Beyond Short-Term Vision: Preparing the Business Events Industry for an Unpredictable Future

by Pádraic Gilligan, Co-founder, SoolNua & Chief Marketing Officer, SITE

There are two terminals now at Dublin airport as annual passenger numbers rush headlong towards a controversial 40m. Like many “legacy” airports, it’s a sprawling campus, with extensions, new wings, spurs and satellites added over the years to deal with the dramatic exponential growth.

If you’re on a Ryanair flight, your gate will be way out in the one hundreds, a satellite added on to what’s now called T1, originally built in the early seventies. It’s a bit of hike to get there as you have to walk through a very long tunnel that, at a certain point, affords you a privileged view of the original terminal at Dublin Airport, designed by Desmond Fitzgerald in the late thirties and opened 84 years ago in 1940.

Initially obscured from view by a blank panel set strategically at eye level, Fitzgerald’s building suddenly materialises, front and centre, at the mid-point of the tunnel, magnificently framed in the glass panels on your left hand side. The building is stunning and beautiful, a true architectural gem, the confident swagger of its modernist curves and glamorous symmetrical terraces mimicking a massive ocean liner.

Like the TWA terminal at JFK – now re-imagined as a beautiful theme hotel – Fitzgerald’s terminal is now a curiosity piece, a once functional building whose original purpose has become totally outdated and obsolete as the vision of its creators turns out to have been laughably inadequate, built to cater for 100,000 passengers per year. It’s a piece of useless beauty.

It would be interesting to have sight of the architectural brief that sparked Fitzgerald’s design for the airport terminal at Dublin.

What shelf life for the structure did our government of the time envision?

How long did they think Fitzgerald’s building would function?

What horizons did they see?

Could they ever have gotten their heads around the fact that, within 80 years, over 80,000 passengers per day might use the airport – 79,750 more than the 275 that Fitzgerald made provision for!

The answer is simple: no, they couldn’t. The same as they couldn’t ever have imagined the multifarious other ways that humanity has progressed, and regressed, scaling the heights and limits of the divine with artificial intelligence while simultaneously descending to even lower levels of craven baseness with petty wars, pointless rivalries and political manoeuvrings.

These thoughts come to me in the context of where we are now as a business events industry. Do we actually have any idea where we are going and what we should be doing now to be better prepared? What horizons are we considering in our planning – are they 3 years hence, 10 years hence or 50 years hence?

Building on the analogy of Dublin Airport’s limited foresight and how it relates to business events, we have to take on board that our current planning for the future may similarly fall short if we don’t take a more expansive view.

We have a fair idea what the catalysts for future change will be – they’ll certainly involve technology, particularly the impact of AI, climate change, sustainability and related topics including DEIAB, present and future geo-political conflicts, economic re-balancing, changes to workplace dynamics, shifting demographics plus a host of unforeseen and unimagined catalysts – for example, in 2018, who saw Covid19 on the horizon?

To ensure that our thinking is as broad as possible, encompassing all relevant factors, the business events industry must adopt a holistic and integrative approach. This will involve lots of discussion, dialogue and debate. We’ll need to adopt a range of techniques such as scenario planning where we update and refine outcomes and scenarios based on emerging trends and potential disruptions.

We need wide and extensive stakeholder engagement, involving a diverse range of voices in planning processes, from environmental experts to technologists, to ensure a well-rounded perspective.

Our planning needs to involve long-term investment, prioritizing investments that will pay off over decades, not just years, such as sustainable infrastructure, education, and technology. In this regard we need to break free from the tyranny of political cycles where decisions are made and unmade in the context of keeping politicians in power.

And we need continuous learning, keeping abreast of changes in technology, climate science, geopolitics, and economics through ongoing education and professional development.

Just as Dublin Airport’s original planners could not have envisioned today’s reality, the business events industry must stretch its imagination to consider futures that may seem distant or unlikely today. By doing so, we can better prepare for a world where the only constant is change.