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Satisfying wants and needs at meetings

Monday, July 14th, 2025 by Adrian Segar

Satisfying wants and needs at meetings is what I do. It’s my ikigai.

Whose wants and needs, you ask?

Everyone’s.

But, à la Maslow, there’s a hierarchy.

At the top: attendees. If the meeting doesn’t satisfy the wants and needs of attendees, it’s a waste of everyone’s time. (Unless, of course, you’re an unscupulous event organizer, holding events to transfer money from attendees’, aka suckers’, pockets to your own.)

That’s why my event designs always prioritize attendees’ experience above anyone else’s wants and needs.

Of course, I also strive to meet my clients’ needs and wants. Here’s the good news: when we design meetings to be participant-driven and participation-rich, they naturally evolve into experiences that fulfill what attendees truly want and need. The result: attendees leave highly satisfied.

And based on thousands of such events, the outcome is clear. When attendees are satisfied, clients are happy.

But there’s a subtle interplay between wants and needs at Conferences That Work that isn’t obvious—until you experience one.

Let me explain.

Satisfying wants

Usually, but not always, attendees arrive knowing what they want.

They want to learn more about a topic or issue. Perhaps they want to meet like-minded colleagues to discuss a pressing challenge. They might be looking for collaborators, potential clients, or someone who understands what they’re facing.

I say “usually but not always” because, sometimes, attendees’ wants are tacit, lying just below the surface. That’s why the opening sessions and processes I use at Conferences That Work are designed to prompt attendee introspection, helping attendees articulate wants they hadn’t fully recognized.

One way or another, attendees attend a conference with known wants.

But how those wants might be satisfied is generally unknown.

Uncovering needs

Unlike wants, attendee needs are usually unknown before the meeting. (If they were known, they’d already be wants.)

Here’s where the magic of peer conferences comes in.

At the very start of the event, a process like The Three Questions helps attendees share what they know, what they’re looking for, and what they’re curious about. It creates a rich, participatory stew of shared experience, insight, and desire.

Attendees begin to recognize that:

Others in the room have something valuable to offer;
They share many of the same concerns and goals; and
Some of their needs were just waiting for the right environment to be discovered.

The result? The generation of a common inventory of communal wants and needs while simultaneously aligning each attendee’s wants with their needs. Uncovered needs become new wants, and the chances of those wants being met increase dramatically.

Satisfying wants and needs at meetings

It’s exciting for peer conference attendees to realize they can tap into the expertise and experience of other attendees to meet their needs and wants. And it’s rarely a one-way flow. You might be learning from others at one moment, and sharing your insight in the next.

When we design conferences with processes that actively surface, align, and fulfill both the known wants and the latent needs of participants, they become something far greater than content-delivery platforms. They become living systems of learning, connection, and transformation.

Satisfying attendees’ wants and needs isn’t about guessing what they hope for. It’s about creating the conditions—early, deliberately, and transparently—for those desires and deeper needs to emerge and be matched with real opportunities. Done well, this doesn’t just create value for attendees. It builds shared ownership of the meeting’s purpose and outcomes.

That’s why satisfying wants and needs is more than a design goal for me. It’s a commitment. One that turns meetings into something that feels, as Johnnie Moore once described as the opposite of a waste of time.

Tags: Event design, needs, wants| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

Being on the edge

Monday, July 7th, 2025 by Adrian Segar

I’m walking along Anguilla‘s beautiful Shoal Bay East beach. It’s paradise. And while I’m walking, I’m thinking about being on the edge.

At the edge between sand and sea, where the waves crash and splash over my feet, it’s stunning. The sand is perfect. The water is clear and blue. Yet, just a hundred metres offshore, massive waves crash against the coral reefs that protect this little island. If I were out there, I’d be dead.

I turn towards the ocean, facing north. There’s nothing but water for two thousand miles; an open stretch of the North Atlantic that ends at the rocky coast of Nova Scotia.

Physical edges

It’s interesting, being on the edge.

We humans evolved in natural environments where physical transitions signaled safety, danger, opportunity, or mystery. We’re wired to notice edges. The boundary where bluff becomes beach. Where wet becomes dry. Our Vermont home is bordered by such an edge: our tidy-ish garden that gives way to twenty acres of unmanaged beech, maple, and pine. A frontier between the cultivated and wild—beloved by certain wildlife, and by me.

For almost all of human history, we lived in places where edges were formed by plate tectonics, weather, and evolution. Today, most of us inhabit environments defined by manufactured boundaries. Cities, buildings, roads, homes, screens. The edges we now live among are largely designed. They reflect our personal choices, our cultures, our economies, and our technologies. And our made-edge environments shape us in return.

Psychic edges

And of course, not all edges are physical.

We live on psychic edges too—zones of feeling, awareness, and relational boundary. Think of interpersonal space: how it changes moment to moment, person to person, culture to culture. Or those charged moments when a conversation pivots, when an acquaintance’s tone shifts, when the unspoken becomes clear.

Psychic edges can form suddenly, like a flash of realization. Or slowly—like the long drift into intimacy. The moment you truly connect with someone is also an edge: you cross a threshold, one that didn’t exist a moment before. And there’s the edge of vulnerability—the point you choose to say what you’ve been hesitating to say, and wait, uncertain, to see how it lands.

Edges are where change happens. They’re dynamic, unstable, and generative. That’s true in ecology. It’s true in relationship. It’s true in identity.
And it’s where the work worth doing often begins.

What edges ask of us

Edges—physical or psychic—ask something of us. They command attention. They stir curiosity. They challenge comfort. And often, they offer us something precious: a way to see more clearly, to feel more deeply, to shift perspective.

The beach, the awkward pause in conversation, the spark of sudden insight—they are all thresholds.

And when we meet them with presence rather than avoidance, they become places of transformation.

Being on the edge isn’t a danger to escape.

It’s an invitation to grow.

Posted in Lessons from Anguilla, life lessons | No Comments »

When the funeral matters more than the dead

Monday, June 30th, 2025 by Adrian Segar

“We live in a world where the funeral matters more than the dead, the wedding more than love and the physical rather than the intellect. We live in the container culture, which despises the content.”
–Eduardo Galeano

Sometimes we focus so intently on the form of what’s happening that we overlook the experience itself.

As an event designer and facilitator, my role is to create and lead experiences that truly meet attendees’ needs and desires. When I do this well, the design and my facilitation fade into the background. What takes center stage is each attendee’s unique experience of connection and learning. In addition, there is the possibility of creating something wonderful collectively that none of us could achieve alone

But, too often, we fetishize the form over the experience.

The structure becomes a ritual.
The ritual becomes a performance.
And the performance becomes a hollow container.

We go through the motions. We feel awe in the imposing funeral hall, yet never truly grieve. We attend a spectacular, themed destination wedding, but never feel meaningfully connected to the couple or anyone else there. We sit in uncomfortable chairs, listening dutifully to a keynote, hoping that some insight will land, but feeling no engagement, no spark, no shift.

In 2018, I asked, “What’s most important about an event, the gift or the wrapping?” It’s a question worth revisiting. Because we are mistaking the wrapping for the gift.

What happens—or doesn’t happen—for each and every person at an event is the core human reason for being there. Yes, sometimes we must attend for political, cultural, or social obligations. But is that how we want to spend our limited time on this earth? Dutifully attending events that fail to nourish, stimulate, or connect us?

What if, instead, we could experience genuine learning, meaningful connection, and a felt sense of shared humanity?

When we pour our discretionary event budget into sensory design—the elegant venue, the curated menu, the dazzling decor—yet neglect process design, we are feeding the container culture Galeano names: a culture that devalues the content.

We can do so much better.

We can design gatherings where the meaning is not just embedded in the program, but emerges from the experience. Where facilitation replaces performance. Where attendees become co-creators. Where what matters most isn’t how things look, but how people feel, change, and connect.

Form matters. But it should serve the experience, not substitute for it.

Otherwise, we’re just dressing up the silence.

If you’ve attended—or designed—an event where the content truly eclipsed the container, I’d love to hear about it. What made it work? What did it feel like?

Posted in Connection, Event design, life lessons | No Comments »

Why I’m not deleting everything

Monday, June 23rd, 2025 by Adrian Segar

Not deleting everything. A split-scene illustration: Left side: A young woman at a clean, minimalist desk, smiling after deleting everything, a blank journal open, no visible clutter. Right side: An older man at a warmly lit desk surrounded by open notebooks, a MacBook with folders visible, sticky notes with half-legible ideas—an atmosphere of quiet richness and depth. The older person is writing, calm and focused, not overwhelmed. — Two desks

Joan Westernberg recently wrote a post on LinkedIn that caught fire. In it, she describes deleting every trace of her productivity systems: all of her meticulously constructed “second brain”, her notes, saved articles, and to-do lists. Surprisingly, she felt relief. No panic, no regret. Just clarity.

Here’s what she wrote:

‘Every note in Obsidian. Every carefully crafted “second brain.” Every Apple Note. Every to do list.

Every article on my “read later” list.

Every productivity system I’d built over years. Gone in seconds.

And I felt zero panic. Just an overwhelming sense of relief.

Here’s what I’ve learned about our obsession with “capturing everything”:

The Promise: Build a networked archive so vast it can answer questions before you ask them. Never forget. Never lose an insight.

The Reality: My “second brain” became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, frozen curiosities, and deferred thinking.

I was reading to extract, not to understand. Listening to summarize, not to absorb. Thinking in formats I could file, not insights I could live.

This is what I know about productivity systems:

→ Storing an idea isn’t the same as understanding it → A perfectly organized system can become a prison → Sometimes the map swallows the territory

My reading database had 7,000 items. It was a shrine to the person I imagined I’d become “if only I read everything.”

But I already know what I want to read. I know the shape of my attention. I don’t need a database to prove I have taste.

What deletion taught me:

Human memory isn’t an archive – it’s associative, emotional, alive. We don’t think in folders. We think in stories, connections, experiences.

The ideas that matter will return. Not because you indexed them, because they mattered. If they don’t, they didn’t.

My new system is no system:

– Write what I think (knowing it may disappear)
– Trust that important things resurface naturally
– One simple note called “WHAT” for truly essential items (a tip I picked up from David Heinemeier Hansson)
– Read what calls to me, not what I’ve obligated myself to consume

I don’t want to manage knowledge. I want to live it.

Six years sober taught me: what got me here won’t get me where I need to be next. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is delete everything and start fresh.’

Her post resonated with many readers, especially those who felt trapped by their own systems of digital curation. She makes a case that obsessive idea capture can become a shrine to potential, not practice. A mausoleum of “old selves, frozen curiosities, and deferred thinking”, she calls it.

I understand why this resonated. We live in an age that encourages hoarding knowledge “just in case,” and makes deletion feel almost sacrilegious. I admire her courage in pressing the reset button.

But I want to add a caveat—one rooted in the experience of a different phase of life.

Joan, you’re a lot younger than me

I’m 73. To my younger self’s surprise (and delight), I’m still doing meaningful creative work. In fact, I’d argue that much of what I do today—writing, designing participatory events, making sense of complex systems—is deeper and more insightful than what I was doing at 33 or even 53.

But here’s the difference: I no longer have the memory I once did.

When I was 25, newly minted Ph.D. in hand, I could rely on my brain to hold onto what mattered. I remembered most of what I read, heard, and thought. The shape of a complex idea, the key insight from a book I’d read two years ago, or the name of a colleague I’d encountered once at a conference—I could retrieve these easily.

That’s no longer the case.

My memory today

Today, I need external systems to support my memory. Not because I’m overwhelmed or addicted to productivity, but because I can’t trust my mind to hold onto things I suspect I’ll need later:

A really tasty chicken recipe that I stumbled across in a sea of thousands.
A blog post draft I wrote in 2016, containing a story that haunted me.
A compelling idea buried in an article I saved four years ago.
A line from a book that sparked a potential tweak for one of my facilitation methods.

These days, without some kind of archive, such ideas often disappear—not over decades, but in minutes or days.

Here’s the thing: I’m not managing these notes. They don’t clutter my attention. I’m not poring over them obsessively. I’m not trying to optimize recall or catalog my intellectual life.

I just want to be able to find what I once valued if I need it again.

And fortunately, that’s easier than ever. Storage is cheap. Search is fast. My notes in Joplin and Apple Notes, along with well-named files and folders on my Mac, sit quietly, searchable in seconds. Ready, should a long-lost idea come knocking again.

Capturing them guards against another reality: websites rot. The online world is fragile. What you thought would always be there might vanish tomorrow.

So no—I’m not deleting everything. I’m not starting over.  I’m simply acknowledging that my brain has changed, and that one of the gifts of technology is that it can help me keep creating with richness and depth, even as I forget more than I used to.

Joan’s insight that “the ideas that matter will return” is often true. But I would gently add that sometimes they return because you left a trail for them to be retrieved.

A gentle scaffolding

My system isn’t elaborate. But it’s enough.

Enough to support the creative work I still care deeply about.
Enough to help my future self rediscover what my past self found valuable.
And enough to keep me moving forward without obsessively cataloging what I’ve already done.

For some of us, there’s a season for gentle scaffolding—simple systems that hold what we can’t, so we can keep doing the work that still matters.

Tags: archiving, deleting| Posted in life lessons, Personal effectiveness | 2 Comments »

Planning vs. Worrying: Navigating the line between preparedness and paralysis

Monday, June 16th, 2025 by Adrian Segar

When we commit to a future action or outcome, we also implicitly or explicitly commit to the steps required to make it happen. This typically sets us down two paths: planning and worrying.

Planning involves strategy, sequencing, and intentionality. It lives in the thinking brain—the part that envisions steps, evaluates scenarios, and acts. Worrying, on the other hand, resides in our emotional centers. It’s a reaction, not a response: anxiety that we’ll forget something, mess something up, or fall short of success. As I explored in Unraveling the Confusion about Thinking and Feeling, confusing these two mental modes can muddle our judgment, especially when we mistake anxious feelings for useful thoughts. Noticing the difference helps us respond appropriately, not just react.

These two processes—planning and worrying—can feel similar, especially when we’re operating under pressure. But they’re fundamentally different in both mindset and effect.

What planning does

Planning puts us in motion. It focuses our attention on what we can do, not just what might happen. Planning creates structure and clarity, even if only provisional, and enables us to move from intention to implementation. It invites creativity: new ideas emerge as we map possibilities and prepare for uncertainties.

Good planning doesn’t ignore risk. It acknowledges that things won’t always go as expected, and it builds in options, flexibility, and fail-safes. As an event designer and facilitator, anticipating potential problems is simply part of the job. Contingency planning is not worrying. It’s thoughtful foresight.

What worrying does

Worry, by contrast, spins. It ties up our energy in emotional loops about imaginary futures. Worry shifts our attention from “What needs to happen next?” or “What might happen that we need to prepare for?” to “What if everything goes wrong?” While occasional worry can be a useful motivator—nudging us to act when we’re in denial or procrastinating—unchecked worry is rarely productive. It keeps us in our heads and out of the present moment, reacting to scenarios that may never materialize.

Worry can also masquerade as planning. But if you’re not making decisions, defining next steps, or clarifying outcomes, you’re probably not planning—you’re ruminating.

The tension between worrying and planning

Planning and worrying often occupy the same mental real estate. When we’re envisioning the future, it’s easy to slip from thoughtful preparation into anxious prediction. The key is to stay grounded in agency and action, holding the tension of uncertainty without letting it become fear.

For me, the trick is to treat each idea that arises, whether it’s an exciting opportunity or a potential disaster, as an invitation to design, rather than a reason to dread. What can I build now that will serve me later? What options can I open up that will make room for surprises—good or bad?

Of course, we know how unpredictable life can be. As the old saying goes, “Man plans and God laughs.” But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t plan. It means we should plan with humility, clear-eyed about what we can control, and calm about what we can’t.

Suggestions

Planning lives in the thinking brain. It builds structure, invites creativity, and fosters agency. It may include thinking about what could go wrong, but it doesn’t live there.

Worrying lives in the emotional brain. It loops around uncertainty and pulls us away from effective action.

Being mindful of the distinction helps us stay focused, calm, and prepared, even in complex or high-stakes situations. Especially for those of us who create experiences for others, learning to plan without falling into worry is a skill worth practicing.

The best antidote to worry isn’t ignoring the future. It’s meeting it with thoughtful design, flexible intention, and a willingness to adapt. In other words: plan like a pro, and hold the results lightly.

Tags: event-planning, planning, worrying| Posted in Event design, Facilitating Change, life lessons, Personal effectiveness | No Comments »

Kill the Keynote. Save the Budget. Elevate the Experience.

Monday, June 9th, 2025 by Adrian Segar

Here’s something that many conference organizers suspect but rarely act on:

Big-name keynote speakers don’t make your event memorable.

In fact, they’re probably sabotaging both your budget and your attendees’ experience.

I’ve spent decades designing and facilitating conferences that people rave about. Along the way, I’ve watched countless organizers spend hundreds of thousands of dollars securing “top-tier” keynote speakers—only to discover that attendees barely remember what was said, let alone find ways to apply it. Meanwhile, the actual time attendees spend connecting, learning from one another, and getting what they came for is limited, under-designed, or completely absent.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

There’s a better way to spend your money—and your time.

It’s time to kill the keynote.

The real emotional experience of a keynote

Think about the last keynote you attended. Maybe the speaker was charismatic. Maybe the story was moving. But what happened next?

You clapped.
You left the room.
You remembered a line or two (maybe).
And then you forgot about it.

Keynotes are emotional performances. They make people feel, which has value. But those feelings are typically transient, passive, and unshared. Keynotes are one-way delivery.

What if, instead, your attendees:

☞Felt that they mattered?
☞Arrived to find a conference built around their real wants, needs, and questions?
☞Talked to each other more than they were talked at?
☞Left not just inspired, but changed?

Changed by:

☞Learning about what they actually came to learn.
☞The connections they made that had real value.
☞Becoming part of a community that truly mattered to them.

From stage to circle: Spend less, deliver more

When you shift your investment from keynote stages to meeting design and facilitation, you don’t just reduce costs—you multiply the value.

For a fraction of what you’d pay a big-name speaker, you can:

Design participatory sessions that attendees shape and co-create.
Facilitate peer learning that surfaces untapped expertise already in the room.
Foster real connection and trust—what attendees often say is the best part of an event.
Build long-term loyalty and community because people feel seen, heard, and engaged.

When participants have the chance to speak, listen, learn, and collaborate, they leave saying:

“That was the best conference I’ve ever attended.”

And they mean it.

Don’t keep this a secret

Here’s the kicker: Events designed for genuine interaction and transformation don’t just feel better—they perform better.

Sadly, too often, meeting conveners don’t know that better is possible. Or if they do, they’re afraid to give up the safety of the keynote model.

So don’t keep this a secret. If you’ve attended or created a participatory event that blew you away, share that story. If you’re a planner or convener, talk to your peers about rethinking the formula. And if you’re ready to move beyond the one-way stage model, reach out—I’d love to help.

You don’t need a famous name to make your event unforgettable. You need the courage to design for connection, not celebrities.

And that starts by asking not, “Who will wow the audience?” but, “What learning, connection, and community will we create—together?”

Kill the keynote!

Posted in Event design, Event professionals, Meeting industry | No Comments »

To Support Our Peers Prioritize Conversations Over Stories

Monday, June 2nd, 2025 by Adrian Segar

How can we best support our peers? Two powerful approaches are learning from shared stories and engaging in one-on-one conversations. But is one more effective than the other?

This question came up recently during an Association Chat weekly group conversation. As we discussed challenges association professionals face, one of us shared how impactful it can be for them to hear individual stories from peers with relevant life experiences. related to their association or independent work. They proposed collecting and sharing these stories as a resource to help others navigating similar paths.

I agreed that shared stories can offer valuable insights. But in association work, where individual journeys, roles, and organizational dynamics differ greatly, I believe that one-on-one peer conversations and mentoring are even more powerful. These direct exchanges allow for real-time support tailored to the listener’s unique situation, something static stories can rarely achieve.

The Power of Peer Conversation

This idea is backed by recent data. A survey of association, corporate, and nonprofit event professionals conducted by Fuse, JDC Events, and Bear Analytics—“Future-Ready Events: A Blueprint for Connection, Growth, and Innovation”—highlighted the value of interactive formats:

This idea is backed by recent data. A survey of association, corporate, and nonprofit event professionals by Fuse, JDC Events, and Bear Analytics, “Future-Ready Events: A Blueprint for Connection, Growth, and Innovation,” highlighted the value of interactive formats.

“When it comes to fostering community at events, survey responses reveal that formats emphasizing interpersonal connection, collaboration, and practical learning rank far above entertainment or promotional content.”
—Future-Ready Events: A Blueprint for Connection, Growth, and Innovation

Here’s how the meeting planners ranked the effectiveness of content formats at their meetings:

The four top-listed formats all involve peer conversation and interaction. “Inspirational Talks”—the sharing of stories—ranked fifth, with only a 10.6% effectiveness ranking.

The study’s broader findings align with this. It emphasizes that successful events “foster deeper loyalty, connection, and long-term impact.”

“The key lies in fostering a true sense of belonging and community, a sentiment that 42.6% of planners cited as the top priority for driving return attendance, and 52.9% included in their top two.”

In other words, what people need most at events—and, I would argue, in professional life—is authentic human connection. Not just curated narratives, but real-time, mutual presence. Conversation creates a space where people feel seen, heard, and supported. A space where they can receive and offer support and mentorship.

When we want to support our peers, stories matter. But dialogue meets people where they are.

Posted in Associations, Event design | No Comments »

Mistakes Associations Make — Part 2

Monday, May 26th, 2025 by Adrian Segar

After four decades of founding associations, serving on non-profit boards, and designing and facilitating countless association meetings, I’ve seen a lot. Enough, in fact, to spot patterns—especially when things go wrong. Earlier this year, I documented three common-but-overlooked mistakes associations make. Here are three more “Don’t do that!” from the frontlines of planning association events.

1—Don’t contract your venue before designing your event!

More often than not, clients ask me to help design a meeting after they’ve already signed a venue contract. Here’s why that happens, and why it’s a mistake.

Venue selection typically happens early in the event planning process—before budgeting, marketing, and F&B planning begin. But designing a thoughtful meeting process often gets overlooked or delayed, especially when the people convening the event aren’t familiar with participatory formats. So, they default to traditional workflows and bring me in post-contract, overlooking the need to think about how desired meeting outcomes might affect venue choice..

Meeting planners and venue staff are comfortable determining space needs for traditional events once they know:

the type of event;
the number of attendees; and
the meeting duration.

But they rarely understand what’s required for participant-driven and participation-rich meetings, which typically need:

larger general session rooms, to allow movement and eye contact; and
more flexible and plentiful breakout spaces for small group interaction.

The result? About 95% of the time, the contracted venue requires compromises to accommodate interactive formats. Sometimes I can design around it. Sometimes the contract has to be renegotiated (cue planner shudder). And sometimes, the event just doesn’t deliver what it could have.

Avoid this entirely. Design the event first. Then choose your venue. You’ll save money and frustration, and ensure your space supports your goals.

2—Don’t call your event an “unconference” because it sounds cool!

Lately, I’ve noticed more event marketers using “unconference” to describe traditional conferences. Don’t do this. There’s a meaningful difference.

Here’s how Wikipedia defines an unconference:

“An unconference is a participant-driven meeting.”
“Typically at an unconference, the agenda is created by the attendees at the beginning of the meeting.”
—Unconference, Wikipedia

Sorry, folks, but that’s not what happens when you use pre-event surveys or curate the program in advance. That’s not an unconference—it’s a conference.

I have been convening and facilitating unconferences (I prefer the term peer conferences, but no one else cares) since 1992. Why? Because they provide a far better conference experience. They give attendees what they actually want in real time—something no program committee or conference “curator” can predict.

In 2010, I explained why asking attendees in advance for program suggestions doesn’t work. And a couple of years later, I shared why a program committee or the mythical “conference curator” doesn’t do any better:

“In my twenty years of organizing conferences, I’ve never found a program committee that predicted more than half of the session topics that conference attendees chose when they were given the choice. During that time I’ve seen no evidence that any one person, whether they are given the title of “curator” or not, can put together a conference program that can match what attendees actually need and want.
—Jeremy Lin and the myth of the conference curator, February, 2012

And, as Seth Godin puts it: “We have no idea in advance who the great contributors are going to be.”

Just about every unconference I’ve convened or attended has brought to light participants whose valuable knowledge, expertise, experience, and contributions were unknown to the conveners (and most, if not all, of the attendees). You can’t do this effectively at a traditional conference with a predetermined program.

So, if you’re a marketer, stop using “unconference” as an event marketing buzzword. We’re not selling cereal here. As Robert Kreitner says, “Buzzwords…drive out good ideas.” Unconferences are participant-driven, which involves building the program in real-time during the event. Having (well-designed) discussion sessions during an event is great, but that doesn’t make a meeting an unconference.

And if you’re a conference convener, learn about what unconferences actually are before calling your event one. (Any of my books will give you detailed information about these meeting formats and how well they work.)

I care about how people use the word “unconference” because I’ve met too many folks who believe that an event billed as an unconference must be one. Then they attend and are underwhelmed. I’d hate to see unconferences suffer because marketing folks use the word as a way to make an event sound hip and sophisticated. So don’t call your event an “unconference” because it sounds cool!

3—Don’t run an “unconference track” at your event!

Here’s the problem with offering an unconference track alongside conventional sessions: very few people will choose it.

Why?

Most people have never experienced an unconference session (one shaped on the spot by the needs, experience, and expertise of the people present).
Passive, lecture-style formats comprise the vast majority of people’s formal learning experiences. If you haven’t previously experienced an unconference session, you’re probably skeptical that it’ll be useful to you.
Faced with the unfamiliar, people usually opt for the safer choice.

So what happens? The unconference track is sparsely attended. The skeptics nod smugly: “I told you it wouldn’t work.”

It turns out that when a participant-led session or sessions are the only conference activities going on, people dive in, and nearly everyone likes what occurs. But when you give people a choice between what’s familiar and what’s not, all but the bravest take the safer path.

Want participant-led sessions to succeed? Make participant-led sessions plenaries or simultaneous breakouts.

Don’t treat them as an experiment. Own them. You don’t have to make unconference sessions 100% of your conference, but there should be no other type of conference activity going on at the same time. Dedicate a morning, afternoon, day, or days to well-designed participant-led sessions. Then, you’ll see just how well these increasingly popular formats can work.

Mistakes associations make

These three common mistakes associations make spring from good intentions. But they’re still mistakes. If you want to create meaningful, effective events, you need to rethink the defaults. And start designing from the experience you want to create, not the contracts, categories, or conventions you’ve inherited.

[A version of this article, “Associations: don’t do that! — Part 2”, appeared in Association Chat Magazine, Volume 2, Issue 2, May 2025. This version includes additional links to resources.]

Posted in Associations | No Comments »

Are You Feeling the Squeeze? The Cost of Meetings in 2025

Monday, May 19th, 2025 by Adrian Segar

In a May 8, 2025, post, the always insightful Dave Lutz shared some deeply troubling statistics on the current state of the meetings industry. I’ve emphasized a few of the more sobering takeaways and added a couple of links for context:

“Pre-pandemic, top-performing annual meetings and trade shows that we analyzed yielded a gross profit of 55–65 percent. In 2024, the gross profit for those same events was down by 20 points. For this purpose, gross profit is calculated by subtracting direct event expenses (not including salaries, overhead, or allocations) from gross event revenue and then dividing by gross event revenue.”

“While many major events have nearly recovered on the revenue side, the primary culprit for a lower gross profit is the significant increase — about 30 percent — in expenses. For some associations, this means that millions of dollars of funding for advocacy and member services will therefore need to be cut or reallocated. That results in increased oversight and pressure for event leaders like you.

Most reports claim that our industry has recovered to pre-pandemic levels. While that may be true for our hospitality partners, only 29 percent of the event planner respondents to PCMA’s Annual Meeting Market Survey said attendance at their largest in-person meeting was on par with pre-pandemic levels and one out of five planners said attendance was lower than 2019. On the flip side, nearly half (49 percent) said attendance was higher — a better picture than CEIR’s Q3 2024 Index Results, which found that only 34 percent of events surpassed their pre-pandemic performance levels. In Q2, attendance performed better — 44 percent surpassed their pre-pandemic attendance levels.
—Dave Lutz, Growing Your Credibility

Ouch.

From my perspective as a meeting designer who works closely with event owners, this data is unsettling. In 2025, many are facing a brutal combination: revenues that remain flat, while expenses have jumped by 30%.

The now-normal trend of last-minute attendee registration only worsens the situation. How can you plan confidently when your final numbers arrive days before the doors open?

Something’s gotta give.

And it has.

Yes, we’re holding in-person meetings again, approximately as many as we did before COVID, but most event owners are clearly still in a tough financial bind. With limited, if any, revenue growth, they are being forced to scale back the very services that make their events successful.

I’ve felt it myself. Before COVID, I was often overbooked. In 2025, the demand for my services—designing and facilitating meetings that people love—is down significantly. I still do meaningful, satisfying work with excellent clients. But I’m doing far less of it.

When meeting owners have to trim expenses to avoid going into the red, value-add service providers become easy, if regrettable, cuts.

And I doubt I’m alone.

Are you a meeting owner struggling to make the numbers work? Are you a supplier feeling the impact of today’s leaner events?

Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments. Let’s learn from one another.

Tags: event professionals, eventprofs, meeting economics| Posted in Event professionals, Meeting industry | No Comments »

Tame the Creative Mind During Meditation

Monday, May 12th, 2025 by Adrian Segar

August 2016. Northern New Mexico. I was deep into a five-day silent meditation retreat, surrounded by quaking aspens, mountain air, and breathtaking wilderness. But my brain wouldn’t shut up. I couldn’t tame my creative mind. On the outside, I was the picture of calm.

Inside? A storm of ideas.

Blog post concepts. Fresh angles on my facilitation process. Insightful links between my retreat experience and my ikigai, my reason for being.

Each idea was a gift. And a distraction.

I wanted to grab a pen. If I didn’t write them down, they’d vanish. But that wasn’t why I was there. I wasn’t supposed to be brainstorming. I was supposed to be meditating.

This was a problem.

It took me nine years to solve it.

Meditation Is Tough

Like many people, I’ve struggled to maintain a meditation practice. Lately, I’ve done better—I recently marked a full year without missing a day. But the process itself is hard.

Notice your thoughts. Let them go. Return to your breath, your body, bringing yourself back to your center, the present moment. Repeat, endlessly.

It’s Even Tougher for Creatives

I suspect that mediation is even more difficult for creative minds. Ideas don’t just drift in—they barge in, waving their arms.

Each time a creative idea arises, I face a dilemma:

Do I break my meditation to capture it?
Or do I stay still, let it go, and risk forgetting it entirely?

At multi-day silent retreats, you’re sometimes allowed a short meeting with a retreat leader, your only chance to speak. So, in New Mexico, I used mine to ask for help.

I explained my dilemma. I don’t remember what he said. But I remember this: it wasn’t helpful.

Since then, I’ve asked other experienced meditators. No luck.

If I were going to solve this problem, I’d have to solve it myself.

The Creative Mind Hack That Finally Helped

Creative ideas don’t just ambush me during meditation. They also arrive when I’m daydreaming—walking the dirt roads near my home, taking a shower, relaxing after work.

And daydreaming, interestingly, looks a lot like meditating. From the outside, it’s hard to tell the difference.

This reminds me of the apocryphal IBM story:

An IBM employee sits at his desk, staring into space. His manager walks in and asks, “What are you doing?” The employee points to the “THINK” sign on the wall. “I’m thinking,” he says.

That story lingered in the back of my mind. Then, during a recent meditation session, a new idea popped up—ironically:

What if I just scheduled a “creative daydreaming” session before I meditated?

Meditation helps me surface good ideas. But what if I gave myself space to harvest them first, before trying to let them go?

So I experimented.

I sat quietly for 10 minutes, with the intention to daydream.
When a useful idea surfaced, I paused, captured it, and then resumed.
Only after that did I begin my formal meditation.

And the result?

Daydream First, Meditate Next.

When I do this—when I daydream first, then meditate—I notice far fewer creative interruptions during meditation.

It doesn’t work every day. On weekday mornings, I often meditate early with my wife, and I can’t always carve out daydreaming time beforehand.

But when I meditate later in the day, I do.

And yes, it helps. A lot.

Does This Work for You?

I wonder if others have tried this. Has anyone else found that deliberately daydreaming before meditating tames the creative flood?

Does it reduce that internal tension between insight and presence?

It has for me. I’d love to hear whether it works for you too, and whether you’ve discovered any additional tricks for balancing creativity with stillness.

Feel free to share your experience in the comments.

Tags: Creative Practice, creativity, daydreaming, meditation, Mindful Productivity, mindfulness| Posted in life lessons | No Comments »