“We want our Collaborative Innovation Summit filled from stage to seats with people sharing transformation ideas and stories,” says BIF Creative Catalyst Saul Kaplan.
After all, it was out of the Summit that the hashtag #RCUS was coined — Random Collisions of Unusual Suspects. And from now until the Summit takes place in September, we’ll run a series of short interviews with former Summit attendees who’ll tell us in their own words why the BIF Summit is a must-go event and how #RCUS has changed their lives. Next up, longtime friend-of-BIF Jen Hetzel Silbert of Spartina Consulting and the Learning401, an “organizational change consultant, facilitator, and trainer who has an unshakable belief that people can create anything they set their minds to.”
Here’s her answer to the question: Why go to the BIF Summit?
The people I have met at BIF during the conversations at the break, over lunch, over coffee, in between storytellers, have radically changed my work and have helped my network to explode.
Go to the BIF Summit because of who you are going to accidentally, serendipitously sit next to, have coffee with, meet during breaks. Go to the BIF Summit because of the conversations that will be started as a result of the amazing storytellers you’re going to see on stage. Anyone can watch those stories on video, on the livestream after BIF. But being in the room, to make and watch the sparks fly, is something you cannot get by sitting in your home office.
The people I have met at BIF during the conversations at the break, over lunch, over coffee, in between storytellers, have radically changed my work and have helped my network to explode. But, my network has exploded in ways that are relevant to what I want to be doing. This is no speed-dating like they do at the Chamber of Commerce for Friday coffee — no insult meant to the Chamber of Commerce! But, it’s the people who go to the BIF Summit that make the difference.
And, the conversations start at BIF, but it’s what happens after the Summit that gives them life. I couldn’t be more grateful. I look at my LinkedIn network, my quasi-Rolodex of contacts across social media, and my address book and the majority of them are connected, if not directly, then somehow indirectly, by the crowd at the BIF Summit.