"I realized this morning that your event content is the only event-related 'stuff' I still read. I think that's because it's not about events, but about the coming together of people to exchange ideas and learn from one another and that's valuable information for anyone." — Traci Browne
Thank you for your feedback! Although some say that comments on blog posts are passé, I still think they provide valuable feedback and connection for communities that develop around posts and the topics covered on a blog.
So I’m happy that currently [December 2014], readers of this niche blog (albeit one that will surpass 6M pageviews this year) have shared 1,000 comments on the 343 Conferences That Work posts I’ve written over the last five years. Many commenters are now friends, and some of you I met first through a comment on a post.
Thank you for your feedback!
[September 2023 Update: Although the pace of commenting has slowed, we’re up to ~2,000 comments. I continue to appreciate and welcome your feedback on my 800+ posts and thank everyone who has taken the time and trouble to write back.
Sadly, I had to remove the Disqus comment system a year ago. It was slowing down the site and occasionally conflicted with other plug-ins. This removed some of the nice display and threading features we used to enjoy.]
Yes grammar wonks, “change” can be a noun. But change(-noun) is about the past or the future. “He dyed his hair!” or “I’m determined to lose a few pounds!” When we use “change” as a noun, we’re passive observers, noticing change without being a part of it.
Why don’t leaders publicly recognize the people who do the work? Like Tim Cook does:
“Tim paused ever so slightly, and what seemed unscripted (at least I hope it was unscripted) he asked all Apple employees present in the auditorium to rise up from their seats. With a round of applause initiated by Tim, he thanked everyone for their hard work, their creativity and their commitment to the launch and everything leading up to the day.” —Dan Pontefract, Apple CEO Tim Cook and his moment of open culture
At the end of Apple’s September 2014 blockbuster product launch of the iPhone 6, Apple Watch, and Apple Pay, Tim Cook did a simple thing. He publicly acknowledged the work and commitment of Apple employees in making these new products and services possible.
I’m assuming that you —at least—privately recognize the work of your team and volunteers. Taking a minute to publicly recognize the people who made your event possible is an easy thing to do. It’s a small but significant gift to the workers and an opportunity for participants to show their appreciation. It’s the right thing to do—yet sadly missing from many events.
No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.
—Albert Einstein
In 2012 I challenged the concept of the conference curator: someone who somehow curates a conference program, like the curator of an art museum. Seth Godin backed me up a year later. Despite my requests, no one ever supplied a single real-life example of a successful conference curator. People thought it would be great if a conference curator actually existed—which brings to mind how Anglosphere parents talk up the tooth fairy to their kids.
I’ve never found any program committee that predicted more than half of the sessions that conference attendees chose when given the choice. (And I’ve been running conferences where the participants get to choose what they want to learn since 1992.)
Do you remember that moment in your life when you realized that the tooth fairy was a fantasy? Perhaps it’s time for you to give up the fantasy of the conference curator too.
I believe in the value of good meeting facilitators and designers who can create appropriate process and an environment to satisfy conference learning, connection, engagement, and action objectives, but I don’t believe in the tooth fairy or the conference curator, nice though it would be if either existed.
Let conference attendees choose conference content. That’s what I’ve been doing for a long time, and I can tell you, based on thousands of evaluations, it works very well. The fantasy of the conference curator is dead. RIP, Conference Curator!
Here are the annotated highlights of an October 2014 etouches webinar on meeting design with Dahlia El Gazzar (host), Maarten Vanneste, and me. It’s just under an hour of video: watch the whole show or use this guide to focus on the topics that you want to hear more about—the choice is yours.
01:30 Dahlia: Introduction.
03:05 Adrian introduction.
04:10 Maarten introduction.
05:00 Maarten: A big picture description of Meeting Design.
08:10 Adrian: Two fundamental reasons why meetings must change: the rise of online, and the change in how we learn what we need to know to do our jobs.
13:05 Maarten: Meeting stakeholders.
16:45 Adrian: One way to get meeting owner buy-in.
19:50 Maarten: The steps for designing a meeting.
30:25 Maarten: A meeting toolbox.
39:10 Adrian and Maarten: Resources for meeting design—books.
44:20 Adrian, Maarten, and Dahlia: Online resources for meeting design.
47:15: Maarten: Answers “Which step do you feel is most beneficial, leading to the largest ROI?”
49:15: Adrian: Answers “Tell me about an epic fail of a meeting design and how you solved it.”
52:05: Maarten: Teasing out objectives from stakeholders.
54:10: Maarten and Adrian: Answer “Where do you see meeting design going in the next few years?”
Jeff Hurt’s recent post makes the case for incorporating reflection/debriefing into all conference sessions. While I agree entirely with him that these activities should be included, I think a minor clarification is needed.
His post implies that you must debrief participant experiences at events for learning to occur. If that were true, you would never learn anything from a lecture. While it’s true that lectures are one of the worst ways to attempt to teach people anything, there’s no question that some learning occurs via lectures for some people some of the time.
Taking notes
You probably discovered at school that if you took notes during a lecture (interestingly, handwritten notes seem more effective than typed notes), you retained more of the material than if you simply listened and tried to remember the lecture points later. This is because note-taking is a form of personal reflection and debriefing; it forces you to process, to some degree, the information you are hearing, which improves your associated memory and understanding, and consequently, accuracy, quantity, and length of recall.
This means that it’s possible to learn from experience without external prompting or exercises, provided you can engage in the necessary reflection on your own. One of the most potent learning disciplines you can cultivate is the practice of regular reflection on your own experiences. I know that many impactful decisions and changes in my life have occurred through ongoing self-reflection, rather than relying on the feedback or advice of others.
During our education, we are rarely taught the value of regular, honest self-reflection. By “honest,” I mean self-reflection that neither avoids beating oneself up over “mistakes” or hard-to-stomach experiences nor glossing over them. Instead, cultivating your ability to dispassionately notice what is happening to you and periodically reflecting on what you have noticed allows you to learn effectively on your own.
John Dewey said, “We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.” Reflection with others and by yourself will allow you to maximize your learning throughout your life.
When facilitating, I often use sticky notes as a flexible tool that allows movement from individual work => small group work => a visual summary for an entire group. 3M has just released a useful free tool for iDevices running IOS 8, Post-It Plus, that organizes and documents the results of such activities, which otherwise tend to end up as untidy rolled-up sheets of flip-chart paper or hard-to-categorize digital photographs.
I ran a quick test of the app on a year-old flip chart sheet with stick notes scattered hither and yon. Post-It Plus quickly identified all the notes (it superimposes a checkmark on each one it recognizes.) If a note is missed, you can tap on it to expand it and adjust the edges. Tap Done, and the note will be added to the collection. Once you’ve captured all the notes, you can create a Board that holds them.
But that’s just the start. Each Board can contain multiple Groups. Tap and hold a note to move it to a new Group. When you’ve categorized notes as desired, you can name your Boards and Groups appropriately and share them via iMessage, email, Twitter, and Facebook. You can also save them to your photo library or export them to pdf, PowerPoint, Excel, or as an image. If you link the app to your paid Evernote account, you can use Evernote’s OCR capability to make all your notes searchable. Integration with other apps, like Dropbox, is also possible, though I didn’t explore this.
Before digital photography, sticky note process was essentially an in-the-moment facilitation tool. Today, even though it’s simple to capture images of a group’s wall work, manipulating the ideas shown afterward is tedious and rarely done (well, to be honest, I have never taken the time to do so.)
Post-It Plus makes further categorizing and analysis of notes post-session just about as simple as possible. The sharing and export functions make it easy to communicate uncovered themes to others. Use this app to extract more value from the rich information exposed by group sticky note process. Post-It Plus is a tool with great potential—and you can’t beat the price!
Want to try out Post-It Plus? Download the free app here.
Get rid of Human Resources. Human Resources: what an ugly term!
Wikipedia defines a resource as “a source or supply from which benefit is produced“. Is this how we think of employees—as resources for a company’s benefit?
I think it’s telling that many organizations still use this term to label the office that hires, manages, and fires employees. And such organizations, at least in the IT industry where I’ve had some experience of them, often don’t do a very good job.
Nowadays I’m noticing a trend in larger organizations to rebrand Human Resources as Talent Management. This is better—we’re not classifying people as resources like steel ingots. But the m-word—management—is still there, emphasizing the role of guidance on how employees work.
So here are a couple of alternative descriptions that I like better.
The first is Talent Leadership. As I’ve written here, I see leaders as influencers and facilitators of process rather than high-ups laying down the law. Organizations need both leaders and managers, but I think that forward-thinking institutions should have their talent led rather than guided.
Want an alternative? Google calls its Human Resources Department People Operations; employees shorten this to POPS. I think this neutral term is a sensible reframe of what “HR” does in a modern organization; covering the nitty gritty work while avoiding any connotation of employees-as-cattle.
I’ve spent the last 10 days living alone in the woods. (No, not what you might be thinking: my home is surrounded by fall foliage, and my marriage is fine.) Quite a contrast from the previous week, which featured two cities, two events, and two meetups.
If you’ve met me, you’ll know that I love to schmooze in company. So you may wonder if it’s hard to be suddenly on my own. Not at all. Although I love bringing people together, I also am comfortable living by myself for a spell, talking to no one except for an occasional phone call.
This makes sense in terms of my testing on the popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®.) As I’ve shared before, I score pretty neutral on the extravert <–> introvert axis of the test. Someone testing highly extravert prefers to draw energy “from the outside world of people, activities, and things”, while an introvert prefers to draw energy “from one’s internal world of ideas, emotions, and impressions” [all quotes taken from”Introduction to Type in Organizations“, Krebs Hirsh et al.]
What a neutral axis MBTI score doesn’t tell you
What the MBTI doesn’t provide is any indication of the intensity of anyone’s aspects. Because MBTI is about personality preference it’s perfectly possible for someone who tests neutral on a specific axis to have strong desires or abilities around the poles of each test dichotomy. As it turns out, I am comfortable not only when I’m socializing with others, but also for extended periods alone in creative, thinking, and feeling modes—I enjoy and need both states.
Consequently, a neutral “weak” score on an MBTI axis may indicate greater flexibility and comfort with the range of preferences associated with that axis. And those of us with a strong preference on axes (in my case, Intuition and Feeling) may have a harder time communicating and working with people whose preference lies at the other ends of the scale—for me, these are folks who prefer Sensing (“taking in information through the five senses and noticing what is actual”) and Thinking (“a preference for organizing and structuring information to decide in a logical, objective way”).
While my clear preference for MBTI’s Intuition and Feeling axes feeds my energy to pursue the congruence, facilitation, and consensus that inform my mission to improve what happens when people meet, its shadow side can be increased difficulty in relating to people who prefer sensing and thinking modes. One’s strengths invariably point to one’s weaknesses. In general, there seems to be a tradeoff between well-roundedness and drive.
Meanwhile, I’ll continue to be alone in the woods. Well, until Celia returns later today…
Thank you for your feedback! Although some say that comments on blog posts are passé, I still think they provide valuable feedback and connection for communities that develop around posts and the topics covered on a blog.
When facilitating, 
Get rid of Human Resources. Human Resources: what an ugly term!