It has been a long time waiting for WEC to return to the city I call home. The last time Toronto hosted, I was a staff member at the same very host venue, the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, volunteering to assist delegates around the building to enhance their personal experience.
Fast forward nearly 2 decades and here we are again, now an MPI member for over 15 years and volunteering to host the world to a grown up version of our big and beautiful city. But now, I'm so fortunate to see it from another set of lenses; honoured to be on the city’s host committee and also a member of our Global Board of Trustees. Important and treasured duties that I have a privilege to be a part of to ensure our chapter members get the best out of their experience as proud MPI'ers.
It's our Super Bowl, or here in Toronto, our NBA Finals...WEC that is, where we not only meet but seek out to carry out our motto of "Designing Shared Experiences". Every year at WEC, our joint executive boards (IBOD & GBOT) meet to discuss how we can provide the guidance, resources and tools for all our members to excel as chapters and leaders in this great industry of ours. And so when we examined how we can challenge ourselves as leaders, we knew exactly that it had to start from our board exercises. How we would look to see and do things differently even from our own experiences to elevate our collective thought process?
It all started with that fateful step a few months ago when we engaged Deloitte Canada...yes, the firm we generally know for their accounting prowess. I knew of their budding Greenhouse initiative that was already leading the way with the Toronto office; a program that is generally reserved for their top tier clients. A feint buzz about this new, disruptive environment they created to help businesses think completely out of the box and challenge themselves to look where they have never possibly looked before. Could they possibly assist our joint boards to find new innovative ways to build a foundation of new thinking while in Toronto for #WEC19? But more than that, could we do something so different and so unique that it would take us all out of seats and make us even a little uncomfortable? We weren't sure but we knew there was enough there for us to dig deeper.
Truthfully, I didn't know much about the Greenhouse except the buzz around a robot named Pepper that chats with you and really good meeting food...with lots of healthy and tasty snacks; this alone, was already intriguing. So when I visited with the MPI event team back in February, it was the furthest thing from my imagination. Yes, there was a robot and yes, there were snacks...but no, it's not actually a greenhouse with tomatoes on a vine.
It's a metaphor for incubating ideas for sustained growth, whatever your challenges may be. Every step of our tour was unique including our check in, to the live and engaging discussions to the dedicated expertise of the staff dedicated to curate provocative thinking. Apparently, Deloitte isn't just an accounting firm! This was it and we knew we had something that would challenge us. We were prepared to meet and design our own experience for the future of our members and the industry at large.
And so here we are, with less than a week until our joint board "lab", we've engaged in some fun lead-up homework and even some friendly banter among the 'teams' leading in which exhibits a youthful excitement as we begin this new journey. We want to share this journey with our members, so I've put up my friendly Canadian hand volunteered to takeover MPI's social media channels to give some behind the scenes tidbits on what your board members are up to. Stay tuned, much more to come!
