A Festival of learning

As you know, we’ve a passion for performance and a while ago, Keith came up with the beautifully simple idea of creating an event that would help share this passion in a whole new way. And so Performance Fest was born.

We love the chance we get to work across a very diverse range of human performance environments – from Paralympic Kayakers to Insurance Industry Leaders, we are able to focus on helping people do what they can, but don’t. And that similarity and diversity is what got Keith thinking.

Everyone’s a performer

Across all of these different areas where we’re lucky enough to work, everyone is a performer, challenged with constantly using and developing their expertise to achieve some amazing things. Although very different fields of play, the passion people show for wanting to become more expert is where the Performance Fest comes in.

We’ve seen loads of great examples where performers from different businesses get together and add huge value for each other through a shared desire to improve. Performance Fest is all about focusing that shared desire to become a more expert performer, who knows the benefit of learning from other performers.

All the world’s a stage…

We’ve heard and seen some great examples of where performers from different fields of play have joined forces to learn from each other, usually with a very specific gain in mind.

Rapid Response Critical Care

Quite a few years ago a team of Doctors who care for prematurely born babies connected with a Formula One team to learn about Pit Crews and how they work together to produce fast performance under pressure. The collaboration allowed the medical team to devise improved ways to deliver brilliant handovers in the key moments after the premature baby arrives in the world. Very different worlds, but wonderfully simple human performance lessons to make a life saving difference.

Be brilliant at keeping looking

Over the past 15 years, UK Sport has been superb in creating annual coaching conferences that bring in performance learning from hugely diverse perspectives to challenge and stimulate Olympic coaches. Chefs, a Red Arrows Pilot, a Cirque du Soleil Creative Director, Military Leaders, Politicians, Film Directors… the list goes on. This desire to learn from other contexts has been a key part of the mindset that drives the quest for Olympic success.

What have you got to share and learn?

Performance Fest is your chance to come and consume loads of learning about performance expertise. It’s also you chance to be an active part of a growing community of people who love being performers in their chosen field of expertise. It’s a unique opportunity to learn from performers in really diverse ‘performance’ contexts to see how they solve the problem of getting ever more expert at what they do.

Outside in

People often seek learning from outside their own arenas when there’s a specific problem to be solved, and that’s great. We think that there’s a constant problem to be solved of, ‘how can I fulfil my potential and find out how good I can be?’. That’s the very reason that you’ve got a great chance to come and learn with like minded performers from singers, pilots, artists, coders and more.

The same spirit and philosophy that helped to create The Performance Room is going to truly come alive in London, in September, and we’d love to see you there learning about all things performance and taking advantage of Keith’s brilliant idea, the Performance Fest 2016.