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A post about posting (on walls) at events – part 1

Friday, August 5th, 2011 by Adrian Segar

Recently I’ve felt frustrated and baffled. No less than three venues (two hotels and a conference center) in the last month told me that I couldn’t post anything on the walls of the room I was meeting in.

I couldn’t post anything. No flip chart paper, masking tape, stick pins, thumbtacks, sticky notes, or wall clips.

That’s a blanket “no”

To add insult to injury, none of the venues apologized or offered any suggestions on alternative ways I could display materials on a vertical surface. None of them had any substitute surfaces, like large portable notice boards or whiteboards available.

One conference organizer wondered if I could use tables instead. Unfortunately, tables are not a comparable substitute for walls for two reasons:

On walls, notes or cards can be placed anywhere in a seven-foot band between the floor and where people can reach. On tables, human reach limits us to a three-foot band.
Many more people can easily see information placed on a wall compared to a table.

Why we need to be able to post on walls at meetings

Some of the most powerful techniques available for group problem-solving require ways to display multiple pieces of information to an entire group. Members can easily and publicly move items around to cluster, list, sort, and map relationships. Schools have used blackboards (chalkboards) for two hundred years to display information to students. Thumbtacks (aka drawing pins) have existed for over one hundred years. Masking tape was invented in 1925. We’ve been using Post-it Notes for over thirty years. These are not new technologies, folks, why are venues banning them from their walls where we meet?

I understand that people use venues for many different purposes. Wall damage, through incorrect use of attachment technology or marker bleed-through, costs money to repair. But “wall work” is an essential component of group problem solving, and for a venue to prohibit its use while offering no alternatives makes it hard to hold many kinds of useful meetings.

In the second part of this post, I’ll cover some of the technologies now available for posting information on walls, including some that you may not know about. Stay tuned!

Have you had venues not allow you to post materials on their walls? What did you do?

Photo attribution: Flickr user pierrelaphoto

Tags: participation techniques, posting, presentations, venues, walls| Posted in Soapbox, Venues | 3 Comments »

The implicit ground rules of traditional conferences

Monday, August 1st, 2011 by Adrian Segar

Traditional conferences have implicit ground rules. Many people are surprised when I talk about the need for explicit ground rules at conferences. “Why do you need them?” is a common response.

So perhaps it’s worthwhile pointing out that every traditional conference has ground rules.

We just never talk about them. They’re implicit.

Some common implicit ground rules

Don’t interrupt presentations.
Don’t ask questions until you’re told you can.
The time to meet and connect with other attendees is during the breaks, not during the sessions.
Applaud the presenter when she’s done.
Don’t share anything intimate; you don’t know who might hear about it.
The people talking at the front of the room know more than the audience.
Don’t talk about how you’re feeling in public.
If you have an opposing minority point of view, keep quiet.

And a few more for conference organizers (a little tongue-in-cheek here):

Don’t reveal your revenue model.
Never explain how a sponsor got onto the program.
Don’t publish attendee evaluations unless they’re highly favorable.

You can probably think of more.

Of course, each of us has slightly different interpretations or internal beliefs about implicit ground rules like these, and that’s what causes problems.

Explicit ground rules

When we don’t agree to explicit ground rules at the start of an event, no one knows exactly what’s acceptable behavior. (Think about what it’s like when you have to go to a conference and don’t know the dress code.) The result is stress when we’d like to do something that might not be OK, like ask a question, let a presenter know we can’t hear properly, or share a personal story. We’re social animals, and most of us don’t want to rock the boat too much. The result: we play it safe; we’ll probably remain silent. And we lose an opportunity to make our experience better and more meaningful.

A common misconception about explicit ground rules is that they restrict us from doing things. (“Turn off your cell phones.” “No flash photography.”) Actually, good ground rules do the opposite; they increase our freedom of action. That’s because, by making it explicit that we permit certain behaviors, like asking questions, they remove stressful uncertainty and widen our options.

I use six explicit ground rules for all Conferences That Work. Four of them, The Four Freedoms, are available for download. To learn about the others and understand how they all work, read my book!

What do you think about explicit ground rules during conferences? Have you attended conferences that used them? If so, what was your experience of having them available?

Tags: explicit, freedoms, ground rules, implicit, questions| Posted in Event design | 2 Comments »

A story about the power of experiential learning

Thursday, July 28th, 2011 by Adrian Segar

What approach should we use to teach participation techniques for meeting sessions? Here’s my answer to this question, illustrated by a story about the power of experiential learning.

With the rise of social learning and the decline in the importance of formal learning, perhaps we should use experiential learning. On the other hand, in the same time we need to experience a limited set of participation techniques we can comprehensively describe many more. Then again, perhaps experiencing a participation technique directly is a more effective way to cement both learning it and truly understanding its relevance. So, if we are teaching participation techniques, which of these two approaches is a better path for learning?

J’s light-bulb moment

Earlier this week I led a workshop at Meeting Professionals International’s World Education Congress (WEC). The 150-minute session covered a variety of techniques that foster and support meaningful participation during meetings. Participants spent most of their time using these techniques to learn about and connect with each other. They also explored questions about their experience at WEC and in the session itself.

As the workshop progressed, and I heard from the forty-six participants, it became clear that one of them, whom I’ll call J, had considerable prior experience with the techniques I was facilitating.

Near the end of the workshop, I ran Plus/Delta (described in Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love): a method that provides a fast, public evaluation of a session or entire meeting. As an advocate for transparency and feedback, I chose the subject of our Plus/Delta to be a group evaluation of the workshop itself. During the evaluation, J commented that he had hoped that I would cover more techniques by talking about them rather than having attendees experience them directly. He then contributed a simple and ingenious way to extend Plus/Delta that was new to me.

My heart sank a little

Here was J, an experienced facilitator of participation techniques, proposing that I should spend the workshop talking about techniques rather than facilitating experiences of them. Could I be going about this wrong?

I moved immediately into the last technique of the workshop, running fishbowl. This is a simple way to facilitate focused discussion with a large group. All participants sit in a large circle of chairs. Only people in the “fishbowl”, a small circle of chairs at the center, can speak. After a few minutes of comments, J entered the fishbowl.

J said that he had read about fishbowls many times before. He understood how they worked, but he had never tried one.

And then, to my surprise and delight, he told us that experiencing the fishbowl had been a revelation to him. Why? Because he had directly experienced the power of the technique in a way that significantly enhanced his understanding of it, which he had previously believed to be sufficient. It was poignant for me to hear J express a new point of view that contradicted what he had said only a few minutes earlier. I admired his courage in sharing his learning with us all.

I too have struggled over the years to define the best balance between understanding techniques through description and understanding them through direct experience. J’s light-bulb moment fits for me; these days I am content to let attendees learn participation techniques, first through direct experience and then, if necessary, via reflection and discussion.

Postscript

At the end of the workshop, J and I talked while I was packing up for a flight home.

He told me that his fishbowl sharing had unexpectedly reminded him of a session he had once attended. It was entitled “One hundred icebreakers in one hundred minutes”, and consisted of rapid descriptions of a hundred ways to introduce attendees to each other.

His rueful comment?

“I don’t remember any of them.”

Tags: experiential, fishbowl, Learning, light-bulb moment, MPI, plus/delta, World Education Congress| Posted in Learning | 2 Comments »

How to recognize someone for their service to an organization when they can’t be present in person

Sunday, July 17th, 2011 by Adrian Segar

How do you recognize someone for their service to an organization when they can’t be present in person?

I faced this problem recently with a retiring founder who couldn’t attend our annual conference. So I thought it would be useful to share how I handled it.

I’ve often mentioned edACCESS, the non-profit for information technology staff at small schools, on this blog, because the organization’s annual conference has been a long-suffering test-bed for my peer conference ideas and experiments. Nancy, Mike & I started edACCESS back in 1991, and although Mike soon left for other pursuits, Nancy & I have been running the edACCESS conference for twenty years.

So I felt sad when Nancy called to tell me she was retiring as Director of Administrative Computing of her school this fall and would be retiring from edACCESS too. We had worked to create a wonderful community together, and now she was leaving us. At least, I thought, we’ll be able to thank her at this year’s conference for her twenty years of service. And then I remembered that she wasn’t going to be able to attend. What were we going to do?

How do you recognize someone for their service to an organization when they can’t be present in person?

What we did

Here’s what we did to recognize Nancy’s contributions to edACCESS, even though she couldn’t be with us in person:

I arranged with Nancy to Skype her from her office at the start of the “morning meeting” group session on the last day of the conference. This was a time when all attendees would be together.

A week before the event

A week before the event, Nancy and I set up a test call with me calling from the laptop I would be using at the conference. It was good we did this because it took a while to get Nancy’s camera working. We arranged for her to start Skype when she arrived at work, thirty minutes before we would start the recognition ceremony.

An hour before we were due to start

An hour before we were due to start, we set up arcs of chairs facing the large screen at the front of the room. I set up my laptop video to project onto the screen. Then I patched the laptop audio and the feeds from my wireless lavalier mike and audience mike into the room’s sound system. Next, I positioned my laptop so that when the screen was upright, the webcam would show the audience. Finally, I angled the lid of my laptop backward so that its webcam would only show me when I stood in front of it.

About twenty minutes before the call

About twenty minutes before the call, Nancy was not showing up as connected on Skype. I called her from my cell and she assured me Skype was running. I restarted Skype on my machine & this time she appeared. Phew! During the next few minutes, I muted our audio while the audience assembled.

Showtime!

Showtime! With the audience quiet I welcomed Nancy and recounted her contributions to edACCESS. Then I asked her to share her recollections of how the organization had started, twenty years earlier. The two of us spent a few minutes recalling our memories of the early days, which we had not done publicly before.
I emphasized that edACCESS would not have existed had it not been for Nancy’s contributions. I removed from a gift bag the present we were giving her: a Kindle (a great gift for someone who’s moving and may not appreciate receiving a bulky plaque). Then I asked the attendees to acknowledge Nancy. Simultaneously, I adjusted the webcam so that she could see the assembled audience for the first time. The attendees rose to their feet and clapped and cheered. Nancy beamed. When the applause finally died down, she talked about the pleasure she’d received seeing edACCESS prosper and thanked everyone who made it possible.
I thanked Nancy one more time, and we brought our Skype ceremony to a close.

Have you used videoconferencing to recognize someone for their service to your organization? If so, how did it work out? Do you have any tips to share?

Tags: acknowledgements, giving thanks, Skype, videoconferencing| Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Participation techniques you can use in conference sessions

Monday, June 27th, 2011 by Adrian Segar

Here’s the summary handout for my workshop on participation techniques you can use in conference sessions that I led at MPI’s 2011 World Education Congress. The notes at the end of the list contain additional resources for information on these techniques.

Technique: Setting ground rules ‡*

Brief description: Setting ground rules before other activities commence clarifies and unifies participants’ expectations.
When to use: Start of session, workshop, or conference.
Helpful for: Setting the stage for collaboration and participation, by giving people permission and support for sharing with and learning from each other. Increases participants’ safety and intimacy.
Resources needed: Paper or online list of ground rules.

Technique: Human spectrogram

Brief description: People stand along a line (one dimension) or in a room space (two dimensions) to answer session questions (factual or opinions).
When to use: Usually at the start of a session. Also, use as an icebreaker before or during the three questions.
Helpful for: Allowing participants and the group to discover commonalities. Also, use to pick homogeneous or heterogeneous groups/teams. Also use to hear a spectrum of comments on an issue and then view any resulting shifts in opinion. Gets people out of their chairs!
Resources needed: A clear corridor space between walls (one dimension), or a clear room (two dimensions).

Technique: The three questions *

Brief description: Three questions answered in turn by every participant to the entire group within a given time limit, typically 1½ – 3 minutes.
– How did I get here?
– What do I want to have happen?
– What experience do I have that others may find useful?
When to use: Normally, right after ground rules have been set.
Helpful for: Learning about each participant, exposing topics and questions of interest to the group, and uncovering formerly unknown useful expertise for the group to share.
Resources needed: Question cards and pens, a circle of chairs. Do not replace cards with the three questions posted on a wall or screen.

Technique: Fishbowl *

Brief description: An effective technique for focused discussion. Works by limiting and making clear who can speak at any moment.
When to use: During any conference content or topic-oriented session. Also, use for conference closing discussion.
Helpful for: Keeping group discussions focused. A plus is that contributors need to move to and from discussion chairs, maintaining alertness and engagement.
Resources needed: Chairs, either set in two concentric circles or in a U-shape with discussant chairs at the mouth.

Technique: Personal introspective *

Brief description: A session where attendees privately reflect on their answers to five questions. All attendees then have an opportunity but not an obligation to share their answers with the group.
When to use: Towards the end of the event, usually just before the final group session for a short event. At multi-day events, sometimes held as the first session on the last day.
Helpful for: Reinforcing learning and concretizing changes participants may wish to make in their lives as a consequence of their experiences during the event.
Resources needed: Chairs, either set in small circles or one large circle, personal introspective question cards, and pens.

Technique: Affinity grouping †*

Brief description: A technique to discover and share ideas that arise during the conference and group them into categories, so participants can organize and discuss them.
When to use: Can be used at any session to elicit and gain group responses to ideas. Also useful as a closing process if action outcomes are desired.
Helpful for: Future planning, and uncovering group or sub-group energy around topics and actions. Can be used to guide decision-making by the group.
Resources needed: Cards and/or large sticky notes, pens, pins or tape if cards are used, walls for posting.

Technique: Plus/delta *

Brief description: A simple review tool for participants to quickly identify what went well and potential improvements.
When to use: Normally during a closing session.
Helpful for: Quickly uncovering, with a minimum of judgment, positive comments on and possible improvements to a conference or other experience.
Resources needed: Flipcharts and, optionally, ropes or straps.

Notes

‡ How to improve your conference with explicit ground rules and Two principles for designing conference ground rules.

† An expanded description of affinity grouping is available in The Workshop Book: From Individual Creativity to Group Action.

* See a complete description of this process in Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love, available from this website, Amazon, or any bookstore.

Other resources
The Knowledge Sharing Toolkit is a useful list of participative processes that can be used with groups.

Photo attribution: Flickr user choconancy

Tags: fishbowl, ground rules, participation, personal introspective, plus/delta, spectogram, techniques, three questions| Posted in Promo | 11 Comments »

Why presenters need to incorporate audience engagement

Saturday, June 25th, 2011 by Adrian Segar

Photograph of small groups meeting at the edACCESS 2011 peer conference — Small groups meeting at edACCESS 2011

Why is it important for presenters to incorporate audience engagement?

“…it isn’t our schools that are failing: it is our theory of learning that is failing.”
— Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown, authors of A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change.

An inconvenient truth

Think back on all the conference presentations you’ve attended. How much of what happened there do you remember?

Be honest now. I’m not going to check.

Nearly all the people to whom I’ve asked this question reply, in effect, “Not much”. This is depressing news for speakers in general, and me in particular as, since the publication of Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love, I have been receiving an increasing number of requests to speak at conferences.

When I ask about the most memorable presentations, people (after adjusting for the reality that memories fade as time passes) tend to mention sessions where there was a lot of interaction with the presenter and/or amidst the audience: in other words, sessions where they weren’t passive attendees but actively participated.

Take a moment to see whether that’s your experience too.

Social learning

Conference sessions that are designed to facilitate engagement between rather than broadcast content provide wonderful opportunities for social learning: the learning that occurs through connection, engagement, and conversations with our peers.

Social learning is important, and here’s why, courtesy of Harold Jarche:

There are additional reasons why supporting social learning during conference sessions makes a lot of sense:

Active participants almost always learn and retain learning better than passive attendees.
Participants meet and learn about each other, rather than sitting next to strangers who remain strangers during a session.
Participants influence the content and structure of the session toward what it is they want to learn, which is often different from what a presenter expects.
Being active during a session increases engagement, creating better learning outcomes.
Actively participating during a session is generally a lot more fun!

A mission for conference presenters: incorporate audience engagement

Conferences provide an ideal venue for social learning; they are potentially the purest form of social learning network because we are brought together face-to-face with our peers. And yet most conference sessions, invariably promoted as the heart of every conference, squander this opportunity by clinging to the old presenter-as-broadcaster-of-wisdom model.

Of course, there are conference sessions that routinely include significant participation. Amusingly, they have a special name so they won’t be confused with “regular” conference sessions: workshops!

In my opinion, every conference session longer than a few minutes should include significant participation that supports and encourages engagement. If you’re a conference presenter, make this part of your mission—to improve your effectiveness by incorporating participation techniques into your presentations. Your audiences will thank you!

Are you a conference presenter? How much do you incorporate participation techniques into your presentations? Please share your ideas here!

Tags: engagement, leadership, Learning, mission, presentations, social learning| Posted in leadership, Learning, Presentations | 5 Comments »

Tip: How to live blog a public conference session without going crazy

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011 by Adrian Segar

Here’s a simple idea, courtesy of edACCESS colleague Bill Campbell, that can come in real handy when you want to live blog a public conference session without devoting most of your time to keeping up with what the speaker or participants are saying.

Crowdsource your event recording! How? Before the session, create a public Google Doc, shorten the weblink to the document, and publish the shortened URL on the Twitter feed for the event and/or on the projection screen in the room before the session starts, together with a request to help out with session notes. Anyone with the web link will be able to log in and help share the work of documenting the session.

Do you ever live blog a public conference session this way? Share your experience in the comments below!

Photo attribution: Flickr user catspyjamasnz

Tags: blogging, crowdsourcing, event recording, live blog| Posted in Tip | 1 Comment »

It wasn’t the lobster: How we often do work we don’t notice

Sunday, June 19th, 2011 by Adrian Segar

Work we don’t notice

Do you know that we do work we don’t notice?

During the summer of 1993, I was dining with my wife, Celia, at a Maine shoreline restaurant. I still remember our wooden table with the red and white check plastic tablecloth. I had just consumed an excellent lobster and a pint of beer and felt more relaxed than I had felt for many months.

Leaning back, well-fed, I had no inkling what was about to happen. And then, suddenly, out of my mouth came these words:

“I think I’d like to give up working at Marlboro.”

My professional life was hectic. I had a full-time salaried position at Marlboro College, teaching half-time and running the IT department half-time. I was also freelance consulting half-time. Oh, and the first two half-time positions were, in reality, more like three-quarter-time commitments.

You can do the math.

Until that seafood-fueled moment, I had never consciously thought about making any kind of drastic change in my work life. And yet, as soon as the words were out of my mouth I became aware that I was going to resign from the college and move to full-time consulting work.

And it felt right.

How did I get there?

Well, ultimately, it wasn’t the lobster or the beer that caused this epiphany—they were just the welcome catalysts. I’ve written elsewhere about how you can learn from stories that resonate, but there was no resonance here.

Instead, my relaxing meal provided an opportunity for months of underlying percolating work to emerge. We often do work that we don’t notice. While steeped in the stress and the toll that long workdays were taking on my life, I didn’t notice the analysis and unconscious calculation of risks and tradeoffs that were bubbling under the surface; the hard, drawn-out preparation needed to make such a drastic change in my professional life.

Looking back, I remember a moment in Maine when I moved from employee to self-employed, and I call it an intuitive choice. Perhaps this is what intuition is: a sudden realization of a conclusion from steady unconscious processing of our experiences. Whatever the mechanism, I believe that we have significant unconscious resources that can often help us respond effectively to difficult situations. How we bring them into our consciousness is for you to discover. Perhaps lobster and a beer?

Have you ever experienced this kind of sudden insight in your life? Please share your story!

Image attribution: Flickr user subinev

Tags: creative work, intuition, work| Posted in life lessons | 2 Comments »

Two principles for designing conference ground rules

Monday, June 6th, 2011 by Adrian Segar

I’ve written before about how to improve your conference with explicit ground rules. Though it’s interesting and enlightening to compare the ground rules embedded in conference designs—for example, Open Space Technology has five ground rules, while Conferences That Work and World Café have six—I won’t do that today. Instead, I want to share two principles for designing conference ground rules.

Ground rules should increase participants’ freedom, not restrict it

“Don’t speak unless the teacher asks you a question.”
“Pay attention!”
“Don’t chew gum in class.”

We’re used to rules like these that restrict our actions and reduce our freedom. But, surprisingly, it’s quite possible to create ground rules that increase our freedom at an event. Here are some examples:

Whenever it starts is the right time.—Open Space Technology
You have the freedom to ask about anything puzzling.—Conferences That Work
Make collective knowledge visible.—World Café

Each of these is a rule that gives permission for participants to act in a way that does not generally occur at traditional meetings. By explicitly giving permission for activities that normally are not associated with Conference 1.0 events, we increase participants’ freedom.

Make ground rules measurable

“Listen to others.”
“Be respectful.”
“Treat people politely.”

Rules like these are superficially appealing, but they aren’t effective because they rely on unmeasurable assumptions. How can we determine whether a participant is listening, respectful, or polite? We can’t, and this can lead to unproductive, time-consuming, and ultimately unresolvable disagreements during an event.

In contrast, here are examples of ground rules that are measurable and thus far less likely to lead to disagreement and subsequent conflict.

“Don’t interrupt.”
“Stay on time.”
“Keep what happens in each session confidential, unless everyone agrees otherwise.”

How were these principles for designing conference ground rules derived?

It would be nice to be able to claim that I first conceived these meta-rules for ground rule design and then used them to build my conference ground rules. No such luck! It took me ten years to realize that explicit ground rules for Conferences That Work would be useful, and another five to figure out the six I now use. Only recently did I notice that all six follow the two principles I’ve described above.

What ground rules do you use for your events? Can you share any other principles for designing conference ground rules?

Tags: freedom, ground rules, measurability, open space, World Cafe| Posted in Event design | 2 Comments »

Conversations => Relationships => Value (Part 2)

Thursday, June 2nd, 2011 by Adrian Segar

Conversations => Relationships => Value

In Part 1 of this post, I introduced this core component of Conference 2.0.

Here’s why this sequence is an important consideration for modern meeting design, and how it’s enhanced by Conference 2.0 designs.

Why should customers buy from you?

Sometimes, business value grows out of the barrel of a gun. When you have a monopoly on a product or service, you can charge as much as the market will bear. But when competition exists, you must use different strategies. For example, you can play race-to-the-bottom: squeezing your suppliers for rock bottom costs that, hopefully, are lower than your competitors. Or, you can differentiate what you offer in many other ways: better service, more options, faster delivery, longer warranties, superior customer support, etc. Thousands of books have been written about how to profitably and consistently market and sell. And, except perhaps for the most cutthroat commodity markets, the ability to build and maintain good relationships with your customers is a key component of most techniques.
This ability is even more crucial in today’s markets, because of four factors:

The increased complexity of products and services.
The increased variety of products and services.
The increased speed of product and service development.
The increased transparency in many marketplaces caused by online customer reviews and feedback.

The first three factors make it harder for potential customers to evaluate whether a specific product or service is a desirable fit for their needs. The last amplifies any deficiencies (perceived or otherwise) that may exist, any of which could prove fatal to sales.

In this new business environment, creating and maintaining good, trustworthy relationships with your customers becomes crucial.

Relationships are the new impressions

In the good old days, the more people heard about your product through broadcast marketing (impressions), the greater your sales. Today, business value, especially for non-commodity products and services, is becoming increasingly linked to the strength and quality of buyer-seller relationships. Traditional marketing can’t manufacture relationships, which are built through conversations between you and potential customers. Some of your conversations will turn into relationships, and some of those relationships will lead to value for your business.

Not all meetings are alike

Meetings provide wonderful opportunities for conversations. But, for two reasons, some meeting environments provide better opportunities than others.

First, for all but very small meetings, the number of conversations doesn’t scale with event size. For example, at a one-day, two-hundred-attendee event you can’t have more ten-minute conversations than you can with a hundred in attendance. In fact, at a large conference it’s often harder to find the people you really want to talk to than at a smaller, more focused event.

Second, Conference 1.0 sessions don’t foster conversations. Conversations only take place during breaks and socials. Compare this with Conference 2.0 designs, which excel at providing opportunities for relevant conversations

How Conference 2.0 designs support conversations

I’ve quoted Howard Givner before and I’ll quote him again. (Why? Because he made this highly positive remark about one of my conferences 😀.)

I easily established triple the number of new contacts, and formed stronger relationships with them, than at any other conference I’ve been to.

Why is Howard’s experience a common one at Conference 2.0? Let’s take Conferences That Work as an example. This conference design starts with initial roundtables that not only provide a structured forum for attendees to meet and learn about each other’s affiliations, interests, experience, and expertise but also effectively uncover the topics that people want to discuss and share. Within a couple of hours, every attendee has the initial introductions and information necessary to go out and start the right conversations about the right topics with the right people. Other Conference 2.0 designs encourage fruitful conversations by giving attendees the ability to meet around topics that they choose during the event.

The bottom line: Conference 2.0 formats routinely lead to more meaningful conversations, which in turn lead to more relationships, which in turn lead to more business value.

Does Conversations => Relationships => Value make sense to you?

Tags: conversation, ff0000, relationships, return on investment, ROI, value| Posted in Event design | No Comments »