We have never been more connected. Teams, Zoom, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, email and now AI allow us to communicate with almost anyone, anywhere, instantly. We can build networks without shaking a hand, attend meetings without leaving home and increasingly have entire conversations with machines. It is extraordinarily efficient. But I increasingly find myself wondering what gets lost along the way.
Before online meetings became part of everyday life, we travelled to see people. We had coffee. We had lunch. We stayed a little longer than planned. And somewhere between the official conversation and the moment someone ordered another glass of wine, something often happened that had never been on the agenda.
A different conversation began. Someone shared something unexpected. An introduction was made. An idea emerged. You got to know one and another. And had a great time doing so.
At Transformation Nomads, we wanted to create more room for exactly that.
“The more digital our world becomes, the more valuable I believe it becomes to sit around a real table with people you would otherwise never meet.”
— Ronald Heister
The Transformation Table
The Transformation Table is a private gathering for clients and relations of Transformation Nomads at our home in Haarlem. For each Table, we also invite a small number of people whom we believe can add something unexpected to the conversation.
That can mean an entrepreneur sitting next to a scientist. An investor meeting an artist. A business leader talking to someone from the media. People who would not automatically find themselves in the same room.
There are no pitches, PowerPoints or rounds of speed networking. You cannot buy a seat simply because you want access to the room. There is a table, good food, good wine and enough time to actually get to know one another.
The conversations naturally move between business and life, because in reality those worlds are rarely as separate as our diaries suggest. We talk about companies, relationships, ideas, society, difficult decisions, opportunities, success and sometimes doubt.
The person behind the business card usually turns out to be considerably more interesting than the business card.
We deliberately invite journalists too
Journalists are regularly part of the Transformation Table. Not because we want to turn dinner into a press event, but because they bring another perspective to the room. They listen differently, ask different questions and sometimes discover people, businesses or stories they would not otherwise have encountered. That can create value beyond the conversation itself.
We saw that after one of our Transformation Tables in Haarlem. What began as a gathering of people from very different worlds eventually resulted in a full-page editorial feature in the Dutch national newspaper De Telegraaf.
The article didn't only introduce Transformation Nomads and our work. It also gave editorial visibility to clients and relations around our table, their work, their ideas and their stories. That is something I find particularly valuable.
We don't promise publicity, nor do we invite journalists simply to generate it. The Transformation Table has to remain a place where people can speak freely and meet one another without a commercial agenda. But when an interesting person meets an interested journalist, a conversation can continue beyond our table.
And sometimes that means a story reaches hundreds of thousands of people. We didn't plan the article. We created the circumstances in which the story could be discovered. That last sentence is, for me, the essence of the PR dimension.
A network should be more than a list of contacts
We can now have thousands of connections without really knowing many of them. LinkedIn is incredibly useful, but a connection is not automatically a relationship. Real relationships require something technology still struggles to reproduce: presence. The hesitation before someone answers. Humor that wasn't planned. Chemistry. Trust. The conversation that continues after everyone was supposed to leave.
This is also why we deliberately bring different worlds together. We spend much of our professional lives among people who speak our language, understand our industry and often look at problems in similar ways. Sit next to someone from an entirely different world and something interesting can happen.
You may see something you weren't seeing before.
That is very close to what Transformation Nomads is about.
Some things cannot be planned
The video on this page captures a glimpse of one of our Transformation Tables in Haarlem. What I like about it is that it doesn't show a networking concept. It shows people meeting people.
Sometimes it leads to a new idea, an introduction or a business opportunity. Sometimes a journalist discovers a story worth telling. And sometimes the value is simply meeting someone you would never otherwise have met.
As AI makes more of our communication faster, cheaper and more efficient, I believe these encounters will become more valuable, not less. Because some things only happen when human beings actually meet.
And that is why we keep setting the table.
I invite you to join us.