Over on the RAG website or our social media you may have seen that the upcoming RAG London conference has been delayed from its original dates of the 8th and 9th of July to the 29th and 30th of September.
The driver for this has been the UK government’s extension of lockdown restrictions in England which will now continue in place through to the 29th of July.
We were naturally disappointed with the delay, with so many people wanting to finally get back together again, but we were pleased that we were able to quickly arrange a new time and a new venue.
RAG could have pushed to rearrange the conference immediately after the end of the restrictions. However while we really want to have our first face to face conference in far, far too long, we also want to make sure as many people as possible can join us and that our speakers can all easily be there in person. Frankly, we are also hoping we won’t be scrambling again to re-arrange in the face of any further last minute changes to the rules. Hopefully it won’t be too long of a wait!
We are all seeing a lot of press about the future of work and how people will engage with each other in the post-pandemic world. Some say everything has changed, others that things will ultimately be much as before. Nobody knows for sure.
During the pandemic we have held two fully online conferences, both of which worked really well, were well-attended and certainly taught us a lot, but they never felt like a real substitute for our physical events. We suspect that people will want to continue to use all of the new ways of working that evolved over the last 18 months but also want to make the best use of face-to-face meetings and their company travel budgets! It’s our hope that some of RAG’s existing key themes will serve us well in this brave new world.
- First, our long running commitment to great guests, an interesting agenda, and high quality content has always felt like an advantage, if a seemingly obvious one. This advantage is now more critical than ever.
- Second, the absolute core theme of RAG is community and it’s only recently that Eric wrote a great post on exactly this. The pandemic has probably advanced our use of remote communications tools by five years or more but this article perhaps highlights the limits to what a Zoom call can do: Why Community Is Important to RAG.
Full details and registration information for the conference with all the updates can be found here: London Conference: 29-30 Sep 2021
