wrapping up a conference
I shall apply Chatham House Rules.
And I will wrap it up in five sections:
- What I have learnt
- What I have done
- What has been fun
- What I can offer
- What I wish to request
learnt
I learnt that people are disgusted by the same things as me. With the same intensity as me, if not greater.
A young lady took the stage to talk about applications of a new-fangled technology. But she added a punch at the end of her talk: “Do you use it because it's the popular trend now? or because it is actually useful to you, and you have found an interesting and novel use-case for it?”
She actually seemed disgusted by the whole jumping-on-bandwagon behaviour.
done
I helped a facilitator regulate his own emotions before he started facilitating a 20-person discussion. (It helped that we have built up some rapport at other conferences previously.)
He is juggling many balls:
- organising a multi-country wedding ceremony with his foreign-ethnicity fiancee, while catering to the whims of his parents-in-law and his own parents
- wrestling with failures of important software on his “smart” phone, and
- dealing with sudden approvals of gigs; he had applied for them, two months in advance – but the organisers had only told him, two days prior, that he had been assigned the gig. (How rushed is that?!)
I held space for him to relate the above to me. Then he went on to do his facilitating job well. “It's peanuts,” he said. Meaning that it's easy for him.
fun
dressing up was fun, and wearing a blazer was fun. Seeing other people's attires was fun. Some wore pinstripe pants, while others chose denim jeans, albeit paired with some fancy shiny shoes: it looked like an Oxford wing-tip.
offer
I picked up some free-of-charge ballpoint pens at the conference venue. I have one to spare. Get it from me if you can catch hold of me in a flesh-and-blood way.
And I snagged a bunch of stickers! I am happy to share them with you, via “snail mail”.
If you want them, please ask me nicely, in an email. Include your postal address, and put “stickers!” in the Subject of the email.
My email address: tony AT tonyshouse DOT art
I can absorb the postage costs, up to a reasonable limit.
request
Please support your local restaurant or eatery that serves delicious food at value-for-money prices, because I imagine you would balk at eating mass-produced conference food on a daily basis.
parting shot
“do the work now: the work that you want to see knocking at your door in six years' time.”
Or:
“create your own luck.”
My request for you: make the grass greener where you are; and I will do my best over here, (health permitting). You can't do my work, and I can't do yours.
As Mother Teresa said:
“We can't all do great things. But we can all do small things with great love.”
Let's have unity, not uniformity. We can work arm-in-arm without seeing eye-to-eye.
And let's practise civil disagreement. As a wise elder says: “A diamond looks different from different angles”. It is unrealistic to expect agreement all the time, among collaborators.