"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
Every conference planner should know about the peak-end rule. First suggested by Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize for Economics and the author of the fascinating book Thinking, Fast and Slow, the peak-end rule suggests that we judge experiences largely based on how they were perceived at their peak and at their end.
This implies that we should concentrate on making sure that our events end powerfully. That’s because the peak-end rule implies that we’ll better remember an event with a peak and then a powerful finish than one with two peak experiences sandwiched in the body of the event.
I wonder, though, if we can do better by dividing up the event into multiple, short, distinct experiences. Each experience would have its own peak and concluding learning. I just finished staffing a four-day workshop crammed with a wide variety of unique highly-participative experiences. Because the activities included were so diverse there were many peaks. Each peak stands out in my memory because they were in a unique experiential context. The proof? I still vividly remember much of the first of these workshops that I attended ten years ago!
By including many different kinds of short experiences in our events, I believe it’s possible to hack the peak-end rule and maximize the memorability of our events. What do you think?
The first Conferences That Work event was held June 3–5, 1992, at Marlboro College, Vermont. If you had told me then that the format would spread all over the world, and that just twelve years later I would devote my entire professional life to designing, facilitating, and evangelizing participant-led and participation-rich events I would have said you were crazy.
Even last week, glimpsing a couple of copies of my book lying on a table behind a Swiss conference organizer during a Skype call evoked a moment of disbelief. (Though it was quickly followed by a mixture of excitement and pride.)
That original 1992 conference has been held every year since. We’ve added an extra day. And we’ve become, in the words of one participant, “The best education-focused tech conference on the planet.”
Hardly a month goes by these days without hearing about events organized by people who have purchased Conferences That Work. It’s becoming clear to me that there are many Conferences That Work taking place that I’ll probably never know about.
A free gift for you
Although I’m hard at work finishing my next book I haven’t forgotten Conferences That Work. The format continues to evolve, so I’m writing a supplement that describes the improvements, both large and small, that I and many collaborators have suggested and implemented since the book was published in 2009. I’ll publish the supplement as a free ebook in the next few months.
Want a copy? Let me know using the form below and I’ll send you a copy when it’s ready.
Think of it as a 21st birthday present on the 21st anniversary of Conferences That Work, to my creation and its practitioners. This drink’s on me!
One of the reasons I love facilitating peer conferences that use the Conferences That Work format is my enjoyment in experiencing the wonderful support and development they provide for communities of practice (COPs). What are COPs? Why are they important? How do peer conferences support them? Read on!
Communities of practice
Communities of practice is a term coined by educational theorist Etienne Wenger. They are groups of people who share a common interest, profession, or passion and actively engage around what they have in common. COPs include three key elements: a shared domain of interest; a group whose members interact and learn together; and the development of a shared body of practice, knowledge, and resources.
While the term is relatively new, communities of practice have existed in human societies for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. Systems of apprenticeship and professional guilds, developed in the Late Middle Ages, all incorporate the three COP elements. COPs have been the predominant modality for professional learning for most of human history!
Why are COPs important?
The Middle Ages are long gone and today we can learn in many new ways. Does this mean that COPs have outlived their usefulness? By no means. Here’s what Harold Jarche thinks about the role of communities of practice in creating effective working environments:
My recommendation has been to support workplace activities that are both cooperative and collaborative and also to provide the necessary support structures. However, my observations to date show that a third piece is required, and that is the fostering of communities of practice to connect the two. These communities, internal and external, are a safe place between highly focused work and potentially chaotic social networking. I also see the support of communities of practice, through skill development and structural support, as a primary role for learning & development staff. —First structure the work system, Harold Jarche
In other words, as shown in Jarche’s diagram above, COPs provide an essential link between the work performed by individuals and teams in organizations (where the rubber meets the road) and the rich possibilities for interaction and learning now available from our social networks, both face-to-face and online.
How do peer conferences support communities of practice?
At a (well-planned) traditional conference, conference planners invest significant time and effort before the event attempting to determine who can potentially provide an “above average” contribution on the conference subject. Peer conferences make no such a priori assumptions about who is a teacher and who is a learner. Rather, they promote an environment in which teaching and learning are ever-fluid activities. The teacher at one moment is a learner the next. Sometimes, everyone in an interaction is learning simultaneously as social knowledge is discovered, constructed, and shared.
Peer conferences don’t assume that every attendee will significantly contribute to the event. Rather, peer conference process provides the opportunity for anyone to contribute, perhaps unexpectedly, but ultimately, usefully.
In my experience, peer conferences are high-quality incubators for communities of practice. They provide a wonderful way for a group of people to explore the potential for creating an ongoing community. The majority of peer conferences that I have facilitated have turned into regular events. But, even when this does not happen, a peer conference inevitably leads to new long-term relationships and communal projects of one kind or another. Conversely, communities of practice can use regular peer conferences to effectively explore and deepen their collective learning and intragroup relationships.
Essential tools
In conclusion, I think of peer conferences as being essential tools—like the radios and scanners used by the other kinds of cops—that support the construction of social knowledge and appropriate learning for communities of practice. Add them to your workplace and conference toolkit and your COPs will reap the benefits!
While alone in my Vermont home I suffered a spell of transient global amnesia (TGA), a rare mental condition.
“A person having an attack of TGA has almost no capacity to establish new memories, but generally appears otherwise mentally alert and lucid, possessing full knowledge of self-identity and identity of close family, and maintaining intact perceptual skills and a wide repertoire of complex learned behavior. The individual simply cannot recall anything that happened outside the last few minutes, while memory for more temporally distant events may or may not be largely intact.”
—Wikipedia
I have no clear memory from around noon through 6 p.m. when I found myself in an emergency room hospital bed.
Here’s what I’ve reconstructed from others’ accounts:
I’ll never know what happened the first few hours, as there was no one with me. Around 3 pm my son called about his taxes and I spoke to him for a few minutes before he had to interrupt the call. When he called back five minutes later I had no memory of him calling. “Dad,” he said, “you sound strange. Are you stoned?” I indignantly told him I wasn’t. “Perhaps you should call Mom,” he suggested.
I didn’t remember where my wife was, which did not seem especially strange to me. Checking my computer calendar, I clicked on Today and saw Celia was in Boston. I couldn’t remember why she was there or what day it was. I kept looking at the calendar to remind myself and promptly forgot. Somehow I called Celia and said, “My brain isn’t working properly.” She phoned our neighbors and, luckily, Jim was in and came to our house. Celia, trained as an occupational therapist and very worried that I had had a stroke, asked Jim to have me raise both hands and smile. I obeyed his request and had no problem. She called the local hospital and they decided to have Jim bring me there while she drove home for two hours at high speed.
I have no memory of driving with Jim to the hospital or of being admitted.
My TGA experience
It felt like I was dreaming. In the middle of a dream, one’s experience of the moment seems normal, but memories of prior moments vanish almost immediately.
But this was a waking dream.
Unlike some TGA victims, I was not agitated or angry. Instead, I was curious about what was going on and continually attempted to use available higher-functioning memory aids—my computer calendar, phone, and the people around me—to regain an understanding of what was happening. I had limited success and repeated my questions and observations over and over again.
“It’s like being in a dream.”
“When did you get here?”
“I wouldn’t recommend this.”
“This is really bizarre.”
I had no idea I was repeating these phrases every five to ten minutes.
I remember Jim being with me shortly before he left, and Celia arriving. During Celia’s frantic drive home, Jim’s wife told her that her brother-in-law had experienced what I was going through, that it might be something called transient global amnesia, and I would probably be fine. By the time Celia arrived at my hospital bed, the ER head doctor had ruled out a stroke and diagnosed me with TGA.
We stayed in the ER while my short-term memory continued to improve. Time seemed to pass oddly; I’d look at my watch and discover an hour had gone by in a flash. I became aware that I was repeating myself. Finally, it was clear that I was improving. Discharged at midnight, Celia drove me home where, exhausted, we both went to sleep.
After I lost my mind
On Sunday my short-term memory was pretty much back. There was a weird hole in my memory of the previous day, a disquieting haze. I tried to fill it in with the recollections of others, but it remained a caricature of memory, one not experienced directly by me but constructed from external reports.
I am thankful that I am back to normal, whatever “normal” means. My experience has given me a glimpse of the amazing operation of our brains, by showing for a moment what can happen when something goes haywire. Celia suffered more than me, shouldering the terrible worry that I would be impaired permanently. By the time I was aware that something abnormal had happened, I was on the mend.
As the days pass, my TGA grows distant, shading into my normal imperfect memory of the past. It is increasingly hard to conjure up the sheer strangeness of the experience.
Perhaps that’s just as well.
Note: Transient global amnesia is rare (2-5 people per 100,000), is unlikely to reoccur, and, though there are various theories, has no clear cause.
Photo attribution: Flickr user thegeekshallinherittheearth
You’re probably a consultant—even if you think you aren’t. So, what’s the best way to spend your consulting time? Let’s explore the choice of how many people to work with.
You could work with one other person, maximizing your influence and effectiveness for that one person. In one-to-one work, you can adjust the amount of detail and depth, level of sophistication, optimum environment, and speed at which you interact to create the best possible circumstances for appropriate learning and problem-solving.
Or you could work with several people simultaneously. A small group can be a marvelous place for people to learn, with your contribution immediately available to all and easy access to clarification and further learning through feedback, questions, and sparked conversations. Perhaps your words of wisdom are more relevant to some in the group than others, but what you say is reaching a wider audience.
How about teaching a class? Now your expertise reaches tens or hundreds of people, though it’s harder to know whether what happens is hitting the spot with your students. Even using frequent feedback and small group work doesn’t give you the same guiding information you could get from a small group, and your class could be largely irrelevant to some without you ever knowing it.
What about writing a book? I spent four years part-time writing Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love. Thousands have purchased the book, many more people than I’m ever going to reach at a single event. That’s an impressive spread of influence. And yet, although I’ve spoken with many purchasers over the last three years since it was published, they are a minority. For most buyers, I don’t know whether they’ve devoured it from cover to cover or if the book sits, unread, on a pile or a shelf.
The smaller the number of people we work with, the more likely we are to influence effectively. The more people we work with, the wider our influence spreads but the weaker it gets.
One interesting observation about influence is how our society values spread over depth. In general, people who successfully spread thin but wide are compensated—with money and fame—better than those who successfully go for depth.
Or, as Jerry puts it:
Influence or affluence; take your choice.
(I wonder about the rightness of this. Most of the important learning in my life, and I suspect in most people’s, has sprung from powerful personal interactions, not thinly spread broadcast content. Well, so be it.)
So what should we do?
As usual, it depends. Let’s assume you have needed expertise or something important to share. If you want fame and fortune more than anything else, then get cracking on that blockbuster book, big movie role, etc. If you want the opportunity to make a big difference with a few people, then concentrate on being a great consultant to your clients.
I love working with individuals and small groups, so I spend much of my time concentrating on depth over breadth. But it’s also important to me to get my ideas out into the world, even though I don’t enjoy the process as much, so I blog, write books, give presentations, and facilitate conferences. Spreading my influence thinly in these ways creates openings for the personal connections and work that are my preferred passions.
This way of looking at how many people you work with can be applied to your use of social media too. Celebrities broadcast to their followers but usually don’t interact with them much. I prefer to use social media for conversations, but I also send out links to my blog posts. We get to choose.
Making a choice
Getting the balance right between depth and breadth is a personal choice—there is no one right answer. The first step is to notice the balance you use and determine if it’s working for you. If not, consider adjusting your work mix so it better reflects your needs and wants.
Don’t stop there. I worked with clients almost exclusively for many years before discovering that there were things I wanted to share en masse. Your optimum balance between depth and breadth may change over time. So evaluate it regularly as part of your regular work-life review.
That way you’ll be spreading your time jam just the way you like it. Yum!
I’ve written about the myth of the conference curator before. I began with the observation that highly paid sports scouts do barely better than chance at picking great players. Now, Seth Godin has written this:
“We have no idea in advance who the great contributors are going to be. We know that there’s a huge cohort of people struggling outside the boundaries of the curated, selected few, but we don’t know who they are. That means that the old systems, the ones where just a few people were anointed to be the chosen authors, chosen contributors, chosen musicians–that system left a lot of people out in the cold…The curated business, then, will ultimately fail because it keeps missing this shoulder, this untapped group of talented, eager, hard-working people shut out by their deliberately closed ecosystem…Go ahead and minimize these open systems at your own peril. Point to their negative outliers, inconsistency and errors, sure, but you can only do that if you willfully ignore the real power: some people, some of the time, are going to do amazing and generous work… If we’ll just give them access to tools and get out of their way.“ —Most people, most of the time (the perfect crowd fallacy) by Seth Godin
Do such tools for conferences exist? Yes, they do!
Appropriate participation techniques are the tools for participants to do amazing and generous work—for others and for themselves—at conferences. Give them permission, access, and support for these tools and get conference curators out of their way.
It’s common to be impressed by a big meeting. Size implies status—and seemingly success. Walking onto the floor of IBTM World—a European tradeshow attended by more than 15,000 event professionals each year—you’re probably blown away by the size of the event. (The video above shows perhaps a third of the tradeshow floor.) You think to yourself: this event must be successful because it’s so [expletive] big.
But size isn’t everything.
A quick exercise
(Have someone read this to you s…l…o…w…l…y for the full effect.)
Close your eyes.
Relax.
Now think of the most important conversation you ever had in your life.
Take your time—I’m not going to ask you what it was about.
Here’s the question. How many other people took part in your conversation?
It’s a small world
I’ve run this exercise at numerous presentations and asked the audience to share their answers via a show of hands. The most common answer is “one”, followed by 2-3, with a few people reporting small group numbers.
No one has yet reported a most important conversation with ten or more people.
Want significant connection (and effective learning) at your events? Then attendees need to spend significant time talking, interacting, and thinking in small groups. Not just at meals or socials, but in the conference sessions!
Design for content versus design for connection
We know that the two most important reasons people attend meetings are for content and connection. Every meeting includes a mixture of these. Let’s concentrate on some differences between meetings that concentrate on content (100%-content versions are called trainings) and those that concentrate on connection around content.
Content-delivery meeting economics improve with size. The income from more attendees covers the cost of the expensive keynoter. To a lesser extent, it’s often possible to get more glitz for the buck at bigger events, where those little touches for decor, food, and beverage become feasible for larger numbers of attendees.
Meetings that concentrate on connection, however, aren’t significantly cheaper per person as meeting size increases. This is because you can’t spread significant fixed costs over more attendees. In fact, to provide the same level of connection at a large meeting that’s possible at a small meeting requires sacrificing valuable face time at the event in order to get everyone into the right small groups needed for effective participation.
Participation is not everyone doing the same thing
If you believe that when a large number of people are in one place they need to all be doing the “same” thing, then you will fail to run an effective participation-rich event. Two hundred people cannot “participate” simultaneously in a traditional meeting format (though elaborate, carefully designed simulations can be valuable). The trick is to determine how to divide a large group into smaller sub-groups that can use any one of a number of tested designs to facilitate and support participative learning and connections.
For example, I designed an afternoon for a 500-attendee medical conference. For this group, we split the attendees into ten groups by medical specialty, allowing each group independently to use small group techniques to determine the topics they wanted to cover and then explore them.
Size isn’t everything
Large meetings are not going away. When there is a clear need for them, someone will capture the market by executing the demanding logistics of a large meeting better than anyone else. But we are often so stuck on a size definition of success—my 2,000-delegate conference is better than your 100-delegate conference—that we overlook the limitations and frustrations that working effectively with a large group imposes.
Unlike broadcast learning (which doesn’t work very well for adults), participative learning (which research has shown over and over again is superior) doesn’t scale. At a large conference, it’s very difficult to deliver the just-in-time learning that attendees need via the rich stew of connection generated by small group process. By carefully dividing up large groups, we can create conference environments that mirror the intimacy and effectiveness of small conferences, but it’s significant work to do this and requires facilitators who know how to do it right. A well-designed small meeting with carefully targeted attendee demographics offers a much simpler environment for supporting effective connection, interaction, and engagement. That’s one good reason to keep your meetings small!
Free! Toilet trained! Motivational speaker topic needs a good home!
Unique opportunity! Too many ideas to handle—this one MUST GO! Great potential for the right presenter! Good for a few minutes OR MORE of your inspirational message! Use it now, before someone else snaps it up!
No trained operators are standing by! This is clearly your Lucky Day!
Are you ready?
Wait…For…It…!
====> Pull With Both Hands! <====
So many angles available in a single four-word concept!
For example.
When you Pull with Both Hands:
Your effort is more powerful!
Two hands provide balance, one does not!
You model cooperation and teamwork!
You avoid failure! (Remember—the towel dispenser mechanism jams if only one hand used!)
There’s always an alternative! (Just turn the little thingy on the side!)
I’m sure a few moments of contemplation on your part will lead to many more!
No catch! Nothing to pay! No salesperson will call!
Yet another creative idea from the billions of tiny brain cells firing 24/7 at Conferences That Work!
P.S. Yes! I’ve incorporated a record number of exclamation marks into this post! The italics count isn’t too shabby either!
Thank you to the creative environment provided by the men’s bathroom at BATS, where this inspiration struck.
With hundreds of people in your audience, every minute you’re speaking solo at a conference session sucks up hours of people’s time. Time that they could have used to connect with their neighboring peers.
Tomorrow’s workers will challenge today’s organizations
How can we best prepare workers for our rapidly changing economy? A presentation at ASTD TechKnowledge 2013 by social media scholar danah boyd (she doesn’t capitalize her name)—“Networked Norms: How Tomorrow’s Workers Will Challenge Today’s Organizations”—is well worth reading in full. danah discusses ways in which old organizational models “are being challenged and disrupted by communities who don’t take the bounded logic of the organization for granted”:
“…if you want to prepare people not just for the next job, but for the one after that, you need to help them think through the relationships they have and what they learn from the people around them. Understanding people isn’t just an HR skill for managers. For better or worse, in a risk economy with an increasingly interdependent global workforce, these are skills that everyday people need. Building lifelong learners means instilling curiosity, but it also means helping people recognize how important it is that they continuously surround themselves by people that they can learn from. And what this means is that people need to learn how to connect to new people on a regular basis.”
Prepare workers for a connection-rich future
How can workers learn to connect to new people regularly? The best way is to give them plenty of opportunities to safely practice. And what better place than a conference of their peers?
Sadly, most conferences provide no support for making connections. Organizers assume that all they need to do is to bring people together in one place and include a few ineffective mixers and socials. As a result, any connections that attendees make at such events are almost completely via their own efforts.
Luckily it’s easy to do better. Here are three ways to create a supportive conference environment for connection that will greatly increase the quantity, appropriateness, and quality of the connections your participants make. Integrate them into your conferences, and participants (and their organizations) will be better able to survive in tomorrow’s economy. These days, maintaining the traditional conference environment is doing your attendees a disservice. As danah pointedly asks at the end of her talk:
“…my question to you is simple: are you preparing learners for the organizational ecosystem of today? Or are you helping them develop networks so that they’re prepared for the organizational shifts that are coming?”
Every conference planner should know about the peak-end rule. First suggested by Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize for Economics and the author of the fascinating book Thinking, Fast and Slow, the peak-end rule suggests that we judge experiences largely based on how they were perceived at their peak and at their end.
