work on their business instead of just in their business, you know, and think about these things. And, you know, he has this thing that keeps striking me that I've been practicing a lot, which is the concept of strategic quitting, which is focusing on the things that you're really good at, because there's usually only two or three. And all the other stuff should be done by people that are good at those other things. You know, because they, it might be in their set of things that they're really good at, and really enjoy doing. And for somebody else, that might be a chore. What that then gives you is the the other thing, which is he says the purpose of thinking is to stop thinking. I love that it's it's, it's so simple, that it is complex, right? Because I've thought about it a lot, but I can't stop thinking about it. Which means that I have to think much more to stop thinking. And sometimes stopping thinking is the thing you need to do before pressing the button and jumping from, you know, PCMA computing leaders to CES to, you know, to doing a podcast to this afternoon, we have to design sessions and you know, playing alp horn in the evening is my decompression mode. So I started playing music again, which I hadn't done for 10 years. Because I usually didn't I wasn't a very loyal musician to the rest of the people playing music with you know, that I was playing with because I was traveling all the time. So I was a very unreliable musician. In the last year, I've become much more reliable and you know, every Monday and Tuesday of the week, I go out and play the alphorn which is the most simple instrument on the planet, but it's the most mentally challenging to master.

Fabian Seewald: 40:05

So these has been some, some learning experiences for you that you're taking away these kind of travel experiences skiing with Roel in Utah, and kind of right now, in a way zooming back in what are the skills that you already have and kind of like re- implementing them? Because one thing I always ask my interview guests is , what are their creative routines? How do they stay creative, because I think a very important point that you put out, it's not just doing more of the same stuff. And then at some point that you get bored out by it, there's a certain amount of focus that you can give and beyond, it's like, if you're in the gym, and just like working on the same muscle the whole day and don't give it time to recover, and then from there and grow, it won't be growing, but you kind of like running around in a circle, like on a hamster wheel. What are like creative routines that you've especially in the last year established for yourself beyond the alphorn ? And do you have like a creative schedule? Do you have some kind of, of life or creativity hacks that you could share with us?

Ruud Janssen: 41:12

So I like to talk to people like you, which is my creativity hack, and then explore places we haven't been before. Right? So sometimes places don't need to be physical places geographically that you go to they can be places you haven't been to before. Like on the last program, you know, we met at IMEX and then you said, you know, we invited you to join the program. And then you created from your perspective of

analog: 41:41

- so we try to balance analog and digital - what kind of analog storytelling or recaps or things could we do. And I thought that was a really refreshing way to, to explore a space that we both had unexplored, but together, we dare to do it, right. So maybe on your own, it's more difficult than if you have somebody like an ally, to do it with, right. And I think that's what I'm finding is that I'm trying a lot of things for the first time. And there's some other stuff that I'm being more systematic in, right meaning, like, I love the routine of walking my two English Bulldogs, and you know, whatever the weather might be there, my rhythm clock of, you know, like basic needs, right, they have a very basic need, if you feed them in the morning, they will need to go walk at 10 o'clock in the morning, and in the afternoon, at three o'clock, it's the same thing, because my youngest english bulldog has, you know, spaghetti in his brain. And when it hotwires, you better leave him, you know, in in the free and in the wild to go run and you know, loses energy, because it's like a kid, right? It's just like that. And they remind you of the kid in yourself, because you need that too, right? I need to go out in nature and walk around. And that's usually when you get the best ideas. So I think some things are becoming more rhythmic. And maybe that's part of who I turned 50 this year, so my brother warned me, he's two years older than me, he said, you might hit some nostalgia. What do you mean, it's like, you start looking at older pictures, and you start reconnecting with, you know, friends from, from, from international school Manila that I hadn't spoken to, in a while, even on a zoom call. And, but also, like, kind of a rhythm and a pace, you know, when, during, when, during the day you're most when your peaks and troughs are, I think I've become quite systematic in the times that I eat, right, which is also like, I think, having worked from home office for the last decade. In the beginning, I had a hard time, you know, finding a rhythm. Because you can just get carried away with your work and forget to eat and sleep or whatever it might be right. I found a rhythm probably after two or three years. But now it's like embedded. It's not, you know, it's, it's, it just works. And I know when I'm productive when I'm not. And I think also now, after this year, my family understands that too. Which is also like you have your own rhythm, but also you have the rhythm of the people around you, right? Who might go to offices or to school or whatever it is. And I have a 17 year old son and my wife, you know, works full time and used to go to the office, but now we both work from home. And then my kid is the only one that goes out of the house, you know, and then my daughter comes back from University from time to time and it's, it's those times of change. Like she was here for three weeks that you realize your own rhythm. Right. So I think it gradually changes slowly over time. And you could probably map out your daily rhythm as to what works for you. And I think that's what I would encourage you to do is to do it much more consciously. And think about that, but also not be like don't be in I I was getting a little bit annoyed, or I don't like people that are like super, or activists at this time. And I was like, super strict on stuff that gets me a bit agitated, because you're not constant, right? There's waves of things, and you when you get to know your waves, and you get to know how you deal with them, you know, take that flow, because it's, I think that's like, you know, like a boat cannot go against the waves, unless you're a submarine. But it's pretty lonely down there. I think if you stay down there for a while, you run out of oxygen. And I want to, I once took a catering course, with a guy that was a chef on a submarine, I was very impressed by him, because he could cook on one square one on one cubic meter, right? He had like, his kitchen was no bigger than one cubic meter. And this guy was so bloody efficient, you wouldn't believe it, right? Because that's how he was wired. That's what he was doing every day. So you get used to the constraint, I think what I've learned is that if your constraint is constant, like, you know, I've been living in this house for the last seven years, I know the environment fairly well and feel delighted I live outside the city and out in the green and have a garden and all of that, because it's, I think that's what's made my life. Actually not that different from the way it was before. To be very honest, the only difference is I don't smell kerosene, I don't rush to get to planes. I spend way less money on travel and way less co2 gets pumped into the air because of my travels. You do miss meeting those other people. But there are other ways of doing that, too. And I think the fact that something has been taken away from us, you know, like we've jerked ourselves into a new reality where face to face encounters at scale do not take place. Now we realize how important they are. Or many more people realize how important they are. What has become easier for me is the fact that not everybody else is able to work just like the way I used to be working in the past number of years without having me motivate them to do it. So that's become a lot easier. To be honest, because I don't you know, I enjoy teaching stuff or like, you know, getting people up to speed on stuff, but not on the basics. I mean, some of the basic stuff is just gets really annoying very quickly. Like I could never teach my own kid to drive a car. You need somebody else to do that. Right?

Fabian Seewald: 47:42

Yeah, for me, it sounds like a bit like on the one hand like self wiring, but then also like rewiring and re readjusting on the on the other hand, what you what you said like, as human beings we don't like change too much. So like kind of also balancing the amount of change we want. And always remember this quote from the book "change before you have to change". Last year, we all got kind of like into this turbulant change but in a way like we need some constant some some things to rely on as you said, like you already had the setup done and you could polish a little bit here and there. Some had to do like major, major adjustments there. And from maybe like this fear of nostalgia let's look at a bit into the future. Yesterday we heard that IMEX is not going to happen this year. What do you see as the future for events for this year but also like on a midterm perspective? Do you already see some some new trends emerging digital is not going to go away but what what kind of content in the event design session that you're conducting currently, what what feeling do you have? What hope and help can you give to the industry because I also feel there's been this this power shift towards like, the tech-savvy agencies and and for artists like for us it's been definitely our hearts and because some experience don't work online as good as they do in real life. So tell us a little bit from from these from this outlook.

Ruud Janssen: 49:10

Well, first of all, I'm sorry that you know, IMEX doesn't take place. Because you know we're staunch allies with them in bringing people together and you know, delivering our EDC level one program there. Those kinds of partnerships. You know, we did that for the last two years with the Caesars Entertainment. I really believe in kind of that the partnership workings of organizations doing things together I think that's super critical. Right so so the fact that that doesn't happen only amplifies the pain of what then gets missed right i think that's the ability to rewire and do that differently. You know, like the way I'm accesses and last two editions also reveals a lot of the DNA of an organization Write the way an organization does that exposes their true self. Right. So, after seeing so many events, there's something that we like to say, which is, you know, show me an organization's event and tell you about their DNA, like go go to an organization's event for two, three days. And you can read their DNA, it's like, it's like a PCR test on, you know, not positive, negative, but it's, it's like a gradient of you know, their abilities, or, you know, the way they do things. And so reading culture over time, and seeing how it change, I think is, is super fascinating and interesting. It's like, business anthropology. And so if you look at it from that perspective, the old adages of, you know, ability to adapt to that change, and how it manifests itself in the team and in the organization out profiles itself, the honesty, and communicating that and not hiding stuff, I think the timeliness of that is a is a is a big thing. And I think that's very commendable. And what it means for us, and trends into the future is that more and more organizations face this, right this week, CES is bringing together 150,000 people in Las Vegas. You know, other types of partnerships are existing, you know, IBM is helping them figure out how to do that, right, so now, the platform has changed, right, from what used to happen at the Las Vegas Convention Center, which maybe got expanded because of this event. Now, all of a sudden, you know, shift to a different type of platform, or it's an and, and, you know, but you cannot release the space in the future, because you, you know, there's a hope and willingness to bring it back into a form that might not have existed last year or this year. And these are difficult decisions, because the bigger it gets, you know, like, the opening of the Olympics in Japan was on TV yesterday, here. You know, there are people that need to take very critical decisions, because the critical path of a large event of that scale, you know, having to build infrastructure, or whatever it might be, the critical path is long. And so I think the test now is how can you optimize the critical path without driving your team nuts? Right, I think that's part of the maybe part of the digital dexterity. But also, well, you know, nobody has the truth, right? So one of the things we do is we study a lot of these events, right? So we had a repository, happy to put up the link to your to your to your listeners, repository, which is basically a matrix gradient from, you know, offline to online, and from, you know, highly, highly organized on the top two, you know, self organizing, and events shift on that scale, there's maybe even a third dimension that you can include there. Because if you understand, if you understand the behaviors of events, you know, we like to look at events like kids, right, like, We're currently designing an event, that's a 15 year old event, and it's behaving like a 15 year old, right? It's in the middle of its puberty. You know, some young events grow really fast, but you know, they're still wearing diapers, right. And some events are 25 or 35 years old, and go through a midlife crisis, or, you know, whatever it is that so that you can draw human parallels to these things. And I don't think, you know, the change of context is only one variable. It's in studying its behavior over time, that you can understand what it does for the organization, and how the people that are involved with it need to deal with that. And I think this is where the why we're so fascinated or preoccupied with event design, we're actually just, you know, we've just literally published the alpha of a new book called design to change, which we've made only available to our masterminds at this this period. But it's, it's like a companion guide between the language and the conversation. So a language is only one is only one part of the equation, what you need to have is a conversation with that language. But you need to master the language first, you know, and I think this is where, whether it's a digital language or the event design language, or whether it's French or German, or whichever it is. The skill set base needs to be there to have a proper conversation, you know, beyond the supermarket conversation when you have to pay your groceries. There's a level of sophistication to that, but people are now getting used to. I think it's a super exciting development and predicting the future is madness. I don't think you should even attempt to do it. Anybody that calls themselves a futurist, I tend not to believe, right. I, you know, I think you can document the past and you know what's happening in the present, but the most important minute is the next one. Because it can lead anywhere, right? But if you can, if you can sketch a story into the future and position, the joint idea of a group of people to say Maybe in October, we could do something like this, right, and you describe it in a level of vagueness or clarity, that allows room for interpretation, then, if you can see that story in the future and position it in time, you can make it happen. If you visualize it becomes even easier, right? That's what Netflix does, in a highly sophisticated level, right? But look at the predictive powers of movies, or look at the predictive powers of you know, storytelling, or events are no different. except they're quite expensive, they usually don't have a rehearsal script, often, you know, lacking. And usually, there's no casting or very limited. So if all of those things can be amped up a little bit over time, which needs to happen, because if your keynote presenter has poor lighting, they can be as good as they want to be behind their computer, but it's, it's not going to land, it's not going to work. If you want to interact with 150 people, we don't have the right technology, or the right curation or the right facilitation is not going to work. And it's not until people try that and understand what it is and how it works and what the limitations are, that you will build that level of experience. And so we think I think we're building it all together, some are learning faster than others, because I just spend more time there. Right? I think 10,000 hours is what does it like three and a half years. So I think digital dexterity, you know, let's check in and you know, July 2023, and see where we are, then I think then most people will have a decent amount of digital dexterity. And others that started earlier have it earlier, they just have an easier, because they can spend their time elsewhere, instead of the basic skill set of trying to build digital dexterity.

Fabian Seewald: 56:47

Anyway, along the way, that's the way to mastery that definitely to go on the journey. Last year, I spent a lot of time like studying flow, the science of peak performance. And there it says flow can be kind of like a shortcut to mastery, because you're learning, learning so much quicker in this context also. So in the end at an event or as well in school, the main challenges as well to put people in this in this state of flow, because then you're you're hyper focused, you're super motivated, and you're also getting more creative. And now looking back at the last year, with your experience in online facilitation, what have been the one or two major aha moments for online facilitation? Is it the technical tools? Or is it as well like standing in front of a group in a room and also standing in front of a group like on zoom? What? What do I like the major learnings like with online facilitation for you?

Ruud Janssen: 57:47

I think as a facilitator, you always have to think three steps ahead of where, where the group is, right. So I think that's important. So if you have to do on the cuff, and you don't have a system, that's quite difficult, because you have to be very good at improvising and improvising to the future. Right. And so, you know, if you're the star player of the Queen's gambit, and you know how to play chess, you know, and think five moves ahead with every possible option, then you might be really good at that, but I'm not. So I I need, I need a way to do that. Right. So. And so I think staying ahead is like a national sport. You know, just to give you a very simple example. At the beginning of this year, we said, you know, we want all of our team members need to be kitted out with the right kit, right? three cameras, video mixer, you know, two softbox lights, proper backdrop sticker in the background, it's very simple, right? It's a set of instructions, and maybe a small investment to make. But what we weren't spending on new suits and shoes, because you cannot see what I'm wearing behind, you know, under my desk, and now gets spent in in your studio and your decorum. Right. So I think having what I've learned is that having reliable equipment having you know, the right stuff as to what people would expect this year, with a little bit on top, but that goes up every year, right? And then still you make mistakes, because you still your router burns down, right. So now I have a backup router. I didn't order one in orderd two - You learn all the time.

Fabian Seewald: 59:30

I remember no workshop, you always mentioned if you don't break anything, you're not trying hard enough. So I think that's that's part of the learning journey.

Ruud Janssen: 59:38

And that's that's our get out of jail free card because that's what we were doing with the event camps back in 2010/2011. Right. We said, if you're not experiment, if we're not if we're not breaking anything, we're not experimenting hard enough. And what I've learned is that we try to bake that into any of the event designs we do with you know, with teams and with clients because it puts a smile on the mind, right? Everybody has experienced it, you know, it makes people feel. But when it does happen, it's your get out of jail free card, because at least you've ticked that box and said, okay, we broke something great, right? Throw confetti at it, whether it's on on your desk or in digital mode, it doesn't matter. But the ability to celebrate failure, I think, is exactly what you said, you know, you have to, but you have to be very upfront. With that stuff, you've got to be, you know, another thing we do very diligently, it's not easy. It's like that balance between analog and digital, right? Whatever you do digital, find the analog counterpart, and vice versa. And sometimes you have to think really, really hard to do it. But it's part of the fun, right? It's part of the fun. And if you're able to do that, I mean, you went through our program. And that's why some people say, you know, the bond you build with these people is pretty phenomenal. You can't wait to meet them in person, right? It's almost like the feeling I had in 2011, about Twitter, maybe when I started in 2008 2009. And in 2011, I met people at event camp, who, you know, we've been communicating on Twitter for a long time. And all of a sudden, we met in person that was magic, right? You could have a small talk, you don't need to do all that you just carry on because you know, each other stream of consciousness, and you can connect to that. I think that's part of digital dexterity. That's what we're building now as well. And it will only increase the need for for that I haven't, I don't listen to less radio than I used to before the internet. I probably listen to more. But I make a conscious choice about listening to radio, listening to a podcast, you know, watching TV, right? Strange enough, when you know, what happened in the US this last week happened last weekend. The sixth. It's hard to beat TV ready, right? I'm not gonna sit around my computer with my family and say this? Well, we all saw it probably triggered somewhere with a notification. But that notification changes my behavior, and actually go to the living room and switch on the TV. And you know, what's crazy is in real time. Because it's a trusted channel, I maybe 30 years ago, people would switch on the radio, because that was the most live thing that could be brought to you, right? And the commentator would describe it in color and had a very rich ability to describe what the right words what they saw and interpreted. You know? Yeah, so it's about keeping the artistic skill of what the radio host had in the 1980s, I guess, or 70s, maybe, or even earlier 1950s I don't know, when TV got really popular. But the fact that it's gone from black and white to color TV, we don't talk about that anymore, right? The fact that this all flat panel, or whether it's on your computer or on your mobile device, or I remember seeing the first video on a mobile device in 2003 at the CEO Mobile telecom conference, when I was still working in a five star hotel. The whole room was perplexing. There were CEOs of mobile telecom companies. I mean, I tell it to my kids and they're like what?

Fabian Seewald: 1:03:17

How was this exciting at all?

Ruud Janssen: 1:03:19

That's progress and that's the future for you right so if you see it you'll know but you don't know until you see it so make it visible.

Fabian Seewald: 1:03:29

And something I heard this one you will see it when you believe it that's also rather maybe connected to to mindset but the one that I liked the most is connection that you find like a digital analog balance in the way you design things and also like think hard about like what can be like the the analog components that match with the digital like what are the digital ones that could could match with the analog one? Well, we're almost at the point of of wrapping up. But as a game changer I always want I always wanted to ask you as well like what is the vision for for the decade ahead? You said like you don't like the futurist, but is there anything as well that you that you would like to achieve that is on your bucket list? I think with the land canvass you already created in a way a movement. Tell us a little bit about the future vision.

Ruud Janssen: 1:04:22

So we would love for and we make no secret about it. Right? So we'd love for students currently, you know, learning in the event is on certificate young professionals program. You know, we have a couple of 100 students as a 1516 universities now that are that have put it in place since we started the pilot. I'd love for this to be become like the default way to to think about events too, from the get go. Right? So you actually design it first before you go and do it which I think will dramatically improve the events. Even if you don't have a lot of experience because students can be fantastic designers. They might still need to learn how to do the events, but you know, they'll wrap their heads around it because most of us have to. So my dream would be that, let's say, the pinnacle events that started adopting this, and the students that are new are doing this meet, right. And we're stuck in the middle gets crunched. That's what what's going to happen, hopefully, in 10 years, and then, you know, people want talk about, you know, events that don't apply event design, or, you know, doing large concerts without cheap music, you know, is is unimaginable, you know, but it took a while for that to get to where it is. And so I'd love to see a lot of, you know, a lot of adoption, you know, people speaking the language, improving the conversation. We'd love to bring our next book to life, you know, the first book came out four years ago. And this book is a result of the experiences over the last four years, right? So maybe in 10 years, we'll have, you know, whatever the next chapters or components are have that in place, because it's a learning organism, but it's not just the people at the event design collective. It's everyone that's, you know, we're almost hitting the 500 mark on certified event designers this year, which I think is great, but it's only the beginning. Right? You know, Esperanto didn't, didn't survive and it wasn't, and it wasn't because it wasn't good. Right? Yeah. It's because the island that it was focused on was off the coast of Italy and nobody, nobody could get to it.

Fabian Seewald: 1:06:36

Wow. Well, what a What a treat this conversation thanks a lot for for sharing your story. But it's well you're you're inside the methodology and yeah, for sure we can to, to put the links into into the show notes. And an IRA from the conversation got some more points to put into my idea quarantine for future creations. For the listeners, the idea quarantine is also part of the event, cannabis methodology, kind of a method that you don't forget things because sometimes when you walk your dog good ideas come up. But right now I also I get some ideas, and I'll put them in my idea currency. And so yeah, balance the digital and the analog. And yeah, thanks a lot for this conversation.

Ruud Janssen: 1:07:21

Thanks for having me on for your inspiration and for bringing the human touch to to our programs that you've done in the past. And I look forward to many more collaborations. And like I said, you know, ideas in the idea quarantine we did when we first started saying that four or five years ago, now, six years ago, in our process, we were like, What do you mean, quarantine, we had to explain, you know, this is what happened when the plague, you know, in Venice, and the boats had to stay out for 40 days and Quarante means, you know, contain quarantine. That's how they got to that before I let people into the city. Again, now everybody knows what quarantine means, you know, so it's, it's a self fulfilling prophecy. Taking ideas out of the idea quarantine and using them. I think what's relevant there, like you said is if the idea changes in the design in a desired direction of change, then it's a good idea. It's not because you came up with it, or because your boss said so or because you need a validator of whether an idea will create value. And that's the, you know, the Delta test, right? So does it bring you from A to B from entry to exit behavior? And if you think of things like that you can crack most problems and challenge any idea. Thank you, Fabian.

Fabian Seewald: 1:08:35

Well, yeah, let's crack on with this mindset and the spirit. Thanks a lot. What a beautiful conversation

with Ruud: 1:08:41

The Event Canvas inspires me and already helped me create more meaningful events, with the empathizing with the stakeholders, and from there and really frame what kind of change you want to articulate. We hope we could also change, enable, inspire you in this conversation. Let's stay in touch. Follow us at@SeeArtsNow and I see you around.