"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
My session Designing Participation Into Your Meetings will, unsurprisingly, include a fair number of interactive exercises: human spectrograms, pair share, The Three Questions, a mild experience of chaos, and others. My goal is to motivate participants to incorporate participant-driven and participation-rich design elements into their meetings.
According to a widely ballyhooed study, event planning is the 6th most stressful job. I have no idea if that’s true, but, looking back on the two-day event I ran last week, I estimate that I had to solve well over a hundred on-the-spot problems that cropped up during the twenty-four hours I was on duty.
If you’re looking for a solution to a problem, there’s a natural temptation to pick the first solution you come up with.
In my experience, this is usually a mistake. An understandable mistake, for sure, but still a mistake. Most of the time, the first solution I come up with is not the best choice, so it’s worth taking a little more time to think before springing into action.
You can reduce the possibility of a poor decision caused by a hasty response by employing The Rule Of Three.
The Rule Of Three
Before deciding on a course of action, come up with three alternatives.
Here are three ways of thinking about The Rule Of Three.
1) Family therapist Virginia Satir encouraged people to have at least three choices. She said:
…to have one choice is no choice;
to have two choices is a dilemma;
and to have three choices offers new possibilities. –The Satir Model, Virginia Satir, et al
2) Jerry Weinberg (who came up with this rule’s name) puts it another way that should get your attention:
If you can’t think of three things that might go wrong with your plans, then there’s something wrong with your thinking.
3) One more formulation: If you don’t have three options for a solution to a problem, you don’t understand it well enough yet, and you might need to explore it more.
Applying The Rule Of Three
It can be hard to apply The Rule Of Three, especially in stressful situations. Sometimes I have a hard time resisting acting on the first idea that pops into my head.
Here are two ways that help me apply The Rule of Three:
1) Get help to come up with more options. When I’m under pressure, asking trusted colleagues to help brainstorm alternatives is a great way for me to widen my problem-solving horizons and avoid missing a great solution. Two (or more) heads are better than one.
2) As with making most changes in your life, practice helps. Commit to applying The Rule Of Three to problems you encounter for three days. Then evaluate the results. How and under what circumstances did The Rule Of Three work for you? Decide whether you want to continue the commitment to maintaining this new approach to problem-solving.
Uh oh, only two options here. I’m looking for at least one more. Suggestions?
The first Conferences That Work peer conference held in Japan began today! Federation EIL, the worldwide network of The Experiment in International Living (EIL), is running the five-day event. Founded in 1932, EIL was one of the first organizations to engage individuals in intercultural living and learning. Originating in the United States, The Experiment introduced the homestay concept to the world. The organization carefully prepares and places “Experimenters” in the homes of host families to study other languages and cultures firsthand.
This is the third year that Federation EIL has used the Conferences That Work format for its annual member meeting. The first meeting, held in Paris, France in April 2010, was disrupted by the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull Icelandic volcano which caused 75% of European flights to be canceled and prevented half the registrants from attending. Federation EIL staff told me recently that had they been using a conventional conference design, they would have cancelled the event because of so many absent speakers. But the Conferences That Work design “routed around the damage” and the event was a success!
I’m happy that we’ve held a Conferences That Work event in Japan, and hope that there will be many more in the future.
Johnnie Moore wrote about this sketch: “I think it captures very succinctly the perils of retrospective coherence – the myriad ways we tidy up history to make things seem more linear.” And: “I think learning needs to be messier; amid all those twists and turns are the discoveries and surprises that satisfy the participant and help new things stick.”
Great points, Johnnie, and I’d like to add one more. Models of success and learning like the one on the left lead to tidy, simplistic conference models (with those deadening learning objectives). When we embrace the reality of messy and/or risky learning, embodied by the sketch on the right, we become open to event designs that mirror this reality and provide the flexibility and openness to address it.
I’ve been designing and facilitating participant-driven and participation rich conferences for over thirty years. It’s true that carefully prepared broadcast-style sessions can provide important learning from lectures by experts to a less-well informed audience. But, in my experience, most of the deepest learning that occurs at events is unexpected. It’s a product of the serendipity that interactions and connections create. And the event’s design facilitates (or restricts) the level of serendipity that is possible.
That’s why fundamental learning is messy.
Sketch attribution: Babs Rangaiah of Unilever (“& learning” added by me)
Here’s a transcript of my four-minute Blink! talk Torn About Technology given on Monday, April 23, at the Green Meetings Industry Council 2012 Sustainable Meetings Conference:
“Let me make one thing clear.
I love technology!
I love my iPad and my iPhone! And I love my iPod touch! (Three computers in one man purse!)
And I’m a big fan of the appropriate use of technology at events.
That people anywhere with an internet connection can get a taste of what’s happening at this conference in Montreal, Canada, without having to use significant amounts of energy and resources to travel here is a GOOD THING!
But I’m Torn About Tech at face-to-face events.
I’m Torn About Tech because technology can distract us from what I believe is the core reason for having face-to-face events.
Because we don’t have to travel anymore to hear someone speak or to obtain up-to-the-minute content.
We can get all that online.
So what is the core reason for having face-to-face events these days?
It’s so we can meet, share, and learn through face-to-face personal connections and interactions.
And there’s a danger, a very seductive danger that I’m certainly not immune to, of focusing on new technology, new gadgets, new apps to mediate our face-to-face experience and, in the process, ignoring much simpler non-tech ways to increase learning, connecting, and sharing at events.
An example. Audience response systems: clickers, gadgets we can hand out to audience members to get responses to questions.
Great devices for anonymous polling, where no one in the room gets to find out how anyone else voted. Occasionally that’s appropriate and useful.
But, come on, is this really what we want at a face-to-face event? I’d like to know how you,you and you feel about an issue. There are a ton of low-tech/no-tech methods we can use to share that information.
We have:
hand voting
card voting
voice voting
dot voting
Roman voting
(one of my favorites) body voting aka human spectrograms
Body voting has audience members stand along a line in the room to show the agreement/disagreement gradient on an issue. You can use it to discover different viewpoints, create debates, and create homogeneous or heterogeneous small discussion groups on a topic—all things that gadgets can’t do.
These voting methods involve people moving about which improves learning, retention, and recall. They’re free or incredibly cheap and they’re a lot more fun.
Yes, there are some things that technology does better than the old ways. Having multiple session scribes live blog into a shared Google Doc projected on a big screen is much better than scribes taking notes on yellow pads or flip charts.
But let’s not fall into the trap of believing that new technology is the only way to improve events.
Very often we can simply use different human process to greatly improve learning, connection, and fun at our events.
Off to GMIC’s Sustainable Meetings Conference this weekend. Besides a four-minute rant Torn About Tech, which will explore my ambivalence about some uses of technology at face-to-face meetings, I’m also emceeing a novel closing session on Tuesday, April 24, 3:00 – 4:30 pm with a format I haven’t tried before: Conference Weavers.
Conference Weavers?
The purpose of a Conference Weavers session is to encourage reflection and reinforce learning by publicly sharing thoughts and impressions from the conference presentations and experiences. We’ll use a number of volunteers who will each spend a few minutes sharing their conference response with the group, followed by a chance for audience questions and responses. In addition, Jenise Fryatt will lead a little interpretative improv at some point. If time permits, I’m going to include a pair-share so that everyone will have an opportunity to share his or her thoughts.
Pair-share?
I thought you’d never ask. Pair-share is a simple participation technique you can use to involve every audience member in sharing and discussion. Audience members divide into pairs and take turns sharing with their partner their conference impressions. Once that’s complete, optional public sharing can be added.
I’ll report on how this format worked after I’m back from the conference. Stay tuned!
How can we get better at building conference programs?
“In 2006 we announced the Netflix Prize, a machine learning and data mining competition for movie rating prediction. We offered $1 million to whoever improved the accuracy of our existing system called Cinematch by 10%.” —Netflix Recommendations: Beyond the 5 stars (Part 1) by Xavier Amatriain and Justin Basilico (Personalization Science and Engineering)
The above quote comes from an interesting blog post by two Netflix engineers who explain why the company has never fully implemented the algorithm that won the Netflix $1 Million Challenge to improve Netflix’s customer movie recommendations.
Why didn’t Netflix use the improved movie recommendation algorithm?
Although an earlier part of an earlier version of the algorithm was incorporated into the way Netflix recommends movies, by the time the prize was awarded in 2009, Netflix’s world had drastically changed:
“Netflix launched an instant streaming service in 2007, one year after the Netflix Prize began. Streaming has not only changed the way our members interact with the service, but also the type of data available to use in our algorithms. For DVDs…selection is distant in time from viewing, people select carefully because exchanging a DVD for another takes more than a day, and we get no feedback during viewing. For streaming members are looking for something great to watch right now; they can sample a few videos before settling on one, they can consume several in one session, and we can observe viewing statistics such as whether a video was watched fully or only partially.” —Ibid
Conference program building: DVDs or streaming?
The traditional way we build conference programs is like how we order DVDs on Netflix. We decide in advance the content we want and order it from presenters. Once the conference starts we have no choice except to view the presentations we’ve ordered.
At participant-driven events, building the conference program is like how we pick a streaming movie to watch on Netflix. When we settle down on the couch, we pick the movie we want at that moment and start to watch. Not to our liking? We can stop the stream and try something else.
Notice there are two things different about the streaming movie choice. First, we get to choose what we want to watch when we’re ready to watch it. We don’t have to make a choice several days in advance. And second, we can switch to any other movie right away if what we choose isn’t to our satisfaction. That’s an option not available with DVDs.
Netflix’s move towards streaming delivery of movies is the reason why the carefully tuned, Prize-developed-at-great-expense algorithm has been largely abandoned. It turns out that people choose different movies when they can decide what they want to watch when they’re ready to watch, and when they can change their mind if their choice is unsatisfactory.
Lessons for your event, courtesy of Netflix
Netflix’s observations parallel my experience of building conference programs. Programs that participants create at the event are noticeably different (and, in my experience, better) than those chosen in advance by a program committee. As I’ve observed before, half or more of the session topics that participants choose via the Conferences That Work design are not predicted in advance by a program committee. If program committees do such a poor job of creating conference sessions that registrants actually want to attend, perhaps you should consider replacing at least some of your conference sessions with those chosen via an effective tool like Open Space, World Café, or Conferences That Work‘s peer session sign-up.
I subscribe to both DVDs & streaming from Netflix, and notice that my DVD queue is getting shorter and shorter these days; we watch far more streaming movies than we did just a year ago. We’re not alone; Netflix streaming users now outnumber DVD subscribers 2:1. With the rise of online, providing topical, up-to-the-minute conference sessions is becoming more important than ever. Let’s plan for a streaming rather than a DVD future for building conference programs.
What does it take to be successfully self-employed?
What does it take to be successfully self-employed, something I’ve managed to achieve for the last forty years? Obviously, you need to competently provide something of value that clients will pay you for. So let’s take that as a given.
Unfortunately, that’s not all you need.
Google the term “successfully self-employed” and you’ll get over twelve million hits. No, I haven’t read them all. But what I’ll share with you doesn’t appear anywhere in the first few hundred highest-ranked links. In my experience, a make-or-break factor separates competent, self-employed practitioners who are successful from those who, sooner or later, go out of business.
The make-or-break factor
I snuck the make-or-break factor into the title of this post.
Besides being competent in what you do, you need to be able to do everything else required to run your business. Or successfully outsource it. To be successfully self-employed, you need to be a jack-of-all-trades or have access to folks who can fill in for the ones you’re lacking or want to avoid doing yourself.
Sounds pretty obvious, right?
Maybe it’s obvious, but over the years I’ve seen more people fail to stay successfully self-employed due to gaps in the support for their revenue-producing skills than I have seen return to regular employment for reasons outside their control.
I’ve seen smart, capable people return to a job because they couldn’t:
Bill clients on time.
Keep their work files organized.
Stay interested long enough in an industry niche they were developing before they decided to do something completely different.
Budget realistically.
Return calls from their clients in a timely fashion.
None of these skills are rocket science. And, if you can’t or don’t want to do them, find someone who will do them for you. The price may be a bargain by allowing you to concentrate on what you’re good at.
I, for example, hate cleaning my home office regularly. (Once in a while is OK, but not every week.) So, I’ve paid someone to do it for the last thirty years. Every time she comes in I feel good about it. I never worry about what clients who drop in unexpectedly might otherwise think.
Similarly, you can hire a bookkeeper if you can’t stand paying bills, an office declutterer if you’re habitually messy, a business coach to help you focus on what you want to do in your professional life, an accountant who will help you stay on the financial straight and narrow, or a phone answering service to improve your responsiveness to clients.
Don’t sabotage yourself
There are many good reasons why not everyone is suited to the self-employed life, but a surprisingly high ~10% of U.S. workers have chosen this way to earn a living. I love the freedom (and even the responsibility, most of the time) of being self-employed. If you do too and have salable skills, don’t sabotage the opportunity to work the way you want by neglecting any of the routine skills your work needs to be successful. Take a hard look at the tasks you’re neglecting, and either buckle down and do them or find someone who will. Then you can concentrate on what you’ve chosen to do to make a living in this world. Hopefully, something that you love.
There are many models of how people behave in groups, and each of them is useful in certain contexts. In the context of organizing and running a conference, how are group culture and event leadership interlinked?
I tend to employ an organic model, in which group members are seen in terms of their uniqueness, rather than categorized by their roles. An organic point of view allows and encourages people to find ways to work together in a variety of complex situations, and leads toward problem-solving that benefits everyone.
An example of organic leadership
For example, a conference steering committee I coordinated was offered the option of engaging a well-known, desired keynote speaker for a conference to be held in six months. Initially, his appearance fee was more than our budget could handle. But, at the last minute, he suggested appearing virtually, giving his presentation on a large video screen, at an affordable fee. We needed to quickly find out whether the conference site could support a virtual presentation.
If we had been using a linear approach to group organization, we would have already chosen the steering committee member responsible for technical issues and it would be her job to resolve this issue. If she were busy or sick, I’d have had to poll the other committee members for help and ask someone to take on additional work. In this case, our committee was comfortable with an organic approach, so I sent a request for help to all the steering committee members, most of whom had some technical expertise.
Because the committee culture was one of staying flexible in the face of unexpected circumstances, cooperatively working together to solve problems, and respecting each member’s unique constraints and contributions, I didn’t worry about treading on anyone’s toes by sending out a general request for help. The outcome: One of the committee members had some free time and immediately offered his expertise, while another, the speaker liaison, told us he thought the speaker would have the information we needed and would check with him.
How do you build this kind of culture for your conference organizing team?
This brings us to the question of what leadership means in the context of organizing and running a conference. Every book on leadership has a different approach; here’s what fits for me.
Author and polymath Jerry Weinberg describes organic leadership as leading the process rather than people. “Leading people requires that they relinquish control over their lives. Leading the process is responsive to people, giving them choices and leaving them in control”. Jerry’s resulting definition of leadership is “the process of creating an environment in which people become empowered.” This is what I try to elicit when working with a conference organizing team.
I also find Dale Emery’s definition of leadership helpful. Dale describes leadership as “the art of influencing people to freely serve shared purposes”. Bear this definition in mind as you work with your conference organizing team. It ties your interactions with them to your shared goal of realizing a vision, in this case organizing and running a conference.
Who on the team leads in this way?
Unlike the traditional, role-based version of leadership, any member can help build an atmosphere that supports this kind of leadership. Once the seeds of this culture are established, I’ve found that it tends to become self-perpetuating. People like working together in this way. Experiencing a conference team coming together, with the members enjoying their interactions while creating a great event, is one of the most satisfying aspects of my work.
Although the impetus for an organic approach can come from any team member, the conference coordinator is the natural initiator of these flavors of leadership. She is responsible for keeping the conference planning on track and avoiding planning and execution snafus. She does this, not by ordering people around, but through a respectful flow of timely reminders, check-ins, questions, requests for assistance, and appropriate redirections.
Some people have little experience working organically. They may join your team with the expectation that others will determine their responsibilities. Or, that a team leader will give them well-defined jobs to do. Often, given a relaxed and open environment where their ideas are encouraged, they will grow into a more active role. They become more confident in their ability to contribute creatively and flexibly to organizing and running the conference.
A helpful reminder for leaders of every kind
Jerry Weinberg suggests you assume that everyone you’re working with wants to feel useful and make a contribution. He quotes Stan Gross’s device for dealing with his feelings that people are not trying to contribute. “They’re all doing the best they can, under the circumstances. If I don’t think they are doing the best they can, then I don’t understand the circumstances.”
Such a mindset will help you focus on finding solutions to people problems that inevitably arise in any group working together on something they care about.
How do you see the intersection of group culture and event leadership? Is your model different? What can you add to these ideas?
Here is a short critique of Open Space, probably the most well-known participant-driven meeting design. Devised by Harrison Owen around the same time as Conferences That Work and presented in his 1993 book Open Space Technology: A Users Guide, this simple approach has become a popular way for participants to choose and discuss topics during their time together.
However, I think that Open Space does not work well for many participants. This has been corroborated informally over the years by every facilitator that I’ve spoken to who has used it. Here’s why.
Open Space poorly serves introverts
Open Space session topics are determined by individuals who stand up in front of the entire group and announce their chosen topic. Generally, this is much easier for extroverts, who have few difficulties speaking to a group extemporaneously, than introverts who tend to shun such opportunities. The result is that introverts are largely silent during the opening process. The subsequent Open Space sessions tilt towards those proposed and often dominated by a comfortably vocal minority.
Since introverts make up ~25-50% of the population (higher in some industries, such as information technology), this is not good.
A facilitator told me recently about her experience at an Open Space conference she was running. The acknowledged expert on the conference topic was present. But he was so uncomfortable with the process that he hardly spoke during the entire event.
We know that introverts can bring much to the table (for example, there’s research that indicates that introverts do better on intelligence tests). Using a participant-driven process that favors extrovert participation is a disservice to everyone present, not just the introverts. In my opinion, it’s a significant shortcoming of Open Space.
How can we engage introverts at participant-driven events?
Being a recovering introvert (according to the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory these days, I am a weak extrovert, but I didn’t always test that way) has sensitized me to the needs of introverts at participant-driven events, and the Conferences That Work design contains numerous small features that largely level the playing field.
For example, creating a safe environment is vital for attendees to become participants at an event. Conferences That Work‘s six explicit ground rules provide a safe, confidential environment that makes it easier for introverts to share at an event.
Another example: I have participants answer The Three Questions and personal introspective questions alone, in writing before they share their answers. Asking for written responses allows introverts to do their reflective work internally, rather than externally as extroverts prefer.
One more important feature of Conferences That Work is that during the start of the event: a) everyone is invited, in turn, to share; and b) each person gets the same amount of time to speak. (Yes, I have a timekeeper present.) This prevents extroverts from monopolizing group time, and models that sharing by all is an integral part of the event.
Conferences That Work is not Open Space!
Although Open Space and Conferences That Work are both participant-driven designs, there are significant differences between them. Perhaps the biggest advantage of Open Space is that you can use it when you don’t have much time; a few hours are often enough to do useful work. For events lasting one-and-half days or longer, however, I believe that the additional structure of Conferences That Work creates a more intimate, powerful, and useful experience for participants. Including introverts!
No, that’s not me up on the stage, and that’s not the kind of session I’ll be leading next Tuesday, May 22, at the MPI New England 2012 Northeast Education Conference, Rhode Island Convention Center, Providence.
Here’s a transcript of my four-minute Blink! talk Torn About Technology given on Monday, April 23, at the 
There are many models of how people behave in groups, and each of them is useful in certain contexts. In the context of organizing and running a conference, how are group culture and event leadership interlinked?
“Cool, even though it seems like he has reinvented Open Space.”