"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
Here are some consequences of concentrating on top-down (traditional) rather than bottom-up (non-traditional) conference process:
Everyone gets assigned their role in advance.
Top-down implies that some people have “the knowledge”; the rest don’t.
There’s less opportunity to engage attendees who aren’t invested; they can zone out as they choose.
Passive reception of knowledge is the dominant learning modality.
There may be less stress for attendees, knowing that no personal contribution is expected.
There are, at best, few expectations for attendees, apart from paying for the conference.
Tradition coupled to prestige confirms legitimacy—” This is the way it’s done”.
The conference confers status by association; you’re a professional in this field because professionals in this field go to this conference.
Top-down imposes control of what’s going to happen: who speaks, who listens, who’s in, who’s out.
Conference structure and content are fixed; they’re very difficult to change even if circumstances cry out for a different direction.
The top-down model can put pressure on presenters, who may feel they need to be comprehensive, all-knowing, and coherent to justify the program committee’s choice of them as presenters.
The power to create conference structure and session topics is confined to the conference program committee.
Top-down supports and perpetuates cliques: the presenters versus the audience; the old hands and the in-crowd versus the newbies.
Everyone knows what is supposed to happen, minimizing the fear of the unknown.
The conference tends to mirror and/or reinforce perceived hierarchy or status in a profession or field—“Here are the experts”.
Meeting and connecting with like-minded people during the formal conference program is largely a matter of chance or careful preparation.
Can you think of other consequences of top-down conference process? Share them in the comments below.
Image attribution: Flickr user flynnwynn/ / CC BY-ND 2.0
“We don’t have a word for learning and teaching at the same time, but our schooling would improve if we did.”—Kevin Kelly, Out of Control.
One afternoon in 1975, I entered an elevator at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, Switzerland. In the elevator was Professor R, the future recipient of a Nobel Prize, and generally regarded by lowly graduate students like me as a physics god. We were alone, on our way to a lecture he was giving. As he ignored me, the door slid shut, and we began to rise.
Abruptly, the elevator shuddered to a stop between floors.
We stood, not speaking, waiting for something to happen. Some thirty seconds went by, but we did not move.
Professor R swung towards the elevator control panel. He started pushing the buttons. Nothing happened. He pushed the buttons again. We remained motionless.
I was trapped in an elevator with a physics god.
And then Professor R began to shout.
It was clear to me that panic didn’t drive his outburst. He yelled at the elevator because he was angry that a mere elevator could delay an important man. His anger was automatic, a habitual response when things didn’t go his way.
I stood, saying nothing. There was an intercom on the elevator panel, and I wondered how long it would be before Professor R calmed down enough for me to suggest we use it. Meanwhile, we were trapped in an elevator together.
He was still shouting when the elevator started upwards smoothly as if nothing had happened. Professor R stopped yelling. We stood for a few seconds, avoiding eye contact until the elevator arrived at our floor and the door opened. The physics god rushed out.
The lecture started ten minutes later. As I sat in the audience, Professor R showed no sign that our little elevator incident had ever occurred.
Later I learned that my momentary elevator companion was notorious for angry outbursts when he didn’t get his way. No one who knew him was surprised to hear my experience.
Initially, I thought my brief encounter with a famous person had just given me a good story to tell. It took a while before I realized what I had learned in the elevator.
***
Our children are born dependent on us. We supply sustenance, shelter, and protection from perils. As they grow they learn. At first sight, it seems that their learning is a one-way street. What can we learn from children?
We can relearn how to learn—if we pay attention. When my younger granddaughter, Kayla was two I’d see her every few weeks. The changes I noticed between visits were striking. At one visit it was clear from how she reacted that she understood what I said to her, but she didn’t speak more than a word or two. Three weeks later, she repeated the last word of everything I said to her; at the following visit she was creating two-word sentences; at the next, I heard a four-word phrase; at the next when she said something I didn’t understand, she patiently repeated herself, perhaps changing a word or two. Now four years old, she is still fearless at experimenting with her world through ceaseless play, is cheerfully curious, life fascinates her, she is resilient and persistent, she is open to new ideas and experiences, and she is spontaneous.
Professor R, on the other hand, had forgotten how to learn in the ways that Kayla does. We all seem to move in this direction later in childhood, perhaps because our increased awareness of social context causes us to self-censor natural curiosity and willingness to experiment. Right now, Kayla is out of control of her life most of the time because there are so many things she doesn’t understand, and because the adults around her steer her life in so many ways. And she responds to this state of affairs with great curiosity and ingenuity. For less than a minute Professor R experienced being out of control of his life, but for him, a new situation, a stuck elevator, evoked only anger.
Professor R understood more about physics than I ever have or will, but that day I discovered that I was wiser than him in at least one way. I knew that when you experience minor setbacks, there are better alternatives than exploding with anger. Until that day at CERN, I had assumed that the people society had provided as my teachers must be smarter than me in every way. Professor R showed me that this belief was wrong, and, over time, this realization has fundamentally blurred how I see the relationship between student and teacher.
I now believe I have something to contribute to everyone and I can learn something from everyone. And that this is true for other adults too.
***
And this is why a peer conference de-emphasizes pre-determined official roles. Attendees figure out for themselves who and what is of value to them, and the conference format supports the resulting connections with relevant topics and people. No one makes prior assumptions about who is valuable and what should be discussed, and people move as needed between teaching and learning, moment to moment.
One can look back at a moment between two individuals and say: at that moment she was the teacher and he was the student. But in the present moment, we have no way of knowing the role we may be in. There is a joy in living in a way that avoids preconceptions about our role, and that, in the process, opens us up to new experiences and learning that would otherwise pass us by.
I don’t recommend being trapped in an elevator with a Nobel Prize winner. But I certainly learned a lot during my short time with Professor R.
How to end a conference? Trainings and conferences that professionals must attend to maintain certification can close with the triumphant presentation of certificates of completion or attendance. But other traditional conferences have no such obvious conclusion. All too often, the conference finale is manufactured. Organizers add an awards ceremony, a closing keynote, a fancy dinner, a raffle, a celebrity speaker, or some combination thereof.
The reason for this artificiality is simple: Traditional conferences that are not training-oriented don’t provide any kind of progression through their theme. Logistical, political, and speaker availability considerations guide the sequence of session topics rather than logical flow. One session doesn’t follow from another. Such a conference doesn’t have a beginning. So, how can we expect it to have an end?
Some conferences dispense with the pretense of closure. This, at least, is honest, though the effect of “transmit content, go home” is somewhat blunt.
How to end a peer conference
In contrast, peer conferences provide a progression, not through content, but through several processes designed to increase attendee connections as the conference proceeds. Typically, two closing spective sessions, personal and group, build on the generated intimacy to provide a powerful and appropriate conference ending.
Are your conferences in the business of supporting meaningful connections between participants?
At peer conferences, on arrival, attendees immediately receive a printed face book (that’s face book: small f, two words) that includes photographs, names and contact data, and additional pertinent information about each participant.
They tell me that it’s rare to receive such a document at conferences. How sad that conference organizers don’t bother to provide this basic tool for learning about fellow attendees. (Perhaps it’s not too surprising, since no books on conference management mention providing an attendee face book.) The absence speaks volumes about the lack of support for participant interaction at traditional conferences.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Actively supporting meaningful connections is an integral part of every peer conference. When the information, openings, and opportunities needed to meet like-minded attendees are provided, not only during session breaks but also as part of the formal conference structure, it becomes attendee-centered rather than session-centered, greatly increasing the intimacy and enjoyment of the event.
Planners of traditional conferences assume that the primary purpose of conference sessions is to transmit pre-planned content.
The three communication modes used among a group of people are one-to-one (individual conversations), one-to-many or broadcast (presentations and panels), and many-to-many or conferring (discussions). Traditional conference sessions are predominantly one-to-many, with perhaps a dash of many-to-many at question time.
One-to-one conversations are infinitely flexible; both participants have the power to lead the conversation along desired paths. Many-to-many conversations are powerful in a different way—they expose the participating group to a wide range of experience and opinions.
In contrast, one-to-many communication is mostly pre-planned, and thus relatively inflexible if the presentation involves a passive audience. At best, a presenter may ask questions of her audience and vary her presentation appropriately, but she is unlikely to get accurate representative feedback when her audience is large. Some presenters can create interactive sessions with significant audience participation, but they are the exception rather than the rule.
Presentations and panels are appropriate when we are training, and have expert knowledge or information to impart to others. But today we have a rich variety of alternative methods to train adults. For example: reading books and articles, watching recordings of presentations, and searching for information and downloading answers on the Web.
What can you not replicate at a face-to-face conference? The spontaneous conversations and discussions! So why do we still cling to conference sessions that transmit pre-planned content, employing the one communication mode for which a variety of alternatives can substitute?
Most conference planners think that meeting organizers need to choose and schedule conference session topics in advance.
One of the questions I asked when interviewing conference attendees for my book was:
“Most conferences have a conference schedule and program decided in advance. How would you feel about a conference where, at the start, through a careful conference process, the attendees themselves determine what they want to discuss, based on what each person wants to learn and the experience each attendee has to share?”
Forty-five percent of my interviewees were unable to conceive of a conference that did not have a schedule of conference sessions decided on and circulated in advance.
The most common response? Interviewees weren’t sure they’d want to go to such a conference without knowing what was going to happen there.
The next most common response? The idea sounded great/interesting/intriguing. But interviewees had no idea of how one would create a relevant conference program at the start of the conference.
What if we could create conference session topics that actually reflect attendee wants and needs
Suspend disbelief for a moment, and assume that at the start of a conference it is somehow possible to use available resources to create conference session topics that actually reflect attendee wants and needs. Then imagine attending such a conference yourself, a conference tailored to your needs. (You might want to reflect on how often this has happened to you.) Wouldn’t it be great?
What is the origin of the assumption that one must pre-plan a conference program? Perhaps it arose from our experience of learning as children, from our teachers in school who knew or were told what we were supposed to learn following a pre-planned curriculum. Certainly, if one thinks of conferences as training by experts, a pre-planned schedule makes sense. But conferences are for adult learners, and adults with critical thinking skills and relevant experience can learn from each other. We’ll see that there are ways of putting conference attendees in charge of what they wish to learn and discuss. But this cannot be done effectively if a conference’s program is frozen before attendees arrive.
The peer conference model described in Conferences That Work does indeed build a conference program that automatically adjusts to the actual needs of the people present. Read the book to find out how.
Four unquestioned assumptions lurk behind the traditional conference format—assumptions so deep-seated that they go unquestioned by most conference organizers. These assumptions embody, and consequently help perpetuate, a distorted and outdated way of thinking about conference purpose and structure, leading to a conference model that, according to a majority of the people I interviewed while writing Conferences That Work, does not well serve conference attendees.
Here are the assumptions:
Conference session topics must be chosen and scheduled in advance.
Conference sessions should be used primarily for transmitting pre-planned content.
Supporting meaningful connections with other attendees is not the conference organizers’ job; it’s something that happens in the breaks between sessions.
Conferences are best ended with some event that will hopefully convince attendees to stay to the end.
In my next four posts, I’ll examine these assumptions individually. And I’ll explain why they lead to conferences that don’t work as well as they could.
“Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased; thus do we refute entropy”–Spider Robinson.
Why do you go to conferences? I asked this question in the interviews I conducted while writing Conferences That Work. The most common answer? Eighty percent of my interviewees said they wanted to network/connect with others. That’s slightly more than the seventy-five percent who said they came to learn.
Traditional conference sessions provide mainly one-way connection from the folks at the front of the room to everyone else. Opportunities for person-to-person connection are relegated to times outside the official schedule, like mealtimes and social events.
Peer conferences are different; we design them to facilitate and support meaningful connections in three ways.
First, peer conferences are small, which simplifies the task of getting to know a decent proportion of the people present, and leads to intimate conference sessions where discussion and sharing are more likely to occur.
Second, the opening session—The Three Questions—offers a structured and safe time to learn about every other attendee, providing valuable ice-breaking information for striking up a conversation with people you want to get to know.
And third, the confidentiality ground rule, agreed to by every attendee, generates a conference environment where sharing—whether it be of information, discovery, or even expression of emotions, of pain or joy—is encouraged and safe.
Reading the October issue of The Sun the other day I came across an excerpt from E.F. Schumacher’s classic 1973 book Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered.
When comparing Buddhist economics with modern economics, Schumacher writes “The former, in short, tries to maximize human satisfactions by the optimal pattern of consumption, while the latter tries to maximize consumption by the optimal pattern of productive effort.”
Similarly, peer conferences try to maximize satisfaction by providing just the content and format that attendees request, rather than trying to offer everything in the context of a big impersonal event.
