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"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

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Comfort, cost, and…casters? Better chairs for your conference

Monday, June 24th, 2013 by Adrian Segar

Can we make better conference chairs?

Better conference chairs Node chair by Steelcase — Steelcase’s Node chair, photographed at edACCESS 2013

Ask meeting attendees what’s most important about the chairs they sit in at an event and they’ll inevitably say they should be comfortable.

Ask meeting venues what’s most important about the seating they choose and they’ll probably say cost (though stackable and lightweight will be mentioned too).

If you ask meeting designers like me…what would we say?

A head-turning moment

In 2013 I facilitated the world’s oldest peer conference: the four-day edACCESS annual conference that’s been running since 1992. The conference always includes a small tradeshow, and that year Steelcase was there.

Steelcase is an interesting and unusual company. After a hundred years in business, it’s the world’s largest manufacturer of office furniture. Rather than resting on their laurels, the company’s management is continually looking for genuinely useful and innovative ways to improve business environments. As an illustration, take a look at the Steelcase blog, which is written by top management rather than junior PR staff.

Steelcase wanted to show several lines of products designed for educational environments at edACCESS 2013. That’s where I discovered their Node chair, designed by IDEO and pictured above. I first noticed and liked the tripod storage platform under the chair—a great place to store bags and backpacks off the floor. But then I saw the chair had casters. And when I sat in it, I found out that the seat swiveled. “So what?” you may ask. Read on!

Moveable chairs

Adjustable office chairs were invented in the 1850s and became common in offices during the 1940s. While office workers have long enjoyed the benefits of these chairs, they are rarely seen in conference settings. A quick web search for meeting chairs turns up hundreds of images of rigid plastic stackable chairs that attendees have uncomfortably endured for years.

Why are chairs like the Node important? Because effective meetings require, encourage, and support participation. Participative formats require attendees to:

Follow activities occurring around the room; and
Move between alternative seating formats.

When you’re sitting in a traditional conference chair, you face the front of the room and can only look elsewhere by turning your head and body as much as your chair allows. Looking anywhere but straight ahead becomes uncomfortable after a few minutes (see Paul Radde’s Seating Matters: State of the Art Seating Arrangements for more information on this). A swiveling chair like the Node makes such shifts of attention easy.

Swiveling makes conference chairs better.

A chair with casters allows participants to quickly move between seating sets. For example, a session might start with a ten-minute presentation, with chairs facing the presenter, and then require small group discussions. Attendees can scoot their chairs into the right formation; no standing or lifting is required. The Node makes this safe by having a tripod construction with a wide base of support, unlike standard office chairs that can tip fairly easily if moved too quickly.

Room to move

“You gotta give me
‘Cause I can’t give the best
Unless I got room to move”
—John Mayall

While the Node chair gives participants “room to move,” it’s not perfect from a venue’s standpoint. There’s no way to stack Nodes, and their unit cost of $600+ will make most venues’ financial managers blanch. But this kind of seating is what we need if we’re going to transition at our events from the outdated lecture formats of the past to the interactive, engaging, connection-making, community-building conferences of the future, and I salute Steelcase for having the vision and the commitment to improve seating options for the education and meetings markets.

[Disclosure: I contributed research, together with Steelcase, to a 2011 White Paper published by the National Conference Center: The Future of The Meetings Industry: Why Certain Conference Innovators Are Winning. I did not receive any remuneration for this work and have no other connection with Steelcase.]

Tags: casters, chairs, comfort, participation, seating, Steelcase, swivel| Posted in Event design | 8 Comments »

Are your meeting evaluations reliable?

Monday, June 17th, 2013 by Adrian Segar

Are your meeting evaluations reliable? Can the way we evaluate meetings change how participants view their experience? Possibly, given the findings of research reported in the June 2013 Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. The study indicates that when we ask people for their reasons to justify their choices, they focus on aspects that are easy to verbalize. This can distort their overall judgment. Here’s Tom Stafford‘s description of the experiment.

An experiment

Participants were asked to evaluate five posters of the kind that students might put up in their bedrooms. Two of the posters were of art – one was Monet’s water lilies, the other Van Gogh’s irises. The other three posters were a cartoon of animals in a balloon and two posters of photographs of cats with funny captions.

All the students had to evaluate the posters, but half the participants were asked to provide reasons for liking or disliking them. (The other half were asked why they chose their degree subject as a control condition.) After they had provided their evaluations the participants were allowed to choose a poster to take home.

What happened?

So what happened? The control group rated the art posters positively (an average score of around 7 out of 9) and they felt pretty neutral about the humorous posters (an average score of around 4 out of 9). When given a choice of one poster to take home, 95% of them chose one of the art posters. No surprises there, the experimenters had already established that in general most students preferred the art posters.

But the group of students who had to give reasons for their feelings acted differently. This “reasons” group liked the art posters less (averaging about 6 out of 9) and the humorous posters more (about 5 to 6 out of 9). Most of them still chose an art poster to take home, but it was a far lower proportion – 64% – than the control group. That means people in this group were about seven times more likely to take a humorous poster home compared with the control group.

The twist

Here’s the twist. Some time after the tests, at the end of the semester, the researchers rang each of the participants and asked them questions about the poster they’d chosen: Had they put it up in their room? Did they still have it? How did they feel about it? How much would they be willing to sell it for? The “reasons” group were less likely to have put their poster up, less likely to have kept it up, less satisfied with it on average and were willing to part with it for a smaller average amount than the control group. Over time their reasons and feelings had shifted back in line with those of the control group – they didn’t like the humorous posters they had taken home, and so were less happy about their choice.
—Tom Stafford, When giving reasons leads to worse decisions

Implications for event evaluations

What might this imply for event evaluations? When asked to give our reasons why we evaluated an event a certain way, this research indicates that we’re likely to focus on reasons that are easy to express. Ever noticed in your event evaluations that attendees’ opinions about food and accommodations are often far more detailed than what they write about specific sessions or the event as a whole? It’s much easier to express an opinion about the former than the latter, and that’s OK in itself. What should concern us, though, is that evaluations themselves, by focusing on the easily quantifiable, may bias how participants perceive our event’s value.

In other words, your meeting evaluations may not be reliable because attendees tend to give easy feedback. One way to minimize this is to focus questions on the more intangible aspects of the event experience.

Perceived value is an important component of event Return On Investment (ROI). I’ve mused about Return On Investment (ROI) for social media (I’m skeptical about measuring it) and participant-driven events (I believe they improve ROI). How might this research affect the calculation of meeting ROI?

Tags: evaluations, psychology, ROI, value| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

Two ways to make conferences better

Monday, June 10th, 2013 by Adrian Segar

How can we make conferences better? Samantha Whitehorn of ASAE’s Associations Now recently wrote an interesting article on new staff roles for meetings and events and I’ve picked out two of her suggestions to comment on:

Attendee Concierge

“Full disclosure: I pretty much stole this one from our June Associations Now cover story about Terry Fong, member concierge for the California Dental Association, who calls 1,000 new members each year to welcome them and ask, “Is there anything we can do for you?”

What if you had a staffer call all new attendees after your meetings and ask them what they liked most and least about the meeting and what else you could be doing to get them to register for the meeting again?

You could also use a similar role onsite and assign new attendees to attendee concierges—in this case, maybe extra staff or member volunteers—and have them check-in with attendees throughout the meeting and then follow-up after.”
—Samantha

I think it’s crucial to check in with attendees during an event. This is something that I’ve done for years—and it’s easy to do. I like to concentrate on attendees I don’t know (the ones I do are probably going to bend my ear anyway) and ask how the event is going for them. And listen. Do this and you’ll get tons of good in-the-moment feedback, build goodwill and relationships with the people you talk to, and get occasional opportunities to answer questions and solve problems they mention while the event’s still going on, rather than having to wait until next year. Don’t just ask new attendees, by the way; returning attendees can have equally valuable feedback for you. And take notes promptly so what you hear doesn’t evaporate from your brain from the conference heat.

Conference Connector

“I’ve blogged before about how the association education model needs an overhaul where the focus is put more on attendees learning and connecting with one another rather than just speakers on a stage or in front of a room.

At ASAE’s 2013 Great Ideas Conference, Thom Singer, served as “Conference Catalyst.” Over the course of the meeting, he gave attendees networking tips and helped them to engage and connect with one another. And at the California Society of Association Executives’ Annual Conference in April, Jeff Hurt served in a similar role, helping attendees keep the conversation and learning going between sessions and during lunch by having organized chats about what they recently learned.

What if you had a full-time staff person who helped form these small-group discussions to not only help members engage but also to help process and remember what they learned in the larger sessions?”
—Samantha

Thom and Jeff are doing great work around this important topic. But rather than simply adding opportunities for connection piecemeal into our events we can make conferences even better. We can build opportunities for meaningful connections right into our entire event design. This means that we need to adopt meeting and session formats throughout our events. Formats that facilitate effective participation, connection, and engagement in the sessions themselves. We’ve known for years that the learning and connections that occur when we do this are far superior to what happens at traditional meetings. This is not rocket science—I’ve been designing and facilitating meetings like this for over twenty years. Participants love them. And more and more of them are taking place, all over the world. Let’s do this!

Photo attribution: Flickr user michigancommunities

Tags: alternative conference formats, ASAE, associations, concierge, conference formats, connections, innovative conference formats, session formats| Posted in Event design | 7 Comments »

Conferences That Work spotlight—Community Jam Northern California Harvesting/Gleaning Conference

Wednesday, June 5th, 2013 by Adrian Segar

This is the first post in an occasional series spotlighting conferences using the Conferences That Work format. If you are planning such a conference, please contact me—perhaps you’ll be featured here too! Here’s a description of the Community Jam Northern California Harvesting/Gleaning Conference.

We’ve got to the point where people are holding Conferences That Work all over the world. I often don’t learn about them until they’re over—sometimes years later. People buy the book and use it as their guide to create their own events. That’s fine by the way; I love how this approach to participant-driven events has spread and taken a life of its own. And I’m proud that the book is comprehensive enough to allow readers to create, market, and run a successful participant-led and participation-rich event. As a result, Conferences That Work is being adopted as a textbook by college event management programs.

Sometimes I get advanced knowledge of an upcoming conference (and when I do I happily add it to my conference calendar). So I thought it might be interesting to occasionally spotlight examples of these conferences that I hear about. Here’s one!

Community Jam Northern California Harvesting/Gleaning Conference — Saturday, June 8, 2013, San Jose, CA

Village Harvest is a nonprofit volunteer organization in Northern California that harvests extra fruit from backyards and small orchards. They pass on the fruit to local food agencies to feed the hungry in the community. Since its founding in 2001, volunteers have harvested a total of 3.8 million servings of nutritious fruit. Village Harvest has become one of the oldest and largest organizations of this type in the world.

Early in 2013, the founders decided to organize a Community Jam regional conference for Northern California harvesting/gleaning organizations. Although the event focused on organizations within a 2-hour drive of the San Jose venue, the organizers discovered that many peer organizations outside their region wanted to attend. As I write this, Community Jam has 56 registrants from 24 different organizations ranging from Salem, OR to Los Angeles.

The Community Jam conference modified slightly the single-day Conferences That Work format. With only seven hours together, Chapter 16’s model schedule is simplified and shortened from its original 8 1/2 hour length. The conference committee decided to shorten the roundtable sharing time and eliminate the first of the Three Questions, use dot voting for the peer session sign-up instead of the usual more comprehensive process, and reduce the length of the closing group spective. By cutting breaks to a minimum, they have squeezed in a fourth round of peer sessions.

Although I’m not generally a fan of minimizing breaks at conferences, you can often get away with this at a one-day Conferences That Work event because most people are able to maintain a high level of involvement during a full day of interesting experiences. Still, this event will be a bit of a rush—with the rush, hopefully, also expressed via the energy and enthusiasm shared at the event.

Posted in Conference Spotlight | No Comments »

Do great speakers just provide a better emotional experience?

Monday, June 3rd, 2013 by Adrian Segar

Do great speakers just provide a better emotional experience?

Feeling good—for a while

At MPI’s 2011 World Education Congress, I heard the best motivational speaker I’ve ever seen. Bill Toliver gave an amazing twenty-minute speech.

I felt inspired by Bill. Here’s what I tweeted at the time.

But three months later, I didn’t remember a thing Bill said. (In fact, I didn’t even remember his name when I came to write this post and had to ferret it out from an archive.)

Now this may be simply because my memory is declining with time—though I suspect that you may have had a similar experience. But I don’t think my dying brain cells are to blame.

As a counter-example, I still vividly remember the workshops I attended over ten years ago.

Why do I remember what happened at those workshops but not what Bill said? We’ll get to that shortly, but first….

Testing two styles of lecture learning

I am not surprised by the results of research published in the May 2013 issue of Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. Here’s the experimental setup:

“Participants viewed one of two videos depicting an instructor explaining a scientific concept. The same speaker delivered the same script in both videos. The only difference was in how the information was delivered. In the fluent speaker condition, the speaker stood upright, maintained eye contact, displayed relevant gestures, and did not use notes. In the disfluent speaker condition, she hunched over a podium, read from notes, spoke haltingly, and failed to maintain eye contact.”
Appearances can be deceiving: instructor fluency increases perceptions of learning without increasing actual learning—Shana K. Carpenter, Miko M. Wilford, Nate Kornell, Kellie M. Mullaney

Right after watching their video, participants were asked to estimate how much of the information in the video they would be able to recall after about 10 minutes:

“Participants who viewed the fluent speaker predicted that they would remember a greater amount of information than those who viewed the disfluent speaker. However, actual performance did not differ between the groups [emphasis added]…

…It is not clear precisely which aspects of the lecturer’s behavior influenced participants’ judgments, and the experience of fluency may be subjective. What is clear, however, is that a more fluent instructor may increase perceptions of learning without increasing actual learning [emphasis added].”

What can we conclude from these results?

It’s just one experiment, but it does support something I’ve believed to be true for years. A great speaker may well provide a more enjoyable and emotionally satisfying presentation—but the learning that results is not significantly better than that provided by a mediocre lecturer!

Am I saying that we should discount the value of the quality of a speaker’s presence, examples, stories, and presentation as a whole? No! If we’re going to learn something from a speaker, there’s value in having the experience be emotionally satisfying.

What I am saying, though, is that it is a mistake to correlate the quality of a speaker’s presentation with the learning that occurs for those present. That is a big mistake.

Highly paid speakers may provide a better emotional experience, but that doesn’t mean their listeners learn and retain what they hear especially well.

But there’s another mistake we’re making when we fill our conferences with speakers.

What’s the use of lectures?

Back to those workshops I attended. Why do I remember vividly what happened in 2002 but not what Bill, the magnificent motivational speaker, said in 2011? Because in the workshops I was participating in my learning. I was interacting with other participants, receiving feedback and insights about what I said and did, and what happened led to deep learning that has stayed with me ever since.

When we give center stage at our events to presentations at the expense of participative engagement, learning suffers. The best speakers may be far more entertaining and emotionally satisfying than the worst ones, but, according to the above research, we’re not going to learn any more from them. Perhaps a truly great speaker may inspire her audience to take action in their lives—and that can be a good and important outcome—but I wonder how often that happens at our events. (There’s an idea for more research!)

What we have known for some time, though, is that if we are truly interested in maximizing learning at our events, hiring the best speakers in the world will not do the trick. Instead, we need to incorporate participative learning into every session we program. That’s the subject of my next book. Stay tuned!

So, do great speakers just provide a better emotional experience?

What do you think is the real value of good speakers? How much have you learned (and retained) from presentations compared to interactive workshops?

Photo attribution: Flickr user psilocybes

Tags: Learning, lecture, participation, presentations, speakers, workshop| Posted in Event design, participation, Presentations | 10 Comments »

Thoughts about entertainment at meetings

Monday, May 27th, 2013 by Adrian Segar

Should we include entertainment at meetings, and if so, how much?

For many years I put a lot of effort into arranging entertainment at conferences. My conferences have included: dinner cruises, a trip to a casino, a winery tour, dinner theater, a hula dancing demonstration, a magic show with audience participation, and a close-to-X-rated game of Pictionary™ between two teams of conferees. These events were a lot of fun, though not everyone participated. But nowadays I am much less invested in the need for entertainment at a conference.

The case for no entertainment

Why? I’ve come to realize a successful conference doesn’t need entertainment. In fact, entertainment can break the “conference trance.” I’ve found that most people are happy to immerse themselves in a set of conference topics that are dear to their hearts. A prolonged break, when their attention is dragged elsewhere, can make it difficult for them to return to the intense experience they were having before the interruption.

These days, entertainment is practically ubiquitous; available to us at any time everywhere. When we can be entertained in any way we want when we want, why do we believe we need to include it in our events? I don’t decide to go to a conference because I’ll be entertained there. Do you? Do your attendees?

There are negatives too. Filling conference white space with entertainment drowns connecting, thinking, and conversation. Aren’t these core activities for successful events? Shouldn’t we make as much space for them as we can during the all-too-short time that participants are together? Yes, entertainment is a pleasant distraction but it rarely changes anything, while a conversation with another person at a conference could change your life.

At least, if you’re going to provide entertainment don’t make it obligatory. For example, don’t force your attendees to experience entertainment during a meal that they have paid for. Provide alternative options for those who would rather spend time with their peers or just quietly unwind.

Should we include entertainment at meetings?

All that said, I’m not opposed to supplying entertainment at meetings, and if there is an obvious opportunity to relax (e.g., a nearby beautiful or unique locale or a well-known show) by all means explore the possibility of incorporating it into your conference. But don’t feel that you need to provide entertainment for your attendees regardless of circumstances, and then hunt high and low for something that might fit the bill. Do a good job on the conference content and process, and your group will entertain itself!

[This post is an adapted and expanded version of a section on entertainment first published in Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love.]

Photo attribution: Flickr user crossettlibrary

Tags: entertainment, white space| Posted in Event design | 11 Comments »

Why don’t meeting conferences pay speakers?

Monday, May 20th, 2013 by Adrian Segar

Why don’t meeting conferences pay speakers?

“All I want is not to be insulted by the people I’m serving by them paying me less than they pay their kids’ piano teachers or their own hair stylists. They can say all the nice things they want when I’m finished. But when they hand me a paltry check, what are they really saying? What do they expect me to conclude about how much they value my work?”
—John G. Stackhouse, Jr

I like going to event industry conferences. I enjoy meeting old friends, making new ones, and learning new things. And I love presenting on all kinds of topics that revolve around making conferences fundamentally better for participants and organizers.

But there’s one thing that really bothers me about these events.

The pitiful reality that few meeting conferences offer to pay speakers.

Traci Browne wrote about this miserable state of affairs three years ago. Sadly, nothing has changed, so I’m raising the topic again.

The default offer, often considered generous, is to cover expenses. (Though I receive many invitations to present that don’t even mention that.( Sometimes organizers have tried to get me to pay full registration too!

When you ask whether they will pay a fee, a common response is “Well, we don’t have a budget for that.” Sometimes this is preceded by an embarrassed pause, sometimes not. Hmm, you have an F&B budget, a venue budget, and an administrative budget, but you don’t have a budget for the people whom you’ve invited to fill your event with educational goodness and value? Why not?

Why they don’t pay

One answer, of course, is “We’ve always done it this way.” This is a rationalization for a lot of bad things in this world.

Another is “you’ll get exposure.” Listen up guys: good speakers for your sessions already have exposure—they aren’t relying on free speaking engagements. Yes, I have had presentation opportunities lead to client work, but not to the extent that they’ve even come close to paying the time and monetary costs to a) create a session proposal, b) prepare a presentation (typically five to ten times the presentation’s duration), c) travel to and from the venue, and d) give the presentation.

Finally, we have the “don’t you want to give to your community?” angle. Yes, I do. Yes, I speak for free or at a reduced rate probably more than I should. I also look for other ways to receive benefits that the conference organizer can provide, e.g. a professional video of my session or a couple of extra hotel nights at a really nice conference location. But, unfortunately, supporting your professional community doesn’t pay the bills.

The next time you (yes, you, you know who I’m talking to) are planning an event, build some money into your budget to pay speakers. When you ask someone to present, offer them up front specific compensation for their expenses and their time and expertise. The message that you value their presence at your event, rather than taking them for granted, will speak volumes.

Photo attribution: Flickr user danmoyle

Tags: compensation, how much, paid, pay speakers, presenting, speakers, speaking| Posted in Event professionals, Soapbox | 44 Comments »

Breaking: Government concerned about privacy concerns of “eyes”

Friday, May 17th, 2013 by Adrian Segar

Dateline Washington, DC. May 17, 2013: Congressional representatives today raised concerns about citizens’ ability to see what is going on by using their “eyes”, two organs buried inside most people’s heads.

“Forget Google Glass,” said Rep Joe Barton, “what if the average US Citizen obtains the ability to ‘see’ what is going on in their immediate vicinity? All hell could break loose. The privacy implications of this ‘vision thing’ are staggering and must immediately be addressed by a high-level governmental commission with the authority to put a stop to it.”

Rep Joe Barton then proceeded to tie a bright red bandana around his “eyes” which he said would stay in place “until the emergency is over.”

Photo attribution: Flickr user briananthonyadams

Tags: eyes, noticing, privacy, satire| Posted in Satire | No Comments »

How can we hold an effective real-time virtual discussion?

Sunday, May 12th, 2013 by Adrian Segar

During a video chat last week, the delightful Australian sociologist Stephen Mugford asked me an interesting question. How can we hold an effective real-time virtual discussion? As anyone who’s tried it knows, creating an effective face-to-face discussion with twenty or more people is challenging enough!

Stephen, who consults extensively on cultural change with police and military organizations, had an idea. Both of us use the fishbowl format for face-to-face group discussion because it clearly delineates who can talk at any moment and prevents the monopolization of discussion by a few individuals. Is there, Stephen asked me, some way to translate the fishbowl format to an online environment? He had been unable to find such a service.

I told Stephen about my experience, three years ago, using the amazing Maestro Conference system, a teleconferencing system that can indeed provide fishbowl discussion functionality (and a great deal more besides) but only for audio. We agreed that what we really need for effective real-time virtual discussion is an audiovisual conferencing system.

What would be the features of an effective system? The hardest technical requirement is the ability to handle a live A/V feed from each participant. This is hard—there’s a reason why Google Hangouts are limited to a maximum of ten participants! Handling the bandwidth and switching of multiple A/V streams is challenging, and, with current technology, expensive.

But it’s probably doable. And, I suspect, the first company that brings this product to market will find many customers.

Are any technology companies out there willing to rise to the challenge?

[Added five years later…]

Five years after I wrote this we have this technology and use it daily. As time passes, it gets harder to remember when we didn’t have Zoom or Teams, or a hundred different platforms for effective real-time virtual discussion.

Photo attribution: Flickr user choconancy

Posted in Event design, NoRepost | 1 Comment »

The center of inattention

Monday, May 6th, 2013 by Adrian Segar

I like being the center of inattention.
—Sparrow

I love Sparrow’s aphorisms, but this one especially snagged my heart. It speaks of the space I inhabit when I facilitate effectively—becoming a creator of process that works for others and is not about me.
Photo attribution: Flickr user hjiang196

Tags: attention, connection, facilitation, process| Posted in Facilitating Change | No Comments »