What’s Your Creative Superpower?
An Interview With ILEA Live Workshop Presenter Tahira Endean
Tuesday, July 24, 2018
According to event producer Tahira Endean, CMP, DES, CED, everyone has a creative superpower; they might just not have discovered it yet. In her ILEA Live pre-conference workshop, Tahira will work with attendees on what it takes to deliver on those “creative” ideas that event professionals are always asked to provide. We caught up with Tahira for a quick chat about her workshop, what attendees can expect and why creativity is so important.
ILEA: What is the setup/format of the workshop?
Tahira Endean (TE): This session will be very interactive. We can make anything creative and fun. We have three hours together, and I really want people to walk away with some ideas they can implement, things that they can take back to their teams and help them learn from. I spoke at ILEA Live in Calgary about how we can create value and then prove it to our clients, and this will be the prequel to that session.
When we’re educating our members about how we can continue to make our events stronger, more creative and show value for and to our clients, those are all things that will support our day to day business.
ILEA: What kind of things will you be talking about in the workshop?
TE: All of us have creativity in us, and quite often the people who are considered the most creative or have the role of creative director will sit down in a meeting, and the first thing people will say is “How are you going to make it awesome?” Well, let’s back it up a bit and talk about the purpose of the event, the objective, and audience and really make things specific for them. We’ll look at how we can build empathy with our clients and stakeholders so that we can get that creativity flowing.
The session will look at the tools that we have to embed into creating events that people are expecting, and well as how we can embed technology into events. I don’t look at technology from event registration and some of the typical things. The angle we take is from a category perspective: from AI to wearables. What can we realistically do? What are different types of clients expecting? How can technology add to it? And we’re definitely going to look at our creative superpowers, because everybody has a different creative superpower.
ILEA: What are the visual tools attendees will discover at your workshop?
TE: Event model generation is one of the main visual tools that will be discussed. We’re seeing a lot of the Event Model Canvas, but it’s probably not something not everyone is familiar with. It’s a great tool that’s been embraced by the industry globally that creates a process for our events.
ILEA: Anything else?
TE: The most important thing is if you have a business where creativity is important — where you sometimes feel a bit time strapped or budget strapped to create the most creative feeling event — this is the workshop for you. If you are a super high end creative, then I hope you’ll come and share your expertise and ideas. If you want to learn how you can embed creativity into your organizations and into your events in ways that are comfortable, in ways that push you a little bit and in ways that help your client get to where you want them to be a little bit faster, this is the workshop that’s going to do that.
Everybody should go to ILEA Live for many reasons. From a creative perspective, it is one of the best events of the year. And also from a size perspective it’s one of the best events of the year. It’s not the biggest event, which means that you get a chance to meet a lot more people a lot more in depth and to really have those conversations that help us move our industry forward and have a lot of fun doing it.
Learn more about Tahira’s workshop, titled “Creative Super Heroes Have NO Box” and register for ILEA Live and the pre-conference workshops today.
Tahira Endean, CMP, DES, CED, is an event producer for BC Innovation Council as well as the author of “Intentional Event Design, Our Professional Opportunity.” She is a frequent industry publication contributor, including several sections in the ninth edition of the CIC Manual, which provides the framework for the CMP studies.
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