Thanks to early motherhood and good genes, I have the luck to coexist with four generations of women in my close family. Pre baby-boomer mum is 81 years old, I, baby-boomer generation just pass 50, my daughter 35 and my grandkid is 14 years old. It is interesting to observe how today, four generations learn from each other. No longer there is a one way communication from the eldest to the younger ones.
More often it happens that our grandkid explains her world to us. It is interesting to observe how great grandma is learning from Gen Z kid how to use the last generation smartphones and be able to Skype with me once a week, and how the Gen Z kid learns from great grandmother how to keep her feet on the ground. She will, for sure, but with her own set of tools. Because she grew up with smartphones, tablets, You Tube, Instagram, Facebook …
Isn’t it funny to talk about slow meetings in the prospect of Gen Z?
Funny enough you hear and read a lot lately about something fashionably called “Slow meetings”. Nothing else than going back to good old time of H2H – human to human – meetings, leave your smartphones outside the meeting room, interact with your pals instead of with your IPads. Very soon the destiny of the meeting industry will be in the hands of the Millennials, who will pass on to Gen Z Kids, a generation that hardly can open their eyes in the morning without reaching for their smartphones first thing. Knowing my granddaughter and her pals, it is my guess that “slow meetings” is not something this generation will be jumping on, if they decide to make their living swimming in the murky waters of the Meetings Industry.
The Generation Z are digital natives, whether we like it or not. But …
So my question is: will those “Slow meetings“ and H2H meetings trends be also implemented by Millennials or by the Gen Z’s at all? Because, whether we like it or not, they are digital natives. Smartphones are their constant companions, their permanent connection to their friends, their dating tools, their walking encyclopedia, their flash light, their water spirit level …
Therefore, what will it be like, the next generation of meetings? Should we, the baby-boomers, go on stressing the importance of our forms of communications or simply try to adjust even more rapidly to the hurricane of virtual communication preferred by Gen Z kids. I am afraid there will be a big gap hard to mind, if no one is guiding them on the importance of human and live interaction, once only Millennials and Gen Z’s are ruling the meetings Industry world.
