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"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

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How the rise of online is changing your events

Friday, February 11th, 2011 by Adrian Segar

How is the rise of online changing your events?

How I used to find information

When I was living in England in the 1960s, finding a telephone number was cumbersome. Five huge telephone books, each requiring both hands to lift, sat in a cupboard in our hallway, with millions of alphabetized names and associated numbers in microscopic print. The books quickly became out of date and were updated sporadically. And, if you didn’t know the exact spelling, or had only an address, you were out of luck.

Books were a key way to obtain information. Wealthy families (not mine) purchased the Encyclopedia Britannica and proudly displayed the 24+ volumes on sturdy bookshelves. The local free library was a key resource. For current information, I could watch three TV channels and read several rather good print newspapers. For specialized information, I subscribed to, or read in the library, a bewildering variety of magazines and journals.

And, of course, I talked to people. My parents, my teachers, my friends, and, later, my professional colleagues were all valuable resources. I found my friends through face-to-face social events or through my work. Finally, if I needed to know more about a subject of interest, I would attend a conference and listen to papers delivered by experts in the field.

How I find information today

The rise of online has changed everything. I don’t remember the last time I consulted a paper telephone directory. Ten years ago I checked eBay to see if an Encyclopedia Britannica set was worth anything. Reluctantly, I ended up recycling the books, because no one wanted to buy them. Today, apart from a local paper and a few paper magazine subscriptions, online is where I find telephone numbers, email or physical addresses, and information on just about any subject that, in quantity and mostly quality, dwarfs the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

People are still a major resource for me, but the primary way that I first meet new people professionally these days is online, via a variety of social media, rather than an initial face-to-face encounter.

And, of course, these days I am a creator of conferences rather than a passive consumer of them. For me, a good conference is one where I can interact, connect, share, and learn with others, and can influence what happens at the event in a way that is useful and meaningful to me.

How the bountiful availability of online content changes events

Today there is amazing one-way content on the web. The internet is where we go for information about people, places, facts, processes, techniques, and solutions to problems. Our resources have migrated from cumbersome books and broadcast media to browsable indexed data servers in the internet cloud.

For face-to-face attendees, this makes vanilla delivery of content at events far less compelling.

In the future, people are not going to travel to your event to listen to a speaker they could watch streamed live, or as a recording at a time and place of their choosing. Providing a ten-minute opportunity for questions at the end of a presentation isn’t going to cut it either. Viewing one-way content over the internet is cheaper and more convenient for attendees. If broadcast content is mostly what you have to offer people will gravitate to obtaining it online; either from you or a competitor.

As a result, traditional events concentrating on the transfer of predetermined content from experts to a local audience are dying. I don’t know how long it will be before rigor mortis sets in. Perhaps some events will remain viable as training opportunities for novices, or as vehicles for CEUs to be awarded or certifications to be maintained. Over time, however, the majority of professionals who care about their profession and the best use of their time will stop going to face-to-face events that don’t incorporate significant opportunities for connection, peer-to-peer sharing, and participant-driven sessions. And, no, a lunch and an evening social or two aren’t going to be enough anymore. Instead, you need to put opportunities for connection front and center of your events, because connection around content is becoming the most important reason that people attend face-to-face events.

Why you should care

Since my first book on participant-driven conferences was published, I have been amazed and delighted by the flood of interest from meeting professionals, peer communities, and business & association leaders. And I’ve also been disturbed. A common story I hear is of long-running conferences in trouble: conferences where attendance, evaluations, and consequent income are falling. The organizers who are contacting me have realized that the traditional conferences-as-usual models are not working like they used to. Attendees are starting to defect or ask for something different. I’ve heard this story from professionals in many different fields.

In my opinion, it’s only a matter of time before the importance of the shift in emphasis away from content towards connection at face-to-face events becomes apparent and generally accepted by the events community. As usual with industry trends, the people who recognize and respond well to them early will be the beneficiaries. Those who continue doing things the old way will lose out. If you’re not currently investigating ways to restructure your events to significantly increase attendee connections and participation, I recommend you start.

Do you see a trend of increased attendee dissatisfaction at traditional events? If so, why do you think it’s happening, and what are you doing about it?

Tags: connectedness, connection, content, Event design, internet, online, rise of online| Posted in Event design | 12 Comments »

The third way to make something happen

Friday, February 11th, 2011 by Adrian Segar

More value can be gotten out of voluntary participation than anyone previously imagined, thanks to improvements in our ability to connect with one another and improvements in our imagination of what is possible from such participation.
—Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky

In his thought-provoking book, Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky reminds us that, until recently, most of the discussion about how to make things happen has focused on two seemingly competing mechanisms.

Private production

The first way to make things happen is private production. Things happen when the cost of doing them is less than what the doers believe the result will be worth. This is how many consumer products and services are created.

Public production

The second way to make things happen is through public production. Society decides that something is worth doing for the common good. An example is the provision of universal health care by a government for its citizens.

There is a third way to make something happen.

Social production is the third way to make something happen

Shirky describes social production as the creation of value by a group for its members, using neither price signals nor managerial oversight to coordinate participants’ efforts. Social production occurs because a group’s members derive benefit from the results of their shared work, and often through their enjoyment of community during the process.

Until recently, the scale of social production was limited. Shirky gives picnics and bowling leagues as examples. What has changed is that internet technologies now give us inexpensive and effective means for group coordination and cooperation. This allows us to aggregate the free time of many people in ad hoc groups that come together for mutual benefit to work on “tasks we find interesting, important, or urgent”. Examples of social production include Wikipedia, Linux, and countless community-run online forums.

How social production will impact meeting design

The rise of social production is important for events such as meetings and conferences. Why? Because the collective knowledge and experience of peer groups normally rivals or surpasses, the knowledge and experience of any one “expert”. When an audience collectively knows more than the presenter at the front of the room (and I’d argue that today this is true more often than not), the question naturally arises: are standard presentations the best way to use attendees’ time?

Traditional conference culture restricts the provider of session content to presenters. Social production culture, on the other hand, supports appropriate openness, sharing, and participation as a norm. When events adopt a social production culture, attendees become participants, involved not only in their own learning but also in the learning of their peers. Everyone benefits from the increased pool of resources, and the opportunity to shape what happens during the event. This adds real value to each attendee’s experience and also to the event’s civic value, i.e. the effect of the event on the world outside it.

As social production becomes an increasingly common way to create value, we need to recognize and acknowledge its ramifications for events. Attendees are going to be less willing to put up with conferences that are designed to make money for the organizers or put on as a public service. Instead, they will go to events where they can participate and shape what happens.

What are you doing to facilitate social production at your events?

Photo attribution: Flickr user stuckincustoms

Tags: Clay Shirky, cognitive surplus, participation, private, production, public, social media releases, social production| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

Changing how we come together at events

Sunday, February 6th, 2011 by Adrian Segar

We need to change how attendees come together at events.

“…if we do not change the way citizens come together, if we do not shift the context under which we gather and do not change the methodology of our gatherings, then we will have to keep waiting for great leaders, and we will never step up to the power and accountability that is within our grasp.”
—Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging

A stirring quote from Peter Block, from a chapter titled The Stuck Community in his book Community: The Structure of Belonging.

Change citizens to conference attendees and you have a good description of what continues to happen at traditional conferences, where attendees listen to session leaders, rather than collectively reaping the benefits of co-creating an event and associated community.

That’s why we need to change how attendees come together at events.

Tags: control, fear, freedoms, leadership, Peter Block| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

Why hybrid events aren’t going away soon

Sunday, January 30th, 2011 by Adrian Segar

I’m a big fan of hybrid events (events designed to provide a worthwhile experience for both local and remote audiences). But I think Dannette Veale is hankering after those Jetsons flying cars, based on this recent quote:

In the future, says Dannette Veale, global manager of the Cisco Live and Networkers Virtual event, there will be no more live vs. virtual discussions. The two experiences will overlap so completely, that what we now perceive as two separate environments glued together through some “hybrid” sleight of hand will merge into a single, seamless stream of content, entertainment, and engagement that can be accessed from either end of the physical to virtual spectrum…
…In the future, there will be no more hybrid events—a term that implies the cobbling together of two separate realities into one hiccuppy, Frankensteiny, excuse to multi-task. The future of events as Dannette Veale envisions it is one where the learning is über compelling, the engagement is exhilarating, and anyone can participate.
—When there are no More Hybrid Events, by Michelle Bruno, posted January 10, 2011

Optimism

I wish I were as optimistic as Dannette Veale. She predicts that live and virtual will “merge into a single, seamless stream of content, entertainment, and engagement”. It would be great—but it isn’t going to happen any time soon.

It’s the last term, engagement, where I part company with Dannette. Yes, content and entertainment can be easily and effectively streamed now. But engagement, arguably the most important ingredient for a successful event, cannot be created by a single stream and suffers from signal delay issues that are very difficult to overcome.

Effective engagement requires many-to-many channels

Effective engagement amongst remote attendees requires many-to-many channels. If I am a local attendee, I can wander up to a group of people in conversation. I can then listen and engage with anyone present. I can be aware of multiple simultaneous connections and can initiate and switch conversations with ease. However, a remote attendee is restricted to (usually) one or (at best) a few streaming feeds produced at the event site. These feeds are not under remote attendee control. I’m not aware of any hybrid events that provide individual, real-time, two-way AV connectivity to more than a modest number of remote attendees. That’s because the number of streams required increases as the square of the number of participants.

We have a hard time providing a few simultaneous streaming channels now. Let alone the hundreds or thousands needed to effectively match the experience of live attendance at an event. Including a chat room for remote attendees is a pale substitute for the rich real-time interaction that routinely occurs face-to-face.

[2023 update (twelve years after this post was written). We now have platforms for online socials that do a decent—though not yet rock solid—job supporting flexible, fluid, many-group video chat interactions.]

A fishbowl-like alternative

One possible way to live with bandwidth limitations while providing a better remote experience is to develop systems that, while providing a small number of two-way connection channels, dynamically switch the limited channels between attendees who are currently active. This is analogous to the fishbowl group conversation technique I often use at Conferences That Work. At any one time, a limited number of interactions are possible, but the people in conversation can “swap out”, while everyone else watches and listens. Such approaches are still at the research stage. But they still will not create the kind of seamless engagement Dannette implies.

Currently, the best hybrid events do a decent job of providing text-based back channels for remote attendees to comment and ask questions. Remote emcee ambassadors can help to bring these attendees into the room and offer them some compensatory content, e.g. presenter interviews, that the local audience doesn’t necessarily get. But without individual, real-time, two-way AV channels for remote attendees, their experience will always be significantly inferior to that of local participants. I don’t see this state of affairs changing soon.

OK, maybe one day soon we’ll all have rock-solid 1GB+/sec connections to the internet. All at a cost that’s too cheap to meter. (Don’t hold your breath.) Even if this glorious day arrives, however, remote attendees will still face another fundamental problem.

The effect of signal delays on engagement for remote attendees

Anyone who has used the fledgling group video chat services available on the web (e.g. tokbox, tinychat, and, recently, Skype) knows the limitations of these services. [2023 update. Today, Zoom is pretty good!] We can overcome the flaws, like poor video & audio quality and unreliable operation, by providing high bandwidth links and appropriate internet backbones. What is harder to mitigate, however, is the signal delays that video conferencing routinely introduces.

Research has shown that signal delays of less than a quarter of a second can seriously affect both the interpersonal understanding of conversations and the free flow we take for granted when we speak to another person face-to-face. Terrestrial links often suffer delays this large. Satellite circuits require a minimum of .5 seconds for a simple round-trip signal. It’s unlikely that we’ll overcome these limitations soon, except for remote attendees who are close (in channel terms) to the physical location of an event.

Furthermore, though I’m not aware of research in this area, signal delays also mess up our habitual ability to read body language responses (mainly facial). Most people, in my experience, are not consciously aware of how well they can “read” interest, boredom, agreement, and emotions on others’ faces. Body language is telegraphed almost instantly and is hard to mask. When we lose the immediate feedback from experiencing how others around us respond to what we say and do, we lose a highly significant channel for connection.

The report of hybrid events’ death was an exaggeration

The difficulties of providing a comprehensive many-to-many channel experience for remote attendees, when combined with the subtle yet important communication degradations introduced by signal delay will, in my judgment, ensure that hybrid events will be around, live and kicking, for a long time yet. What do you think?

Photo attribution: Flickr user catspyjamasnz

Tags: connection, engagement, Event design, hybrid events| Posted in Event design | 2 Comments »

Leadership, conferences, and freedom

Friday, January 21st, 2011 by Adrian Segar

“[There are] almost as many definitions of leadership as there are persons who have attempted to define the concept.”
—Ralph Stogdill, Handbook of Leadership: A survey of theory and research (1974, p.259)

I’m not going to add to the thousands of existing definitions of leadership. I believe that defining what leadership is—essentially, process that influences others to accomplish something—misses the point. What we need to understand first, is the purpose of leadership. Once we’ve decided that, we can think about what leadership qualities we need to carry out that purpose.

The task of leadership

Here’s the wonderful Peter Block musing in a recent book:

“…perhaps the real task of leadership is to confront people with their freedom.”
—Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging

I love this expression of leadership mission.

Too often our vision of leadership is clouded and restricted by 19th-century ideas of leadership, emphasizing autocratic, bureaucratic, and charismatic leadership styles that are still commonly held up for us as models of what leadership is about. Even though more enlightened leadership models (e.g. servant and transformational styles) are becoming more widely used, there’s still a tendency to revert to the old models in some situations.

Leadership at conferences

For example, how do we treat conference attendees?

At most conferences, attendees have very little say in what happens. The event revolves around a set of limited preselected session choices made by the conference leadership. Such an event culture implies a default passivity. Organizers, not attendees, make decisions—organizers who are, perhaps unknowingly, using leadership styles more appropriate for young children.

It’s perfectly possible, however, to offer freedom to conference participants. Unconference designs provide structure and support for participants to determine what they want to learn, share, and discuss. Participants are then free to make the event their own.

Most of us who are asked to try something new feel a natural reluctance or wariness. First-time attendees at an unconference often feel apprehensive about the prospect of taking a more active role. That’s why Peter’s phrasing confront people with their freedom is appropriate. Unconferences offer an environment that gently confronts attendees with their power to influence what happens. In my experience, once attendees experience what it is like to have a real voice in shaping their event, the vast majority of them embrace this new freedom.

What do you think of Peter Block’s musing on the real task of leadership?

Photo by Flickr user Dunechaser.

Tags: control, fear, freedom, leadership, Peter Block| Posted in leadership | 3 Comments »

How to get great attendee evaluation response rates

Tuesday, January 18th, 2011 by Adrian Segar

I routinely get ~70% evaluation response rates for conferences I facilitate. Here are three reasons why this rate is so much higher than the typical 10-20% response rates that other conference organizers report.

1. Explain why evaluations are important

At the start of the first session at the event, I request that attendees fill out the online evaluations and explain why we want them to do so. I:

Promise attendees that all their feedback will be carefully read;
Tell them that their evaluations are crucial for improving the conference the next time it is held; and
Tell attendees that we will share all the (anonymized) evaluations with them. (I don’t share evaluations on individual sessions with attendees, but I forward all comments and ratings to the session presenters. I do share overall ratings and all general comments about the conference.)

When you explain to attendees why you are asking them to spend time providing evaluations, and they trust you to deliver what you’ve promised, they are much more open to providing feedback. And I suspect that when attendees know that other attendees will see their anonymized feedback, they may be more motivated to express their opinions.

2. Provide online evaluations early

I provide online surveys available at the start of the event, which participants can complete at any point. If the conference has a printed learning journal, I’ll include a printed version of the evaluation. Attendees can fill it out as an aide-mémoire during the event if they wish.

3. Follow-up reminders improve evaluation response rates

Post-conference, via email, I gently remind attendees who have not yet completed an evaluation. I include a due date (normally 10-14 days after the end of the event) and a few sentences reiterating the reasons why we’d appreciate their response. I send up to three of these reminders before the due date.

None of this is particularly onerous, and the result is a rich treasure trove of ideas and feedback from a majority of attendees that I can use to improve future conferences.

What are your typical evaluation response rates for your conferences? What do you do to encourage attendees to provide event feedback?

Photo attribution: Flickr user herzogbr

Tags: evaluations, surveys| Posted in Event design | 2 Comments »

Demystifying the unconference

Friday, January 14th, 2011 by Adrian Segar

It’s time to demystify the unconference.

Nine hundred years ago, when the world’s first universities began and prestigious libraries might contain a few hundred hand-copied books, the way you learned something was to travel to where a man (in those days it was always a man) knew it, and sit and listen to him teach it to you.

This model for learning sank deep into our culture. Today, on a computer we can hold in our hands, we can search the internet for information or watch videos of the finest presenters. Yet, even though we have amazing content at our fingertips, our meeting designs have not changed much from the classroom model required by the technologies available during the Middle Ages.

Over the last forty years, new face-to-face meeting designs—such as Open Space, World Café, Conferences That Work, Future Search, and Everyday Democracy—have appeared that challenge the entrenched dominant learning paradigm of passive reception of predetermined information. Although each design has unique features and goals, what they all have in common is that what happens at the event is participant-driven, rather than being largely prescribed by the conference organizers. Such formats are unconferences.

Here are some of the key features of an unconference

You can design them to work on a group problem or goal. Or as a time for individualized learning and sharing. Longer events can also include traditional sessions, keynotes, etc.
Meaningful and useful interaction between attendees is center stage, rather than something that happens in the breaks between sessions.
The culture is participatory, not passive. This has a highly positive effect on the environment, outcomes, and community created at the event.
Learning happens in small groups, rather than in large general sessions.
Teaching and learning aren’t fixed roles; a teacher at one moment may be a learner the next.
Unconferences harness the experience and expertise of the participants, rather than relying on the contributions of a few outside experts.
Participants have more input into and control over their learning and takeaways from an unconference. The event is, therefore, more likely to satisfy their wants and needs.
Interesting, unexpected things are likely to happen. While traditional conferences discourage risky learning, unconferences create an environment where participants can create sessions on the spot. Unconferences welcome questions and encourage sharing.

Why unconferences?

It’s no coincidence that unconference designs appeared as our society responded to the increased availability of information and ease of sharing made possible by the personal computer and the internet. And yet, despite the pervasive reality of ubiquitous knowledge and connectivity, professional event planners still rarely use these new designs.

One reason is the fear that an unconference just won’t work. I’ve run unconferences for twenty years and reviewed thousands of evaluations. I can assure you that the level of satisfaction with unconference formats is much higher than traditional events. (One of the reasons for this is that I’ve found that traditional program committees predict less than half the sessions that attendees actually want.) Other reasons include the misconception that crowdsourcing session topics before an event make it an unconference, the understandable fear of giving up control over one’s event, and general unfamiliarity with unconference revenue models, facilitation requirements, and logistical considerations.

All these barriers to the implementation of unconference meeting designs are readily overcome with education and experience. Most event planners (and their clients) have begun to hear the rumbles of dissatisfaction from attendees who are no longer satisfied flying hundreds of miles to listen to speakers they could have watched on YouTube, or to attend a conference where a majority of the sessions are not what they really wanted. Instead, these attendees are increasingly demanding meetings that concentrate on what only face-to-face events can provide—like Howard Givner’s experience of an unconference:

“…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.”

It’s time to demystify the unconference. We know how to create these events. Clients are asking for them. So, if you haven’t already, attend an unconference and experience a participant-driven event firsthand. Or talk to people who have. Then you’ll be ready to demystify unconferences and begin to build unconference designs into your event planning future.

This article was first published in Lara McCulloch-Carter‘s free eBook What’s Next in Events 2011.

Photo attribution: Flickr user stuckincustoms

Tags: control, Event design, Everyday Democracy, Future Search, open space, unconferences, World Cafe| Posted in Event design | 1 Comment »

How to add participation into a traditional conference and market it

Wednesday, January 5th, 2011 by Adrian Segar

A common question people ask me is how to add participation into existing events and market them effectively. The Medical Group Management Association did just that at their 2011 PEER conference (estimated 800 attendees).

Even MGMA’s choice of name for the conference echoes the event’s theme of “directing the conversation”: PEER, a neat acronym for Participate, Educate, Experience, Relate.

Conference marketing

Take a look at how the conference brochure carefully incorporates PEER themes (click image to view).

What do you think of MGMA’s design and marketing?

Full disclosure: MGMA is a client of Conferences That Work.

Tags: marketing, MGMA, participant-driven, participation| Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Why requiring learning objectives for great conference presentations sucks

Monday, December 20th, 2010 by Adrian Segar

Requiring learning objectives for great conference presentations sucks.
I have been filling out quite a few conference presentation proposals recently. And I’ve begun to notice a pattern in my behavior. My mood changed when I had to fill out the session’s learning objectives. (These are statements of what attendees will be able to do by the end of the session.)

Specifically, every time I had to fill out the learning objectives for a proposal I got really, really annoyed.

Over the years I’ve found that paying attention to patterns like this is nearly always a learning experience for me. And I had just watched Chris Flink‘s TEDx talk on the gift of suckiness, where he makes a great case for exploring things that suck for you…

…so I reluctantly delved into why I started to feel mad when required to write things like “attendees will be able to list five barriers to implementing participant-driven events“.

At first, I wondered whether my annoyance at having to come up with learning objectives (with active verbs, please, like these…)

was because I was a sloppy presenter who hadn’t thought about what my attendees wanted or needed to learn. I imagined the conference program committee wagging their finger at me. Or sighing because they’d seen this so many times before. Listing learning objectives was forcing me to face what I should have thought about before I even suggested the session, and I didn’t like being confronted with my lack of planning.

And then I thought, NO. I DO have goals for my sessions. But they’re much more ambitious goals than having participants be able to regurgitate lists, define terms, explain concepts, or discuss issues.

I want to blow attendees’ minds. And I want to change their lives.

OK, I admit that would be the supreme goal, one that I’m unlikely to achieve most of the time. But it’s a worthy goal. If I can make some attendees see or understand something important in a way that they’ve never seen or understood before so that they will never see or understand it in the same way again—now that’s worth striving for.

Here’s an imaginary example (not taken from my fields of expertise). Suppose you are evaluating two proposed sessions on the subject of sexual harassment in the workplace. The first includes learning objectives like “define and understand the term sexual harassment”, “identify types of sexual harassment”, and “learn techniques to better deal with sexual harassment”. The second simply says, “People who actively participate in this session are very unlikely to sexually harass others or put up with sexual harassment ever again.”

Assuming the second presenter is credible, which proposal would you choose?

Learning objectives restrict outcomes to safe, measured changes to knowledge or competencies. They leave no place for passion, for changing worldviews, or for evoking action.

That’s why requiring learning objectives for great conference presentations sucks.

What’s your perspective on learning objectives?

Tags: Chris Flink, gifts, learner, Learning, learning objectives, outcomes, suckiness| Posted in Presentations | 17 Comments »

Do you treat your conference attendees as adults?

Saturday, December 11th, 2010 by Adrian Segar

Do you treat your conference attendees as adults?

Do you treat conference attendees as adults? Black and white photograph of a 1940s classroom full of children sitting at desks and looking forward. A teacher, wearing a suit, stands at the back of the room. Photo by Flickr user yvonnert — Photo by Flickr user yvonnert

In a previous post, I wrote:

“We are scared about not having control in our lives. That’s why we lock down our events, forcing their essence into tightly choreographed sessions. Attendees are carefully restricted to, at most, choosing which concurrent session room they’ll sit in.”

What messages do traditional events send to adult attendees?

You are children, unable to create meaningful learning experiences for yourself.
You don’t really know what you need to know, so we have figured it all out for you.
Your job is to pay our fee and sit in one of these rooms at these times.

These messages aren’t appropriate, even if only novices attend your event. (Though, in this case, it’s a training, not a conference.) Control-centered leadership is appropriate for emergencies, not conferences. Treating adults as if they were children is demeaning and evokes an uneasy climate that brings out the worst in attendees.

Of course, there are conferences for children. And it’s interesting that these events usually bend over backward to empower the youth that attend and provide the tools for the participants to make the event their own. Adults who work with youth know that the last thing teenagers want is to be told what to do. How surprising, then, that once those teenagers grow into adults we start treating them like children again.

At the start of Conferences That Work, we tell you that we will treat you like an adult. For example, if you need a break from the full schedule we’ve co-created, take it—this isn’t school! Or, if you want to discuss a topic that didn’t make it into the crowd-sourced program, contact the other people (known from the roundtable) who want to join you and use one of the extra empty rooms we’ve reserved. And, if you want to question (respectfully, of course) the process we’ve offered—do so, and know that we’ll listen and respond to your ideas and suggestions.

Participants find these simple suggestions refreshing. They encourage attendees to take ownership of the conference and make them less likely to complain about the aspects of the event that, as we’ve reminded them, are under their control.

So try treating your attendees as adults at your next event. Even if they aren’t. Give them the freedom to challenge, comment, make suggestions, question, and influence what happens. They will thank you for the opportunity.

Do you treat conference attendees as adults at your events?

Tags: adults, control, freedoms| Posted in Event design | 7 Comments »