"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
The 2014 Business Travel News survey, based on data from Airlines Reporting Corp. (ARC) from 29 Travel Management Companies (TMCs), reports that though corporate hotel occupancy rates and rental car transaction days rose in 2013, processed airline ticket transactions remained at 2012 levels. While revenues and profits rose in all three markets, ARC transactions for the TMCs surveyed dropped 0.3%.
A drop in government business may explain the flat ARC transactions, but it puzzles me that hotel (occupancy rate rose from 61.3% to 62.3%) and rental car (Avis Budget rental days rose 4%) sectors still saw significant growth. Does this mean that business travelers are staying longer at destinations than before? Are they driving rather than flying? What do these statistics imply?
Unfortunately, there are still too many cosmetic conferences.
In 1981, I was in Atlantic City for a large tradeshow. A casino sound technician friend (who’d had the nerve-racking responsibility of miking Frank Sinatra the night before) invited me to join him for lunch at the staff canteen.
The casino decor was impressive: thick carpet, velvet wallpaper, elaborate light fixtures, and gold-plated handrails. I was standing in a plush hallway when my friend arrived. He opened an almost invisible door, revealing a matching corridor that turned to the right. We stepped through and the door closed behind us.
As we walked around the bend, the luxuriant carpet, wallpaper, and handrails ended abruptly. Ahead loomed gloomy flat grey walls and a dirty floor. We were on an empty backstage, and the cosmetic glamour reserved for paying customers was gone.
Some “special events”—like weddings, galas, and awards ceremonies—have a more-or-less fixed ritual, and event professionals make these events distinctive by concentrating on unique and creative decor, flow, spectacle, entertainment, and technical production. This is entirely appropriate for this kind of event, where these elements are, by and large, how the repeated cultural ritual is made distinctive and memorable each time we attend.
Most conferences, in contrast, promote a different emphasis: a focus on content and connection. The mistake I see repeatedly is that meeting planners are putting too much energy and resources into the environmental details of the meeting and not enough into the format and underlying process of the conference itself.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with providing an attractive or spectacular environment for an event. All things being equal, we’d prefer to have tasty meals, appealing surroundings, excellent entertainment, and flawless production. However, we need to recognize that overemphasis on these considerations leads us to neglect fundamental meeting design issues that dramatically impact the achievement of our core conference goals. Otherwise, our conferences may be cosmetically alluring but ineffective. And your attendees may become all too aware of the bare walls and emptiness behind what you profess to supply.
“The intelligence of the individuals didn’t matter.
The content didn’t matter.
It was the pattern of how they shared with each other.
If everyone was engaged; if everyone was sharing lots of ideas, acknowledging other ones (sounds really simple!) that gave rise to a collective intelligence that is about as strong as IQ…
…The flow of ideas between people…gives rise to this collective intelligence.
And you can shape it…
…[email and social media] turn out not to make much difference.
Some people have a funny idea of sustainability in meetings.
In 2011 Simon Sinek keynoted MPI’s World Education Congress. As I and thousands of attendees watched, he began to share his message by drawing a diagram on a flip chart pad. Almost as soon as Simon picked up his marker, people started tweeting that he was wasting paper.
At recent conferences, I’ve been asked if I really need to have attendees work with sticky notes and flip charts. People ask, “Can’t they just talk to each other?” I’ve also encountered resistance to requests to print a few attendee tour photos for use in artifact-building exercises.
Let’s put these and similar requests in perspective.
I am a supporter of sustainable events. From 1978 – 1983 I managed a solar energy business and didn’t do it for the money. I am glad that apps have made it unnecessary to print the vast quantities of schedules and vendor catalogs that we schlepped around in the past. I applaud the installation (and flexibility) of electronic signage. And I love the efforts to minimize the appalling food wastage we took for granted when running an event.
The case for using recyclable materials
Yes, I know that people rarely keep the flip chart sheets, note cards, and sticky notes produced during interactive exercises. But they are needed for the experience of creation. Writing something down, sketching, or drawing a diagram provide powerful alternative modalities for learning and sharing that we traditionally restrict to hearing and looking (which often, by the way, don’t translate into listening and seeing). The act of building these creations into an appropriate concrete event metaphor—like the cardboard box bridge participants constructed at the Green Meetings Industry Council’s 2014 Sustainable Meetings Conference—also increases the effectiveness of participants’ experience.
Let’s take a quick look at the sustainability impact of using these materials at an event, using the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) approach. I’ve rounded off the figures, which I obtained from carbon footprint calculators available on the internet; smaller amounts are better.
Making and printing a single sheet of office paper: 10 grams CO2e
An average meal: 3,000 grams CO2e
Driving a Toyota Prius 300 miles to a conference: 70,000 grams CO2e
Flying from Boston to San Francisco: 750,000 grams CO2e
Sustainability in meetings
As you can see from these figures, the modest use of sheets of flip chart paper and sticky notes at an event contributes insignificant CO2e compared to the carbon footprint of the meals and travel of a typical attendee. While we should work to use as little of these (recyclable) products as possible, let’s focus on reducing the much larger contributions to greenhouse gases caused by the food consumption and travel to and from our events.
Please don’t call me a speaker. Yes, anyone who’s met me knows I like to talk. It’s true: I have been accused (justifiably at times) of talking too much. Yes, I get invited to “speak” at many events.
A typical conference speaker spends the vast majority of his or her time speaking, while an audience listens. These days, “speakers” often show pictures or videos too (but they’re still called speakers; interesting, yes?)
To be clear: there’s nothing wrong with the act of speaking itself; it’s the timeframe that’s invariably screwed up.
Most speakers speak uninterrupted far too long. How long is “too long”? Ten minutes is about the maximum for effective learning. Up to twenty minutes may be acceptable occasionally. More than twenty minutes—you’re doing your audience a disservice!
People cannot listen and simultaneously think effectively about what they’re hearing or seeing. We need quiet time to reflect on what we have just heard and seen; time to think about what it means, how we understand it, whether we agree with it, and so on. We also greatly benefit from doing this reflective work with other people as it exposes us to different interpretations, new points of view, additional relevant experiences, and so on.
None of this can happen with a speaker, no matter how engaging and entertaining, who speaks for fifty-five minutes non-stop, leaving five minutes for questions.
Even if you give me just twenty-five minutes, I will include time for people to interact with the content and ideas I’m sharing. People will learn more, retain it longer, retain it more accurately, and develop more ideas of their own when they participate actively during our time together.
So, Adrian, what would you like us to call you?
Well, please don’t call me a speaker. A presenter is a better descriptor for what I do. “Presenter” can, at least, imply that I present some content and then give the audience opportunities to work on that content alone / in small groups /collectively, rather than just listen.
Another word that is often appropriate is facilitator. As a facilitator, my job is to help participants engage in their learning and sharing. As a facilitator, when I’m working with a group of people who have experience and expertise in a common topic, I can help them learn in valuable ways from each other without possessing comparable knowledge myself. Because the combined expertise and experience available in a room full of peers is generally greater than that available from a single expert, effective facilitation is a powerful tool for providing great learning experiences, with the added benefit that participants become aware of other resources for their learning and development besides the folks at the front of the room.
I’m not suggesting that you banish all speakers from your events. (Though many meetings, in my experience, would be better if you did.) But I do want you to be aware of the consequences of blithely calling everyone who contributes a “speaker”.
So, please don’t call me a speaker. Whether you describe me as a speaker, presenter, or facilitator, I’m going to keep on doing what I’ve been doing. But language is important. I’m asking meeting planners and their clients to stop labeling people like me as “speakers”. And, if you want your attendees to receive optimal benefit from your events, I urge you to remember the reality that filling your program with speakers lecturing at an audience is a terrible modality to use if you claim that your conference is really about adult learning and connection, rather than promotion and status.
Last week’s Green Meetings Industry Council’s 2014 Sustainable Meetings Conference opened with a one-hour keynote panel: The Value of Sustainability Across Brands, Organizations and Sectors. Immediately after the presentation, my task was to help over two hundred participants, seated at tables of six, grapple with the ideas shared, surface the questions raised, and summarize the learning and themes for deeper discussion.
Oh, and I had twenty-five minutes!
For a large group to effectively review and reflect on presented material in such a short time, we have to quickly move from individual work to small group work to some form of a concrete visual summary that’s accessible to everyone.
Here’s what I did
[Added August 2023: I documented this entire process, named RSQP, in more detail in my book Event Crowdsourcing.]
Stand up!
1) My audience hadn’t moved for over an hour, and their brains had, to varying degrees, gone to sleep. So, for a couple of minutes, I had people stand, stretch, twist, and do shoulder rolls.
Explain!
2) Next, I summarized what we were about to do. I
Outlined the three phases of the exercise: a) working individually; b) sharing amongst the small group at their table, and c) a final opportunity to review everyone’s work in a short gallery walk.
Pointed out the tools available. Each table had a sheet of flip-chart paper (divided into a 2 x 2 matrix), 4 pads of different colored sticky notes, and a fine-tip sharpie for each person.
Explained the four categories they would use for their responses. After introducing each category I asked a couple of pre-primed volunteers to share an example of their response with the participants.
REMINDERS. “These are themes with which you’re already familiar that the keynote touched on. You might want to include ideas you think are important. And you might want to include themes that you have some expertise or experience with. More on that in a moment. Write each REMINDER on a separate blue sticky note, which will end up in the top left square of the flip chart.”
SPARKS. “Sparks are inspirations you’ve received from the keynote; new ideas, new solutions that you can adopt personally, or for your organization, or at your meetings. Write your SPARKS on yellow sticky notes; they’ll go in the top right square.
QUESTIONS. “These are ideas that you understand that you have questions about. Perhaps you are looking for help with a question. Perhaps you think a question brought up by the keynote is worth discussing more widely at this event. Write your questions on a green sticky note; they’ll go in the bottom left square.
PUZZLES. “Puzzles are things you feel that you or your organization or our industry don’t understand and need help with. Write your puzzles on a violet sticky note; they’ll go in the bottom right.”
Gave these instructions. “In a minute I’m going to give you about five minutes to work alone and create your REMINDERS, SPARKS, QUESTIONS, and PUZZLES. Don’t put your notes on the flip chart paper yet; we’ll do that communally soon. Any questions?” [There were none.] “Two final thoughts:
1) Words are fine, but feel free to draw pictures or diagrams too!
2) Consider adding your name to any of your notes. We’re going to display your notes on the wall over there. If you have expertise or experience in one of your themes, adding your name to your note will allow others who are interested in the topic to find you. Have a question or puzzle you need help with? Adding your name will allow others who can help to find you.”
Get to work alone!
3) I gave everyone five minutes to create their notes, asking them to shoot for a few responses in each category.
Share at your table!
4) For the second phase of the exercise, I asked each person to briefly explain their notes with the others at their table, placing them on the appropriate quadrant of the flip chart as they did so. I allocated each person a minute for this and rang a bell when it was time for the next person to begin.
Review everyone’s work!
5) The final phase was a gallery walk. I asked one person from each table to go and stick their flip chart page on a large blank meeting room wall. Once done, I invited everyone to go to the gallery and explore what we had created together.
The results
Here’s one end of the resulting sharing wall.
6) Later that evening I had a small number of subject matter experts cluster the themes they saw. (If I had had more time, I would have had all the participants work on this together during my session.) The resulting clusters were referred to throughout the conference for people to browse and use as a resource. Here’s a picture, taken later, showing the reclustered items in our “sharing space”.
Yes, you can go from broadcast to learning in 25 minutes! Even when time is short, an exercise like this can quickly foster huge amounts of personal learning, connection (via the table work and named sticky notes), and audience-wide awareness of interests and expertise available in the room. Use reflective and connective processes like these after every traditional presentation session to maximize their value to participants.
There are privacy issues in meeting apps. I’ve written before about the lack of information about who has access to attendee information, and I’m concerned about the ramifications of the growing trend for meeting apps to offer login via one of the established social media networks, typically Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Perhaps you should be too. Social check-in is touted as a plus for event attendees, allowing them to:
discover friends, contacts, followers, and followees who are also attending the meeting;
provide in-app social network functionality; e.g. the ability to tweet from inside the app; and
be notified (in some apps) when social network contacts are in the vicinity.
These features are, indeed, potential pluses for an attendee. But there are downsides too, which are rarely mentioned.
Potential for abuse
When you authorize an app to access your personal social network information, you are allowing the company that created the app access to that information. At a minimum, this includes read access to your social media contacts in that app, which may (e.g. Twitter) or may not (e.g. FaceBook, LinkedIn) be public. If the app also requests write access, it can, in principle, do things like sending tweets from your account.
There’s potential for abuse here. An app developer can copy all the information that you expose to them and keep it forever, even if you de-authorize the app from access to the network later. Some questions that come to mind:
What will you do with the information I make available to your app?
Who will have access to it? For example, unless you pay LinkedIn big bucks you do not have access to every member’s information. But an app can (and in one case I’ve seen, does) expose every attendee’s LinkedIn profile to all other attendees.
For how long will you make that access available?
Will the app developer eventually destroy the information retrieved during the event?
What are the consequences if someone breaches the app’s security? Can the attacker take over the compromised social media accounts?
Clear answers to these questions are rarely given before you’ve (perhaps reluctantly) given the app permission to access your social media account(s).
Give participants a choice
In addition, some apps don’t give you a choice; you can only use them if you provide the app login via one of your social media networks. And if you want to share other social media IDs with attendees, e.g. your Twitter ID, you can’t just add the ID into a data field for your information but have to give the app access to your entire Twitter account.
I understand there are more stringent data protection standards in Europe, but the state of affairs I’ve described above is common in many of the U.S. apps I’ve seen.
There shouldn’t be privacy issues in meeting apps. I think it behooves app developers to provide clearer answers to these questions and allow us to opt-out of providing forced access to our social media accounts when we use a meeting app.
If your event had a mouth what would it say? In their brilliant book Into The Heart Of Meetings, Eric de Groot & Mike van der Vijver set out their process for formulating meeting objectives—a critical activity that, sadly, is glossed over by most meeting owners and planners. Instead of the usual approach of developing a dry meeting “brief”, Eric & Mike describe how they ask a meeting owner to talk about the “motion” of the meeting content:
“…could you try to visualize the content as some kind of physical substance? Imagine you could turn the content of your meeting into a material such as stone, water, rubber, sand, a bunch of plastic pipes, a fireball — anything…”
Once the meeting owner begins “to see the meeting content as physical matter, we give him a large sheet of paper and a fistful of coloured felt pens, and ask him to make a drawing of this content and the way it has to move”.
The book goes on to give explanations and examples of how this seemingly strange process successfully draws out the meeting owner’s fundamental ideas about what the meeting is to do. It works by providing a creative environment for the client’s underlying culture, assumptions, and desires to be uncovered and expressed.
If your venue had a mouth what would it say?
At the 2014 PCMA Convening Leaders conference I had the opportunity to witness a variant of this approach. Eric and I were talking about meeting design with “Thomas”, the manager of a North American conference center. Thomas was telling us about the challenges of positioning his venue to cater to a rapidly changing meetings market. After a few minutes of listening and discussion, Eric asked him:
“If your venue had a mouth what would it say?”
Thomas thought for a few seconds and said. “When you asked that, the image that came into my mind was that of a fairytale.” He paused. “It’s like there’s a little fairy sitting on your shoulder telling you what you need to hear.”
I’m sure that the image Thomas conjured up in response to Eric’s question surprised him. In a few seconds, he discovered and shared an evocative summation of how he saw his venue appearing to the world: a benevolent magical assistant appearing when needed to help achieve his clients’ meeting objectives. This led to a deeper discussion of steps Thomas could take to better align his operations with this vision.
The power of visualization techniques
As this example illustrates, visualization techniques provide extremely powerful methods for excavating key meeting objectives and underlying client desires. Vital information, of which the client may not even be consciously aware, arrives into the light of day.
There’s another big benefit. Such approaches supply valuable buy-in by the client to the final meeting design. As Eric & Mike explain:
“Conclusions…about what the programme is supposed to do with the content come from meetings’ owners drawings and they accept the consequences because they made the drawings themselves.”
Have you used visualization techniques to develop meeting designs? If so, what was your experience? If not, do you think they could be useful tools for working with your clients?
I’ve been a proponent of learning with others for many years. Here are a couple of examples of the advantages of cooperative work.
Neutrino physics
In the 1970’s I was an experimental elementary particle physicist. I was lucky enough to work on one of the most important physics experiments in the second half of the twentieth century. Labs in five countries were exploring the rare interactions of neutrinos in a huge bubble chamber at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. We had to view and hand-digitize millions of filmed particle tracks projected onto large white tables. Only a few of these images were expected to show the crucial events we were looking for. So it was vital that we didn’t miss anything important.
Gargamelle film scanning table
When you’re staring at hundreds of similar images for hours on end it’s easy to overlook something. So how did we minimize the chance of missing an infrequent crucial particle interaction?
The answer is surprisingly simple. Different staff scanned every set of film images at least twice on separate occasions. We then checked the set of information on each image to see if everyone agreed on what was going on. If they didn’t, other staff viewed the film again to discover who was right, thus catching missing information or interpretative errors. Statistical methods then allowed us to calculate how accurate each scan operator was, and even to predict the small likelihood that all viewers would miss something significant.
This approach allowed us to be confident of our ability to catch a few, very important particle interactions. The best evidence for our results—which provided the first confirmation that a Nobel Prize winning theory unifying two fundamental forces in nature was indeed correct—was based on finding just three examples.
Pair programming
Another example of how cooperative learning can create more reliable work is pair programming: a technique that became popular in the 1990’s for developing higher quality software. In pair programming, two programmers work together at one computer. One writes code while the other reviews the code, checking for errors and suggesting improvements. The two programmers switch roles frequently. Pair programming typically reduces coding errors, which are generally difficult and expensive to fix at a later stage, at the cost, sometimes, of an increase in programmer hours. Many software companies creating complex software find that the value of the increased quality is well worth any additional cost.
While these two examples of cooperative learning concentrate on reducing critical mistakes, it doesn’t take much of a leap to see that working together on a learning task may increase the accuracy and completeness of learning. As a bonus, the two (or more) learners involved receive an opportunity to get to know each other while they share an experience together. With the right design, there is little downside but much to gain from learning with others rather than alone.
What’s the relationship between conference size and “success”?
Here’s the beginning of a blog post by Seth Godin with every occurrence of the word “organization” replaced by the word “conference” and the word “traditional” added to the first sentence.
As a [traditional] conference succeeds, it gets bigger.
As it gets bigger, the average amount of passion and initiative of the conference goes down (more people gets you closer to average, which is another word for mediocre).
More people requires more formal communication, simple instructions to ensure consistent execution. It gets more and more difficult to say, “use your best judgment” and be able to count on the outcome.
Larger still means more bureaucracy, more people who manage and push for conformity, as opposed to do something new.
Success brings with it the fear of blowing it. With more to lose, there’s more pressure not to lose it.
Mix all these things together and you discover that going forward, each decision pushes the conference toward do-ability, reliability, risk-proofing and safety. —Seth Godin, Entropy, bureaucracy and the fight for great
I think it still works, don’t you?
Small is beautiful
Judging by their favorable evaluations, conferences that use the Conferences That Work format are highly successful. Yet they don’t grow significantly bigger, even though some of them have been held for years. Participants discover that effective intimate learning and connection that occurs requires a small event. The maximum number of attendees is capped. This ensures that the attractive conference environment isn’t lost by the consequences Seth describes.
I once spoke to a veteran of large medical conferences who bemoaned the time she had wasted attending such events. She told me that the talks were invariably on already-published work, with people presenting for status or tenure reasons. In addition, apart from the schwag and meeting a few old friends, she did not enjoy or find her attendance productive. She was looking forward to a much more rewarding experience from the small conference I was planning for her group.
Her comments are typical, in my experience. Unfortunately, people usually assume that the size of a conference is a metric of its “success”. From the point of view of organizers and presenters this is true: the bigger the conference, the more status you receive. But from the point of view of the customers of the conference—the attendees—after 40+ years of attending and organizing conferences it’s clear to me, both from my own experience and from that of hundreds of attendees I’ve spoken to, that, all other things being equal, smaller well-designed conferences beat the pants off huge events in terms of usefulness and relevance.
What do you think? What redeeming factors make larger conferences better? Are these factors more important than the learning and connection successes that smaller conferences provide?
The 2014 Business Travel News survey, based on data from Airlines Reporting Corp. (ARC) from 29 Travel Management Companies (TMCs), reports that though corporate hotel occupancy rates and rental car transaction days rose in 2013, processed airline ticket transactions remained at 2012 levels. While revenues and profits rose in all three markets, ARC transactions for the TMCs surveyed dropped 0.3%.
Unfortunately, there are still too many cosmetic conferences.
Please don’t call me a speaker. Yes, anyone who’s met me knows I like to talk. It’s true: I have been accused (justifiably at times) of talking too much. Yes, I get invited to “speak” at many events.
