Standing in an Uninspiring Conference Room, I Realised I Might Be Wrong About Everything
The Bath Business Conference sounds exactly like the sort of thing you'd make an excuse to avoid, and I nearly did, except my friend Kathryn McKee told me it was unmissable. Kathryn is a fractional CFO who moved to Bath five years ago and has done something in the past couple of years I've been trying to figure out for the past couple of months - how to build genuine professional relationships rooted in community rather than transaction, how to develop a network of people who actually know and respect her rather than just collect her business card - and when she said the conference was one of the best events she'd attended last year, I had no choice but to follow her lead.
So yesterday I spent eight and a half hours standing in a corporate hotel function room drinking terrible coffee whilst accountants and solicitors exchanged business cards and made small talk about parking in Bath, listening to panels about successful high streets and AI labs and Johnny Palmer talking about running Warleigh Weir as an exemplar of how heritage cities can preserve history whilst maintaining thriving local economies.
When Allison Herbert, CEO of Bath BID, took to the stage to talk about Bath winning the Britain in Bloom award, her face lit up talking about community involvement from businesses and volunteers. It wasn't corporate pride, it was genuine delight that people had come together to do something that mattered. You could hear it in her voice - this wasn't just another award to add to the website, it was proof that what they were building actually worked.
Not every session landed like that, of course. I walked out of a couple when the talks turned stale, either because of my own questionable attention span or just the inevitable boring bits that accompany any business conference. Eight and a half hours is a long time to maintain focus, and not every panel about leadership strategy and HR compliance breaks new ground. But even the fact that I stayed for most of it, that I kept coming back to the main room after ducking out for air, suggests something was holding my attention beyond professional obligation.
Somewhere around mid-afternoon I had this sudden realisation that I might have been getting something fundamentally wrong.
For months I've been carrying around this idea that community and genuine human connection are dying in this country, that we're all atomised and transactional, obsessed with technological velocity at the expense of actual depth. When I thought about the South West, Bristol was obviously where things were happening - it's easy to see why people are drawn to the larger sibling with all its dynamism and investment - whilst Bath felt like a beautiful museum city where retired people drink tea and complain about the traffic.
I think I've been wrong about all of it.
Bath is doing something quietly remarkable. The SETsquared Partnership universities raised £273 million in investment last year. The Council and University of Bath are developing an entire riverside innovation quarter right in the heart of the city. Bath Rugby is investing £50 million to stay at the Recreation Ground where they've been since 1894 rather than moving to some soulless out-of-town location.
But listing developments and investment figures misses what actually matters. What struck me wasn't the announcements themselves but watching how people responded to them. Kathryn turned to me during one of the sessions and said "I love all the badass women in here that run this city". These were people who genuinely care about their city, willing to spend a full day together in person, standing in the same physical space making connections fundamentally about community rather than transaction.
What Bath represents is that dynamism doesn't have to announce itself loudly to be real, doesn't have to choose between heritage and modernity. The universities are deeply embedded through initiatives like the Innovation Centre and SETsquared incubator. The council is actively partnering on developments like Bath Quays North that bring research and commercial activity into riverside areas that used to be derelict industrial sites. Bath is integrating startups and innovation into something deeper, choosing depth over speed, building something that lasts rather than something that scales quickly and collapses faster.
What I'm circling around here is this: the story we tell ourselves about progress and dynamism might be missing something crucial about what actually makes communities work. The dominant narrative is that the future belongs to places that move fast and break things, that embrace disruption and scale rapidly, that communities are basically just networks optimised for information flow rather than messy human relationships that take time to develop.
Standing in that conference room surrounded by people who care deeply about Bath, I felt genuinely hopeful because it suggested there's another path available, another way of thinking about what dynamism looks like that doesn't require choosing between heritage and innovation, between being human and being efficient.
At lunch, sitting back at a communal table, I watched Kathryn dive with warmth and curiosity into the inner workings of the business of the gentleman opposite her. Not networking in the extractive sense, not collecting contacts or positioning for advantage, but genuine interest in what someone else was building. Her power comes precisely from not treating tables as hierarchies to climb but as communities to contribute to.
I'm not wrong about the technological disruption or the AI-driven workforce displacement or any of the structural challenges I spend so much time thinking about - those are all real and accelerating. We've probably got four to five years before AI fundamentally reshapes employment in ways most institutions aren't remotely prepared for, and the community bonds we're building now will matter enormously when those disruptions hit. But I might have been wrong about the underlying trajectory, wrong to assume that community and humanity are inevitably losing ground to algorithms and efficiency, wrong to think that the future necessarily belongs to whoever moves fastest rather than whoever builds deepest.
Yesterday, spending eight and a half hours in that conference room surrounded by accountants and solicitors who showed up to be part of their city's story, I realised that reports of humanity's death might be greatly exaggerated, that sometimes the most radical thing you can do is show up in person, drink bad coffee, and believe that face-to-face connection still matters, that community is worth investing in, that there's still time - but not unlimited time - to build things that last.
It gives me hope that dynamic, fascinating people doing interesting things can be found on my doorstep in Bath, not just in further-flung places like Bristol and London. That the network I've been trying to build, the non-transactional relationships I've been working to develop, the community integration that felt frustratingly elusive - it's all here, happening in uninspiring conference rooms over terrible coffee, if I'm willing to show up and pay attention and recognise that dynamism doesn't always announce itself loudly.
Which, given everything else happening in the world right now, feels like exactly the kind of realisation we need.
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Marc Richard is a business turnaround specialist working with SMEs facing crisis. He writes about business resilience, soft skills development, and AI's impact on work at marcdrichard.com and through his advocacy initiative Harshlight. He lives in Bath with his wife and two young boys.