A crisp Perth morning. Distinct Kookaburra calls make up the soundtrack of the anticipation of something big. For months, excitement had been building over one date: December 1^st 2022. Will we, won’t we? After two false starts in prior years, all the signs were encouraging. Covid restrictions were lifting, and international travel was carefully returning to something resembling normality. This would be the year that the Moore Global APAC Conference was going to happen, in person, for the first time in three years.

After a year of careful planning (and a few last-minute nervous flight bookings), Perth finally welcomed 100+ delegates from over 15 countries across the World to Western Australia. The honour was bestowed on Moore Australia to host the calendar-highlight, in collaboration with the APAC Regional Council. The small conference team didn’t take the commission lightly. After being apart for so long, this edition had to be special!

Elevate

At the start of the year Moore Global set forth the theme and narrative for all Moore Global conferences in 2022: Elevate. The narrative woven through these conferences tells the story of that which lies beyond our peripheral vision and horizon. It also emphasises the network’s commitment to our people and rising stars to always elevate talent in our respective organisations. As the final conference in the series, the APAC conference’s predominant aim was to drive this message home for the last time in 2022.

Science

Moore Global’s mission to build a value-driven, vibrant network, which encourages growth and helps people thrive, comes with a prerequisite of being able to facilitate opportunities and environments where our colleagues can build trust and engage in creative processes.

In terms of connectivity, since COVID, people around the world have been more connected than ever. However, research conducted in recent years suggests that virtual interaction comes with a cognitive cost for creative idea generation, as it focuses the communicators on a screen, which prompts a narrower cognitive focus.¹? To summarise the research simplistically; as our physical field of vision narrows to focus on the screen, our ability to think laterally narrows accordingly, thus hampering creative thought processes. ?

Additionally, the fields of Strategic Communications and Social Psychology have long confirmed that, for individuals to build meaningful connections and feelings of trust, they ideally must meet in person. This feeling of trust is imperative in facilitating team creativity. ^{2 ?}When you consider the studies, it is not difficult to understand why bringing people together in a room is important.

Interestingly, when it comes to which idea to pursue after the creative process has completed, studies find no evidence that virtual meetings are less effective than in-person groups.

Reminding the reader of our aim as a network to increase revenue through increased cross-firm referrals -which can only happen in a trust-based environment-, the studies reenforce our original conference goals: to Elevate our field of vision beyond the known.

(Re)Connect

Over the past five years the APAC and neighbouring regions have seen much change. In fact as a network, we have been through a re-brand, expansion, firms and partners have joined, some staff and firms have left. Such is the natural flow of things. But unfortunately it has also left us with significant blind spots in our peripheral vision. It was clear that, although Elevate was our ultimate conference aim, our foremost job was to re-introduce APAC colleagues to each other.

In fact, during our pre-event survey, the overwhelming majority (95%) of respondents cited ‘connecting with colleagues’ as their predominant motivation for joining the conference. In answer to this, we engineered more than ten dedicated networking opportunities throughout the two days with ample opportunity for conversation and connection.

All speakers were briefed ahead of the conference about our objective and narrative. Sessions were made as interactive as possible, whilst offering insight into new service lines such as ESG as well as delivering sector updates by our esteemed Sector Leaders.

Building connection builds brand affinity

Over the past two years Moore Australia has been measuring staff’s brand affinity at specific intervals. We have seen strong correlations between in-person events and brand affinity, whereby staff are more likely to answer ‘a(chǎn)gree’ or ‘strongly agree’ to the statement ‘I feel #proudlymoore’, when they have recently attended an in-person event or webinar.

True to form, 96.7% of APAC conference delegates either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement ‘I feel #proudlymoore’ during the conference exit-survey. Whilst it is true that this hardly constitutes scientific research, when paired with established social psychology knowledge it is not surprising. Humans need connection.

As a network, we strongly rely on the connection between our personal values and brand values to retain staff. Allowing staff of all levels the time to attend conferences to help them build meaningful connections will help further cement that affinity.

Whereto from here

The Asia Pacific region is hugely diverse. Let’s not beat around the bush. We are all extremely different in our language, culture, legal frameworks, firm sizes, sectors, operating models, etc. However -in my opinion- herein lies our strength.

The diversity of the APAC region means we have to work harder than any other region on collaboration. During our school years most of us were taught that the more and harder we practice something, the better you become at something. By definition, this makes us better: we are better at cross-cultural communication, cross-border collaboration, working together to assist clients across multiple legal frameworks. Can we get better at it still? Absolutely! However, sharing our unique expertise freely with our partner-firms across the network will help us to continue to build the trust that is required to help our clients, colleagues and wider community thrive.

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References:

1. Brucks, M.S., Levav, J. Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation. Nature?605, 108–112 (2022). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04643-y

2. West, M. A. The social psychology of innovation in groups. in Innovation and Creativity at Work (eds West, M. A. & Farr, J. L.) 309–322 (John Wiley & Sons, 1990).