Meetings Innovator: Claus Raasted

Skift

5 days ago

Claus Raasted wants to disrupt the default settings of the meetings industry — one bold, low-stakes experiment at a time. His legacy goal? Make the world a little less afraid, and a lot more willing to try something new.
Claus Raasted is on a mission to disrupt the default settings of the meetings and events industry — one bold idea at a time. Whether it's ditching the agenda, defaulting to alcohol-free experiences, or encouraging the industry to take a page from the world of video games and cartoons, Raasted's advice is simple: take more risks, especially small ones.
His core message? Innovation doesn't have to be digital or expensive. It can be human, cultural, and surprisingly low-stakes. Instead of endlessly optimizing the same formats, Raasted challenges organizers to create space for experimentation and let the fringe influence the mainstream.
Raasted's legacy goal is disarmingly human: to make the world a little less afraid. Blending playfulness, curiosity, and courage might just be the most underrated innovation strategy of all.
Meetings Innovators is a new series dedicated to spotlighting the trailblazers defining the future of the meetings industry. Each month, we feature visionary professionals breaking the mold with innovative strategies, fresh perspectives, and bold ideas. Beyond planning events, these pioneers are crafting experiences that resonate, inspire, and lead the way forward. Join us as we celebrate the creative minds taking the future into their own hands and shaping what's next in the world of meetings and events.
Skift Meetings spoke to Raasted to capture his views on innovation and his best advice on how to change up meetings and events. Here's what he had to say.
How Do You Define Innovation?
Raasted: The only difference between a visionary and an idiot is history because they look the same to begin with. If you want innovation, you need idiots or you need to cultivate crazy, and that's a challenge. If you don't have people who are prepared to do it differently then you're not going to have innovation. What you're going to have is incremental improvement. But if you want real change, then you need to go to people who say, "Let's try something different." And maybe it's going to fall flat on its face. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea. But the reaction might also be, "Oh, hell, why haven't we done this before?"
I was at a talk a couple of years ago, a leadership summit with 3,000 people in the room and the speaker, Alexander Osterwalder, asked a question to the audience. "How many of you out there who are like CEOs or leaders think that you can spot a good innovation project from a bad one? Half of them raised their hands and he said, "If I was your boss, I would fire all of you because we need to stop thinking that the current leadership can figure out what's going to work and what's not. Instead, we need to look at how we set up test parameters and create a test environment so we can try out things safely without risking the house.'
Innovation Doesn't Have to Be Technological
The other big challenge is that when most people think of innovation they think of technological innovation, as in something digital or something physical. But the reality is that there are so many innovations that are not in the technological realm or the physical realm or the digital realm but in the human realm: innovations in processes, innovations in culture, and innovations in mindsets.
Innovation, especially with regards to meetings and events, should not be limited to tech. It should just as much be about process, culture, mindset and actions. If I had to give just one tip to people about innovation, that would be it. Don't limit yourself to innovation being a technical thing.
Unfortunately, the people who are actually making the decisions tend to think of innovation as a technical thing. Whereas the idea of doing things differently that are not technological but are human is surprisingly hard to get any buy-in for, even though it is usually cheaper, faster and simpler to experiment with.
Intentionally Limiting Information
One example from the College of Extraordinary Experiences is about the limited amount of information we provide attendees. We often hear, "Oh, but there must be a program. There must be an agenda that everybody knows." No, there doesn't have to be. We also hear, "Wow, I realized I don't need to know as much as I thought I needed to know." And if you had told me beforehand that I didn't need to know, then I wouldn't have believed it.
You don't have to tell people a lot of things. You can, but you don't have to. And for these people who come out on the other side saying, "Oh, it could be done differently." The only reason they believe it could be done differently is because they've seen it and experienced it done differently. No amount of somebody telling them would convince them because it seems like madman talk. An innovation is like that. It seems like crazy talk until it works.
How Do You Get Buy-in for Innovation?
Raasted: There are two ways to get buy-in.
Build Strong Allies
One way to get anything changed, even tiny stuff, is to have very strong allies who trust you a lot and allow you to make micro experiments. But that is tough. Like people you've worked with for years and years and now finally they say, "Okay, during this one session, what if we didn't have a panel, but we had somebody being interviewed? Tada! Wow, crazy." Or, even wilder, what if we had the participants talk to each other? Oh, wild, right? But that requires a surprising amount of trust from event organizers to even test out micro formats. Even doing a 45 minute segment out of 100 differently requires a surprising amount of trust. So one way of doing it is to find the people who actually make the decisions and build that trust and then go for slow progress.
Showcase Innovation
The other way — which I found to be much more effective — is to showcase events or do something where you get to do the thing. People will a lot more often be convinced by what they see and experience than by what they hear. There's so many things in the meetings industry that somebody else solved or did better 20, 30, 50 years ago, but still haven't traveled because nobody has seen it in action yet.
Whenever people evangelize — and I'm one of those myself — we tend to come in and seem like these wild maniacs who've come out of the desert saying, "You don't need name tags or there doesn't need to be a program." And instead of people going, "wow, that's interesting. Let's experiment with that," in one of our tiny things where we can afford to fail, they shun us like the plague. But the moment they've seen it in action, then they go, "Oh, maybe here's what I could take away from my own thing.
Why Should Meetings and Events Seek Innovation?
Raasted: I think it's so important because you go to a meeting and you talk to people and most of them know what's wrong. You ask them what are we here for? What's the most important thing? Oh, it's the networking. Okay. What do we spend zero time, zero money, and zero design effort on? Oh, the networking. Okay, we have booths that people spend insane amounts of money on, and people tend to laugh and think that, okay, that's wasted money or why do we do it that way? We have programs that work, but they could work a lot better.
At the same time, you have all these fringe events — the College of Extraordinary Experiences is one of them, but definitely not the only one — where people come out starry eyed and say, "Wow, that was different. Why don't we have more of that?" But that's usually where it stops.
Innovation Happens in the Fringes
One of the nice things about the computer game industry or the movie industry is that although it is risk averse and the big mainstream companies have the budgets and reach, there is also a fringe that is much more risk friendly but doesn't have the budgets or the brands. The big difference there is that people in Hollywood also watch weird artistic Afghan black and white movies shot on three iPhones in the dark. And people in the computer games industry played Minecraft when it started hitting.
In the events industry, there's a huge community that intermingles with each other, but it is only rarely that any of these people venture to the fringe. Some of them do, but it is very, very rare. And that means that the innovation that happens at the fringe is transferred extremely slowly compared to several other industries.
The Ephemeral Nature of Events
This is also hard because an event is ephemeral. It only exists as it exists. Yes, you can watch some of the talks afterwards on video if they were taped, but you can't go to the event afterwards. Either you're there or you're not there. Perhaps they do the cloak room in a different way, or they have small cards on the tables that say at this table we talk about marketing. How brilliant, how innovative, how interesting. If you're not there to see them, then you don't find out and you don't take it home. Where for a Hollywood movie, anybody can stream more or less anything anywhere on the planet.
I think events are more like the theater world. To be inspired by a theater performance, you have to see it, or else you won't notice how they did something different or how they used the orchestra or whatever it is they did. That means that innovation also travels slowly there. Theater, however, is global and has an insane history that's at least two and a half thousand years old. So there's been a lot of innovation going on so far anyway.
Long story short, the events community is doing itself a disservice by not traveling to the fringe more often. There are a ton of other people who are doing interesting things. Whether it's Phantom Peak in London or some sort of interesting thing happening in Beijing or a small event being done in Utah. The fact that it is very rare for the mainstream players, especially the senior ones, to go to anything that even smacks of fringe, and we're not talking about the Fringe Festival here.
How Should Planners Look to Innovate?
Raasted: Look for places where you can afford to make mistakes or isolate and experiment. Do something that may change things if it works, but if it doesn't, it's not a big deal. The opportunity space for that is always so much bigger than people realize, including myself.
In 2022, my partners Paul and Phil came to me and said to Claus, "We think we should make the college non-alcoholic as a default. Yes, people can still have wine in their rooms if they want, but we should make it non-alcoholic instead of alcoholic. There's been a pandemic. We can open up fresh. But we think this should change. We think we should not have alcohol as the default, but have non-alcohol as the default.'
Consider the Risk
I wasn't sure they were right. But I thought — and it's something I strongly believe in — it doesn't matter what I believe. What matters is, could we risk it? If it worked, it would radically change the event and be interesting for other people. If it didn't work, we could just go back next year. The price of failure was not that high and the potential upside of success was quite high.
So we did it, and it worked brilliantly. Now it's a standard, but it wasn't about saying will this work or not. It was about saying what is the potential downside if it doesn't work? Can we afford that? Can we absorb that loss or that annoyance? Yes, we definitely can. We've got a strong enough brand for that. And there's a budget upside. We no longer have to buy a lot of alcohol because that was included. That's not nothing. There was a design upside, a safety upside and cultural barriers were crossed. All these sorts of things were potential upsides if it worked. And it did.
So, to me the big question is finding places where you can experiment without it costing too much if it fails and where it actually could matter if it works.
Try Something New
There are always things that get in the way. But that idea of starting the event by saying we're trying something new this year is powerful. If it's your first year, that's really risky. But if you're IMEX, you can try something new. Don't say we have no booths and everybody and the whole of Hall 9 is in the dark and you make connections, right? That's going to be too much.
But you could do it differently. You could say, "Okay, instead of having an educational program, we're going to have a mega networking space and bring in 50 professional wing people to facilitate connection. It could mean the moment you move into that hall, there will be people here to help you meet, so you don't only have meetings scheduled on the event app, but you will have emergent guided meetings between people. So instead of having all those stages and spending money on flights and hotels for speakers, just hire 50 wing people. Then you have a new model, and if it doesn't work then you say, "Well, we tried it last year. We're not doing it again this year."
If it works, people will always want other stuff. But the question is, what will they want most? We all want everything, all the time, for free, all at once. So, it's always a trade-off. There are always going to be trade-offs.
What Inspires You to Be Innovative?
Raasted: One of my central principles is a bias for curiosity. I do that both as a natural thing but also as a deliberate thing. And one of my guidelines on curiosity is don't be ashamed of where inspiration comes from. Don't limit yourself to where you get inspired from. Do you see something in a 'My Little Pony' episode and you think, "Oh, that's cool. Let's do that." Or do you play Assassin's Creed 2 and think, "Ah, let's do something like that." Or do you walk past a thing that's being done in a kindergarten? So, I am constantly inspired by all sorts of stuff from the big things to the small things.
For example, I wrote a blog post once on the best designed door handles I'd ever seen in toilets at the Oslo airport and with a whole explanation of why that was the case. It was a door handle at a toilet in an airport and it made me write a whole blog post because I felt inspired by that.
Who Inspires You?
Raasted: Rory Sutherland, who's a behavioral economics guy from the advertising firm of Ogilvy, because I'm a huge believer in behavior design, and while behavior design and behavioral economics are not necessarily exactly the same, they're pretty close.
When I first met Paul Bulencea — who's one of the three partners in the College of Extraordinary Experiences — I found him hugely inspiring because I was used to being the crazy guy. People said that'll never work and suddenly now I was the guy saying that'll never work and that was a really really interesting perspective swap and taught me how to think a lot bigger.
Ruud Janssen from the Event Design Collective for making it very clear to me the power of frameworks and building movements around standards and structures. I remember a conversation with him years back where he said, "What does this CED thing mean, the certified event designer credential, and he said, "It doesn't mean anything, but it's going to mean something when there's 200 of them out there." The last time I saw him, they were doing cohort number 57 or something like that and now there's way more than 200 of them out there. And now it means quite a bit. But this thinking that to get to something that matters because it's number 100, you need to start at number one and you need to have the discipline and the patience to get to number 10 and number 20 and number 50 and then it starts kicking in.
What Organizations Inspire You?
Raasted: IMEX is pretty interesting because on one hand it is a place that has very little innovation. It's this huge behemoth that needs to function and not failing is more important than changing the game. It's one of the big players, but it was started by somebody who said, "Let's take what we know and massively disrupt." And I think that I find it interesting because it's so often easy to think of people either as innovators or non-inovators.
The reality is that the people who are the innovators of today are the naysayers of tomorrow. If today you're the rebel, then in 10 years you're the man. That means that the stuff you start out with by saying we're going to do it differently, it's going to be wild etc. Then sometime down the line, if you are successful enough, then you're the ones who are saying, "No chances. We'll do it exactly like we used to." And still a little bit of change, but not huge change.
What Do You Want Your Legacy to Be?
Raasted: I want to be remembered for making the world a slightly less fearful place.
We evolved biologically in a world where if you tried something new and it worked, you took a risk, it might mean that you got dinner for two days for yourself and your family. If it didn't work, you might be dead, right? So, biologically speaking, the upside of risk is quite low and the downside is very high.
In the lives we lead today, most of us, not all of us, but most of us, especially the people who are going to read this article, the upside of doing something differently, of taking a risk is potentially huge. Everybody we know is one viral social media piece away from having their life completely changed personally, business-wise, etc. And the downside is actually pretty low for most of us, right?
Taking Risks in the Business World
For example, I wear a Batman suit. Putting that on for the first time for a serious business convention, that was a risk. But how risky was it actually? Were the organizers going to stone me or were they going to drag me to the basement and say, "This is suits only country, bumpkin, and then kill me." No. The worst case would be that somebody laughed. Or maybe they didn't laugh. Maybe they just huffed and puffed a little and they probably didn't even tell me. Or what's the actual risk? It's so low. But, the potential upside is pretty damn big.
Biologically speaking, we are engineered for a world that no longer exists for most of us. And that means that we need to train ourselves in trying to take more risks and being less afraid because we simply have less to be afraid of. And our fears are more these intangible social fears than they are these, 'I will be killed and my family will be murdered.' Not for everyone. There are plenty of people on the planet who don't have our privilege. But for those who are reading this article, most of them will be in that position. And yet we still behave as if slight social discomfort is the same as actual death because that's how we are biologically wired. It's just not the world we have.
If I can help make the world just a little bit less afraid, a little bit more playful, a little bit more experimental, then that will automatically lead to some people having better lives, getting more s*** done, trying out new things, and saying, "Hey, maybe we could do it this way instead.'
What Is Your Advice to Aspiring Innovators?
Raasted: Learn how to sell. If you can't sell, it doesn't matter how good you are at producing magic, then you're going to need somebody who can talk to other people about you.
If you can sell, it almost doesn't matter how bad you are at producing magic because even if you don't have any of your own, there are plenty of other people out there whose magic you can help make happen.
You need somebody to do it. And if you're not the one doing it, then somebody else has to. I wish I'd learned that earlier.
The amount of struggling artists, struggling people who do insane stuff is quite large. The amount of struggling experienced salespeople is not that large.
Claus Raasted helps organizations both big and small become better at GETTING S**T DONE, and serves as Director of the College of Extraordinary Experiences. He travels the globe as a keynote speaker, and has been both a Coach and Senior Advisor at the consulting giant McKinsey. Raasted is the author of 46 books, the latest of which is fittingly titled 'Claus Raasted's Little Book of Getting Shit Done'. He also has a past in reality TV, but these days, who hasn't?