In September, New Zealand-based events company Red Carpet took its “Up Close” seminar series with de Bono to Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, Beijing and Shanghai. “If you never change your mind, why have one?” is a signature quote from creative thinking leader and author Edward de Bono. In this context, conferences, incentives and company retreats are more frequently being used not just to download corporate sales figures and year-end targets, but also to deliver more inspirational messaging to optimise mental creativity and the untapped powers of the human mind. Companies in every country, are competing to recruit, train, motivate and retain staff across all disciplines.

The rising demand for original meetings in Asia-Pacific is to some degree a result of regional economic growth. Too often, companies choose the familiar “tangible” information overload presentation option, rather than trusting “intangible-result” conferencing, where delegates are afforded mental space to form their own responses. On the one hand, while many clients outwardly profess their receptiveness to innovative methods of educating and motivating their employees, key decision-makers can be wary of ceding too much “thought control” to external parties – especially when it involves hiring someone from overseas to come and address company members. The long-standing trade-off between creatively engaging and expanding delegates’ mental capacities and simply filtering corporate messages and visions is tricky to handle. So how do meeting planners and conference organisers swim against the stream? How do they ensure that delegates receive the message loud and clear and remember it, long after the seminar has finished?Ī number of experts have spent a great deal of effort, learning from human psychology to suggest ways of maximising conference and meeting resources. The constant bombardment of our senses with stimulation, the torrent of irrelevant information in our email inboxes and on our screens, the media obsession with the sound-bite and the ten-second attention span created by the pressures of our hectic daily schedules, all work to weaken our focus and undermine our ability to reflect.

Ensuring that we get the best out of this 1.5kg of precious human tissue seems to get harder as modern life becomes more complex. Our personalities, identities, our perceptions of the world around us and our place in it, are all absorbed, filtered, processed and repackaged in a mass of grey matter packed in our skulls. While the French philosopher was focusing on nothing less than the profound nature of human existence, his words also reflect other less abstract truths. 'I think, therefore I am,” said Rene Descartes.

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