Welcome : Conferences That Work

Are your events suffering from falling attendance, evaluations, or profits? Do you want to make your current face-to-face conference "can't miss" better, even as more and more content becomes available online? Are you wondering how to successfully start a new conference? I can help!

I'll help you create engaging conferences around the learning your attendees really want and need. Conferences designed to build meaningful, mutually beneficial connections between participants. Conferences that help people work smarter and generate the right personal and organizational action outcomes.

For over 25 years I've been designing and facilitating Conferences That Work: innovative, highly interactive, attendee-driven events that leverage attendees' expertise and experience to create just the conference that participants want and need. You can also include traditional plenary sessions for an event experience that will delight your attendees and stakeholders.

I consult on conference design, facilitate entire conferences, individual sessions, and session crowdsourcing, present regularly about participant-led and participation-rich events, and lead interactive labs on participation techniques that will fundamentally improve your meetings and conference sessions.

I facilitate three popular sessions—The Solution Room, The Personal Introspective, and The Group Spective—that provide powerful opportunities for participants to learn, connect, engage, and reflect at your event.

I also specialize in designing and facilitating large group discussions on hot topics, using my unique Fishbowl Sandwich format.

I've written three books on meeting design.

— Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love condenses 30 years experience designing, organizing, and facilitating conferences into an information-packed step-by-step guide to a proven design for creating productive conferences that people love.

— The Power of Participation: Creating Conferences That Deliver Learning, Connection, Engagement, and Action is a comprehensive guide to participation techniques that increase learning, connection, engagement, and outcomes at any conference session or event.

— Event Crowdsourcing: Creating Meetings People Actually Want and Need explains why event crowdsourcing is an essential strategy and practice for creating for successful meetings, and teaches you in detail how to create meetings where attendees want, need, and love every session.

Contact me today to set up a consultation.

Recent Peer Conference Calendar Additions

04 Dec 2019 - 06 Dec 2019: Reboot Healthcare Summit 2019, Queen Mary Hotel, 1126 Queens Highway Long Beach, CA 90802.
Reboot Healthcare is convening people who have the courage and stamina to be new kinds of leaders in healthcare. The kind of people who are not afraid to speak the raw truth of healthcare’s challenges, the kind of people who can inspire hope in our ability to overcome those challenges, the kind of people who can creating better solutions at the state and national level, and the kind of people who can build the camaraderie to put everything into action at a local level.By the close of the Summit, entrepreneurs, licensed medical professionals, patients, and other interested parties will have the confidence and direction to begin functional change in healthcare organizations nationwide.
10 Jan 2020 - : National Radiology Peer Learning Summit, Virtual.
This free, four-hour virtual summit sponsored by the ACR will convene invited experts and thought leaders to define the concept and parameters of peer learning. The goal is to develop a white paper to document the current state of programs and to recommend a strategy for implementing effective peer-learning practices for all radiologists in the U.S.Topics to be addressed include:
- The practical differences that exist between small and large practices as well as academic and private practices
- Direction from the Joint Commission and ACR Accreditation on expectations and recommendations
- The differences between peer learning and peer review
- Challenges implementing peer learning systems
- How peer learning fits within regulatory needs

More upcoming events >>

From The Blog:

November 18, 2019

My two-word ikigai

The Japanese have a word ikigai, which roughly translates to “the reason you get out of bed in the morning.” Here’s my two-word ikigai:

Facilitating connection.

Do you know your ikigai?

Graphic attribution: The Toronto Star — and a hat tip to Cool Tools for sharing this great graphic.