A new report from The Meetings Show has landed, and if you work anywhere near sustainability or ESG in events, it’s worth your attention.

Titled Human Led, Tech Enabled, it’s built on a futures workshop run in June 2026 by Graham Norris, an organisational psychologist and Conference Futurist. Norris put a room of organisers, venues, destinations and suppliers through a structured exercise: scan the forces reshaping the world to 2036, stress-test four contrasting futures, then design the one they actually want.

Get the report from The Meeting Show here.

The results are striking not for what they include, but for what they leave out. Given a blank canvas to imagine events a decade from now, nobody in the room reached for holograms, robot hosts or metaverse conferences. Across 20 workshop sheets, one idea kept resurfacing: human connection. Technology showed up constantly in the material, but almost always backstage – handling registration, logistics, data and admin. Centre stage was people.

The industry is asking for proof, not promises

For those of us who’ve spent years arguing that sustainability and social value need to be measured, not just claimed, the report’s sixth headline finding is the one to sit with. It describes a shift “from unquestioned growth to pressure for visible social, environmental and commercial value.” Participants expected events by 2036 to demonstrate all three kinds of value at once – commercial, social and environmental – not trade one off against the others.

That expectation runs through the report’s eight tensions too. One in particular gets to the heart of what platforms like ours exist to solve: the tension between commercial returns and social value. The workshop wanted events that build wellbeing, belonging and community, while also worrying openly about proving return on investment for exactly that kind of value. As the report puts it, current metrics barely capture things like connection and community, which makes them hard to defend at budget time.

This is precisely the gap Impact and Track are built to address. You can’t manage what you don’t measure, and an industry that wants to be judged on social and environmental value as seriously as commercial value needs tools that make that value visible – to clients, to boards, to the people signing off next year’s budget.

Sustainability and travel: a tension the industry can’t outsource

The report doesn’t shy away from the uncomfortable maths either. Events remain a travel-dependent industry, and the workshop’s environmental scan was blunt: extreme weather, water scarcity, venues at risk of closing, energy-hungry data centres. One group’s preferred future explicitly asked for “affordable travel for all” and sustainable events “at the same time” – an ambition, not yet a solved problem.

That’s the tension Track exists inside. Carbon reporting won’t make the trade-off between accessibility and travel disappear, but it turns an abstract worry into something an organisation can actually track, report and improve year on year – which is the precondition for making better decisions about it at all.

Why this matters for how we think about our own work

None of this is really new territory for us at event:decision – it’s the argument we’ve been making since day one. But it’s striking to see an independent, structured piece of futures research land on the same conclusions from a completely different starting point.

The people closest to running events, when given room to imagine the industry a decade out, didn’t ask for less accountability. They asked for more – just delivered without friction, and without technology getting in the way of the human experience events are ultimately for.

Read the full report, “Human Led, Tech Enabled,” from The Meetings Show and Graham Norris, Conference Futurist.