Events Are Back. Now We Need to Get Honest About Them.

25 May 2026

Events Are Back. Now We Need to Get Honest About Them.

Three questions the events conversation keeps avoiding – and one panel that won’t

By Mike Klein

Live events are back. Full rooms. Packed agendas. Waiting lists. After the pandemic cleared, the demand for in-person events returned fast – and it hasn’t let up.

That’s the good news. Here’s the harder question: what came back that’s actually better?

Walk into most corporate events today and you’ll find the same structure that existed fifteen years ago. Keynote. Panel. Networking break. Repeat. The content has changed. The format hasn’t. The technology around us has transformed how people communicate, collaborate, and consume information. The conference, in most cases, hasn’t noticeably changed.

There are three things the events conversation keeps avoiding. The panel I’m leading at IABC World Conference in June is going to address all three.

1. Sustainability is not a logistics question.

Most organizations that have started thinking about sustainable events stop at the cups. Switch to glass. Eliminate plastic. Done.

That’s the wrong level of analysis. Sustainable events design starts with the venue selection, runs through the catering strategy (what’s served, how much, what happens to the surplus), the travel calculus, the swag decision, and the post-event collateral. And then there’s the piece the events world hasn’t fully reckoned with: the communications dimension.

How you frame a sustainable event is a brand decision. It signals values. It creates an opportunity to connect internal sustainability commitments to lived experience. Done well, it’s not a constraint on the event – it’s part of the story the event tells. Done poorly – or not thought about at all – it’s a gap between what an organization says it stands for and what it actually does when it puts a thousand people in a room.

Panelist Arlene Amitirigala, in-house communication leader in Toronto, is building a sustainable events guide for her organization right now. Panelist Monique Zytnik, a communications consultant in Berlin, completed a formal certification in sustainable events design and built a framework from scratch. These are not aspirational positions. They are practitioners doing the work. The IABC panel will get into specifics.

2. The format hasn’t been rethought.

There’s a term for what most organizations do when they plan an event: cookie-cutting. They know what a management conference looks like. They know what hotel to book, what kind of speakers to invite, when to schedule the networking dinner. They change the content. They leave everything else the same.

The problem is that the environment around them has changed completely. What can now be done digitally has expanded dramatically – which means what needs to happen in person has to be thought about differently. If a video call can cover information transfer, what does a live room need to do that a video call can’t? The answer should be driving event design. It mostly isn’t.

Unconference formats – events built around participant-led conversations rather than pre-set agendas and expert-delivered content – have existed for years. They remain rare exceptions. Not because they don’t work. Because organizations haven’t stopped to ask whether what they’re doing instead is actually working better.

There’s also the question of what happens inside the room. Panelist Renee Summers, who runs events for a wide range of organizations from her Canada-based company Summers Direct, has observed something straightforward: events where presenters bring genuine humor – not hired comedians, but authentic levity built into the substance – consistently generate more engagement and stronger recall. The point isn’t to turn every event into a comedy show. The point is that the emotional register of an event is a design decision. And it doesn’t get made intentionally often enough.

3. You’re probably designing for the wrong people.

Here’s a question most event briefs never ask: within the audience you’re convening, who are the ten or twenty people whose behavior actually needs to change? Because there’s almost always a gap between the room you’re filling and the outcome you actually need.

A management conference for two hundred leaders sounds clear enough. But if you’re honest about it, there are perhaps twenty in that room who are going to make a materially different decision next month based on what they experience today. The rest will have a good time, rate the event positively, and continue more or less as before. That’s not a failure – it’s how human systems work. The question is whether you designed anything specifically for those twenty. Whether the content, the speakers, the format, the conversations were calibrated to move the people who can actually change things.

Most event designs don’t make this distinction. They optimize for average satisfaction across the whole room. That’s different from optimizing for impact.

Diversity belongs in this conversation too. Who is on stage shapes what the room believes is possible. Representation in speaker selection isn’t just an equity issue – it’s a quality issue. Homogeneous speaker rosters tend to produce homogeneous thinking. And they tend to alienate the parts of the audience they don’t reflect.

What this has to do with the future

None of these are new problems. What’s new is the pressure. Organizations are under more scrutiny on sustainability commitments. The workforce is more segmented – employees have very different relationships with their employers depending on their skills, their roles, and their sense of whether they have options. And AI is changing the calculus on what needs to be live: if a virtual experience can now match some of what previously required a flight and a hotel room, the argument for in-person gets more specific and more demanding.

The events industry is going to have to answer harder questions. What does a live event do that nothing else can? Who is it actually for? What does it cost – financially, environmentally, in terms of people’s time – and is that cost earning the result?

Those are the questions the panel will dig into at IABC World Conference. If you’re attending, the session is worth your afternoon. If you’re not, expect coverage here at Strategic.

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The Future of Events is a panel at IABC World Conference, June 2026, moderated by Mike Klein. Panelists are Monique Zytnik, Renee Summers, and Arlene Amitirigala. The session runs 45 minutes.

Mike Klein is Editor-in-Chief of Strategic Magazine and an IABC Fellow.

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The communication professiona’s role is evolving, and IABC World Conference is where we’ll explore what’s next.

Join a global network of communication professionals 14-16 June in Toronto for practical insights, peer learning, and new ideas you can take back to your organization. https://wc.iabc.com/.