Latest / PCMA Convene Podcast / Interview: The Decade of Disorientation - What Event Leaders Need from the 2026 Skills Horizon
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- Convene Podcast Transcript Convene Interview, ep. 23 *Note: the transcript is AI generated, excuse typos and inaccuracies Magdalina Atanassova: This is the Convene Podcast. Today we’re exploring what it takes to lead with clarity, discernment, and real groundedness in a decade defined not by disruption, but by disorientation. My guests are Convening APAC keynote speakers Dr. Sandra Peter and Dr. Kai Riemer: Co‑Directors of Sydney Executive Plus, professors at the University of Sydney, and two of Australia’s most respected voices on the future of work. When they’re not wading through vast signals datasets or sprinting between airports, they’re advising leaders from heads of government to head chefs on navigating complexity, upskilling thousands of leaders across 20-plus industries, and sharing their insights in boardrooms, ballrooms, and opera houses around the world. In this conversation, we explore the decade ahead through the lens of the 2026 Skills Horizon report: the five messy Shifts reshaping how we live and work, the four Clashes that demand balancing — not choosing — and the four Blobs of converging skills that will define future‑ready professionals. We talk about how leaders can cut through noise, rebuild trust in an increasingly broken information environment, and cultivate the grounded presence teams need now more than ever. We start now. Sandra Kai, welcome to the Convene Podcast. Kai Riemer: Thank you. Sandra Peter: Thanks for having us. Magdalina Atanassova: Yeah, it's my pleasure. So you framed the decade we're in as the decade of disorientation. So what signals feel especially urgent for leaders in this first year, in this very messy decade? Kai Riemer: Okay, well, first of all, it's become increasingly harder to actually find the right signals. Right. There's so much noise out there in the. The environment that we have to pay way more attention to what are signals. And also the fact that what we're seeing and why we're calling it disorientation is that, you know, we used to have trends that can be, that can be signals that we can, you know, use to extrapolate and then find ways to think about the future. A lot of that starts breaking. Sandra Peter: Yeah. And a lot of people are very used to thinking about the world in terms of trends that they can follow, and they start ignoring signals and they try falling back on onto those trends. And what we're seeing is much messier. We're seeing things fragmenting, we're seeing things decaying. We call these things shifts because it's kind of an easier way to think about the impact that they have on the work that we do. Magdalina Atanassova: And I want to address this. The 2026 Skills Horizon Report, which also will be linked in the show notes for those who want to dig in. And by the way, It's a fantastic report. I encourage everyone to download it and read it. So there you outline this five major shifts, as you just mentioned. The values, technology, accountability, trust and energy. So for the sake of event planners, which one or two should they prioritize as they plan the next few years and why? Kai Riemer: So we each get to pick one. Magdalina Atanassova: Why not? Kai Riemer: You pick first. Sandra Peter: I pick first. Oh, I think probably the values shift for me and mainly because I think there's such a different approach that people of different generations have to how they perceive even things like what is good leadership or what is good management, where does work happen and how do we go about it. So their attitudes are shifting and we're seeing even counterintuitive findings in some of these. So young men being much more conservative than young women. So for the first time, we're seeing younger generations having more conservative values than older people in organizations. So I think if you're trying to think of how you represent events, how you represent topics, thinking that the messages that you're sending out there have to be touched in very different terms for very different audiences, I think presents particular challenges for people organizing conferences. Kai Riemer: Okay, well, it's not easy to pick. Everyone wants to say technology and AI, but we keep that in the box. I want to say the trust shift and the trust shift because I think events have an increasingly important role to play to reinstate trust in expertise, trust in science, trust in news, trust in journalism, trust in reliable sources of information. Right. The information environment is increasingly broken. Social media gets inundated with misinformation, disinformation, AI generated slop. So people are looking for trusted sources of information. And I think events can have a big role to play in that space by curating speaker lineups, by favoring established voices, expertise, diverse lineups of people who bring really good and interesting perspectives. And I think that that's important because it's a way to counter that eroding trust that the wider population has in established sources of information. Partly because the information environment, as we said, is increasingly messy and broken. So yeah, so there you have it. Values and trust. Sandra Peter: We managed to not say AI yet. Magdalina Atanassova: Oh, wait, we're keeping it in reserve. It's coming. And I'll go back to trust in a bit. But before that, I just want to move kind of in the way that you designed the report because it's important that we follow the structure, I feel. So these shifts create for clashes. Right. We have policy versus people, efficiency versus expertise, capability versus control, and abundance versus attention. And now we can spend A lot of time on all of those. But I just want you to address. Why did you say that? It's not either or tension, but rather a balancing act between those. Sandra Peter: For all the clashes that we have there, it's leaders won't be able or organizers won't be able to pick one correct way. It's always a matter of having both and figuring out to what degree you can balance. You know, you manage policy. You mentioned policy versus people or efficiency versus expertise. You want to take advantage of both and you want to figure out how do you strike that productive balance. Now, when we designed this report, and maybe we should have said that a bit earlier, but when we designed this report, what we did is, first of all, we had a look at every conversation that's out there, from what happens at big conferences like Davos or South by Southwest to all the way to what happens in places like the Economist or the best business books of the years. But we spend a lot of time Talking to leaders. 150 of them for this edition. Global CEOs, heads of state, Nobel Prize winners Kai Riemer: Head chefs, airline captains, theater directors. Sandra Peter: And every single one of them identified the need to have these places where it's always this balancing act. You can't pick one of them. You need to be able to balance both. So we wanted to draw people's attention to these four this time around. Kai Riemer: So in the first edition of the Report, we had the shifts. We paid a lot of attention to how things are breaking. For the second edition, we wanted to translate how those shifts create fault lines and how that actually plays out for leaders. And it is in those clashes. And if you think about efficiency versus expertise, for example, around the role of AI, you want both, you want the efficiency gains, productivity, but you also want to use AI to uplift your expertise and not to erode it. But you know, we're seeing problems on both sides. We're seeing AI creating messy conditions around productivity because if you think about, I can now create much longer reports much faster. Sandra Peter: And now I have to read all those long reports that Kai is writing. Kai Riemer: So is that productivity when I create more and she has more work reading it, for example. Sandra Peter: But at the end of the day, AI does create great efficiency gains. We can do things faster. We can do novel things that we weren't able to do before. But it can also erode expertise if you're not thinking about the work that you're doing and generating slopes like less attention, less care. Kai Riemer: Right. Easily done. But then I don't have to think right. And Then over time, I might not think as much and I might offload my work to the AI and erode my own expertise. So people are worried about how to balance, you know, building expertise rather than eroding it and finding productivity rather than making work harder. Right. So it's a real balancing act that every workplace, every leader has to figure out by themselves for their own context. Magdalina Atanassova: And I just want to focus it for a second on abundance versus attention, because that felt very in line with events, right? Because. Sandra Peter: Oh, absolutely. Magdalina Atanassova: What I see is, you know, we go to conferences, we are not really concentrated sometime because there's all these things happening in the world. So the question is, how can event leaders really help attendees make sense of what's happening and focus and not just consume content, but really be there? Sandra Peter: So on the one hand, let me say that I think the clash between abundance and attention has always been there, but it's never been this urgent. There's the need to stay informed on more stuff than ever before. But everyone's attention is trained, as you said, by either too much information or fractured by things like, like algorithms. And for most people, that translates into, like, everyone's following. You know, they're on seven social media networks at, at all times, substacks, podcasts, even great ones like this one, newsletters and. And so on. But on the other hand, they're getting interrupted all the time. They're reading more stuff than. Than they should be reading. You know, this technology is a solution, but also a problem. And I think event organizers have a chance to do that curation, which is one of the big problems. How do you find the signal in the noise? And finding the signal in the noise means here's what you need to pay attention to. Here it is in a form that's digestible and that's accessible to you, particularly tailored to that audience. And event organizers have been doing this for a very long time. I just think now their work is more important than ever. Kai Riemer: So one of the things that we highlight in the report is the discernment, the taste, right? So to judge what is really important, and that's basically the job of a curator, of a programmer, right? To figure out what are the kind of sort of, what's the lineup, what's the content, what are the ideas that we bring to the audience to basically cut through this noise, on the one hand, so there's a very important role, probably an elevated role for events to play, because you can actually break through this noise with a really well curated lineup. And then the other part of the equation, which is sort of the attention bit, I think be mindful around how we use technology in events. Right. Because I've observed that there's a very liberal sort of working with, you know, and here's a, here's a QR code and then this slido and this slido and if you're using this too liberally, you basically encourage people to open their phones early in a talk and then they are with their slido and then they get their notifications and you lose them because you know the phone is a very sticky. So you want to be careful how you actually use this. And we find it sometimes it's much better to do Q and A the old fashioned way. Sandra Peter: Yes. Kai Riemer: You have a little bit less control, you take a bigger risk giving someone the microphone because you can't curate the questions. But you also don't lose people by getting them to use their phone during the talk. So I think there's a lot of, Sandra Peter: there's a place for not taking out your phone at all and there's a place, place for, you know, a thousand people in the audiences having their phones out all at the same time. Kai Riemer: Yeah, exactly. So create moments is what I'm saying. Rather than think about, be mindful about when to introduce technology rather than just do it as a byproduct of what you're doing. Magdalina Atanassova: I love that. So let's get to the blobs and even though they have a funny name, they're quite serious. So the blobs highlight the converging skill clusters shaping future ready professionals. Just for those that have not still seen the report. So if we map the blobs onto the role of event organizer, which new hybrid capabilities matter most and which traditional strengths are becoming less central, you think? Kai Riemer: Interesting. So before we do that, just as a bit of background for the audience. Right. So by the time we finished the clashes, we've told you how the world is breaking and what the message that leaves behind for you as a leader. So the blobs are really the solution. Right, because the idea is that upskilling helps learning new things and focusing on the things that matter. And so our four blobs are basically those areas of convergence. Now I think we might, you know, do the pick your favorite. Sandra Peter: Again, that is so unfair because I think we both like doing less with more is probably one that we both want to focus on. Kai Riemer: Well, you go ahead. So that's blob. We call it Blob 4. So this is all about the leader and that speaks directly to abundance, the Attention. Sandra Peter: Yeah. This idea of thinking through complexity is something that I think event organizers are really in a very good position to manage. Probably a couple of things that I highlight out of it. There's been an emphasis on bringing new things to audiences all the time. But I think there's an important point to highlight that there are also some things that a lot of audiences take for granted or assume or have been thinking the same way for a very long time, and they need to let go of those ideas. We call that skill unlearning in the skills horizon. And it's been around for a while, but I think more important now than ever, there are some very established theories, ways of thinking about the world, even things that were popularized at big conferences where either the research has moved on or the world has moved on. But we never do the job of retiring those ideas. We just leave them out there. A bit like zombies, you know, trying to find, you know, not a lot of thinking, but still, still moving around. They still look like they're. They're alive. And there's quite a few of those. So I think there's a place for helping people unlearn things. And there's also quite a place, quite a place for helping people do a bit of futures thinking. As the world is disruptive, there's such a huge opportunity to help people think through that complexity and to present them with lineups or with speakers that help them in the moment that these audiences find themselves in. Kai Riemer: And we want to be very clear when we say futures thinking, it's really thinking around plausible futures that have an impact on the presence. We're not talking flying cars and brain implants and sort of, you know, not sort of just the lazy collection of some extrapolation of some technology. Right. So we get a lot of those things, but really serious engagement around what the future would do. Now I want to pick Blob two, actually, which is sort of. We call the blob, solving problems of scale. And I want to come back to the trust element. So that blob this year we. The motto is, you need to trust and be trusted. And in that blog, we find interesting skills like civic place making, the role in which organizations and leaders take part in public conversations to strengthen democratic process or local communities. And I think event organizers have an opportunity to be part of that civic process as institutions in and by themselves. Sandra Peter: So we've just come back from presenting the skills Horizon at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. And south by Southwest has been in Texas for 40 years. But the role of conferences like that, to create a place to bring community together, to do that cross pollination between people from different industries of different ages. I think that if anything, the decade of disorientation strengthens the role and places so much more important on these moments that are not just the conference themselves, but the community that comes together around events. So this idea of how do you build trust at scale? I think conferences have a huge role to play in that. Kai Riemer: Yeah. And I mean, conferences, especially international ones, they are impacted by geopolitics, but they're also a really good way to engage with geopolitics because they bring together people from many different places internationally, and they're also therefore an opportunity for people to sort of build bridge across cultural differences and things like that. So, yeah, I think they. The two blobs we would want to highlight. Sandra Peter: Oh, and they're also fun, Maggie. Yeah. Magdalina Atanassova: But also serious, though. And I think you also kind of touched on Blob 3. Right. About disagreeing and still coming out together as. Magdalina Atanassova: Yes. Magdalina Atanassova: With greater trust and dignity. So I think that was. That was good. That was my favorite, so I get to mention it. Sandra Peter: Yeah, yeah, look. Kai Riemer: Yes, of course, the idea of working across differences and, you know, the idea to create discourse that fosters belonging rather than division. I think there's also a good place for events. Sandra Peter: Again, there's a good quote in the skills horizon from one of the leaders around moving slowly and fixing things. So there's great opportunities for that. Magdalina Atanassova: Yeah. So you wrap up the whole report with the idea of the grounded leader, which is someone who cultivates taste, makes sense and speaks human, which I loved. So can you share how a good grounded leader will help engage, guide and inspire their teams? Kai Riemer: So the idea of the grounded leader, first and foremost is we hear a lot about adaptive leadership, but the problem with adaptive leadership is you need to know what to adapt to. Right. And with this shift and with the disorientation and the messiness of today's world, sometimes it's very difficult to know where to look and what's a stable thing to latch onto. And so what we're saying is this Sandra Peter: is particularly particularly stressful. Like people in organizations try to figure out everything is changing around them, where do I look. So the role of the leader really changes for us. Kai Riemer: The leader themselves need to be grounded. That's the idea. And how do you do that? We say by cultivating taste. And what we mean by that is to have a point of view first and foremost, your own point of view. And it's not about being right or wrong or being correct, but having an outlook on the world that people can latch onto so that they have a fixed point from which to see the world. Right. And then use that to decide what's good and what's not. You will make mistakes, you will be wrong. You can adapt as you go, but at least you have sort of you become the fixed point for the team to then be a meaning maker, to be a place maker, and all the other things. But it all sort of evolves from taste. Sandra Peter: And I think the one that you also mentioned, like, you know, keeping it real, the idea of speaking human over and over, we heard from leaders over the past years, don't use jargon, say things in very practical ways that cut the crap. Yes, cut the crap. Use a bit of humor. Right. And infuse it with personal anecdotes and with humor. And we've seen a lot of leaders trying to really engage with audiences in very straightforward, real ways. Kai Riemer: Yeah. Not taking yourself too seriously. And also, you know, being. Being there for the team. Magdalina Atanassova: We're past that polished look of a leader. Right. We need a raw reality. Sandra Peter: Yeah. Magdalina Atanassova: Was there anything we didn't mention, and we definitely should before we wrap up? Sandra Peter: Oh, look, I. I think we've done great. Not to mention artificial intelligence, Kai Riemer: but we really just. Sandra Peter: Yeah. And for those of us who do research in, like, we do actual research in artificial intelligence is something that we've spent many, many years. Before it was cool. We were in AI before ChatGPT, before it was cool. Right. We're nerds with glasses. I think there will be a huge upskilling kind of moment for people around AI. So I think we're very far from understanding what this is doing to professions, to the way in which we organize social lives, to our economies, to our democracies. So I think will be on the radar for quite a long time. But we need to very much move beyond the hype and figure out how we make these things actually work. So I think having a lot more realistic kind of talks grounded in what the technology actually is, not the hype that we need to raise the kind of funds that we need to support it, but what the technology actually does and then research or work as it evolves, as we understand what it's doing to productivity, how it's changing our organizations, our economies. And I think in that respect, again, conference organizers, conveners have a great opportunity to kind of tap on into the realistic versus the fantastical sides of AI. Magdalina Atanassova: I love it. Kai Riemer: What she said. Magdalina Atanassova: And I'm sure that just a taste from what you're going to deliver at Convening APAC, which is coming up. So I hope people are now even more excited to learn about the Blobs and all the other fun things in the report. And of course they can get a head start by downloading it. So, Sandra Kai, thank you so much for making the time and being on the podcast. Kai Riemer: Well, thanks for having us. Sandra Peter: Thank you so much for having us, Maggie. Look forward to seeing you in 3D. Magdalina Atanassova: Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Remember to subscribe to the Convene Podcast on your favorite listening platform to stay updated with our latest episodes. For further industry insights from the Convene team, head over to PCMA.org/convene. My name is Maggie. Stay inspired. Keep inspiring. And until next time.