The #SocialAge Safari: a Learning Conference in 2015

In April next year, i’m curating a new conference: it’s called the Social Age Safari and it’s a 2 day, open session conference where we will co-create a narrative around the new realities of learning and leading.

It’s designed to build a better understanding of the Social Age: how we learn, how we lead, how we change.

The Conference is aimed at strategists and leaders in organisations who want to help them get fit for the future.

Working within a loose, facilitated structure, delegates will co-create the narrative through a series of presentations, discussions, collaborative activities and contributions.

The ecosystem of the Social Age

In this section, we will explore the foundations of the Social Age: the evolved nature of work, the new Social Contract, the drive towards social responsibility and the mechanisms of co-created and co-owned change.

We can chart some of the features of the Social Age to better understand the skills we need to navigate it

Collaborative Technology
In this section we will explore how technology impacts on learning, leading and change. We will look at the ways technology moves us between formal and social spaces and how that impacts our ability to influence and direct conversations and the whole organisation.

Technology facilitates, demands, connects and subverts. But who is in control?

Agility and Creativity
In this section we will explore the need for agility and how we develop it within the organisation. It’s about devolved creativity and the systems and processes that support it.

The Power of Communities
In the final section, we explore the role, purpose and location of our communities and the ways we can engage them to create a more effective organisation.

Social Leaders must understand the purpose of different communities and take an appropriate stance when they engage

A lot of my work is around agility: how our ecosystem has changed and how we need to adapt to remain relevant, to be effective. Here on the blog, we explore new models of learning, new types of authority and leadership, the nature and impacts of technology, the role of creativity and a host of other thoughts. It’s a shared and open space, and i intend for the conference to be the same.

I’ve thought a lot about how to do this: by their nature, conferences are a little abstract and exclusive, but i want this one to be as open and inclusive as possible, and here’s how.

There will be forty spaces: we aim to sell half commercially and use the other half subsidised to community members and charities. We will also run open webinar sessions each day, connecting those who attend with anyone in our community who wants to join in. And over the two days, we will co-create a narrative that we’ll publish, free, afterwards.

I’m a fan of #WorkingOutLoud and sharing widely, so the notion of any event which is, by it’s nature, exclusive sits uneasily, but i also recognise that in a two day residential event, we can create a great learning space for those who can attend. I hope we get it right.

You can find out more here: The Social Age Safari

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