"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
Although the report (to which I contributed in a minor way) concentrates on the German meetings industry, remember that Germany leads Europe as a meetings and convention destination, and is in second place worldwide after the USA as a destination for all meetings and conventions.
The global meetings megatrends report includes three future scenarios constructed around the themes of Architecture, Knowledge Transfer, and Technology, a summary of eighteen study future outcomes, and a description of the methodology used.
November 11, 2005, flying home from a Phoenix conference
The flight attendant didn’t hand me the cup of ice water but put it directly on my tray. As it left her fingers it slid smoothly across the slate blue surface, towards my lap. Simultaneously puzzled and anxious, I reacted instinctively, grabbing the cup an inch from the tray edge. A spill averted, I let go for a fraction of a second, and the cup started to slide again. Fascinated, I flicked the cup lightly with my fingers and found I could control its glide with the lightest of touch.
For a minute I played with my cup as a child, delighted by a mystery I did not understand.
Mystery and play!
Then a moment came when my inner scientist moved into consciousness and asked: “What is going on?”
I lifted the cup, and the mystery collapsed into understanding.
Under the base was stuck a tiny chip of ice.
I put the cup back down on the tray and played some more. But within twenty seconds the ice melted and the cup became ordinary, unmoving. My pants were safe from a spill, but the world had shrunk back to the normal, expected.
But for a minute, my fragile worldview that there are reasons why things happen, even if we don’t know what they are, disappeared. I played in a space of suspended belief.
And a tiny slice of wonder made my life a little richer.
Mystery and play, and the suspension of belief.
Photo attribution: Flickr user ineffablepulchritude
At every event I’ve ever attended, tap water has been free while bottled water usually costs money. Which leads to my Wi-Fi manifesto. I propose that organizers supply Wi-Fi like water at events.
These days, event Wi-Fi is a utility. People need a Wi-Fi connection, even when they are physically together in the same space. I know that providing Wi-Fi costs money—but so does providing water.
I believe that event organizers should, at a minimum, provide base level rate limited free Wi-Fi throughout the meeting spaces of the venue, plus an optional paid higher-performance tier of service.
The free Wi-Fi would be rate limited to somewhere in the region of 100-300kB/sec per device, irrespective of the number of devices each attendee brought. The paid tier would provide a higher bandwidth, appropriate to attendee needs.
“…for a 250-room hotel, the cost is about $2.50-$4.50 per room, per month.”
This infographic breaks down the costs, which work out to 10-15 cents a day. That’s $20-30/day for an event with 200 attendees. (At this point you may be wondering why some hotels charge $14.95/day for internet access per device. This is called “making money hand over fist”.)
None of this is hard anymore
Rate limiting internet bandwidth for individual users is simple due to the incorporation of Quality of Service (QoS) policies in modern inexpensive routers and access points. You don’t even need two sets of access points for different bandwidth tiers; you can support multiple discrete Wi-Fi networks (VLANs) on a single access point. Finally, ramping up bandwidth and reliability for high-demand events is now relatively straightforward because most systems support bandwidth aggregation, allowing multiple internet service providers to seamlessly provide bandwidth from more than one circuit.
Attendees don’t expect events to provide high bandwidth internet access for free (though they’ll love you if you do). But, like a tap to fill your water bottle, bandwidth that’s sufficient for basic tasks like checking email, interacting on social media and light web browsing should be available for free at every event.
Like Water for Chocolate Wi-Fi. That’s my manifesto.
Want to join me—or am I dreaming? What do you think?
“The W.K. Kellogg Foundation is a relationship-based and an event-based organization. We love to bring our grantees together so they can learn, network, and share best practices.” — Sterling Speirn, President and CEO, W.K. Kellogg Foundation
Published in 2013, this report is just as relevbant today. You can download for free the beautifully designed Convenings 2.0 report (click on the report cover above). Convenings 2.0 describes a wealth of thoughtful approaches, proposals, and standards for meetings hosted by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation for its grantees. Containing extensive research by Carol and Mike Galle, and Sharon McMurray of Special D Events, I believe this document deserves wide circulation to associations, foundations, and event and association professionals.
Thirty-five subject matter expert contributors from foundations, the meeting industry, and adult learning/academia contributed to the report, including my friends and colleagues Mitchell Beer, Michelle Bruno, Sandy Heierbacher, Carolyn Ray, Maarten Vanneste, and myself. The bibliography includes books and reports by Joan Eisenstodt, Jackie Mulligan, Maarten, myself, and many others.
The report scope includes meeting and event logistics, knowledge management, integrated communications, technology, foundation considerations, design and execution, communication and branding, a set of twenty-one recommendations, and an outline of design, execution, and evaluation process, with an appendix covering adult learning theory and its application to meetings and a glossary. Apposite quotes are sprinkled throughout the fifty-two pages.
There’s something for everyone here, folks. It’s well worth reading!
Here’s a magical question to ask when someone says “I don’t know“.
I don’t know
One of the most common answers to a question is I don’t know. (I’m not saying it’s especially common, just more common than “cheddar”, “42”, and “in the second drawer on the left”.) Generally, I don’t know is a good answer because it’s likely to be an honest one. After all, it’s when someone confidently answers a question about which they really haven’t a clue that all kinds of trouble can follow.
But occasionally someone—let’s call him Paul—answers with I don’t know after a pause, perhaps in a hesitant manner, that makes you wonder if perhaps he does have an interesting answer “at the back of his mind”. Here’s a magical follow-up question that often leads to a more specific, useful response.
Let’s suppose that a specific problem has been identified and described by Paul and you ask him:
“What would the solution look like?”
Paul, after a pause, says hesitantly:
“I don’t know.”
Here’s the magical follow-up question, asked in an even tone:
“If you did know, what do you think the solution would look like?”
Now stay quiet and wait for an answer.
You may get another, puzzled, I don’t know, but more often than not, this reframing of your original question will evoke a specific answer to your question.
Why does this work?
I’m not a psychologist, but I believe that this follow-up question works because we don’t consciously know everything we know. The “if you did know” addition gives Paul temporary permission to ignore his stated lack of knowledge and potentially tap his experience and expertise at an unconscious level.
Note that if Paul appears confident that he doesn’t know, this is not the right question to ask. Also, if you have a hunch that the magical question might work, don’t ask it in a condescending way, i.e. implying that you know Paul knows the answer but he doesn’t.
I’ve used this magical question judiciously with good results. Have you? How did it work out? Share your experience in the comments!
How do you facilitate change? In this occasional series, we explore various aspects of facilitating individual and group change.
An Elementary Meeting has a specific name and consists of an obligatory, tacitly agreed series of actions performed by those taking part in the meeting. It usually originates in a specific national culture.
Some examples of Elementary Meetings are weddings, court trials, Christmas dinners, autopsies, parties, and conversations.
You may be thinking: “What on earth have these got to do with creating an environment for participation at meetings?”
Eric & Mike explain that the power of Elementary Meetings is that they include a set of conventions and behaviors familiar to all participants. We’ve all held conversations, been to parties, and eaten holiday meals, and even if we haven’t attended a trial or an autopsy we’ve probably seen them enacted on TV or in the movies. If it’s possible to map the form of a professional meeting onto the form of an Elementary Meeting we can create an event where attendees possess a common underlying knowledge and/or experience of its components and flow.
Here are three examples of the power of this approach.
1) A wedding
Suppose a client asks you to design an event to prepare the workers of two companies that are about to merge. Merging two organizational cultures is generally a difficult task; two examples are the history of the AOL/Time Warner and the Chrysler/Daimler-Benz mergers. Most of us do not have direct experience of corporate mergers. But we are familiar with what happens at a wedding—a ceremony about the merging of two people’s lives! Making this connection suggests modeling the corporate merger event on the marriage process. This could include how the couple (of companies) met, “courted”, and got “engaged”. Other marriage components suggest themselves: “stag nights” before the wedding, rehearsal dinners, etc., culminating in the actual “wedding” of the two companies. In their book, Mike & Eric recount how they used this particular Elementary Meeting model for a successful company merger.
Notice how the wedding metaphor brings up all kinds of creative ideas for event process. Not only that, but any of the appropriated matching processes will be familiar and relatively comfortable to participants due to their existing knowledge of what the Elementary Meeting routinely entails.
2) A conversation
How would you design an internal corporate event to announce major changes at a company? Change is rarely easy, so you’ll expect a host of questions and potentially some confrontation. The likely first thought of most meeting professionals would be to use a standard presentation set-up: employees sitting in theater seating facing management making presentations on a stage at the front of the room. But here’s how Eric and Mike describe the message such a setup sends:
“Having management on the stage in the floodlight and the employees as spectators sitting in the auditorium in darkness carries a powerful message. The message is this: the employees are a passive audience of what the management wants to put across; there is a gap between management and the rest of the company and the employees are kept in the dark. The participants would feel this in an instant. It is not a message that is transmitted through words; it is transmitted through the experience they have when entering the theatre and the lights go out. They undergo a physical experience that tells them: you are mere onlookers, the important people are up there on stage. In fact, the gap is clearly visible, you can see it because there is an open space between the front row and the stage.”
What Eric & Mike came up with
Instead, what if we used a conversation as the Elementary Meeting starting point for the event design?
“All 450 employees were seated on the stage, in two groups facing each other. This made them actors in their own play. Centre stage stood a small pedestal, with a camera mounted on it. It worked as a whiteboard. Everything that was written on it was projected directly onto big screens, visible for everyone. Those who spoke stood in the middle, between the two stands. Meanwhile, each participant was constantly facing a whole bunch of people, namely their colleagues. This gave an instant feeling of ‘us’; having a conversation amongst ourselves.”
See how the simple metaphor of a conversation changed the dynamic environment for this event?
3) Saying goodbye
You can even use the Elementary Meeting metaphor to design a single session. In this final example, Mike and Eric describe the end of a seminar using a sports-based Elementary Meeting, namely the ritual used at the start of a hockey game:
“…the facilitator instructs participants to arrange themselves in two rows opposite each other, like ice hockey players before a match. They find themselves standing in pairs, one in front of the other. When he signals they shake hands, express a brief wish, and then step sideways to meet the next person. In just a couple of minutes, all of the 64 participants have exchanged a meaningful goodbye.”
Powerful metaphors
As you can see, when designing an event it’s worth investigating whether there’s an Elementary Meeting that will provide a familiar format for the entire meeting or a portion of it. Mike and Eric’s book is well worth reading for more examples of how to create breakthrough meeting designs, as well as a host of other fresh and innovative ideas about meeting design.
I like this idea! Walking potential attendees through the flow of the event helps to clarify and demystify conference process. (Especially if people haven’t attended an event format like Conferences That Work before.) Want to try to market your conference with an annotated schedule? Here’s an example of what you can do, written for the October 2013 1st Annual Vermont Leadership Network Conference.
Want to better understand what will be happening at the 1st Annual Vermont Leadership Network Conference? Here’s an annotated schedule!
[Note: Some details are omitted here! For more information, visit About Peer Conferences.]
Thursday, October 17, 2013
Registration will be open between noon and 2 p.m.
At 2 pm, after a brief welcome and an explanation of conference ground rules, we’ll start with The Three Questions. The Three Questions provides a structured, safe way for you to learn about other participants early in the conference. During The Three Questions, you’ll:
discover topics of interest to explore;
get a sense of the depth of interest in these topics; and
find out who has experience and expertise that you want to connect with and explore further.
We’ll include frequent breaks and refreshments during the roundtable, ending around 4:30 p.m.
After an hour break, we’ll hold peer session sign-up during dinner. In peer session sign-up we’ll visually document our wishes and suggestions for the upcoming conference sessions. Then, we’ll determine which of the suggested peer session topics are popular and schedule the chosen sessions into a conference program. This is a short process that will be held during the dinner and subsequent socializing, with a small group subsequently using the resulting information to create Friday’s program. The result will be a Friday conference schedule that optimally matches desired topics with the resources of the group.
Friday, October 18
We’ll have time for four sets of (usually) one-hour concurrent sessions on Friday, with breaks between each and lunch served between sessions 3 and 4.
What might these sessions look like? They are typically informal: often facilitated discussions, presentations, panels, workshops, walks, etc. As an example, five years ago the class of ’08 used this conference format for a reunion—here are the topics that were chosen (8 sessions in concurrent pairs):
Fun and team camaraderie in the workplace • Fundraising • The political process – running for office • The systematic development of informed consent • Am I doing what I want to be doing? • Technology – social networking & other applications • Getting Things Done • Appreciative Inquiry
Closing sessions
At 2:40 pm we’ll end with two facilitated closing sessions, a personal introspective and a group spective.
The personal introspective will give you a structured opportunity to think about what you have experienced at the conference, how your experiences may impact your life in the future, and what changes you may want to make as a result. After reflection, you’ll then have an opportunity to share your answers in small groups.
After a break, a group spective will start at 3:50 pm. The group spective will provide facilitated time for participants as a group to evaluate the conference. We’ll also suggest and begin to develop future initiatives for Vermont Leadership and the Snelling Center. We’ll use a variety of techniques to do this.
The conference will end at 5 p.m. All are welcome to stay and socialize with their classmates and new friends at a reception hosted by the Snelling Center immediately following the conference.
As you can see, participation on Thursday will make a big difference to your conference experience and your influence on its form and content. Please attend the whole event if at all possible!
Outline of the conference schedule
To summarize, here’s the outline of the conference schedule for Thursday and Friday.
Thursday, October 17, 2013
12:00 PM – 02:00 PM
Registration
02:00 PM – 02:10 PM
Welcome
02:10 PM – 03:10 PM
The Three Questions
03:10 PM – 03:30 PM
Break
03:30 PM – 04:30 PM
The Three Questions continued
05:30 PM – 07:00 PM
Dinner and peer session sign-up
07:00 PM –
Informal chat, socializing, music, etc.
Friday, October 18
08:30 AM – 08:40 AM
Morning news
08:40 AM – 09:40 AM
Peer session 1
09:40 AM – 09:50 AM
Break
09:50 AM – 10:50 AM
Peer session 2
10:50 AM – 11:05 AM
Break
11:05 AM – 12:05 AM
Peer session 3
12:15 PM – 01:30 PM
Lunch
01:30 PM – 02:30 PM
Peer session 4
02:30 PM – 02:40 PM
Break
02:40 PM – 03:40 PM
Personal introspective
03:40 PM – 03:50 PM
Break
03:50 PM – 05:00 PM
Group spective
05:00 PM –
Optional: class reunions, etc.
Notice that I’ve added a regular schedule at the end of the annotation, so attendees can still easily see when all sessions take place.
I like this way of marketing your conference with an annotated schedule. Familiarizing people with something different in advance is a great way of reducing the common resistance to trying something new. Thanks for the suggestion, Judy!
Another issue of an occasional series—Dear Adrian—in which I answer questions sent to me about event design, elementary particle physics, solar hot water systems, and anything else I might conceivably know something about. If you have a question you’d like me to answer, please write to me (don’t worry, I won’t publish anything without your permission).
Q.Dear Adrian,
Forgive me if this is something you have been asked a million times before (and maybe you could point me to the page on your website which gives the answer, although I couldn’t find it.)
How do you market a new peer conference?
I can see that the peer conference structure can work for groups that have already been meeting for many years, for example, industry association meetings, and people are looking for a better format.
But I think it would be very hard to get people to have enough confidence in a new peer conference without anything to show them about what is going to happen there (except possibly a list of other delegates, if it was possible to get anyone to sign up to a conference where the agenda was a blank sheet of paper).
The standard way to market conferences as you know is to try to attract some relevant interesting sounding speakers, and use the speakers names in the marketing – but that forces the structure into the standard 30 minute powerpoint format.
Do you have any examples of where someone has developed a new peer conference as a commercial business?
Great questions—no need to apologize! People often ask me about how to market peer conferences, and your request has an interesting focus.
Most of my consulting clients want help with conference redesign—making established traditional events more peer-driven and participation- and connection-rich. Actually, it’s often easier to create a new peer conference than to change the format of an existing conventional event. Changing something that already exists is often harder than starting from scratch.
I’m not saying that it’s simple to market a new peer conference. As you point out, people are accustomed to seeing a pre-determined schedule of conference sessions and speakers. This influences their decision on whether to attend. (I cover this “program trap” in Chapter 4 of Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love.) Many wonder a) how you can create a great conference program at the event and b) how good the resulting conference will be. Your marketing has to address these concerns.
In my experience, there’s an essential prerequisite for a new peer conference to get off the ground: a core group of organizers who understand and believe in peer process (ideally, but not necessarily, through experience) and who are committed and prepared to proselytize the envisaged event to their professional circles. My rule of thumb is that this group should contain at least five people.
Once you have your core group in place, your marketing should feature the peer conference format without going into all the details. Intrigue potential attendees, especially those tired of traditional conferences, and talk up the proven nature of the design. Here’s an example of what you might say:
Have you attended a conference about TOPIC recently? Then you probably sat in room after room with scores of other attendees listening to outside experts talk about topics that weren’t quite what you were interested in. You were sure there were some interesting people to talk to, people who had the same questions you did (and maybe even some answers)—but how could you find who they were and meet them among the swirling crowds? Did you come away frustrated, feeling that only a small portion of the time you attended was valuable to you?
If so, you’re not alone.
INNOVCONF is different.
INNOVCONF is an out of the box conference experience that replaces highly scripted events, calls for papers, pre-determined workshops, keynote speakers, networking receptions, etc. We use the proven Conferences That Work design to create a conference that adapts to meet your needs, leverages the combined expertise and experience of all participants, and provides unique opportunities to discover, connect, share, and learn with the peers you want to meet.
Our conference format is participant-driven and participation-rich. The attendees themselves—DESCRIPTION OF TARGET ATTENDEES—will determine the conference’s agenda, presenters, session format, focus, and results during the first afternoon of INNOVCONF. (To learn more, visit conferencesthatwork.com.)
The goals of INNOVCONF are simple. Create the best possible conference for each individual attendee. Maximize participant interaction and connectedness. Strengthen our community. And explore future group initiatives. Sounds good? Then register today to join your peers at this innovative event!
To answer your last question, until I published my 2009 book I was the only person creating peer conferences. So it’s still early to expect many examples of established pure Conferences That Work format peer conferences “as a commercial business”. In addition, many current peer conferences are not commercial meetings-for-profit ventures. Instead, they create effective ways to bring a professional or vocational community together. Fees and budget are set to cover costs and make a modest profit.
What people have started to do is to use the Conferences That Work format in conjunction with traditional general sessions to create what I called in the book a hybrid event. (Unfortunately, since publishing, “hybrid” has come to mean an event that has face-to-face and online components). The marketing of these events often plays up the big names invited. However, the formats themselves contain significant peer conference elements. Three examples are FinCon: A peer conference for the financial blogging community, the Swiss Caux Conferences, and the Renaissance Weekends.
Karl, I hope this is useful. I’d love to hear more about your potential conference. If there’s anything I can do to assist you, please let me know.
In American schools, the first experience of public speaking is typically Show and Tell. A child stands in front of the room with something brought from home and tells their classmates about it. The child gains experience and confidence in addressing a group and provides entertainment to the classroom audience. Everyone quickly forgets the details of the monster truck except the presenter.
Many conference sessions follow this same format. A presenter imparts information by showing and telling to an audience. A “good” presenter may entertain people, but research shows that much of what is learned during the session is quickly forgotten.
So, how can we learn better? It turns out that the more multi-sensory our environment becomes the more our ability to learn improves. This requires us to become active participants in our learning. If the child passes around the monster truck for other children to touch and explore, their memory of it will be more accurate, more detailed, and longer lasting. If everyone gets to play with the truck for a while, they will learn even more.
We can improve the learning in our conference sessions in a similar way. If adults are to effectively learn new ideas—and this doesn’t just include rote learning but also understanding the ideas—they need to actively discuss the ideas and answer questions about them. When two people discuss a topic, research indicates that the current speaker makes the greatest cognitive gains. This occurs because 1) speaking provides the opportunity for tacit knowledge to become conscious, and 2) articulating ideas activates more of the brain than listening.
Three ways to do rather than show and tell
One simple technique to create active discussion at a conference session is pair-share. When pair-share is happening, half the audience is explaining their ideas to the other half. As each speaker and listener swap roles, everyone in the room gets to actively process the session’s content. This is far superior to the typical question-and-answer session at the end of a presentation, which provides little or no opportunity for most of the audience to take part.
Another example is LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®, a method for getting people to “think through their fingers”. This tactile interactive process uses working with Lego® to quickly move small groups of people into sharing and learning through creative problem-solving.
A final example: my favorite conference sessions to facilitate are experiential workshops that involve participants working together throughout, experiencing new techniques or solving problems as a group rather than as individuals. The high level of activity provides a fertile environment for learning through doing, rather than by listening or watching.
All other things being equal, when we do, we learn better than when we’re shown or told. If you want your attendees to learn more effectively, you’ll need to incorporate more “doing” into your conference sessions.
My next book includes a large number of participatory techniques that you can use to maximize learning, connection, engagement, and community building at any event. Sign up to be informed when it’s published!
Here are some thoughts after spending a couple of hours reviewing participant post-event evaluations of the annual edACCESS conference.
I don’t know any meeting planners who especially enjoy creating, soliciting, and analyzing conference evaluations. It’s tempting to see them as a necessary evil, a checklist item to be completed so you can show you’ve attempted to obtain attendee feedback. Clients are often unclear about their desired evaluation learning outcomes, which doesn’t make the task any easier. After the event you’re usually exhausted, so it’s hard to summon the energy to delve into detailed analysis. And response rates are typically low, so who knows whether the answers you receive are representative anyway?
Given all this, how important are conference evaluations? I think they’re very important—if you design them well, work hard to get a good response rate, learn from them, and integrate what you’ve learned into improving your next event. Here are four important truths about conference evaluations, illustrated via my edACCESS post-conference evaluation review:
1) Conference evaluations provide vital information for improvement
We’ve held 30 edACCESS annual conferences. You’d think that maybe by now we have a tried and true conference design and implementation down cold. Not so! Even after 29 years, we continue to improve an already stellar event (“stellar” based on—what else?—many years of great participant evaluations). And the post-event evaluations are a key part of our continual process improvement. How do we do this?
We think about what we want to learn about participants’ experience and design an evaluation that provides us the information we need. Besides the usual evaluation questions that rate every session and ask general information about event logistics, we ask a number of additional questions that zero in on the good and bad aspects of the conference experience. We also ask first-time attendees a few additional questions to learn about their experience joining our conference community.
We provide a detailed report of post-conference evaluations to the entire edACCESS community—not only the current year’s participants but also anyone who has ever attended one of our conferences and/or joined our listserv. The responses are anonymized and include rating summaries, every individual comment on every session, and all comments on a host of conference questions.
Providing this kind of transparency is a powerful way to build a better conference and an engaged conference community. Sharing participants’ perceptions of the good, the bad, and the ugly of your event says a lot about your willingness to listen, and makes it easy for everyone to see the variety of viewpoints about event perceptions (see below).
The conference organizers review the evaluations and agree on changes to be implemented at the next conference. Some of the changes are significant: changing the length of the event, replacing some plenaries with breakouts, etc., while some are minor process or logistical tweaks that improve the conference experience in small but significant ways.
Evaluations often contain interesting and creative ideas that the steering committee likes and decides to implement. All major changes are considered experiments rather than permanent, to be reviewed after the next event, and are announced to the community well in advance.
We evaluate our evaluations. Are we asking a question that gets few responses or vague answers that don’t provide much useful information? If so, perhaps we should rephrase it, tighten it up, or remove the question altogether. Are there things we’d like to know that we’re not learning from the evaluation? Let’s craft a question or two that will give us some answers.
Using the above process yields fresh feedback and ideas that help us make each succeeding conference better.
One final point. Even if you’re running a one-off event, participant evaluations will invariably help you improve your execution of future events. So, don’t skip evaluations for one-time events—they offer you a great opportunity to upgrade your implementation skills. And, who knows, perhaps that one-off event will turn into an annual engagement!
“Were these people really at the same event?” Most meeting organizers have had the experience of reading wildly different evaluations of the same session or conference. While edACCESS 2013 evaluations don’t supply great examples of this, I always scan the answers to questions about the most and least useful session topics.
What I want to see is a wide variety of answers that cover most or all of the sessions. Because edACCESS is a peer conference with (at most) one conventional plenary session, I see such answers as reflecting the broad range of participant interests at the event. It’s good to know that most if not all of the chosen sessions satisfied the needs of some attendees. If many people found a specific session the least useful, that’s good information to have for future events, though it’s important to review this session’s evaluations to discover why it was unpopular.
What’s equally important is to share the diversity of the answers to these questions with participants. When people understand that a session they disliked was found to be useful by other participants, you’re less likely to need to field strident but minority calls for change—and have information to judge such requests if they do occur.
3) Dealing with unpleasant truths will strengthen your event
edACCESS evaluations contain many appreciations and positive comments on the conference format and how we run it. Sometimes, there are also a few anonymous comments that are less than flattering about an aspect of my facilitation style.
Even if the latter express a minority opinion, I work to improve from the feedback I receive. I plan to check in with the event organizing committee to get their take on the feedback. I’ll ask for suggestions on whether/how to make it less of an issue in the future without compromising the event.
Facing and learning from criticism is hard. The first response to criticism of anyone who is trying to do a good job is usually defensive. But when we confront unpleasant truths, plan to better understand them, and follow through we lay the ground for making our event and our contributions to it better.
4) Public evaluation during the conference augments post-event evaluations
While it’s still rare at traditional conferences to spend time evaluating the event face-to-face, I include such a session—the Group Spective—at the close of all Conferences That Work. I strongly recommend a closing conference session that includes facilitated public discussion of the conference covering topics like What worked? What can we improve? What initiatives might we want to explore? and Next steps.
It’s always interesting to compare the initiatives brought up by this session with suggestions contained in the post-event evaluations. You’ll find ideas triggered by the discussion during the spective that may appear or may be absent from the evaluations. The spective informs and augments post-event evaluations. Some of the ideas expressed will lead to future initiatives for the community or new directions for the conference.
What experience do you have with conference evaluations, either as a respondent or a designer? What other truths have you learned about conference evaluations?
