Some tourists make a point of seeing the sights. Others prefer to immerse themselves in the ambiance of a new country/culture. And some want nothing more than to switch off and relax in a place far from the trials and tribulations of work.

I’m an immerser myself. During our three-week vacation in Europe last year I especially remember:

• The manic delight and amusement of the village elder who guided our car around the trucks that blocked the exit from the tiny hill-town of Monticchiello.
• All the tiny Tuscan cafés we lazed in so we could hang out and watch Italians go by.
• The Lake Como fish-seller who took twenty minutes to successfully seduce me into buying the last of his fried calamari.
• Noticing some of the tens of thousands of little things—timings of traffic lights, scarves, houseplants, drinks, and climate—that shape and define a country’s culture.
• The young hotel receptionist, bless her, who sympathetically soothed us when we arrived exhausted after dragging our suitcases from the Zurich train station.
• A perfect day in the heart of the thousand-year old New Forest with our good friends Bruce and Elizabeth, at whose wedding my wife and I met.

Event attendees are tourists too.

Some event tourists are there for the content. They gravitate to the event’s museums and art galleries, concrete accomplishments of the far and recent past. They want to know the established order.

Other event tourists are there for the connections. They are stimulated by the ambiance, excited by the opportunities of meeting new people, open to learn important things, little or big, from their peers.

And some event tourists are there for a break from a job that may have become too much for them, that has exhausted them to the point where they need an official excuse to disappear from the office.

What kind of event tourist are you?

And what kind of event tourists do you cater to at your events?

Image attribution: Flickr user decadence

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!

Conference organizers have an unfortunate tendency to stuff their programs full of sessions. It’s an understandable choice; if participants have committed all this time and money to be present, shouldn’t we minimize white space and give them as many sessions as we can cram in?

Unfortunately, filling every minute of your conference schedule does not lead to an optimum experience for attendees. We need white space; free time for attendees to do what they want and need to do. Here are some science-based, light-hearted, yet serious reasons why.

Biology
Yes, all of us need to use the bathroom every once in a while. The good news is that just about all event organizers remember this.

Physics
But what many forget is that Star Trek technology is not currently available; we cannot instantaneously teleport from one meeting room to another. At a minimum, breaks between sessions need to be long enough for attendees to walk leisurely between the two session locations that are furthest apart. But don’t program the minimum; people also need time to check their messages (otherwise they’ll just do it in the sessions, right?), get a cup of coffee, fall into a serendipitous conversation, etc.

Physiology
On average, conference session attendees sit 99.13% of the time.

OK, I made that up. But I’m not far off. And here’s a cheerful graphic about the perils of sitting created by Jan Jacobs:

Give your attendees more time to stand up and move about between sessions (and during them, see below) and, who knows, they may live longer.

Social science
According to social scientist Dr James House, “The magnitude of risk associated with social isolation is comparable with that of cigarette smoking and other major biomedical and psychosocial risk factors.” Why expose your attendees to such an unhealthy environment? We need to create conference environments that encourage and support connections with others, rather than leaving attendees to their own devices, and it turns out that conference mixers don’t provide as good opportunities for attendees to meet new people as you might think. We need additional kinds of white space at our events.

Neuroscience
Neuroscience supplies the most important rationale for providing white space at your events. As molecular biologist John Medina describes in his book Brain Rules: Learning occurs best when new information is incorporated gradually into the memory store rather than when it is jammed in all at once. Brains need breaks.

We need white space not only between sessions, but also during them to maximize learning. Medina suggests that presentations be split into ten minute chunks to avoid the falloff in attention that otherwise occurs. (Back in the ’70s, Tony Buzan, the inventor of mind maps, recommended studying in cycles of twenty minutes followed by a short break, a technique that has served me well for forty years.)

In addition, Medina tells us that multisensory environments provide significantly more effective learning than unisensory environments; recall is more accurate, has better resolution, and lasts longer. So make sure your sessions include multisensory input (participatory exercises, participant movement, smells, touch, etc.) and your conference locale provides a pleasant multisensory environment.

So, what to do?
How do we find a balance between providing white space during and between conference sessions and our desire to provide as much potential content and opportunities for our attendees?

During sessions it’s important to provide white space between every ten to twenty minute chunks of learning, so that the learning that has occurred can be processed and retained. This is something that we should all be doing to optimize the learning experience at our events.

Between sessions it’s important to include significant unstructured time. A ten-minute break between two one-hour sessions is the absolute minimum I’ll schedule, followed by long refreshment or meal breaks. I am not a fan of providing intrusive entertainment during meals—eating together is one of the most intimate bonding activities humans have—for goodness sake, let your attendees talk to each other during this time!

I’ve saved my best advice for last. Instead of deciding how much white space should exist at your conference, let the attendees decide! At the start of the event, explicitly give people permission to take whatever time they need to rest, recuperate, think, etc. It may seem silly, but I find that if you publicly define the event environment as one where it’s expected and normal for people to take whatever time they need for themselves it becomes easier for attendees to give themselves permission to do so.

[Thanks to Joan Eisenstodt for providing the initial impetus for writing this post!]

White space—it’s not just for advertising any more! What’s been your experience of white space at events? What suggestions do you have for improving its use?

Image attribution: Flickr user zavie.

Thank you everyone who participated in last week’s two #eventprofs chats about …the future of #eventprofs chats. Here are links to the survey results and the Tuesday and Thursday transcripts. I’ve had a chance to think about the discussion, and, as the de facto #eventprofs community manager (other drivers welcome), here’s what I plan to do in the future:

Organize one chat per week
Although we have had two weekly time slots for #eventprofs chats for some time (Tue 9-10pm and Thu 12-1pm EST), in practice we have been averaging just over one chat per week (58 in 2011). There was clear agreement that we should change how often we meet to once a week. I’m still open to anyone suggesting an additional short-notice chat on a hot topic, but I won’t be scheduling more than one chat a week.

Rotate the day and time we hold the chat
It was clear from the discussions that about half those who responded preferred daytime chats and half preferred evening chats. Rather than disenfranchise half our audience permanently, we’re going to rotate our chat times weekly between our existing Tue 9-10pm and Thu 12-1pm EST times. I’m not going to to be a robot about this; we may chat two Tuesdays or Thursdays in a row. But over the year, we’ll hold about the same number of chats on each day. Follow @epchat to be informed about upcoming chats.

Chat hashtag
We will keep using the #eventprofs hashtag for the chat. Yes, it contains a lot more, sometimes irritating, announcements (aka spam) than the good old days, but that’s the price of fame. The same would eventually happen for any new hashtag we adopted. Event professionals new to Twitter often discover our chats via the #eventprofs hashtag. Besides, do you really want to have to remember to check one more hashtag?

Chat topics
We have had a neat tool for suggesting and voting on #eventprofs chat topics for some time, but it has not been used much, though I publicize it regularly on Twitter. I did not receive any ideas on ways to increase suggestions for chat topics, though several new topics were suggested (thank you Michelle & Marvin!) which I’ve added to our tool. People liked the idea of having more guest speakers on the chat and I will try to solicit more of them. And I would really appreciate suggestions/introductions from the #eventprofs community (that means YOU); contact me, it only takes a moment!

OK, so how can I help?

1. Follow @epchat to be informed about upcoming chats.
2. Take just a couple of minutes to suggest and vote on #eventprofs chat topics. If there’s a topic you want to talk about, suggest it! If there’s a guest you want, suggest him or her, together with the topic! If everyone added at least one topic just once a year and did comparison voting on five pairs of suggestions, we’d have a great pool of suggestions.
3. If you are interested in moderating or being a guest on an #eventprofs chat, just let me know! Include your name, suggested topic, and the day you’d like to be on.
4. I would love to move our #eventprofs site from the creaky (but free) pbworks wiki to something more streamlined (a free WordPress site would probably work). But I don’t have the time to do this myself right now. If you would be prepared to help with this project, I promise to have your likeness, links, and a generous profusion of thanks prominently displayed on the resulting gloriously updated version. Contact me!

In the end, as always, the health of the #eventprofs community is up to you. My continuing goal is to support making the #eventprofs chats maximally useful to the greatest number of event professionals, within the constraints of volunteer time and energy. Comments and helpful suggestions are, as always, welcome.

I received 23 responses in the following 8 hours—thank you to everyone who took the time to respond! (And a big thank you to several respondents who offered to moderate a chat for the first time.)

The survey responses

Responses to Q2 (changes => more likely)

1x a week would make it easier for me. it was more about the consistency then the times. I used to have them in my schedule then took them out – inconsistent. it has been much better now.

I think it would be good to have some testimonials and do a bit of promotion around that. You know “great chat learned loads and all very useful”

I would rather see it as a once monthly event to look forward to where the whole community was online and more engaged

none

once a week during the day.

I would prefer a change to the hashtag so that there is less interference during the chat from other #eventprofs users. Reminders via email are helpful (thanks for today’s reminder).

timing is not as important as topic although day time chats are better for me.

Looking forward to that discussion this evening. (Sorry, still pondering.)

mid-weekly chats 8 or 9pm

I am on EST time. The chat on Tuesdays at night never works for me. I try not to work after I leave the office I think lunch time is great on Thursdays. Two per week is a lot. I also think that having people from the community is a great way to promote the chats. Wish we could make the community a little more organized in a way. The wiki is ok but having a whole site dedicated to #eventprofs would be cool – chat schedule, topics, past topics, transcripts, list of members, list of moderators and frequency, twitter stats, maybe even syndicate the blog content or have a location that lists all resources everyone is sharing, meetups in your city, links to other sites, etc. Any way you can help the moderators and members promote themselves would get more people to engage and contribute I think. The #eventprofs hashtag is also used very widely know… maybe we should have a sepearte tag for the chats themselves. It would be cool to have an #eventprofs member badge! [Adrian: there is an eventprofs badge!]

I would like to attend on Mondays rather than Thursdays. With my kids 9PM on Tuesday is never doable and Thursday is always a busy day. It would be nice to start the week off with Eventprofs!

Would prefer chats on Friday & Monday instead of mid-week. More convenient times for Europe GMT+1 = end of the afternoon or early evening after 8 pm Less chats; one topic only. Other platform then twitter not to bother no event tweeps to much More attendees also like to see more end-users/customers to get their insight

I believe 1 chat per week is appropriate…2 is too many. Plus there is a difference between a corporate event and a special event; a public event and a private event. Someone who plans education for associations does not have the same needs/problems/challenges as someone who plans an awards dinner. Yes, there is some overlap, but… So I believe extremely focused chats are the best solution with the specific audience listed in the promotion of the chat. IMO that is the best way to have successful, solution driven chats.

Once a week during the work day with existing format and a way to filter out sales promotions.

Evenings are tougher for me, maybe a bit earlier in the day would make it easier.

I think once a week would be sufficient. You can rotate between Thursday and Tuesday to hit people with different time zones,

It’s always hard for me, on the West Coast to attend the Thursday chats as they are during work hours. If we could have them at 5 pm Pacific or 8 pm EST, then it would be easier to attend. 6 pm is also a little tough as it is time I normally would be driving home.

I’m usually too busy during the day for the chats, and I’m usually off the computer before the evening chats. I might be able to join more with an early evening time. Timing doesn’t affect how I recommend them, though, as this is just my schedule.

Use of different technology occasionally along with twitter, (Google Hangouts, Skype, Webinar format, video, etc)

earlier times for late chat (due to time difference). format is good. maybe more chats with guests (ask a colleague), or chats about specific events and their challenges. change in hashtag for chats?

Summary of survey results
[Warning! Small sample! Apply caution before drawing conclusions!]

Frequency
Six people preferred reducing the frequency to one chat a week. Five people seemed to imply through their comments that the frequency be kept as is. The remainder did not mention changing the frequency, except for one person who suggested once a month.

Time of day
Five people preferred holding the chats during the day/working hours, while three preferred evenings. Not surprisingly, the  three European respondents did not want 9pm EST chats.

Separate hashtag
Three people suggested having a separate hashtag for the chat.

Other suggestions
Promotion: do more, use testimonials, help promote moderators, better website.
Platform: use other platforms besides Twitter.
Content: more guests, post questions before chat, focused topics.

Conclusions
Keeping the small sample size in mind, I have to conclude that there wasn’t an obvious majority in favor of any specific change. That’s not to say we should keep things the way they are. If we tried out a once per week chat, I’d be in favor of rotating the day/time so that people who can’t make a specific date/time combination wouldn’t be completely locked out. I’d also love to improve the functionality/ease of use of the website as some suggested, though I’d need some help to make this a reality (offers  welcome!) Finally, I’m still really undecided about changing the hashtag for the chat. Using a new hashtag might cut down promotional tweets (though I suspect they’d invade any new hashtag eventually) but would cut off exposure to the 2+ years development of the #eventprofs brand, such as it is.

Did you miss the survey, or this evening’s chat? Feel free to add your comments below!

This morning, I logged on to the NY Times, credit card in hand, to renew my digital subscription which I knew would expire around the end of the year. I thought it would take a couple of minutes at most.

First I thought I’d find out the day my subscription expired. What? Apparently I have to call the NY Times! The expiration date is apparently a closely guarded secret—it isn’t shown on the account management page!

OK, well I’ll just renew my subscription anyway. I click Subscribe, and choose the plan I want.

Was the NY Times happy to take my money?

No!

The screenshot tells the story. My only options were to call or email them!

So I called.

Get this: the NY Times is unable to renew a digital subscription until it has expired! Apparently, I have to first call the NY Times to find out when my subscription expires and then renew exactly on the day my subscription expires if I want to maintain unbroken access!

A question to NY Times Management: are you trying to make it as inconvenient as possible for your existing customers to give you money?

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.

The peer conferences I run are extremely effective at catalyzing change, both in the people who participate in them and the organizations that run them. Why is this?

Many people think that we can make change happen by presenting logical reasons why the change should be made.

Many people are wrong.

Here are John Kotter’s & Dan Cohen’s findings about implementing change, as described by Chip and Dan Heath in their book Switch.

In The Heart of Change, John Kotter & Dan Cohen report on a study they conducted with the help of a team at Deloitte Consulting. The project team interviewed over 400 people across more than 130 companies in the United States, Europe, Australia, and South Africa, in the hopes of understanding why change happens in large organizations…

What did they find?

…the core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people, and behavior change happens in highly successful situations mostly by speaking to people’s feelings.

…Kotter and Cohen observed that, in almost all successful change efforts, the sequence of change is not ANALYZE-THINK-CHANGE but SEE-FEEL-CHANGE.

This is why peer conferences are so effective at catalyzing change. The peer conference change model embraces the important role of feelings in facilitating change. Explicit ground rules that make it safe to express feelings (The Four Freedoms and group agreement on confidentiality) are key. Also important is the closing personal introspective, which provides a framework for participants to determine the changes they wish to make and uses group sharing, often emotional, to reinforce participants’ conclusions.

In fact, peer conference design implements a change model that is even broader than Kotter & Cohen’s SEE-FEEL-CHANGE.

Rather than concentrating on seeing, just one of our five human senses, peer conference design facilitates and supports the sequence EXPERIENCE-FEEL-CHANGE, where EXPERIENCE includes multiple sensing modalities. Small group discussions, story telling, outdoor talk-while-walking sessions, mini-workshops, and simulations all stimulate multiple senses, providing fertile input for the emotional responses that are vital components for creating successful change.

We are driven much more by our emotions than most of us are willing to admit. Let’s recognize this, and use conference designs that, by capitalizing on this reality rather than denying it, are more effective.

How do you evoke emotions at your events? Have you found doing this to be an effective way of facilitating change?

(You do ask for evaluations, don’t you? Here’s how to get great event evaluation response rates.)

Publish your complete, anonymized evaluations.

You may want to restrict access to the people who attended the event.

That would be good.

You may decide to publish your evaluations publicly, as we just did for EventCamp East Coast 2011, and as we did a year ago for EventCamp East Coast 2010.

That’s even better.

If you believe in your event, and want to make it better, why not be transparent about the good, the bad, and the ugly?

I explain why these event designs are become increasingly popular, respond to Maarten’s question about whether people only want to come to events to listen to experts, and provide a couple of tips on learning about and formatting participant-driven and participation-rich events.

Interview with Adrian Segar about his book ‘Conferences That Work’ at #EIBTM11 from Maarten Vanneste on Vimeo.