 I have just spent a really interesting afternoon being both MC and a keynote at a conversation all around community regeneration and this was inspired by the Restart project which is funded by Erasmus Plus. Now this was really interesting because rather than looking at this from a business point of view or from any one point of view it was a holistic discussion around how communities reinvent themselves and we drew on examples from a wide variety of aspects including individual regeneration all the way up to as far as you can imagine so I wanted to share a couple of insights with you. Number one, let me give you some geographical examples right around the world of communities that have reinvigorated themselves and with the following results. So number one is the Doc Lands in London between 1981 and 1998. It designed the design canary wharf and a lot of services around the enviable area there now but also the 2012 London Olympics also led it to creating the Queen Elizabeth Park as well after the Olympics was done. And now that led and will have led by 2030 to 10,000 new homes, 20,000 jobs and 5 billion pounds of economic impact. If we go to Belfast the Titanic quarter up to February of 2020 which naturally enough true to the challenges of hospitality has changed since but it doesn't take away from what it has achieved which is that it now or by then was bringing one million pounds a week of economic impact. It changed the tourism footprint of Northern Ireland and also it raised confidence in the region as well around what it could do and the ambition that it had in within that sector. Porto Madero in Buenos Aires was sold to a publicly limited corporation for the purposes of community development and it went on to have a huge environmental impact of 39 hectares of bodies of water, 28 hectares of green space, triggered two and a half billion dollars of private investment and I think that was something that I certainly learned from today is we often think of community development from the point of view of public investment but when public investment triggers a very significant amount of private investment it can lead to massive results and that project also has generated 45,000 service jobs and then the last one that we referred to that I had brought during my keynote during this is the Old Town in Portland, Oregon and that was a five-year action plan that basically regenerated the area socially, environmentally and economically and that led to 10% job growth, 28% wage growth and launched four neighborhood events as well as a range of community livability events including museums, gardens and employment access centres. So the question is though is that I'm telling you success stories and I want to look variety of places around the world in order to find them. The question is how, how do you actually trigger them and that was what the purpose of the Erasmus Plus Restart project is all about, is enabling community leaders in order to do that. So a couple of things that I shared with everyone today is when I personally needed to reinvent myself or alternatively when I needed to breathe a new life into something we were doing within the business or a project that we had worked on. Three techniques that I shared were, or include, the first one is being very, very clear on why you want to get somewhere and I shared an experience of when the where we were trying to get to on one particular occasion wasn't exactly where we thought we were going and I shared an example of that but just to having the time to elaborate on that now but I will just give you a quick anecdote that I think exemplifies this is there was a property owner one time that was receiving complaints from his tenants that the lifts were too slow. So what he did after that was that he was looking to all sorts of expensive changes and what about infrastructure developments and all sorts of things and then somebody said to put a mirror and beside, put a mirror on the wall beside where people wait for the lifts and see what happens. So we did and then his tenants thanked him for increasing the speed of the lifts. You see the thing is, is that what they were actually looking for was not to change the speed of the lifts but actually instead was to be entertained while waiting and by putting a mirror there of course people then could look at themselves and time pass so much faster. So first of all, it's really important when you are looking to reinvent yourself. Maybe it is career wise, maybe it's business wise, maybe it's any other wise is first of all understand why you're doing it because that will be both the momentum that will prepare propel you and will also determine whether you're successful or not. Second thing I also suggested this this technique we've certainly used many times but particularly when we needed to pivot one of the businesses a couple of years ago is testing the assumptions is actually gotten to a room and we documented every assumption that we had about the business and the business idea, the target market, everything we just documented every assumption. And you know what the most worthwhile assumptions were to document are the ones that were most obvious because if I if I hold something really dear to me, that's very obvious in my opinion, not going to articulate because I mean doesn't everyone in everybody know what they're often the ones that can lead you into you know where you don't scenario analyze you don't think about backup plans and so on. So anyway, documenting all of the assumptions that you have about something and then putting them on a graph which is changeability and also impact. So on a matrix right across matrix is like likelihood to change. So really likely to change versus not likely to change at all and then impact if it did change so really high impact if it changes and then on the bottom very little impact even if it did change. And by plotting things on that matrix, you can actually see well, okay, where are our blind spots forming because we're not questioning the assumptions are alternatively because we are not considering that these things might change and as a result that we're not taking any any action. Now, I don't need to mention certain things that have happened over the past five years that we can all imagine that have really challenged our assumptions about a very wide variety of things. If you need some inspiration for thinking through those, you could also add pestil in there. So pestil is what's happening politically, economically, socially, technologically, legally and environmentally if you need some stimulation for thinking through that. And the last technique that I suggested today as well that I think is super useful when you're re energizing yourself is look at the problems that you face and just question what if we were to use those problems to lever the solutions like what if the problem was actually the way in which we could make the solution better? What if our situation was to improve as a result of the problem? So to give you a very concrete example of that, I mean, around COVID last year when everything was changing back in March, anything in person that I had been doing speaking events, training events, our savvy teens, everything was now thrown into disarray, whereas instead we've pivoted on all of that now to focus in on not apologizing or trying to come up with a replacement for actually being in our for not being able to deliver something in person. But instead, what about if we were to use the fact that we can't be there in person to lever the technology, for example, along the way. So they are to move from community generation projects at a geographical standpoint to individual or business regeneration. So now I just want to share with you a couple of things that I learned from the various different speakers today. So we started off with Udras Noguelga, who said that we have had a free trial of remote working. And now we can see if we like it or not. But regeneration in local community environments enables families to return home, it counteracts immigration and it also restores work life balance. Then we had Claire first, who's the CEO of work West and what she said was particularly design thinking can be very good in community regeneration, including the Stanford model, which is where you empathize, define, ideate a solution, prototype the solution and then test with a user group, almost like using design thinking like it would start up, but for a community as well. Then we had Martina early from Roscommon leader, and she said that in order to regenerate communities, you need to be clear vision and ambition, you need to be a problem solver, you need to deliver for funders but bring everybody with you. You also need to present yourselves, yourselves being the community that is seeking to reenergize to the generation of tomorrow and make yourselves relevant along the way. And each of them spoke about so many various different areas in which we can learn from best practice on that. Also then Podrig from LIIT spoke about the benefits of effective regional alliance, including fast tracking knowledge, mechanism for pooling resources, sustainable opportunities, emphasis on community heritage and more collective influence. Then we had Marie who showed us the great resource that has been created. It's available at restart communities.eu. And this is a tool that you can personalize and it can tailor it so that it can meet the needs of communities that are seeking to reenergize. Now Orla Casey then from Momentum Consulting, she said that Ireland, the island of Ireland is full of best practice and this particular resource that they put together has 50 video interviews on YouTube and 29 learning topics and so on. But she picked up on a couple of trends. This is 2020 have made communities hyper local, increased importance of text, need for agile thinking and community spirit has soared in 2020. Then we also then went on to hear from Charlie Fisher who said community wealth needs to take more of a focus as well as foreign direct investment and corporate development. And he also said community rights needs to move from representative electives to more public participation. And then finally Community Finance Ireland went on then to say that in order to apply for their type of finance, they want projects that have got where people have got the authority to borrow capacity to repay, but also where the impact is going right into social projects at the end of the day. Fantastic event. Check out restartcommunities.eu