Accessible Disruption - Strategy Table

Nicola Kastner: [00:00:00] My first job, I was at a hotel and I worked in the sales office as a sales secretary, which was kind of funny 'cause I didn't know how to type. But anyway, that I digress. We had corporate values that were on the wall. So the one that I chose to memorize was accept. Change is a positive force.

Podcast Host: The world is changing. For most human beings, change is uncomfortable and challenging to address. Whether you are a startup working on agile processes or a mature organization, navigating change with an existing complex structures, the mindset and skills to adapt has never been more vital. The team from the strategy table want to help the wider world understand the need and approach to meaningful and impactful change management, helping organizations navigate disruption and make change accessible to [00:01:00] everyone.

This is Accessible disruption.

Welcome to another episode of Accessible Disruption, where we take a deep dive into what change management means and how it intersects with the human experience. I'm Anthony. Co-founder of the Strategy Table and with me, of course, is my co-host, Tahira Paul. Thanks Anthony. Joining us today is a very special guest, Nicola Kasner, CEO of ELX, which is an invitation only global community that unites senior corporate event leaders across all industries, sectors, and from large corporations.

It's built on an ethos that it's lonely at the top. And ELX fosters an environment where senior leaders can exchange ideas and best practices with peers in similar roles or similar levels of complexity through in-person and online engagements. They provide a digital resource library and a [00:02:00] community Slack channel where everybody can connect and discuss the most relevant topics in the industry.

In her role as CEO at ELX, she drives strategic initiatives, expanding the global footprint and growing membership, while of course ensuring that that community remains intimate and highly collaborative. Prior to ELX, Nicola held various roles in consultancy. I. Agency and brand sides of the events industry.

Most notably, she was the global Vice President for events marketing strategy at SAP, where she was responsible for designing and optimizing event strategies for events ranging from 25 people to 25,000. Nico, I think it was a year ago that I first met you, uh, probably somewhere around Imex Frankfurt, and I was surprised that we hadn't intersected before in the industry.

But it was great to meet you and I've been inspired by what I've been reading online that you've been posting since we first met and first connected online. With that in mind, welcome to Accessible Disruption and we'll hit you with our first question, which is [00:03:00] obviously a provocative one every time, but.

What is disruption? What is change? What do those words mean to you?

Nicola Kastner: That's a good question. So you're right. We did meet almost a year ago to the day, it was my first week on the job that we had a call, and tomorrow is my one year anniversary. So how, it's funny how things go around, right? Um, so what is, what is change and disruption?

I mean, there's been a lot for me. Can I start with a story? Yes. When I was in. My first job, I was at a hotel and I worked in the sales office as a sales secretary, which was kind of funny 'cause I didn't know how to type. But anyway, that I digress. We had corporate values that were on the wall. There were a list of 10 of them, and it didn't take my 20 odd year old brain very long to realize that I only needed to know one.

They weren't gonna come around and ask me again. They wouldn't remember, right? Or they weren't going to the boardroom to say, Hey, what did Nicholas say last time? Did she say the same to you? So the one that I chose to memorize was, except [00:04:00] change as a positive force. To this day, it has been something that has stayed with me.

It is so true, and it is something I strongly believe in my soul.

I'm, I'm curious to dig into that. We also had a great conversation with David Allison around values and how corporate values and personal values sometimes don't align, and it can be a big challenge. But is there anything specifically with that one line, it stuck with you all this time?

Oh. What was it in that time and place and what does it mean to you now? Has that changed or is that sort of locked in?

Nicola Kastner: Well, I think, um, it's, it's locked in, but it meant very different things to me when I was 20 odd than it does now at this point in my career where I'm CEO of an organization. But I think the theory that changes is the only thing we can count on.

It is so true. I've seen it in roles that I've been in throughout my career. We've seen so much disruption in the industry. We had the financial crisis, we had [00:05:00] sars, we had nine 11, we had Covid, and now we've got the geopolitical landscape. Everything is changing constantly. So I think as humans, we, and in our careers, we have to be flexible and lean into that rather than resisting change, we just have to.

Allow it to lead us because fighting it is pointless.

So you have a core belief that change is inevitable. What would be some of the, if you had to help equip somebody with change, what would be something that you would say to them?

Nicola Kastner: For me, I have always trusted my instinct. I have never had a plan, a master plan that this is what I'm gonna do, this is my next career.

You know, goal people say you should have a five year, 10 year career. Plan. I've never had that, and if I did, I wouldn't be where I am today because I have trusted my instinct a couple of times. Actually, one time specifically, it steered me wrong, but what came out the other side of it was better than it probably would've been [00:06:00] if I had not taken.

A particular role and move forward. I wouldn't be where I am today. So I think trusting your instinct, leaning into it, making informed choices. But really, if it feels right in the gut, then it probably is. Right?

I always call it with events, I always call it my event stink. Mm-hmm. You know, as soon as the client asks for the thing, you're just like, Hmm, that seems like a terrible idea that you should probably just go with that.

Let's find a way to not do that thing. Not gonna serve you wrong generally. Yep. So we jumped head first into talking about change and disruption, which is our passion point. But I'm also curious, ELX, what is it for the, you know, there's some people listening who aren't from our event space, aren't from the meetings world.

How does that relate to what we're talking about around understanding change and navigating change?

Nicola Kastner: Yeah, so ELX is an invite only community for global heads of events from large corporations. [00:07:00] It's a member driven organization. We have about 185 members today. We bring our members together to share best practices, to benchmark, to collaborate with one another, in many cases, to commiserate with one another as well, because these rules are lonely.

It is very lonely, uh, in these roles, and people need to have a safe space. I know, because I used to be in that role. I was vice president of event marketing strategy globally for SAP, so I lived their existence, left to consult, left to become, then became CEO, that that was a journey. But I, but we really bring people together in a safe space.

We operate under Chatham House rules. Everything is confidential. People can use the insights, what they've learned, but they can never say who set them, what company they work for, or who else was part of the conversation. So that also creates a safe space 'cause every single member in the community agrees to that.

Well, I'll, I'll take it back to a personal example. For me, when I was at SAP during Covid, we all had to do [00:08:00] the magic pivot. I hate that word still to, to this day, and my entire company. Was looking at me to tell them how I was gonna replace our largest pipeline driver of the year. Our team of 70 odd people were looking at me for what to do.

I didn't know why did, first of all, why was it an event problem just, but anyway, game one, right? But I didn't know I was part of a community. It was a grassroots community. We'd been meeting regularly, monthly, and in parallel, a group of eight massive tech brands broke off into a group. We'd meet every four to six weeks and just share best practices.

I called it my super secret society. That was my lifeline, because I didn't know, they didn't know. None of us knew what we were doing. We all knew we were making it up as we were going along, but we also knew we weren't saving lives. Collectively. Our brain power was so much better together than it was individually.

[00:09:00] I. Honestly, it was a game changer for me. It was a lifeline. So I often think about ELX, right? What if ELX had existed during Covid? Would we have felt as alone? Maybe not. Would anything been any different? I don't know, but I would like to think that all eighty five, a hundred eighty five members would be coming together to share.

There and collaborate together. And we're starting to see that with the geopolitical shifts, right? No matter where you are in the world, our community is global. But no matter where you are in the world, people are being impacted by this. So these conversations, um, we have regular calls. They're called off the record calls and came up as a topic of conversation on one of the calls with five minutes left, I was like, we can't touch this.

In five minutes, we're gonna have a standalone call. We have a channel in our Slack community dedicated to it. I created a whole LinkedIn series and went deep into research to help our community and help the industry as a whole. But we're in it together. We're figuring it out together, and I think to me, that's [00:10:00] the power of community.

Well, it's gonna be an interesting thing because this geopolitical shift, there's still a lot of time left to see how things shift.

Nicola Kastner: Oh, we're, what, six weeks in, right? Yeah. We need timestamp on this, right? These are definitely, we're recording this on April 14th. Who knows what's gonna happen on April 15th, or 16th or 18th or whatever, you know,

when we're all together at IMEX Frankfurt, which this episode will come out before these happen.

But you know, Kevin Hinton with the US Travel Association on Wednesday afternoon is doing a session, um, that is 120 days in. Like, what do you need to know about meeting in the us? We know that's gonna be a jam packed session, followed by a session with the event leaders, exchange community about what planners really want from agencies and what do agencies really want from planners, sort of debate that you'll be moderating.

And I think that that's, you know, there's so many bigger discussions that happen around that, but at the end of the day, they always say, like you said, we're not saving lives. But you know, we say we're in this very stressful industry. Well. We know that it's stressful because of whatever idea we come up with.[00:11:00]

We are always being impacted by external forces, whether it's the geopolitical or the suppliers that we're bringing together. So how do you get everybody onto that same page to say, here's the problem. What we actually need to solve is not this one event. The actual problem that we need to solve is how do we bring people together to communicate effectively?

And grow all of our businesses collectively to forward.

Nicola Kastner: Agreed. And I think the, one of the problems we are having to solve right now is the uncertainty of constant change. Right. And, you know, how do you plan ahead? For what? You don't know what's coming. You don't, you have to be flexible. Like going back to circling right back to where we started, right.

Accept change is positive, force, plan ahead as much as you can, but understand that you need to be flexible. And I think most of us get that in events because we wouldn't be in events if we weren't. Right. You know, we're like the docs, you know, smooth and cool on top, but like paddling, like hell under the water.

But [00:12:00] that's, that's the events business through and through. We're not immune to this. It's just another thing for us to figure out

what we're trying to, as we launch this journey of where we're going, it's adaptation, resilience, collaboration. So, you know, how do we, how can we help people build those skills, their skills to understand how, where do we, you know, come from?

And you know, it's interesting that at 20 something. Uh, probably a little bit like us. You probably had had enough uncertainty in your life up to some point that the value you chose was that change is always gonna be there. So, you know, we did a couple of podcasts at the beginning of just talking to each other.

Ben Ryan, who's our, uh, third co-founder, you know, he's military family, you know, started in Australia, immigrated to Canada. I moved around all of the time as a child. You just become very adaptable without actually knowing that's a skill you're building, whereas not everybody comes from that same type [00:13:00] of need to be adaptable or resilient.

Nicola Kastner: Like to think that I chose it 'cause it resonated with me. Probably I chose it 'cause I was a, I was lazy and it was easy to remember, but it's a good thing because it's worked.

Yeah. I, I, that brings us to an interesting point. I think the thing that also for, for Hir and I, and, and Ryan to make sense, it was.

Not only change being natural and easier for us to adopt because we'd had a lot in our lives practice anyway. Practice. Practice, yeah. It is a practice. Managing change is a practice you need to go through. But I think also to a point you raised community, we put ourselves within communities whereby we could navigate change with other people as well.

And the work you're doing with ELX around that, aside from the psychological safety and. Providing a place for people to gather. What other ways are you using the next level, that collaboration to help with resiliency, A and a adaptability. Is there [00:14:00] any specific collaboration methods or processes that you use?

Nicola Kastner: I wouldn't say they're necessarily collaboration methods. We got a few things that we do. So through our content, through our digital content, we bring people together on regular calls. That's an important way to bring the community together to see each other face to face. Virtually, but face-to-face, right?

And to build connections outside of the digital content. And of course in-person events. All of those things are so critical, especially in our industry. We know the power of face-to-face events, and I see that firsthand in the community. We're leveraging research because I have always had this theory based on my expertise and conversations with our members in events.

We are building the plane while we are flying it, and we land that plane, 80% built. And we don't look at it again by that point. It's fallen apart until next year. And we start over and we start over and we start over and we start over. So one of the things we are [00:15:00] doing right now is we're doing a research project.

So we had a hundred responses, so that's massive. From a response rate. It was quite a long survey that we did in the community to understand how, how the community members are using technology. Team and innovation and managing team performance and how that relates to driving outcomes. You know, based on, started loosely on my plain analogy, but, but what we are seeing of sneak peak is there is a direct correlation to intentionality about time for innovation, time for creating a safe space.

Time for finishing the plane. There is a direct correlation to outcomes, so that's super exciting and that's research that we will be sharing, obviously at a, uh, greater depth within the community. But we'll also be sharing it to the greater industry as a whole because I think a lot of people will be able to benefit from that.

Let's take this opportunity to take a short break now and hear from some of our [00:16:00] sponsors. But of course, if you want to hear this ad free, along with extended versions, access to our book club and the chat community, you can visit strategy table.co or click on the link in the description. We'll be right back.

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So this is very selfish, but you know, as someone who has written two books, our intentional event design and our KPI is Joy, which is about outcomes. Clearly, I understand that we need to be outcome driven. I am curious about where people are sitting on that outcome. Perspective and what [00:18:00] are the outcomes that are being sought?

Nicola Kastner: So 93% of our members, so we use, we have a CRM. So when members become part of the community, they give us some information and we ask 'em about topics of interest. The number one topic of interest, 93% of our members. At this point have selected measurement. The number one topic of interest. What I do see within the community is a variety of spectrums of skill sets around measurement.

Traditionally events, people. And not all, but have been more logistics driven. That's been the nature of our business. I call that the events business, not the business of events, which is understanding that an event is designed to drive an outcome every single solitary event, and we have to understand what that outcome is in order to design the right.

Experience to drive the outcome. It just doesn't happen because you decided to measure it. You can't back into it, right? [00:19:00] As a whole, our industry needs to think more strategically, not just my members. 'cause at the leadership level, they're, the understanding is there, but I think as an industry, we need to think about them more, right?

Like, how do we drive better outcomes? How do we measure for better outcomes? What are we trying to achieve? And then design the experience to achieve those. Understand the needs of the stakeholders too, right? You have to find that balance between the business goals and the attendees, your sponsors, whoever it might be.

You could have, like if I think about imex, how many different stakeholder groups are there? Probably 20, 25. You've gotta find the right balance of meeting those needs, understanding, doing that, stakeholder mapping, understanding the business objectives, then. Designing the right experience. Also understanding what you need to measure to determine if the experience was the right one.

That all has to be done before you do a single thing around the event. Then you design the experience to achieve those [00:20:00] outcomes and you measure them, communicate and use the results. Really simple. When you look at it visually, five step process that I always recommend and I write about on LinkedIn, maybe not quite as simple, how do you map 25 stakeholder groups?

I would imagine I would love to be a fly on the wall for some of those discussions. Finding that right balance, that's the art.

Well, and I think it's not one person deciding what all those outcomes should be. It's. Bringing in the right people into the room to stand up for their stakeholders and to say, you know, it's like I'm as the head of program fighting for the education to say, and it has to be the right education, not fluff.

It has to provide what people are looking for. Well, what is that? Well, that changes every show because the world changes every show. We need to be responsive to that. We need to be responsive for the reality that it's a global group in Europe. It doesn't need the same things as America.

Nicola Kastner: Exactly.

There's overlap for sure, but in different ways and different ways of looking at it.

Whereas, you know, Ollie's gonna fight for the participant experience and the sales team is gonna make sure the exhibitors are getting what they need. [00:21:00] And we have our impact teams looking at all of our groups like ELX to say, how do you want to fit and how do we make it so that it works for all of those different people.

It's 15,000 people, so you're not gonna make 15,000 people happy doing the same thing for everybody. That's

Nicola Kastner: right.

That's about how people find their tribes and their communities and their pathway through the event in a way that's gonna provide the balance that they need. Some people are gonna be quite happy to go at Mach one in heels, and some people are going to need to have that time when they can go up to the wellbeing lounge and wear comfortable shoes and find a salad, and all of them are perfectly okay.

Nicola Kastner: Do you wanna wander through the little boutique area or do you wanna go direct to the marketplace area? I don't know. I don't, I shop at IKEA very often, but you know what I mean, where I just wanna go and get the thing that I came for and I'm out designing those experience. I actually think there's not a lot of analogies between the way that I, IKEA sets up their store and what can be done at events.

But to your point, of all those stakeholders, [00:22:00] the key piece is getting to a point that everybody understands there's a commonality. So you know what you're working towards and you've got goals. Because things are gonna get thrown at you. New things are gonna come in. And if it takes you off course on what you have all aligned on and agreed on, you're not gonna have your Ikea experience.

You're gonna land up at Timbuktu. You know what I mean? Like so how do you get that right alignment? Everybody agrees and buys in so that you're not internally fighting for different things. 'cause you know who suffers? The attendees, every participant, everybody. And it'll drive the right outcomes. Yeah,

and, and we come back to how we collaborate and understand each other.

I, I like to say my last decade in events hasn't been so much about events as it's been my role as what I call a corporate translator. Getting in the room and working with executive teams to properly articulate why they even think an event's important. Part of whatever change is going [00:23:00] on and then helping that team that's so embedded in events that they're almost stuck in events running day.

Like you said, the execution team, the, the skills that make you brilliant at executing, following direction, following orders aren't necessarily the same skills. You need to have the conversation with the event owner and the C-suite and the executive. You need to not just take the order, but you need to understand what's behind that.

Order behind that request at a deeper level. Some of the things you shared with us resonated. A lot of the stuff comes down to that trust. Again, because you talked about what ELX is doing with research and engaging with members to develop your knowledge and share that knowledge around your credibility.

How much do you really know about the state of business and the state of the events world? I think you're doing a great job with that. Kudos to that. The other thing you're doing is you're consistently doing it. You're consistently showing up and bringing this community together to talk about stuff, and they know that you are there.

They feel that reliability in you and you're doing it in a safe space where they can turn up and be their true selves, which is creating that intimacy as well. Three core [00:24:00] elements of trust that all feed off each other and support each other. They're getting that from their membership within. Your communities.

What I'm interested in is how do you feel the divide is between these leaders of events within their organizations? What's the divide between them and the executive leadership and their viewpoint to the role of events and what events serve? What does another CEO. See in events.

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Nicola Kastner: There's not a lot of opportunities to grow up, so to when I mean grow up, I mean go up in the recruiting lines. What, where your opportunities are to expand your skillset. I. Yeah, make yourself more valuable, learn different things, learn different aspects of the business 'cause it just makes you so much better at your job.

For me, it was data. I, other than trusting my gut and my instinct, understanding how to use data to make informed decisions was a game changer and has been a game changer. Still continues to be a game changer in my career. It's something I leaned into quite early. I was scared to death of it, but I was like, this is kind of cool.

And then I found out what a pivot table was. It changed my life and I still love pivot tables and everyone should learn them. I strongly believe that for me, data was my superpower. I. Right. I think everybody has a superpower or multiple superpowers. Find out what they are and then lean into them and grow those and cultivate those and grow those and cultivate them in your [00:26:00] teams as well.

When and where are we gonna get to see this data that you have coming

Nicola Kastner: out? I think the data and the research is gonna inform a lot of where we take some of our content over the next year and maybe where some of the discussions go for us. To the point of we've got five minutes left on the call. We can't tackle five minutes of all the geopolitical fallout.

Let's have another call. Let's have a call. I had, I approach the running. Yes, I'm intentional and purposeful, and I have strategic plans and strategic pillars. Of course, you have to do those things as a CEO. But I also have to trust my instinct and guide the conversations and guide the organization in the way that my community needs it.

So what I know today might be different than what the community needs in five or six months or whenever it might be. So for me, I lean into that a lot. Research will help us. Get the right insight that is coming out in July. We will be releasing it at our annual Congress as well as a white paper, so we'll have two versions, [00:27:00] one that's sort of a much deeper dive for our members, but one we release at a high level because there will be insights that the industry as a whole can benefit from.

While not everybody can be in the ELX room or around the ELX table. That doesn't mean we should be keeping everything secret within ELX, and I strongly believe on that. I believe that we have a responsibility as leaders in this industry to leave the industry better than it was when we joined. So every small little piece that I can do to help do that, what and ELX can do to help do that is very important to me

and we appreciate that.

Thank you. I think it, it is really important that we can't be selfish with data.

Nicola Kastner: Yeah. And insights, you know? Absolutely. Right now I, that's why I started sharing so much on LinkedIn because you know what, to me is table stakes and just common sense because it's been ingrained in my career to some people.

I. It's like a lightning bolt of information, and if it helps one person, and I've heard from a lot of people that [00:28:00] it helps a lot, even if it's a post event reporting template that took me hours to create. None of it's proprietary. There's no data in there. Use my template. I don't care. Save yourself hours.

Go finish building the plane instead of building a PowerPoint template to report outcomes, you know,

but for heaven's sakes, be measuring. Fill in this. Take the template and fill it in please. Yeah,

Nicola Kastner: I think you know Tira, right? Anthony? I don't know if you do. I was writing on LinkedIn a lot about measurement because that's my jam.

I believe I have some insights that I can share. The co-founder of ELX is actually the founder of Explore the Event Measurement Company, and he reached out to me on LinkedIn and said, you write like, I think I'd like to have a conversation with you. And I was like, oh, there's an event measurement software.

How do I not know about this? My jam? I thought I was gonna have a demo. Hour and a half later, no demo. Now the call hour and a half later, no demo. Third call. Do you want a job? I'm like, yes, I do. That's literally how ELX came about for me.

Okay. We, we have to let you go. 'cause you know, [00:29:00] busy CEO have got work to do, but we always ask for a.

Call to action, a closing statement that you might have that can inspire listeners to seek out their own disruption, find their own change, and make it accessible. Do you have a last call to action that you could put out to our listeners?

Nicola Kastner: So simple, right where we started accept change as a positive force.

There

you go. I think that's could not be more perfect. I think we've covered perfect. So much interesting stuff. We're probably going to have to ask you back in the future maybe happy. Maybe at the year and six months. Let's see. Let's see where, where we plot this out. But thank you for your time today. I think it's been very valuable.

Reflect some insights on July 17th. We are gonna come back and revisit those insights. That's exciting.

Nicola Kastner: Yeah, maybe that's a good time. Maybe after the research comes out, I'm happy to come back and talk about that. We'd love

that. Thank you. So thank you for your time today and we will talk to you all later on.

On accessible

Podcast Host: disruption.[00:30:00]

Accessible Disruption is written and spoken by Taira and Dean Ryan Hill and Anthony Vade. All content is developed in collaboration with the team at Strategy Table Podcast Production by Experience Design Change Inc. An association with the change lead network. Find more information@strategytable.co.