Jordan Waid, VP of Brand Experience, Freeman XP, explains his view on disruption in events

How would you describe The Trend Lab in five points?

• The Trend Lab is an innovation incubator that identifies key insights that are around for us to use in the events and marketing industry.
• It is a way to approach a challenge differently. You can take three things that keep you up at night and use our table of trends to solve those problems or look at the challenge differently.
• The elements and trends are categorized into six different groups: attitude, format, content, engagement, intersectional and effectiveness; ranging from micro to macro in size and impact.
• It is an effective way to be playfully disruptive within your organisation and to keep you ahead of the competition.
• It’s a source of innovation; you can take a series of trends and mash them up to create something new, meaning it also works as an innovation generator.

Why has the term disruptive become so trendy?

Probably because of what innovation enables. But I always like to put the adverb “playfully” before the adjective – “to be playfully disruptive”, because I think some people can be disruptive to the point where it might be annoying and what one would want to do is to be disruptive in a way that opens up a new idea and it creates a new way of looking at things. Disruptive in a way that wakes you up from everyday routines. If you can do something that “playfully disrupts”, it takes you to a different place and that is a very powerful tool; I think this is why we all aim to be playfully disruptive lately and why this concept is everywhere.

What should we learn in order to be disruptive in our work?

The key thing is (if you really want to be insightful) to know your audience and what their main objectives are for attending your event. With that, if there is something you can do to disrupt their everyday experience at that event, something that gets them looking at things differently, that is what you would want to do. For example, one of the trends we identify in our Trend Lab is “Collaborator Incubator” and interestingly, we just held a round table here at the MIS with all the speakers. This debate could be seen as a way to be disruptive: having people selected and make them collaborate to solve challenges. You have all these great minds out there in the world and you brought them together in a room during a great event in order to generate more knowledge and debate than what each person could bring to this event individually. This is the type of initiative that we should encourage in order to be disruptive.