WHY YOU WANT PERENNIALS IN THE ROOM
They don’t fit into generations; they transcend them — and they’re the uncredited engine behind every event that has ever truly worked.
Spend enough time inside conferences, festivals, leadership summits, donor weekends, board retreats, or the countless micro-societies we call “events,” and you begin to understand that a room is never neutral. A room has a chemistry. Sometimes that chemistry is flat, polite, dutiful. Sometimes it’s turbulent in all the wrong ways. But every once in a while, the room seems to breathe. People lean in. Conversations develop texture. Strangers form alliances before the coffee cools. And the question for any organizer who cares about the craft is always the same: why this room and not the others?
A decade ago, when the culture was obsessed with dividing human beings into rigid generational units—Boomers against Millennials, Gen X suspicious of Gen Z, marketers playing amateur anthropologists—a counter-idea began circulating quietly among people who paid attention to how humans actually behave. The idea was simple: some people don’t age out of curiosity. Some people cross the artificial borders of age, culture, discipline, hierarchy. Some people remain mentally and emotionally porous long after the world has decided they should be settled. These people were given a name: Perennials.
And yes — let’s say it plainly so there’s no confusion. This isn’t about flowers. It’s not a gardening metaphor gone rogue. It’s the same principle that exists in nature: certain things return, season after season, with new growth, new resilience, new relevance. Someone gave these people a name — Perennials — because they don’t wilt with age or fade with trend cycles. They come back stronger. They bloom repeatedly. They show up with fresh curiosity every time. The word fits not because they’re delicate, but because they’re durable. Because they’re rooted. Because they rise.
And just so no one confuses the metaphor: this isn’t about flowers. It’s not a gardening detour or a cute branding flourish. It’s the same principle you see in nature — certain things return, season after season, with new strength, new resilience, new relevance. Someone gave these people a name, Perennials, because they don’t wilt with age or fade with trend cycles. They come back sharper. They bloom repeatedly. They rise.
Which raises the next question people whisper once the idea settles: Can you become a Perennial, or is it something you’re born with? There’s no scientific consensus that Perennial-ness is innate — I can’t verify any claim that it’s biological or “inbred.” What we do know is that the traits Perennials embody — curiosity, reinvention, cross-generational ease, intellectual stamina — show up across ages and backgrounds. It behaves less like DNA and more like a muscle. The more you put yourself in new rooms with new people and new ideas, the stronger it gets. Some people fall into it naturally; others train their way into it through disruption, appetite, or sheer cultural hunger. If there’s a truth here, it’s this: Perennials aren’t born — they’re chosen, one curious moment at a time.
And that choice is what makes their presence so combustible inside a room.
A Perennial is not defined by birth year or job title or the era in which they came of age. A Perennial is defined by a posture of mind. They arrive in a room expecting it to matter. They listen in a way that invites others to be more intelligent. They ask questions that create openings rather than closures. They drift between generations without noticing where one ends and another begins. They treat a gathering not as content distribution but as an opportunity for discovery. And everyone around them senses it.
If you are an event organizer, you have felt their presence even if you’ve never named it. You can have three thousand attendees and still feel nothing but air. But a room with even a handful of Perennials comes alive. The panels sharpen. The hallway becomes a destination. The roundtables behave like salons. The last session of the day, which should by all rights be a graveyard, instead turns into the moment everyone quotes over dinner.
The reason for this lift is not mystical. Science has been explaining it for years. Curiosity—real, neurological curiosity—activates the same brain regions responsible for learning, anticipation, and reward. Curious people create the conditions for collective intelligence simply by being present. They trigger synchrony, the alignment of emotional and cognitive tone that allows groups to think in unison. Social physicists describe this as idea flow, a measurable pattern in which innovation spreads through collisions between unlike minds. Perennials are collision-makers. They introduce Lagos to Helsinki. They put a seasoned executive in conversation with someone just out of school and make the pairing feel inevitable. They carry the kind of openness that disarms defensiveness, and once that barrier falls, everything else becomes possible.
Event planners often misread this phenomenon as “good energy,” as though it were a stroke of luck or a happy accident of personality. But the truth is more architectural. Rooms with Perennials behave like living systems. Rooms without them behave like agendas. Perennials are not just lively attendees; they are the connective tissue that makes meaning move.
History has always had these people, even if previous eras lacked the vocabulary. Leonardo da Vinci, for instance, lived in the High Renaissance, a time that categorized people by patronage and craft, not by age. And yet Leonardo behaved exactly like the Perennials in your audience today: roaming freely between disciplines, collapsing boundaries, designing environments—both artistic and mechanical—that awakened the minds around him. His astonishing event-like spectacles for the courts of Milan and Florence weren’t entertainments; they were provocations. They were invitations to wonder, engineered for the curious. He would have recognized the Perennials of today instantly, not because their technology resembles his notebooks, but because their mental velocity mirrors his own.
Modern events are full of these people, if you know how to draw them. They are the ones wandering the perimeter of IMEX in deep conversation long after the exhibit floor should have emptied. They are the ones turning a Cannes Lions terrace into a strategy lab disguised as a cocktail hour. They are the reason YPO forums feel intimate rather than performative. They are the ghosts in the machinery—the ones who animate the entire system.
Which leads to the question every serious event organizer must eventually confront: How do you attract them? Not by spectacle. Not by hype. And certainly not by flattening your programming into the safest version of itself. Perennials can sense over-choreography instantly; it deadens them. What draws them is the promise of novelty, of honest exchange, of intellectual tension, of a room where the stage is not the only place where something interesting might happen. They want permeability. They want collision. They want to be surprised. Events that offer that atmosphere become perennial magnets.
And the reverse is equally telling. Without Perennials, an event can run with flawless precision and still feel like a simulation of itself. Everything works, yet nothing happens. Ideas don’t travel. People stay in their clusters. The hallway is quiet. The room never quite takes its first breath.
When Perennials are present, the room behaves differently. Ideas stretch. Conversations deepen. Strangers stop acting like strangers. The gathering seems to develop its own internal intelligence, something that feels less like programming and more like possibility. It has nothing to do with age or scale or the superficial markers we’ve spent too long pretending matter. It has to do with the simple fact that certain minds elevate other minds by virtue of how they move through the world.
Those people are the Perennials. They are the uncredited infrastructure of the events industry—the attendees who give your gathering its pulse, its meaning, its afterlife. They are the ones who carry the spark from one room to another, who make the ideas portable, who transform a meeting into a moment and a moment into something that lingers long after the chairs are stacked.
Find them. Invite them. Design for them.
Your event will feel the difference before anyone says a word.
THE PERENNIAL MARKETING CHEAT SHEET
How to Attract the People Who Make Every Event Better
Perennials don’t respond to age-based messaging, generational targeting, or “community for Millennials/Gen X/Gen Z” nonsense. They respond to curiosity, relevance, intelligence, connection, and cultural voltage. This cheat sheet gives you the language, tone, and strategy to reach them.
1. Speak to Curiosity, Not Age
Perennials self-identify by mindset, not demographics.
Use: “Built for the endlessly curious.” “Where ideas go once they’re ready to grow.” “Come for the thinking. Stay for the conversation.”
Avoid:“Millennials welcome!” “For industry veterans!” (Instant turn-off.)
2. Signal Intellectual Voltage
Perennials hate dull, over-produced, over-choreographed events. [Inference] They want ideas with friction.
Use:“This event has edges.”“Not another ‘innovation’ panel. Real conversations only.”“Where smart people come to collide.”
3. Emphasize People, Not Programming
Perennials go where other Perennials go.
Use: “The room is the content.” “You’ll meet the people you’ve been reading.” “For the ones who actually move the industry.”
4. Make Reinvention a Theme
Perennials respect transformation — because they live it.
Use: “For the reinventors.” “Where your next chapter meets its spark.” “Come find the idea that rearranges something.”
5. Show Cross-Generational Intelligence
Perennials move comfortably between decades.
Treat that as a feature, not a footnote.
Use: “Five decades of talent. One room.” “Ageless thinking. Timeless collisions.”
6. Give Them a Sense of “Insider Access”
Not VIP nonsense — intellectual access.
Use: “The conversations people actually remember happen here.” “A salon masquerading as a conference.” “Where the hallway matters as much as the stage.”
7. Use Identity Language
Perennials love realizing: “This is me.”
Use: “For the culturally awake.” “For the endlessly curious.”“For the perennial in you.”
8. Lean Into Emotional Charge, Not Hype
Perennials don’t want FOMO; they want activation.
Use:“You’ll leave charged.” “You’ll leave changed.” “You’ll leave with new people.”
9. Avoid Anything Patronizing or Cliché
Perennials flee from gimmicks.
Never use: “Thought leaders!” “Power networking!” “Future-proof your career!” (Instant cringe.)
10. Always Market the Collision, Not the Schedule
Perennials attend not to consume content — but to mix, spark, collide.
Use: “Come for the spark.” “Stay for the collisions.” “Leave with something you didn’t arrive with.”
The 7-Word Summary (fits on a Post-It):
Market to curiosity, not chronology or hype.