Conversation with Mark Pesce on the future of virtual events, organizations, and society

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Fellow futurist Mark Pesce is an old friend. We first actually connected when he spoke at my Future of Media Summit 2008, but I had long before being inspired by his work, writing about Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML), which Mark co-developed, in my first book.

We happened to live 100 meters from each other in Sydney’s Surry Hills for a few years, and for many years now our work and positioning as futurists and keynote speakers has been highly aligned.

I obviously had to interview Mark for The Virtual Excellence Show, and it was indeed a highly stimulating conversation. Watch the video, and see below for some summary points.

Some of our discussion points:

  • In a time of unprecedented uncertainty the key skill is navigating uncertainty
  • As organizations shift into virtual we are moving from a text culture to a video-first culture
  • Keynote speakers are finding new ways to shift to virtual speaking
  • Events need to be designed in new ways to create serendipitous connections and new layers of value for participants
  • We can design events akin to universities and universities akin to events
  • Leadership is about finding the answers together, learning by doing
  • Augmented reality is already here, with a new wave of enabling technologies to support the next phase including smartglasses
  • Videogrammetry is a highly exciting field for the next phase of virtual