The other week RISE consultants Gita-Marie Goldman and Madelanne Rust-D'Eye spent 3 days under the domes of the Eden Project at Anthropy UK - a gathering aimed at inspiring a better Britain.
Since then we've been reflecting a bit more on our experiences there and what felt different about Anthropy?
Conferences are synonymous with aggressive networking for organisational advantage and handing out contact details to as many people as possible: Choose the conference which is most useful, go along and promote yourself, extract the most out of it and leave.
Yet Anthropy was less about “networking” for our own individual advantage and more about creating new connections.
We met people doing similar work and those in different work. We met people we understood and those we found less familiar. We bumped into people we knew and also got into random but meaningful conversations with people we happened to be sitting next to. It was a brilliant opportunity to get out of our usual bubble and connect with others who shared a curiosity for new thinking and possibilities.
The setting of the Eden Project and its origin story of collective endeavour, experimentation and connection to the world around us, provided the perfect backdrop for these new relationships.
Our client work is all about shaking up ways of thinking and considering our humanness in it all. We found the purpose of Anthropy strongly resonated with some of the principles behind RISE - placing humanity at the core of our experience and creating a common energy for positive change, beyond a narrow commercial driver.
Anthropy left us feeling renewed and energised with ideas, connections and possibilities that we couldn’t have foreseen. This felt more about coming together for change and less about leveraging or building our little black book of contacts. A reminder to burst our own bubble every now and then, and shake things up.