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The 2020 Covid19 Pandemic might just be the most disruptive event in the last 60 years. It has, amongst many devastating social and personal effects, also propelled us into what seems to be a \u2018New Normal\u2019 of work, with a speed and force we could never have imagined three months back. And as we emerge out of Lockdown into Recovery, the worlds of Work and Learning are changing radically\u2014indeed, will arguably never be the same again. In our new COVID-19 mini-Season at \u2018Learning Is The New Working,\u2019 \u2018From What-If To What Now?\u2019 we\u2019re exploring what that\u2019s looking like on the ground\u2014and this week\u2019s guest, Russell Butler, Founder and CEO of Learning event creators iVentiv is literally thinking and responding in-flight to these issues. After all, industry conventions are so important to our industry, and most L&D teams use some form of convening to practice our \u2018trade\u2019\u2014but it\u2019s one that hasn\u2019t worked for everyone for a while. What\u2019s really interesting is that Russell had been disrupting that model for some years\u2026 but that COVID and travel bans present an existential threat to even his new way of fostering learning. Listen in to hear about the genuine drama of this possibly terminal crisis and what he\u2019s done to save it, including:

how he ended up in \u2018Silicon Spa:\u2019 a place \u2018bang in the middle\u2019 of rural England with a \u2018serious gaming\u2019 heritage that he found highly impactful on his own growth as a business professional

his workspace\u2014an office between the Motor Sport Industry Association and the National Beekeeper Society next to where the Queen retired some of her ceremonial horses; the first ten years of what\u2019s very much a family business, iVentiv, and the evolution of its \u2018Learn, Connect and Develop\u2019 mission; what he learned from the first 100-plus iVentiv events; how well his pipeline looked at the start of the 2020\u2026 and then how much it changed; the day he had to tell his staff in their brand new offices that the business faced huge challenges, and that none of it was their fault; the pivot/postpone conundrum; a steep learning curve: the start of iVentiv\u2019s virtual and what\u2019s proving to be a surprisingly strong, Zoom-based way back; the usefulness of the self-challenge, \u2018What are you doing to keep yourself relevant for us - and not just for us?\u2019; and much more.