Blog

"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

Welcome to the Conferences That Work blog!

You're in the right place for the latest posts on conference design, facilitation, peer conferences, associations, consulting, and stories like being trapped in an elevator with a Novel Prize winner.

Or sign up for a subscription to my blog posts or RSS feed so you never miss another post.

The Solution Room—a powerful conference session

Thursday, March 22nd, 2012 by Adrian Segar

There’s been a lot of interest in The Solution Room, a session that I co-facilitated last July at Meeting Professionals International World Education Congress in Orlando, Florida. It is one of the most popular sessions I’ve facilitated at conferences this year. So here’s some information about the session…oh, and don’t miss the two-minute video of participant testimonials at the end of this post!

History of The Solution Room

Ruud Janssen explains that the original concept was co-created onsite at Meeting Professionals International’s 2011 European Meetings & Events Conference by Linda Pereira, Miranda Ioannou, Midori Connolly, Robert Benninga, Mike van der Vijver, Simon Bucknall, David Bancroft Turner, and Ruud himself. Ruud produced a short video of the original session, as well as a longer video of participant testimonials.

Minimum resources

A facilitator trained in running The Solution Room.
Enough round tables seating 6-8 people for every participant to have a seat.
Flip chart paper that completely covers the tables, a plenty of colored markers at each table
Sufficient clear space in the room to hold a one-dimensional human spectrogram for all participants

Brief description

The Solution Room is a powerful conference session, which not only engages and connects attendees but also provides peer-supported advice on their most pressing problems. It typically lasts between 90-120 minutes and can handle hundreds of participants. A session of 20 or more people starts with a short introduction followed by a human spectrogram that demonstrates the amount of experience available in the room. Participants are then given some time to think of a challenge for which they would like to receive peer advice. A second human spectrogram then maps participants’ comfort levels.

Next, the facilitator divides participants into small groups of 6-8 people. Each group shares a round table covered with flip chart paper and plenty of colored markers. The group members individually mindmap their problem on the paper in front of them. Each participant then gets a fixed time to explain their challenge to their table peers and receive advice and support.

Finally, there’s a public group evaluation. Two human spectrograms map the shift in comfort level of all the participants and the likelihood that participants will try to change what they’ve just shared.

A two-minute video of testimonials from my Solution Room session at the 2011 Meeting Professionals International World Education Conference in Orlando, Florida

Photo attribution: Flickr user tnoc

Tags: connection, engagement, MPI, Ruud Janssen, solution room| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

I and thou: blogging as if a person was actually there

Wednesday, March 14th, 2012 by Adrian Segar

I and thou.

All actual life is encounter.
—Martin Buber, I and Thou (1923)

I finally realized why certain bloggers irritate me.

A lot.

Even if I agree with much of what they say.

It’s simple.

They never write as if they were there.

These bloggers always present themselves as authorities. The way they write implies they speak THE TRUTH.

Personal stories do not appear in their posts.

Perhaps this is a reaction to my years of lectured-to schooling, the fantasy I was encouraged to believe (only eventually dispelled by my experience) that everything had THE RIGHT ANSWER if I was only smart enough to hear and understand it.

Well, I don’t care.

§——————————————§

When I feel even a splinter of the authentic self come through a blogger’s writing, even if I don’t agree with them at all, something changes. The person appears to me by choosing to enter into relationship through their writing. They become vulnerable and appealing.

We become connected.

I like that.

A lot.

When a person hides behind their words, streaming out some truth as if it were divinely inspired, I feel a void.

§——————————————§

Bloggers—all writers for that matter—let us know who you are.

I and thou.

We want to know you.

Tags: blogging, I and thou, Martin Buber| Posted in Soapbox | 4 Comments »

Resources for using Pinterest for events

Tuesday, March 13th, 2012 by Adrian Segar

Stimulated by the March 13 #eventprofs Twitter chat, here are some relevant resources to get you started or learn more about using this suddenly-popular tool in the events profession.

Learning about Pinterest

Pinterest entry on Wikipedia
Pinterest: A Beginner’s Guide to the Hot New Social Network on Mashable
56 Ways to Market Your Business on Pinterest via copyblogger
How to Get Free Traffic From Pinterest Search by Neil Patel
Pinterest Marketing Tips and Strategies on Authority Hacker

Pinterest and events

How To Effectively Use Pinterest for Events by Tuvel Communications
Pinterest and event marketing: Good companions? by Michael Heipel
Pinterest for Events by Daphne Bousquet
Why You Should Consider Pinterest as Part of Your Event Checklist by Arwin Adriano

Socials aren’t great ways to meet new people at conferences

Thursday, March 8th, 2012 by Adrian Segar

We know that the two main reasons people attend conferences are to learn and connect with others. Traditional conferences provide little or no session support for the latter. Instead, they assume that one or two social events provide a good environment for attendees to meet interesting new people. Socials at conferences are assumed to fulfill this function.

But research summarized in a recent article in Wired by Jonah Lehrer indicates this is not the case:

Do people mix at mixers? The answer is no…Mixer parties are supposed to free their guests from the constraints of preexisting social structure so they can approach strangers and make new connections. Nevertheless, our results show that guests at a mixer tend to spend the time talking to the few other guests whom they already know well.
—Do People Mix at Mixers? Structure, Homophily, and the “Life of the Party” by Paul Ingram and Michael W. Morris

This finding agrees with the common observation that traditional conferences provide a miserable social environment for first-timers. Walking into a room filled with hundreds of strangers is a daunting experience for all but the most extrovert. If we want to increase the likelihood that first-timers return to our events in future years and become active members of our conference communities, we need to provide effective ways for them to connect with their peers, preferably right at the start of the event.

If socials at conferences aren’t great ways to meet new people, then how can we improve matters?

Well, Jonah’s article also describes interesting research on the effect of group size on the likelihood that people will meet diverse peers. A 2011 paper Social ecology of similarity: Big schools, small schools and social relationships concludes that in large groups, people spend time with people who are much more similar to them than in small groups. The research also found that the friendships developed in small groups were closer and longer lasting. Yet another piece of evidence, perhaps, in favor of the small conferences that I’ve always championed.

Photo attribution: Flickr user IFLA 2011 Goethe-Institut Reception

Tags: mixers, socials| Posted in Event design | 2 Comments »

Facilitating change: Four lessons from the devolution of the British roundabout

Tuesday, February 28th, 2012 by Adrian Segar

How do you facilitate change? In this occasional series, we explore various aspects of facilitating individual and group change.

The devolution of the British roundabout

I grew up in England, where roundabouts are more common than traffic lights as a way of routing traffic. (Fun fact: Hertfordshire, England, built the first roundabout in the world in the early 1900’s.) When I was a kid, roundabouts were walled constructions in the center of traffic circles. They looked like this:

In the 1960’s, the Brits realized that such elaborate constructions were overkill, and roundabouts became more like this:

As time went on, roundabout design was simplified further to this minimalist design:

These so-called mini-roundabouts were smaller than previous versions because they allowed the rear wheels of large vehicles to drive over the edge of the central circle when making tight turns.

While in London last year I saw the most recent evolution of the British roundabout. The physical barrier of the central island has completely disappeared, and the roundabout has just become a simple painted circle, with directional arrows painted on the road surface.

Four lessons we can learn about facilitating change from this brief history of roundabouts

When we are facilitating a desired change, we need to clearly communicate the change we want to make

Think about what would have happened if the initial replacement for the street intersections that human cultures have used for thousands of years was a plain white circle. People would not have understood how it was supposed to function. Without a physical barrier forcing a circular route, drivers would have been tempted to drive straight across it. The first roundabout design had to impose a fundamentally different way of navigating intersections; otherwise, it wouldn’t have worked.

It’s easier to facilitate change in small increments than in large leaps

By the time of the plain white circle roundabout, the concept of driving around, rather than through, circular objects placed at the center of intersections was imprinted on the British drivers’ psyche. The final design is quite different from the elaborate early roundabouts, but it developed through a series of incremental design refinements.

Change is attractive if the new situation has advantages

Each change in the design of the British roundabout created advantages for the builders (less expensive), environment (less space wasted at intersections), and users (more space to negotiate the intersection). While the promise of an improved outcome does not guarantee that a change will occur, it certainly can’t hurt.

Different cultures can have very different approaches to change

If you’re not British, your experience of roundabouts will be different; you may not even know what a roundabout is! In the United States, roundabouts only started appearing in the 1990’s (rotaries and traffic circles employ different rules). Other European countries have their own roundabout designs and unique histories of introduction. Don’t assume that a change that has worked for one culture will be acceptable to another. (A corollary to this lesson is that exploring other cultures is a wonderful way to have your eyes opened to aspects of your culture that you take for granted.)

Are there other lessons we can learn from the British roundabout? What other design evolutions can you think of that teach lessons about facilitating change?

Tags: British roundabout, change, culture, facilitation, roundabout| Posted in Facilitating Change | 3 Comments »

Content Is Marketing; Profits Come From Somewhere Else

Thursday, February 23rd, 2012 by Adrian Segar

Here’s an important lesson I learned about marketing while running a solar business thirty years ago, forgot, and learned again after publishing my first book in 2009. With the rise of online, this lesson has never been more important than it is today.

Succeeding in business in a commodity market

In 1979 I was an owner of Solar Alternative, a Vermont solar manufacturing company. It was the height of the first “energy crisis,” and solar was, forgive me, hot. We manufactured solar hot water systems, which we retailed, wholesaled, and installed all over New England. Solar hot water was a fairly easy business to enter in those days. Our small company, which employed about a dozen people, had plenty of competition, some of it providing equipment of questionable quality.

Apart from the solar collectors, which we manufactured using a few hand tools and our big investment, a ten-foot sheet metal brake, all the other solar hot water system components could be purchased from any well-stocked plumbing wholesaler. We developed a reputation for supplying reliable systems that could withstand the severe New England winters but so did many of our competitors.

Our company needed a way to successfully differentiate itself from significant competition.

We noticed that our customers were unwilling to pay for information about correctly selecting and installing solar hot water systems. There are many ways that these systems can fail or provide sub-optimum energy output, and we had learned how to avoid them. Our potential customers were willing to shell out big bucks for the systems themselves, but they did not want to pay separately for our hard-won knowledge.

So, we gave away our expertise.

The one differentiator between Solar Alternative and our abundant competitors became our unique willingness to provide free, unlimited advice to the wholesalers and end-users who investigated and/or purchased our products.

We were happy to freely share our valuable content—how to build and install high-quality, reliable solar hot water systems—with anyone who asked. Our company gave away our content for free. We made money from the mark-up on our products when our prospects trusted our expertise and decided to purchase.

The brutal economics of writing a book

Writing my first book cannot be described as a carefully thought-out business decision. I was mission-driven to share what I had learned about participant-driven events since I began organizing them in 1992. It took four years of part-time work before Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love was published. Despite brisk sales for a niche book, my compensation for writing it was a few cents per hour.

This isn’t news, of course. Very few of the million book titles published globally each year ever make an author much money directly. So, was my decision to write a book one of the poorer financial choices of my life?

Well, no. (The worst was shorting Google’s IPO; it seemed like a good idea at the time.) Though the book provides a tiny income, the fact that I wrote it has led to numerous speaking, consulting, and conference design engagements, any one of which pays far more handsomely than selling a hundred books. Though the book isn’t free, its content sells for about one cent for every hundred words, a pretty minuscule amount. I make money from the apparent expertise and exposure that the book implies/conveys (your choice).

Content is Marketing; Profits Come From Somewhere Else

Get the connection between these two stories? For whatever reason, people are generally reluctant to pay much or anything for commodity or packaged information. But that doesn’t mean they don’t value good content. Often, they use the existence of high-quality information to cement their trust in the person or organization that provides it. From this perspective, content—whether it be advice on solar hot water systems, a fresh way of thinking about conferences, or accurate, timely, and useful information on any topic—is effective marketing for whatever you sell that makes money for you. I think this has never been truer than in today’s online world, where it’s never been easier to find pertinent content.

In 1985, my mentor, Jerry Weinberg, said it well: “Give away your best ideas.” It has worked for me, and I believe it can work for you, too.

Do you give away your best ideas? If so, how has doing so worked for you? If not, why not?

Post inspired by Publishing 2.0: Content Is Marketing, Profits Come From The Packaging

Tags: content, marketing, profit| Posted in Marketing | 7 Comments »

Jeremy Lin and the myth of the conference curator

Wednesday, February 15th, 2012 by Adrian Segar

“There is talent everywhere. We just don’t know how to find it.”
–Jonah Lehrer

Today’s Wired article by Jonah Lehrer describes recent research on the NFL scouting combine that concludes that highly paid sports scouts barely do better than chance at picking great players like Jeremy Lin out of the pool of promising candidates.

Sports scouts, with all the information, statistics, tests, and direct observations at their disposal can’t pick the best players! So why should we believe that “conference curators” can pick the best presenters and presentations?

In my twenty years of organizing conferences, I’ve never found a program committee that predicted more than half of the session topics that conference attendees chose when they were given the choice. During that time I’ve seen no evidence that any one person, whether they are given the title of “curator” or not, can put together a conference program that can match what attendees actually need and want.

Sure, taking a thematic, big-picture approach to constructing a conference program and then soliciting appropriate presenters may produce better results than issuing a call for speakers and picking sessions from the offerings of those who choose to respond. If you insist on leaving attendees out of the loop, it’s probably the best you can do. (Sadly, I’ve found that polling attendees before the event doesn’t work.) But it doesn’t, in my experience, create a conference program that truly serves attendees.

The smartest person in the room

It’s elitist and untrue to claim that only “curators” can put together a conference experience that attendees will value. “Attendees don’t know what they don’t know,” says Jeff Hurt. Yes, that’s often true if you’re comparing the knowledge of a single attendee with the knowledge of an expert. But, in my experience, attendees collectively know what they don’t know far better than any outside “expert”. As David Weinberger puts it in his latest book Too Big To Know: “The smartest person in the room is the room.”

Finally, who are these conference curators? Is it possible to be a conference curator for any kind of conference, or do you need to be a subject matter expert on the conference topic? What are the credentials a conference curator needs? None of the articles I’ve read answer these questions.

The conference curator is a myth

I think that the need for a conference curator is a myth created by those who desire to maintain the role of experts in the construction of conference programs. Let it go, guys. The people formerly known as the audience can do a much better job.

I’m sticking my neck out again. It’s a great way to learn. Are you a champion of the conference curator? Chop away in the comments below.

Photo attribution Flickr user nikk_la

Tags: curation, curator, myth, polling, program| Posted in Event design | 10 Comments »

What kind of event tourist are you?

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012 by Adrian Segar

Some tourists make a point of seeing the sights. Others prefer to immerse themselves in the ambiance of a new country or culture. And some want simply to switch off and relax in a place far from the trials and tribulations of work. Let’s talk about event tourists.

I’m an immerser myself. During our three-week vacation in Europe, I especially remember:

The manic delight and amusement of the village elder who guided our car around the trucks that blocked the exit from the tiny hill town of Monticchiello.
All the tiny Tuscan cafés we lazed in so we could hang out and watch Italians go by.
The Lake Como fish-seller who took twenty minutes to successfully seduce me into buying the last of his fried calamari.
Noticing some of the tens of thousands of little things—timings of traffic lights, scarves, houseplants, drinks, and climate—that shape and define a country’s culture.
The young hotel receptionist, bless her, who sympathetically soothed us when we arrived exhausted after dragging our suitcases from the Zurich train station.
A perfect day in the heart of the thousand-year-old New Forest with our good friends Bruce and Elizabeth, at whose wedding my wife and I met.

Event attendees are tourists too

One event tourists might be there for the content. They gravitate to the event’s museums and art galleries, concrete accomplishments of the far and recent past. They want to know the established order.

Another event tourist is there for the connections. They are stimulated by the ambiance, and excited by the opportunities to meet new people. They are open to learning important things, little or big, from their peers.

And some event tourists are there for a break from a job that may have become too much for them, exhausting them to the point where they need an official excuse to disappear from the office.

What kind of event tourist are you?

And what kind of event tourists do you cater to at your events?

Image attribution: Flickr user decadence

Tags: europe, event tourist, tourist, vacation| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

Why I don’t like unconferences

Wednesday, January 25th, 2012 by Adrian Segar

“Why I don’t like unconferences.” If you know me you’re probably scratching your head at the title of this post.

“Adrian,” you’re thinking, “unconferences are what you do! How can you not like unconferences?”

Well, it’s the word “unconference” I object to, not what it represents. Unfortunately, “unconference” has come to mean any kind of conference that isn’t a traditional conference. Originally the word “unconference” was coined to describe a participant-driven meeting. However, in recent years — rather like the encroachments on “counter-culture” and “green” — people use “unconference” to imply that their conference is cool in some way, even if it still employs the programmed speaker-centric event designs that we’ve suffered for hundreds of years.

What “conference” once meant

The meaning of the word “conference” has been corrupted to virtually the opposite of its original intent. As I describe in Conferences That Work, “conference” was first used around the middle of the 16th century as a verb that described the act of conferring with others in conversation. Over time, the word’s meaning shifted to denoting the meeting itself.

Regrettably few of today’s “conferences” provide substantive opportunities for conferring: consultation or discussion. Instead, they have become primarily conduits for the one-to-many transfer of information on the conference topic.

I believe that participant-driven event designs are a response to this drift of meeting process that has occurred over the years. In a sense, participant-driven events are the true conferences: events that support and encourage conferring.

To be accurate, we should be calling traditional conferences “unconferences”, reserving the word “conference” for the participant-driven event designs that are slowly becoming more popular.

Sadly, that’s unlikely to happen, so I talk about “participant-driven events” and avoid using the term “unconference” whenever possible.

In the end, I know my thoughts on the meaning and use of a word carry little weight. With rare exceptions, our culture, not the pronouncements of an individual, determines the meaning and usage of words. But if you agree with me, feel free to follow my example and spurn unconferences—but just the word, not the concept!

Tags: participant-driven, unconferences| Posted in Event design | 8 Comments »

The science of white space at events

Thursday, January 19th, 2012 by Adrian Segar

Conference organizers have an unfortunate tendency to stuff their programs full of sessions. It’s an understandable choice; if participants have committed all this time and money to be present, shouldn’t we minimize white space at events and give them as many sessions as we can cram in?

Unfortunately, filling every minute of your conference schedule does not lead to an optimum experience for attendees. We need white space: free time for attendees to do what they want and need to do. Here are some science-based, light-hearted, yet serious reasons why.

Biology

Yes, all of us need to use the bathroom every once in a while. The good news is that just about all event organizers remember this.

Physics

But what many forget is that Star Trek technology is not currently available; we cannot instantaneously teleport from one meeting room to another. At a minimum, breaks between sessions need to be long enough for attendees to walk leisurely between the two session locations that are furthest apart. But don’t program the minimum; people also need time to check their messages (otherwise they’ll just do it in the sessions, right?), get a cup of coffee, fall into a serendipitous conversation, etc.

Physiology

On average, conference session attendees sit 99.13% of the time.
OK, I made that up. But I’m not far off. And here’s a cheerful graphic about the perils of sitting created by Jan Jacobs:

Give your attendees more time to stand up and move about between sessions (and during them, see below) and, who knows, they may live longer.

Social science

According to social scientist Dr James House, “The magnitude of risk associated with social isolation is comparable with that of cigarette smoking and other major biomedical and psychosocial risk factors.” Why expose your attendees to such an unhealthy environment? We need to create conference environments that encourage and support connections with others, rather than leaving attendees to their own devices, and it turns out that conference mixers don’t provide as good opportunities for attendees to meet new people as you might think. We need additional kinds of white space at our events.

Neuroscience

Neuroscience supplies the most important rationale for providing white space at your events. As molecular biologist John Medina describes in his book Brain Rules: Learning occurs best when new information is incorporated gradually into the memory store rather than when it is jammed in all at once. Brains need breaks.

We need white space not only between sessions but also during them to maximize learning. Medina suggests that presentations be split into ten-minute chunks to avoid the falloff in attention that otherwise occurs. (Back in the ’70s, Tony Buzan, the inventor of mind maps, recommended studying in cycles of twenty minutes followed by a short break, a technique that has served me well for forty years.)

In addition, Medina tells us that multisensory environments provide significantly more effective learning than unisensory environments; recall is more accurate, has better resolution, and lasts longer. So make sure your sessions include multisensory input (participatory exercises, participant movement, smells, touch, etc.) and that your conference locale provides a pleasant multisensory environment.

So, what to do?

How do we find a balance between providing white space during and between conference sessions and our desire to provide as much potential content and opportunities for our attendees?

During sessions, it’s important to provide white space between every ten to twenty-minute chunk of learning, so that the learning that has occurred can be processed and retained. This is something that we should all be doing to optimize the learning experience at our events.

Between sessions, it’s important to include significant unstructured time. A ten-minute break between two one-hour sessions is the absolute minimum I’ll schedule, followed by long refreshment or meal breaks. I am not a fan of providing intrusive entertainment during meals—eating together is one of the most intimate bonding activities humans have—for goodness sake, let your attendees talk to each other during this time!

I’ve saved my best advice for last. Instead of deciding how much white space should exist at your conference, let the attendees decide! At the start of the event, explicitly give people permission to take whatever time they need to rest, recuperate, think, etc. It may seem silly, but I find that if you publicly define the event environment as one where it’s expected and normal for people to take whatever time they need for themselves it becomes easier for attendees to give themselves permission to do so.

[Thanks to Joan Eisenstodt for providing the initial impetus for writing this post! And check out Give Me a Break! for another viewpoint on the topics of this post.]

White space—it’s not just for advertising anymore! What’s been your experience of white space at events? What suggestions do you have for improving its use?

Image attribution: Flickr user zavie.

Tags: breaks, downtime, Event design, socials, white space| Posted in Event design | 11 Comments »