"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
“Leadership is about the role of the catalysts in organizations who influence and shape both strategy and execution, while management is the discipline that guides how large numbers of people efficiently accomplish complex work. Organizations need both catalysts and discipline.
…leaders are facilitators and their defining characteristic is their ability to enable connections that drive effective collaboration among large numbers of people. When leaders are facilitators, organizations adopt the disciplines of self-organized networks that are designed to leverage collective intelligence.
Rod was the COE of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Federal Employee Program with over $19 billion in annual revenues. I like how he distinguishes between leadership and management. Although he’s talking about organizations, his definitions apply beautifully to the roles of leadership and management at participant-driven meetings.
Replace “organizations” with “meetings” in the quotes above. Rod’s vision for the viable future of organizations becomes the same set of principles I’ve championed for effective, powerful conferences:
Supporting and encouraging conference participants to network & collaborate.
Using meeting designs that leverage the experience & expertise of the group.
Transforming meetings from top-down presentations to peer-initiated & led sessions.
Isn’t that interesting?
How do you see leadership and management roles play out in your meetings? What works, what doesn’t?
Best Practices look backward, providing advice that worked in the past; Next Practices focus on what to do in the time ahead.
—The Internet Time Alliance
I always felt irritated, but never knew why, when I heard someone talk about best practices as the business processes we should strive for. Reading the excerpt quoted above, taken from the Working Smarter Glossary of the Internet Time Alliance led to an aha! moment.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with learning about and comparing different approaches to solving problems or satisfying business requirements. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel or repeat mistakes that others have made.
But when we limit ourselves to the best that others are doing, two things happen.
Status quo and complacency
First, we blind ourselves to the reality that our world is constantly changing. The “best” of today may become quickly obsolete. As examples, we only need to look at how the music & publishing industries continue to cling to outmoded business models as digital distribution becomes commonplace.
And second, we don’t think about ways we might come up with something better. Example? Unlike the rest of the airline industry, Southwest Airlines has been profitable for 37 consecutive years. Not by implementing well-established practices of the fiercely competitive air transportation business. But by introducing new ways (flying out of smaller airports, standardizing airline fleets, employee profit-sharing, etc.) to satisfy customers and grow their market.
Learning about what’s best is fine for novices who need to get up to speed on what an industry currently does. Implementing next practices can be scary, because they may require us to do things that we, and perhaps no one else, have ever done before.
But, if we restrict ourselves to what’s currently best, then at best we’ll maintain the status quo, with the ever-present danger that at any time a competitor could make our industry’s best practices second best. Instead, focus on next practices. Doing this allows us to be open to reinventing our work, leading us to the potential of a profitable (and interesting) future.
“Why do you want to go to this conference?” is a question that a boss has probably asked you at some point. The real question is, of course, Is it worth the money and time invested in having you attend? It can be a hard question to answer. Especially when the event in question has no or few predetermined sessions, like the peer conferences I design and facilitate. So how can we measure and improve event ROI?
Improving Event ROI
Probably the most exhaustive methodology for planning and evaluating event ROI has been developed by Jack Phillips and Elling Hamso. It’s long and comprehensive, and here’s a summary of it.
According to this methodology, one of the components involved in evaluating Event ROI is the degree of Relationship Learning, which Elling defines as follows:
“Relationship learning refers to the building of affinity between people, getting to know others, trust and liking. All forms of peer learning benefit from the strength of personal relationships, it is the foundation for subsequent information, skills and attitude learning in the peer relationship. Relationship learning may be measured in much the same manner as other forms of learning. At the most detailed level, individual relationships of trust and liking, for example, may be scored on a scale from very low to very high, or more general reports of relationship learning may be collected.”
How peer conferences improve event ROI
Well, this is exactly the kind of learning experience at which peer conference designs like Conferences That Work excel! Here’s how Howard Givner described a peer conference he attended:
“…one of the most innovative and eye-opening professional experiences I’ve had. Aside from coming back with lots of new tips and ideas, I easily established triple the number of new contacts, and formed stronger relationships with them, than at any other conference I’ve been to.”
—Howard Givner article: The Un-Conference: Participant-Driven Agenda + Mashup Networking = Relationship Building on Steroids
Conversations, and subsequent relationships, are very important. Doc Searls, co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, wrote a great article about their pivotal role: Building a Relationship Economy. Well-designed peer conferences provide an environment that encourages and supports a rich abundance of the initial components of the following sequence:
“Value” here means the kind of business worth your boss is thinking about. More prospects, new sales, increased customer satisfaction, etc. All the things that translate into funding for your paycheck, profit for your company, and a happy boss.
So, when your boss next asks you The Question about the participant-driven conference you want to attend, take a deep breath. Tell them you expect to make many more business relationships at this event than you would at a conventional conference. Relationships that will turn into solid business value for your organization. Communicate exactly why you want to go. Explain that participant-driven conferences improve event ROI because they are much better than traditional meetings at building sessions around the content that attendees actually want. Good luck!
“When I think of how meetings are marketed, I never see anything, at least for our industry, that tugs at heartstrings. That’s where many of us connect. Imagine if say there were words and visuals of founders of organizations who were still active in some way…it just seems we forget.” —Joan Eisenstodt, from a March 6, 2011 comment on Facebook
In 2003, at a conference I was facilitating, I noticed a couple of participants wandering around with a camcorder. (This was a somewhat novel occurrence at the time; inexpensive camcorders were just appearing.) They were shooting footage of conference events and seemed to be interviewing people. No one had asked them to do this, and I assumed they were videoing for their own purposes. This was fine by me, and, in the usual press of conference process, I forgot about what they were doing.
Six months later, out of the blue, I received this:
Watching, I had one of those rare but so special conference choked-up moments. Without asking anyone, Tom Flanagan and Whitney Donnelly decided to make a movie about our conference and offered it to us for promotional purposes. When conference attendees do something like this unsolicited, you know there’s something good going on.
Today, it’s easy to make such movies. But we haven’t made any more. The video is still available for viewing on the edACCESS home page. Nothing out of the ordinary by today’s standards, it remains as a reminder of something very special made by Whitney & Tom because their heartstrings were tugged back in 2003.
Do you create events that tug at heartstrings? If so, you should feel proud. I know I do.
We are increasingly moving into a patron economy. This impacts events.
I believe we are moving inexorably towards a time that is similar in some ways to an era in our past—a time when content creation will be supported largely by the subsidy of patrons.
—from Part 1 of this post
We are returning to a patron economy
In Part 1 of this post, I explained why I believe we are returning to a patron economy.
Luckily, there are a lot more patrons now than there were when Mozart and Beethoven eked out a living via the largesse of nobility and the wealthy. These days, when you tip generously in a restaurant, donate to worthy causes or volunteer, you are a patron. Once we’ve satisfied our core needs, our desires to create and share remain. These desires, decoupled from financial reward, are now easier for many to fulfill than they’ve ever been.
How will this future affect the world of events? Events have always relied to some degree on the contributions of volunteers. For example: family members at a wedding, conference advisory board members, and student interns. As emphasis shifts from content to connection at face-to-face events, the contributions of enthusiastic volunteers become increasingly important. Even a few true fans can make a dramatic difference to an event.
The new event patrons
I’m writing this just after attending a four-day, 500-attendee association conference where key participatory sessions were facilitated or led by twenty enthusiastic volunteers.
Hiring professional facilitators to lead these sessions would have been very expensive. The volunteers received branded fleece jackets, a reduced event fee, and public acknowledgment of their contributions. No extra lodging or travel expenses had to be paid because the volunteers were already attending the conference.
In addition, hiring professional facilitators to lead sessions would have been a far less satisfactory experience for attendees because outside facilitators would not have had the substantial subject matter expertise and experience that the volunteers possessed. I sat in on some of the sessions, and an outside facilitator would not have been able to understand, let alone guide, the discussions because of the considerable professional knowledge taken for granted as the basis for discussion by the participants.
Volunteers are the new patrons
When I think back, I realize that none of the conferences I’ve organized over the last twenty years would have been possible without the significant contributions of volunteers. Think about the events you’ve organized—how true is this for you? As we move towards more participative and participant-driven sessions at events, the role of volunteers will become increasingly important. Your volunteers are your new patrons—ignore them at your peril!
Surprisingly, many conference venues do not provide floor plans with room measurements for meeting planners. On a recent round of site visits, only one of the seven facilities visited had this information readily available. Four of the venues had floor plans but supplemented them with infuriating capacity charts showing the number of seats available for classroom, theater, banquet, boardroom, hollow square, etc. sets. (Please, venue sales managers, read Paul Radde’s refreshing book “Seating Matters” and realize that these room sets are not optimum for most circumstances.)
For event designs such as Conferences That Work, where room sets include large circles, horseshoes, table-less small group rounds, and other configurations, I must have the basic room dimensions in order to plan what can happen where.
As a result, a twenty-five-foot tape measure has been part of my site visit kit for many years. This tool, while cheap, is awkward to use. Ideally, you need two people, holding each end, stretching out the tape, and moving multiple times to measure a large room.
A favorite site visit tool
So I was delighted to discover a modern tool that’s ideally suited to rapidly measure room dimensions, the Bosch DLR130K Distance Measurer, as shown above [Update May 6, 2017: The DLR130 model has been discontinued; the newer Bosch GLM 35 looks great too!]. The DLR130 unit uses a laser to measure distance. The DLR130K is a kit that includes the unit, a belt pouch, and four AAA batteries.
This little gem is smaller and lighter than my 25′ tape measure. In about a second, it measures distances up to 130′ [40 m.] within 1/16″, not that I need anything that accurate. By standing in the middle of a really large room and measuring the distances to the opposite walls, you can handle room dimensions up to 260′. The unit will calculate area and volume too if, for some reason, you need to. The batteries are claimed to last for 30,000 measurements.
The DLR130K costs around $90 [Update May 6, 2017: The newer GLM 35 sells for $70 without a case]. A high-quality 25′ tape measure costs around $20, so this is a more expensive tool. I think it’s worth it.
Perhaps one day, every venue sales manager will supply room dimensions (I can dream). Until then, I’m bringing my new favorite site visit tool with me on every site visit.
We are becoming a patron economy. Over the last thirty years, we’ve seen the slow crumbling of business models relying on paying for atoms carrying the real article of desire: information. Once, being paid for cassettes, CDs, newspapers, DVDs, copy-protected software, and password-protected services was how “content providers” (such a soulless term!) made money. These schemes are dying wherever and whenever the cost to the consumer of playing buy-my-content-by-my-rules is greater than the cost of downloading the associated bits that have had their copy protection broken.
We’re in the middle of this transition. For example, right now, the paperback version of Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love outsells the ebook four to one, even though the ebook is half the cost of the paperback. So perhaps people still like physical books. I don’t expect things to stay this way for long.
Making a living
A few years ago, I got into a heated public argument with software freedom activist Richard Stallman about how I might be paid for the four years I spent writing my book. (At the end of his presentation, Richard complained that he had never spoken in front of a more combative audience. We took this as a compliment.) Richard told us we should give our content away. I asked him why anyone would bother to spend four years writing a book. He told me, scornfully, that I should give the book away and make money in some related arena.
I have to admit that now, knowing the bald economics of writing, I’m more sympathetic to Richard’s point of view than I was when we sparred. If the book continues to sell at its current rate, it will take another year just to earn back the money (for editing, copyediting, interior design, cover design, and copywriting) I spent creating it. That’s before I start receiving any compensation for the time I spent writing it! Meanwhile, people are hiring me to design, organize, and facilitate conferences, and I have to sell many books to equal the income from a day of consulting. Richard, maybe you were right.
With the repeated demonstrated failures of attempts to copy-protect information and the rise of ubiquitous online content, I believe we are increasingly becoming a patron economy — a time when content creation will be supported largely by the subsidy of patrons.
In part 2 of this post, I’ll explore how this shift to a patron economy will impact events.
A good conference is like an island vacation! As I write this, I’m about to return from a two-week vacation on Anguilla, a tiny rural British West Indies island with some of the most beautiful beaches in the world (you may hate me now). My home is a tiny rural town in Vermont. Still, although the population of the surrounding area is similar to that of Anguilla there’s an interesting difference between my home and island destinations—and I’m not talking about the weather.
At home, there’s no way to know whether someone has a connection to the area. The occupant of a car I see driving on Route 9 near my house might be a businesswoman from upstate New York traveling through Vermont to Maine—or someone who’s been living a mile further down my road for three years who I haven’t yet met.
Commonalities
But in Anguilla, anyone I see has something in common: we are, even temporary visitors like me, residents of an island fifteen miles long and three miles wide. Our individual life stories, no matter how different, all include that we are, at this moment, living on one small island with a unique history and culture. Some of the people I met: the woman who, five years ago, came to work here for a week and decided to stay, the barbecue guy telling us about the tiny mosquitoes that appear at night when there’s no wind, the Danish tourist who collects shells on the beach so the hermit crabs can find new homes—we all have Anguilla to start from, and this gives us a way to connect.
A good conference is like an island vacation; it provides the same opportunities to its attendees. While we are together, we share; not just the conference location, but also the commonality that each of us chose to attend and all this implies, as well as our experiences together. Creating a conference environment where we can easily share these things makes the event richer, engaging, and more memorable. Perhaps, even, as enjoyable as an island vacation…
There are many reasons why you should hold multi-day events.
I have held a number of one-day conferences. One (very full!) day is the minimum time needed to process the essential components of a peer conference: the roundtable, some peer sessions, and a minimal spective. Frankly it’s a rush to complete even these basics in a day. —Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love, Adrian Segar
Occasionally, I’m asked to design one-day peer conferences. When I ask why the event can only be a day long, I hear answers like these:
“Our members are very busy and can’t take more than a day off.”
“Then we’d have to arrange for somewhere for people to stay overnight.”
“Our conference has always been a single day.”
“It’s too expensive to make it longer.”
“Our venue only serves lunch.”
Here are six reasons why you should overcome these objections and make your conferences longer than a single day.
Making connections takes time
Research has shown that people attend conferences for two principal reasons of roughly equal importance: educational opportunities and networking. (Note: I believe networking is becoming more important.) Networking—making connections with people and building relationships with them—takes time. At a one-day event full of traditional presentation sessions, typically, the only opportunities for people to meet each other are during lunch and a couple of short refreshment breaks. That’s very little time to network. Adding the dinner, evening social, and breakfast of a single overnight doubles, at a minimum, the time for connection available at a one-day event.
Getting there
A non-local attendee incurs fixed time and travel costs to get to and return from an event, irrespective of its duration. If your conference’s value to participants increases with its duration—if not, why are you making it longer? —amortizing these fixed costs over a longer event reduces the hourly expense of attending.
Attendees who eat together bond together
Academics may argue as to whether the reasons are biological, cultural, or both, but few would disagree that people bond over communal meals. A one-day conference provides a single lunch plus, usually, two refreshment breaks. Add just an extra half day and we get three refreshment breaks, perhaps an evening social with munchies, dinner, breakfast, and lunch. That’s a big difference!
Something magical happens overnight
In my experience, overnights during a conference facilitate the processing of experiences from the previous day’s events. This is especially important at the start of a peer conference, where the first half day exposes attendees to a large variety of ideas and resources. But the effect is useful at any event. Although we all appreciate the time to consciously process our experience, there’s growing evidence that short-term memories are turned into lasting long-term memories during sleep. I find that the rapid torrent of information shared during the first day of a conference seems to acquire shape and form in my mind overnight—the next morning brings clarity to the dominant themes and interests shared by the participants.
The above multi-day rationales apply to any conference. The following apply to peer conferences.
Reserving enough time for content
The standard Conferences That Work design employs four sessions that wrap around its content heart. For a fifty-person one-day event, a roundtable, peer session sign-up, personal introspective, and group spective consume more than four hours of traditional session time, leaving little time for the peer sessions. This has two consequences. The first is that a one-day peer conference has to drop the personal introspective. The second is that I won’t run a one-day peer conference anymore, and recommend that you don’t either.
The minimum time I now recommend for a peer conference is a day and a half. Even at this length, there really isn’t sufficient time to add a traditional session like a keynote. But participants consistently report that it’s long enough to provide excellent connection and community-building time, as well as four sets of peer sessions tuned to their needs.
Peer session preparation
Many first-time participants are surprised by how well the vast majority of peer sessions are led and/or facilitated when there’s such a short time between the choice of a peer conference session topic and the resulting session. And the volunteer leaders/facilitators themselves are surprised and empowered by how well they fulfill their role, despite sometimes worrying beforehand whether they will do a good job knowing the limited time available to prepare. Even so, a longer conference gives leaders more time to think about their sessions, consult with other peers, and prepare.
What other roadblocks have you experienced when promoting longer events? What other reasons do you suggest for holding them?
Do you have fewer Twitter followers than the folks who follow you?
If so, cheer up, it’s normal, thanks to the magic of simple statistics! You are more likely to be a friend of a popular person simply because he or she has a larger number of friends. So, on average, your followers are likely to have more followers than you do.
