Convene On Site: PCMA Masters Series

Great conversations begin with great questions, and yesterday's PCMA Masters Series program at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., kicked off with 10 of them. Presenters Jeff Leitner and Bryan Campen cut right to the heart of the topic -- "The Bold New World of Convention Exhibits and Trade Shows." Leitner, founder and dean of Insight Labs, which "deconstruct[s] things for a living, and then we reconstruct them," told the more than 200 attendees: "This is a conversation about 2016, and the bad news is that no one knows what is coming in 2016. ... But we have to try, because your companies and clients all depend on you to have a sense of what's coming so you can help prepare them for it."

Why do we need to have this conversation? "To get people to realize that the future" is much closer than it used to be, said Campen, social media director for Manifest Digital, which is conducting the Future Meet project (co-sponsored by PCMA). "The future is actually crashing into us at this point."

Back to the Future: PCMA Master Series

If you missed the PCMA Masters Series in Washington D.C. on Oct. 21, you can watch a complimentary webcast at noon CST on Wednesday, Dec. 1 at PCMA's new interactive learning and networking space, PCMA365.

At the live event, a panel of association and meetings industry experts tackled the topic "Associations and Meetings of the Future: A Look Ahead to 2020," and offered what Executive Editor Chris Durso called "a terrific assortment of big-sky and ground-level insights."

Convene On Site: PCMA Masters Series

The PCMA Masters Series program held at the Renaissance Washington, DC Downtown Hotel last Thursday offered a terrific assortment of big-sky and ground-level insights (some of which I tweeted throughout the event), but for me the grand unifying takeaway was the fact that you can't separate a meeting from its parent organization, and vice versa. An obvious conclusion, perhaps, especially considering the topic was "Associations and Meetings of the Future: A Look Ahead to 2020," but there it is.