If you know me you’re probably scratching your head at the title of this post.

“Adrian,” you’re thinking, “unconferences are what you do! How can you not like unconferences?”

Well, it’s the word “unconference” I object to, not what it represents. Unfortunately, “unconference” has come to mean any kind of conference that isn’t a traditional conference. Originally the word “unconference” was coined to describe a participant-driven meeting, but in recent years—rather like the encroachments on “counter-culture” and “green”—it has started to be used by people to imply that their conference is cool in some way, even if it still employs the programmed speaker-centric event designs that we’ve suffered for hundreds of years.

What is sad about the word “conference” is that its meaning has been corrupted to virtually the opposite of its original intent. As I describe in Conferences That Work, “conference” was first used around the middle of the 16th century as a verb that described the act of conferring with others in conversation. Over time, the word’s meaning shifted to denoting the meeting itself.

Regrettably few of today’s “conferences” provide substantive opportunities for conferring—consultation or discussion—instead they have become primarily conduits for the one-to-many transfer of information on the conference topic.

I believe that participant-driven event designs are a response to this drift of meeting process that has occurred over the years. In a sense, participant-driven events are the true conferences: events where conferring is supported and encouraged.

To be accurate, we should be calling traditional conferences “unconferences”, reserving the word “conference” for the participant-driven event designs that are slowly becoming more popular.

Sadly, that’s unlikely to happen, so I talk about “participant-driven events” and avoid using the term “unconference” whenever possible.

In the end, I know my thoughts on the meaning and use of a word carry little weight. With rare exceptions, our culture, not the pronouncements of an individual, determines the meaning and usage of words. But if you agree with me, feel free to follow my example and spurn unconferences—but just the word, not the concept!

I recently returned from a long-planned vacation in Europe with my wife Celia, spending two weeks in Italy and one in England. Here’s my first post on some event design musings triggered by living, albeit briefly, in different cultures from my own.

There’s more than one way to travel
In just twenty-four days we used a splendid variety of modes of transportation on our journey. Each of them had their unique characteristics:

Airplanes between the US and London
The only way to travel several thousand miles in a day. And a quick way to get from London to Italy, our first destination, so we could begin the vacation promptly.

A rental car in Italy
To explore the remote delightful hill towns of Tuscany at our own pace, we needed a car as public transportation in the region was limited. We stopped often, at will, to admire the scenery and take pictures.

Walking
Part of the charm of tiny Tuscan towns is that cars are more or less banned from their ancient hearts. Celia & I walked everywhere we could, up and down steep steps impassable by any other means, through narrow passageways, into tiny churches, and we spent considerable time sitting in cafes watching the world go by. We can’t walk as far as we used to, but when possible, personal locomotion is the most flexible and intimate form of traveling.

Ferries on Lake Como
On arriving at our hotel on the shore of Lake Como, having survived the impatience of numerous Italian drivers on the somewhat hair-raising, twisting narrow road around the lake. we happily parked the car. We didn’t use it again until we left, six days later. Every day we’d explore a different lake town, traveling there by lake ferry from the stop a hundred yards from our hotel. Every trip unfolded a new experience of the lake and its shores, enhanced by the ever-varying mists and light of day. It was wonderful to avoid the stress of driving and to be chauffeured smoothly from place to place.

Trains
Rather than flying back to London, we decided to take trains, stopping in Zurich overnight, as our goal was to travel by land over the Alps. Driving would have taken too long and been too tiring; the high speed European trains satisfied our desire. Once in London, we traveled extensively by overground trains for two day trips outside the capital, and the Tube inside London. The overground trains took us efficiently to our destinations while providing satisfying vistas of the English countryside, and the Tube got us where we needed to go faster than any other kind of transportation.

Buses
And when we were in less of a hurry in London, we took buses, allowing us to re-familiarize ourselves with the city we once lived in for many years.

What has all this got to do with event design?
There were alternatives to all the transportation modalities we used. We could have traveled to Europe via ocean liner, we could have braved the scorn of Italian race car drivers on the lake roads we avoided. Heck, we probably could have hired sedan chairs to transport us around the hill towns, just as the Medici did centuries ago.

Celia & I made our travel choices for many different reasons: cost, practicality, accessibility, speed, intimacy, and beauty, to name a few. It would have been simpler to surrender our ability to choose; we could have booked a tour, giving up our freedom to spontaneously travel and explore for the ease of making a single payment and leaving our itinerary and travel arrangements to others.

We make the same kinds of choices every time we organize an event. Do we do things the easy way, the way we’ve done them a hundred times before? Do we trade the opportunity to be creative for the ease and safety of uniformity?

There’s no one right answer. If you’re like me, for example, one attraction of designing, organizing, and running events is the creative opportunities available for even at-first-sight mundane commissions. Maybe you prefer to get really good at doing a certain kind of event with the same methodology, process, and location over and over again. Whatever your preference and business model, when designing and organizing events what’s important to remember is that you always have choices.

How you program conferences depends (or ought to) on your answer to the question: Do conference attendees know what they want?

No one ever asks this question, of course. But if they did, the conventional answer, given while under the influence of truth serum, would have to be: “No they don’t. That’s why we have a program committee that puts together a set of sessions that’s tailored to our audience.”

The problem with this answer is that, after twenty years of running participant-driven conferences where I’ve had the luxury of comparing what participants chose to do with what the organizers predicted they wanted, I know the following to be true:

The best conference program committees predict only half the program sessions that attendees really want.

Think about that for a moment. Half or more of the sessions in your last conference were not what your attendees really wanted.

What a waste.

So don’t listen to those who say that a committee of subject matter experts will do a good job putting together a conference program. It won’t.

Now it’s not that I think that the conventional answer to the question that I started with is wrong. Conference attendees don’t know what they want any better than the program committee if you ask them before the event. (Yes, I’ve checked that statement by comparing pre-conference attendee suggestions for sessions with what actually got chosen. Same dismal prediction success.)

The reality is that if you want to find out what conference attendees really want to discuss and learn about at a conference, you need to do the following:

Uncover topics for discussion at the event
Potter Steward, Supreme Court Associate Justice of the United States famously wrote that pornography was hard to define, but that “I know it when I see it”. In the same way, individual attendees (or program committee members) find it hard to define in advance the session topics they’d like, but when using a group-generated comprehensive list find it much easier to pick what they want to have happen.  As I’ve written about before, this process works poorly in advance. By having group members request topics while the whole group is listening, everyone hears good, unexpected ideas for topics that may subsequently initiate a novel and popular session. This is one of the important functions of the roundtable session used in Conferences That Work.

Provide a convergent/divergent process for choosing the topics that will be scheduled
To get a conference program that optimally reflects the true needs and desires of the people present you need to first publicly stimulate divergent thinking, so that a comprehensive set of plausible ideas is generated by the whole group, and then follow up with convergent process that narrows topics down to a realistic set of popular group choices. This is similar to classic brainstorming and decision-making process, and it surprises me how rarely such a well-established protocol has been used for the creation of conference programs. The peer session signup used in Conferences That Work provides this two-stage process.

Your choice
So, do conference attendees know what they want? Yes, they do—when the above criteria are satisfied. And they do so better than any well-intentioned committee attempting to create a good program before the event. So you have a choice. Keep building your conference program the same old way, knowing that half or more of your sessions are not what attendees would choose. Or, use process that guarantees success, because your attendees get the program they want by creating it themselves.

Your choice.

Photos by Flickr users nycarthur, wererabbit

The other thing about Steve was that he did not respect large organizations. He felt that they were bureaucratic and ineffective. He would basically call them “bozos.” That was his term for organizations that he didn’t respect.

The Mac team they were all in one building and they eventually got to one hundred people. Steve had a rule that there could never be more than one hundred people on the Mac team.

—John Sculley (former CEO of Apple) talking about Steve Jobs

There’s that number one hundred again, the same number I use as an upper limit to the size of the conferences described in Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love. Yes, it’s possible to extend the methodology described in the book to larger events. But they won’t be the same.

During my workshops on participant-driven and participant-rich events I’m often asked “But what do you do with people who won’t participate.”

When we explore what’s behind this question, we find an assumption that if we don’t get everyone at our event participating we’ve failed in some way. Coupled with this assumption is a fear of how some attendees may respond if exposed to an event environment that’s different from what they habitually experience.

Yes, there will nearly always be attendees who, for a variety of reasons, don’t want to participate. And their reasons may be totally legitimate—I remember one attendee who completely clammed up midway through a workshop and we eventually discovered that he had just heard that his best friend had been lost at sea. Then there are people who are scared of being judged by their peers on what might come out of their mouths; people who arrive at events exhausted, unable to expend any more energy than necessary; people who are sure that they learn best listening to lectures rather than conferring with their peers…

Some people, when gently encouraged and supported to try participating, discover that it’s actually not such a terrible experience…in fact they quite like it! Often they become the biggest cheerleaders for increasing the amount of participation in events.

On the other hand, some people will probably never be convinced. In my experience they are a small but always-present minority (around 1 – 2% at my conferences).

But we cannot censor the use of participation-driven and participation-rich event designs because a few attendees are uncomfortable or resistant to them. To do so is to penalize the majority of attendees who benefit greatly from the opportunities they receive to create the event they want and to learn about what they want to learn from their peers during the event.

So the next time someone tells you that “some people won’t like” the participatory event design you’re championing, point out that the tail may be wagging the proverbial dog.

Because the danger of being fixated on creating an event that works for everyone, is that you are likely to end up with an event that works for no one.

Photo attribution: Flickr user meredithfarmer