salt 2025
Not a System Update, A Human One
But what’s the point of a conference?
In this year of 2025, what is there to learn in a room that we can’t learn online? Is this productive? Is this efficient? Is this the best use of my time in a world where technology is increasingly demanding us to work like the computers that assist us in our daily lives?
These are trick questions. The answer is both yes and no.
This year, at the SALT conference, we explored the reasons that productivity is not necessarily the end goal we’ve come to believe, and why we can’t prompt people to do our bidding like machines. We came together to discuss the need to slow down, to reconnect, to be face-to-face when it comes to business, rather than outsourcing our professional relationships to a Zoom meeting or an email.
What could we learn, when we lean into the problems that arise from working with people?
Maybe we’d discover that human interaction is not the problem at all - unless we treat each other like prompts that should conform to expectations rather than challenge them.
The Salt 2025 conference celebrated the beautiful disruption of working shoulder-to-shoulder with people. Select attendees were given cards that required them to interrupt, disrupt, or even perform a random act of kindness during the conference. Meanwhile, keynotes and Q&A panelists paused to make way for musicians to share a song or two. Meanwhile, the breakout sessions explored the people-driven purpose behind brand identity, financial literacy, team-building, and so much more.
The result? A conference that ebbed and flowed at the rate of human connection. A professional networking event that facilitated offline friendships, new partnerships, new resources.
What’s the point of a conference? At Salt 2025, it was this: just be together. Be reminded that work is people; and if it’s not, then you might be doing it wrong.
