All too often, clients planning an event don’t spend enough time making hard but important event choices.
What is engagement?
A few months ago I designed and facilitated BizBash’s inaugural two-day leadership summit in Puerto Rico. 24 C-Suite executives discussed some of the event industry’s biggest current issues. One eye-opening takeaway for me was the radically different ways in which participants thought about and measured “engagement” at their events. Production companies focused on meeting micro-statistics. Brands were big on impressions generated. While as a meeting designer, I think about the emotional involvement or commitment of participants.
If folks in our own industry don’t agree (for completely legitimate reasons) on what the common term engagement means, how to measure it, and how to obtain it, is it surprising that our clients are unclear about their goals and objectives for their events?
We need to make event choices
Making event choices is hard but necessary. For one thing, as Seth Godin points out:
“You can’t create an event that’s intimate, open to all comers, proven, resilient for any weather, held outdoors and unique.”
–Seth Godin, Paths Not Taken
In addition, the blurry intersections between cultural, organizational, and participants‘ expectations, wants, and needs require us to understand the specific consequences of making event choices and the tradeoffs that result.
From my blog post: Whom is your event for?
Helping clients make choices
When designing meetings with clients, an important part of my work involves helping them uncover assumptions that impede realizing their goals and objectives. For example:
“Given the deteriorating evaluations for your annual conference, perhaps we should rethink a program comprised of expert presentations?”
“It’s been five years since we reviewed your goals and objectives for this meeting. Let’s revisit your vision to check if anything’s changed.”
Noticing and accepting that choices like these need to be made is a crucial first step. Once we’ve identified them, it’s helpful to document unresolved choices as part of the meeting design process.
We keep these choices in mind while working together to build an event that best attains the meeting’s goals and objectives. We evaluate potential design solutions, decide between the alternatives, and, perhaps after several design iterations, agree on what to do.
One last point. Clients have to remember that you can’t please everyone! Whatever hard choices get made, someone’s going to be upset.
That’s why they’re hard choices. But we need to identify and make them if we’re going to end up with an optimum meeting design.
The words we use for meetings matter. Unfortunately, familiar terms often perpetuate conventional meeting thinking. By changing the words we use, we can change how we think about events. Here are three examples of better words to use when talking about meetings.
online rather than virtual
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, in-person meetings vanished overnight. Suddenly Zoom became a household word. If we couldn’t safely meet face-to-face, we’d sit in front of screens.
But what should we call these internet-mediated meetings?
In July 2020, I suggested that we not call them virtual meetings. Instead, I made the case to use the word online. In essence, I pointed out that virtual has the connotations of “not quite as good” and unreal, while online is a neutral and well-established description of the meeting medium. Read the post for a detailed argument.
Though I don’t claim any credit, I’m happy to observe that meeting industry professionals and trade journals currently tend to prefer “online meeting” to “virtual meeting,” though there are some notable exceptions. Google also shows the same preference, with 5.0B search results for “online meeting” versus 1.3B for “virtual meeting.”
connection rather than networking
This is a big one and a harder switch to make. The word networking has been used so often to describe what people do at meetings that it’s tough to supplant. But describing everything that happens outside event sessions as networking subtly directs attention away from what can be the most valuable outcome of well-designed meetings: connecting with others.
We’ve biased how we talk about connection at meetings by using a word that is much more focused on personal and organizational advantage than personal and professional mutual benefits.
I lightheartedly titled my recent post on this topic, “Stop networking at meetings“. But it’s a serious suggestion. Having a mindset of encouraging and supporting connection around useful content plus a set of meeting process tools that can make it happen is a game-changer for meeting effectiveness.
peer conference rather than unconference
Sadly, I’m a voice in the wilderness on this one. 13 years ago, I wrote Why I don’t like unconferences. As I explained in my first book, Conferences That Work, what people call an unconference is what a good conference should actually be. At unconferences, far more conferring goes on than at traditional events. I coined the term peer conference as an attempt to remove the “un” from “unconference”.
I was ignored.
This linguistic problem worsened as people decided that calling traditional events “unconferences” made them sound cool. They ignored the central feature of an unconference; that sessions are chosen at the event rather than scheduled in advance. These days I frequently see advance calls for speaker submissions at meetings advertised as “unconferences”! You even find traditional breakout sessions described as unconferences, presumably because more than one person might speak. I cover these depressing developments in These aren’t the unconferences you’re looking for.
Today, “peer conferencing” is principally used to describe an educational approach to writing in groups. So I’ve reluctantly given up trying to swim against the tide and have been using the term unconference in my recent writing.
C’est la vie.
What do you think?
The words we use for meetings matter. My little campaigns to reframe some language the meeting industry uses have had mixed results. What do you think of my suggestions? Are there other examples of meeting industry language you’d like to see changed? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
P.S. Some meeting industry terms I like!
Apropos of nothing, here, in alphabetical order, are some meeting industry terms I like. Don’t ask me why.
It’s time to stop networking at meetings. No, I’m not saying we should only listen to lectures at meetings. Rather, I’m going to explain why using the term “networking” for all occasions when attendees get to talk with one another subtly directs attention away from can be the most valuable outcome of well-designed meetings: connecting with others.
We talk about virtual networking not working as if the in-person networking has been fixed.
I agree with Victoria’s observation, but think it’s important to consider a wider perspective. Here’s an expanded version of my brief comment on the ensuing LinkedIn conversation.
Networking at meetings
When you imagine “networking” at meetings, what image comes to mind? You’ll almost certainly think of a group of people, either standing around or sitting, eating and talking to each other. When do these conversations occur? The dominant perspective of networking at meetings is that it happens during socials, meals, and breaks.
For some meeting constituencies, this is understandable. Suppliers, vendors, and sponsors are present to do business, meet up with existing customers, and get new ones. “Networking”, whether during a sponsored meal or social, or a tradeshow is an appropriate term. You’re building or strengthening your network of prospective and current customers. Note that networking is an asymmetrical process conducted by those who have something to sell with those who may be interested in buying.
Connecting at meetings
Participants, on the other hand, come to meetings for content and connection. That’s connection, not networking. Unlike networking, connecting is a fundamentally symmetrical process. Any participant may have something—information, a perspective, or a problem—worth offering or receiving. Connecting is a spontaneous peer-to-peer process, where meeting participants fluidly give and receive, learn and teach, through conversations and interaction. Connection can potentially benefit any participant, and the benefits are often mutual, i.e. connections made lead to positive outcomes for everyone involved.
When do participants connect at meetings? Traditionally, the answer is the same for connecting as networking: during socials, meals, and breaks. But it doesn’t have to be this way!
Limiting connection to socials, meals, and breaks means participants miss out on the most powerful way to create connection at meetings: around relevant content.
In other words, there’s every reason to incorporate opportunities for connection into meeting sessions.
Meetings—whether in-person or online—that do this successfully are overwhelmingly preferred by nearly all participants. That’s why I’ve been designing and facilitating such meetings for the last thirty years. They work!
Facilitating valuable connection during meeting sessions
As you might expect, to facilitate valuable connection during meeting sessions it’s not enough to tell participants to go and talk to each other. Nor does it involve turning sessions into speed-dating or adding irritating “icebreakers”.
Instead, it means designing sessions that:
Improve learning by actively engaging participants around content rather than listening to it or watching it.
Leverage the rich and extensive knowledge and experience of participants in the room.
Increase opportunities to meet like-minded peers via discussion of session content, ideas, and questions.
In addition, you need to include sessions at the start of meetings where participants can learn about who else is present that they might want to get to know, where common issues and problems can be aired (and later addressed), and where relevant expertise and experience in the room is uncovered so that it can be tapped as needed.
Thinking of connection as networking skews perspectives
Labeling all occasions when meeting attendees converse as “networking” conflates fundamentally different means and goals of interaction into one bland term. Calling what happens outside the sessions “networking” obscures the rich possibilities of interaction between participants that good meeting and session designs provide.
So let’s stop talking about “networking” at meetings, and start talking about connection. More important: don’t just talk about it but use meeting and session formats that support and create connection around relevant content during the sessions!
Want a simple way to improve meeting session learning? Provide a shared Google Doc where all participants can take notes, ask questions, and get answers!
A shared Google Doc is an easy, familiar tool you can use to facilitate and improve real-time conversation and learning around presented content. And when the session is over, participants have a convenient archive for reference.
The idea was sparked by discovering this deleted tweet thread. “I learned today that a group of students used a Google doc to take lecture notes–they all took notes simultaneously in a collective file.”
“As they took notes they would mark places they were confused or couldn’t follow the lecture–other students would see & explain, real time.”
“At the end of the semester, as they are prepping for finals, they have this massive document of notes, questions, & explanations from peers.” —from a 2016 since-deleted tweet thread
Now this isn’t an original idea. I’ve used collaborative Google Docs at meetings since 2010 to collaboratively brainstorm and solve a problem, for scribing answers to The Three Questions, and to capture the pluses and deltas in a group spective. And a quick web search will discover numerous examples of teachers who use this technique in elementary through college classrooms.
Here’s an example from a community college class…
A group of us did something similar in 2014 when we live-blogged the PCMA Convening Leaders conference. Offering the same technique to all participants at meeting sessions may be new. (If it isn’t, let us know in the comments below!)
Create a short link to each Google Doc. I use a link that combines an abbreviation for the event with a short version of the session title. For example, an “Improving Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” session at the 2022 XYZ conference might have the link tiny.cc/XYZ2022ImproveDEI.
Add the session title and the short link to the top of the linked Google Doc.
Repeat for all meeting sessions.
For meeting owners
Before the meeting publicize that meeting session participants can and are encouraged to create collaborative notes on each session. Right before the meeting provide participants with a list of links to the collaborative docs for each session. Also, ask session presenters to display the URL for their session’s Doc and encourage participants to use it.
For session presenters
Even if meeting organizers haven’t adopted the above approach, there’s nothing to stop presenters from incorporating this technique into their sessions.
After the meeting or presentation
Change the access for each Doc to “viewer” (people with the link can see the document but not edit it) and then make the session notes available appropriately. You could share them on a private website, email the Doc links to participants, or use any other distribution method that fits.
What do you think?
If you use this method to improve meeting session learning or have ideas on extending it, please share your experience in the comments below.
Sometimes, it’s only at the end that we realize we’re just scratching the surface.
Two meetings
Oregon 2009
16 years ago, I facilitated a four-day event “Fixing Food” for the state of Oregon. The participants were farmers, agricultural workers, food wholesalers, grocers, academics, and restaurant owners. Everyone was excited, confident that the collective expertise and experience would be able to explore and tackle the important issues and problems they were experiencing.
It was only during the last hour of the event, that everyone became aware of the sheer quantity and complexity of the concerns. Instead of springing into action to implement solutions, the participants realized they had just scratched the surface of what they had uncovered.
Puerto Rico 2022
In 2022, I designed and facilitated a leadership summit on the future of the meeting industry. Two years of the COVID19 pandemic had devastated the industry. Now it looked as though meetings were starting to rebound. What would they look like? Would new partnerships between stakeholders and suppliers develop? How would the dizzying number of new digital technologies change events? What could and would engagement become?
We had seven hours, spread over two mornings, to explore these and other lofty topics. The participants included some of the most experienced leaders in the meeting industry. Though we didn’t know what we might conclude, we had high hopes of finding some agreements and paths forward.
But, as you might suspect by now, the summit ended with many questions and fewer answers. We realized, for example, that we didn’t even share a common understanding of “engagement” — different sectors of the industry regarded and measured it in significantly different ways. Once again, we were just scratching the surface.
Complex problems
Why do we often underestimate the difficulties involved in solving problems? One human evolutionary advantage is our drive for sense-making. Our sense-making prowess allows us to build models of the present and make decisions about potential future behavior. This has led to our incredible ability to reshape the world.
But there are two dangers that arise from our drive to make sense. (Check out the link for more details.) One of them, retrospective coherence, makes us overestimate our ability to explain why things happen. The other, premature convergence, leads us to prematurely abandon uncovering relevant questions, information, perspectives, and ideas before we start formulating solutions.
Fixing Oregon’s food problems or forecasting the future of the meeting industry are examples of what are called complex problems in the Cynefin framework. Complex problems are those where we struggle to figure out what questions to ask and cannot accurately predict what the consequences of an action would be.
So should we stop trying to explore and solve complex problems when we meet together?
No.
For one thing, we often don’t know whether our problems are simple, complicated, complex, or chaotic until we explore them. Many participants’ questions uncovered during the events I design turn out to have simple or complicated answers that can be provided by the collective knowledge of the group.
Simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic domains in the Cynefin framework.
Secondly, regardless of big picture outcomes, well-designed participant-driven and participation-rich meetings create a rich variety of valuable experiences for participants. Important connections get made or strengthened, useful resources are uncovered and shared, and future collaboration and action are sparked.
And finally, there is tremendous value in the discovery of the magnitude of complex problems per se. Gaining a more realistic perspective, however daunting, is useful and important. As my mentor Jerry Weinberg used to say, “It may look like a crisis, but it’s only the end of an illusion.”
Scratching the surface
Hopefully, you’ll agree with me at this point that scratching the surface, though less satisfactory than going deep, is not a waste of time. But it may still be a frustrating experience. Can we make it less painful?
I think so. When we start to work on a new problem, we don’t know in advance whether we’ll be scratching the surface or going deep. What we can change are our habitual expectations. Practicing risky learning makes dealing with feelings of failure easier. And becoming accustomed and willing to “lower our standards” also helps.
To conclude, I encourage you to always, at least, scratch the surface. Because sometimes you’ll find the gold underneath. And even if you don’t go deeper right away, you’ll have invariably experienced and learned something useful.
Photograph of my green fluorite crystal from the William Wise Mine in Westmoreland, NH Image attribution: Cynefin illustration by Edwin Stoop (User:Marillion!!62) – [1], CC BY-SA 4.0
After two years of only designing and facilitating online meetings, I’m suddenly immersed in preparing for in-person meetings again. And that strange emotion nervous excitement is coming back!
Two multi-day events, 2,000 miles apart, in the space of a week.
Even an in-person pre-con, just like in the old days.
I find it tough to prepare for meetings. Creating designs, turning them into implementations, trying hard to not miss any important details, making sure everyone involved knows what they need to know and do, negotiating compromises, contingency planning, etc. Frankly, I feel just plain nervous before the event. It’s stressful. Preparation seems to have no limits — except I know it must end as soon as the meeting starts.
At that moment, nervous excitement takes over.
Nervous excitement
Many meeting professionals, speakers, and performers will know what I mean by nervous excitement. If you don’t, here’s how I described it at the start of my book The Power of Participation:
“When I got on my feet to dance in public for the first time in 32 years I felt a strange mixture of emotions, best described as nervous excitement. I had given up the idea that I had control over what might happen and was all too aware of the scary possibility that I might feel self-conscious or embarrassed. Simultaneously, there was a part of me that was tremendously curious and excited about what I was about to do.” —Adrian Segar, The Power of Participation, Chapter 1
I feel nervous excitement when I:
have the responsibility for making something happen for many people;
am aware that what I do matters in the moment;
am giving up the illusion of control;
feel excited by and open to the possibilities of what might happen.
And then a funny thing happens…
…Usually, these days, I don’t feel nervous excitement for long!
It disappears. To be precise, the “nervous” piece goes away, and I’m left with excitement.
Which is pretty nice.
It wasn’t always like this. When I started standing up in front of meetings, I felt scared of making mistakes, losing control, or failing somehow.
And decades of practice showed me that I survive (so far) whatever happens. This emotional learning somehow changed how I felt once I got going. I’ve become brave. And I quickly move into what the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi called flow, “characterized by the complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting transformation in one’s sense of time.”
I’ve noticed however that if I feel rushed — like at a workshop I gave recently — the nervous component persists. And that’s OK. As a lifelong learner, I continue to accept opportunities to improve my work. Nervous excitement is a vast improvement over the fear I felt when I dared to present and facilitate long ago. Oh, I gotta go, time to step up to the front of the room…
[Note: This event was a workshop, not a presentation. Sessions are often advertised as “workshops” that aren’t. If you want to know the difference, read this.]
Allocate enough time for workshops so you don’t have to rush
I think my biggest regret about this workshop is that it felt rushed. Why? The quick answer is that I tried to include too much for the time available. But it’s more complicated than that.
Don Presant asked me to offer a CSAE session of up to an hour in length. I asked for the maximum. In retrospect, I should have asked for more time. (I might not have got it, but it never hurts to ask.) After the workshop, Don asked me how much time I would have preferred. “Two hours,” I replied immediately.
Over the years I’ve become good at keeping to the time allocated for sessions. My approach is simple; I practice what I plan to do with a stopwatch running and keep paring down what I’d thought to include until it fits. I note the elapsed time at the start of each new segment and check how I’m doing during the session, adjusting accordingly.
This workshop didn’t work out so well. I cover the logistical reasons below. But being rushed is never good. I had never tried to run a one-hour online workshop before. And one lesson I learned is that I’m not going to try to run one in just one hour again.
Additional concerns when a workshop is online
My workshop was designed to include two chunks of content and two participative exercises. As is usually the case in my workshops, I work at two levels. I try to make the workshop personally useful for the participants by allowing them to learn about each other. Simultaneously, participants experience and get familiar with how the formats I use work.
This workshop would have been better in person. I probably could have done it in an hour. What made it rushed online was the time taken to switch between content and participative segments, and the toll this took on the flow of the session.
If I’d run this workshop in person, I could have easily run it by myself. Online, I needed two assistants — thank you, Don and Carrie Fischer! Don did the intro and close, monitored the chat, and fed me questions. Carrie hosted the meeting on Zoom, set up multiple breakout rooms, and messaged instructions while the breakouts were in session. There’s no way I could have run this workshop without them. Yet I now realize that having one of them or a third person manage the context switches between the interactive and content portions of the workshop would have helped me a lot!
Over the last couple of years, I’ve run multiple successful two-hour or longer online workshops. Looking back at the run of shows, these workshops had a similar or fewer number of context switches between interactive and content segments. Consequently, I’m going to allocate longer time for workshops than an hour from now on.
Logistical concerns that made this workshop rushed
One unexpected logistical concern occurred just before the workshop started. Instead of using CSAE’s Professional Zoom account, we had to use mine. Fortunately, my Zoom settings were set as I needed them to be, but I did worry that this would require me to take over some of Carrie’s work. Luckily, with Don and her as co-hosts, Carrie was able to handle the usual Zoom support.
Unfortunately, I was responsible for the context switches between Zoom Gallery mode and sharing my keynote presentation slides. That was a mistake; at least the way I tried to implement it.
Using Keynote in Zoom
There are several ways to share a Keynote presentation in Zoom. My favorite is to share my Keynote presentation as a virtual background in Zoom. Zoom has described this functionality as “beta” for a while, but I’ve not had any problem with it to date except for the minor bug I found this time, as described below. My “talking head” is superimposed on my slide at the size and position I choose. Here’s an example (this is my view as the presenter):
This works well for a one-off presentation in a Zoom meeting. However, it turns out to be painful to implement when you need to switch in and out of Keynote during a workshop. Here’s why:
When you switch to displaying a Keynote deck via this method in Zoom, there’s a short delay while Zoom loads the deck. We tested this during our tech rehearsal and the delay was acceptable (a few seconds) with the setup and bandwidths we had. This is not a big deal, though it’s not what a professional production team would do.
More seriously, if you stop sharing your deck and then want to share it again, you can’t continue from the last slide you displayed. Zoom reloads the entire deck from scratch. My workshop involved three shares of my master deck, interspersed with participative portions in Gallery view. To avoid having to step through previously viewed slides, I split my workshop presentation into three Keynote decks. And that’s when I found a Zoom/Keynote bug…
The Zoom/Keynote bug. After splitting my presentation into three separate decks, I began a rehearsal. I ran through the first deck, stopped sharing it, and then selected the second deck. Zoom picked the wrong deck to display! (At first, I thought I’d clicked on the wrong deck, but it quickly became clear that Zoom+Keynote was to blame.) This was not acceptable! I realized that each of the three decks had the same long filename with a number appended to the end. I guessed that Zoom was not reading the entire filename, and that’s why it was picking the wrong deck. Sure enough, when I renamed the three decks with a number at the beginning of the filename, Zoom reliably picked the deck I had chosen. Phew!
Better ways to manage context switching
During the hour workshop, I had to perform six context switches while facilitating: Gallery->Keynote->Gallery->Keynote->Gallery->Keynote->Gallery. I found it distracted my mental flow, especially the several steps involved in starting up a different Keynote deck each time.
In Gallery View, I used breakout rooms and a camera off/on technique for simple human spectrograms and fishbowl discussion during the last segment of the workshop. This was complicated to manage in the short time available, and I felt the quality of the workshop suffered.
I mentioned these problems to my friend and event production expert Brandt Krueger, who sympathized. He pointed out that I had encountered limitations of software-based solutions to what are essentially production issues. For example, I could run Keynote on a second machine (I have three in my office) and use a switcher to instantly switch video between the Zoom and presentation computers. (Brandt loves the ATEM Mini switcher, and I have come close to buying one on several occasions.)
Consequences
I had assumed that what I’d rehearsed might take a little longer when I went live. And I expected to spend some time answering impromptu questions during the first three segments of the workshop. But I had reserved what I thought was enough time for the open-ended final discussion so I could still end on schedule.
As it turned out, I underestimated the slowdown from context switching. Answering a couple of questions brought me to the final segment about ten minutes later than I had planned. The time for the concluding discussion was shorter than I would have liked. We went over a few minutes, and I cut a final “lessons learned” pair share I had planned to include.
Although I covered everything I’d planned, the workshop felt rushed to me, and I don’t do my best work under the circumstances.
Well, that’s how you learn. I’ll do better (and allow longer to do it) next time.
Conclusion
There are some of the lessons I learned from this online workshop. I hope they help you avoid my mistakes. If you have other suggestions for improving the challenging exercise of running an ambitious online workshop, please share them in the comments below.
A rare opportunity! Hosted by CSAE Manitoba, this free one-hour online Participate Lab will introduce you to the design of participation-rich events through the direct experience of participatory meeting techniques and formats. All are welcome to attend this event at no charge (both CSAE members and non-members).
We’ve known for a long time that lectures are terrible ways to learn. Today’s attendees are no longer satisfied sitting and listening to people talking at them. If you want to hold meetings where effective learning, connection, and engagement take place, you need to build in authentic and relevant participation.
Our time together at this Participate Lab will cover:
Why creating participation-rich meetings is so important.
Human spectrograms: a simple tool for learning about other participants.
The Conference Arc:
Building connection while uncovering wants, needs, and resources.
Creating the right program.
Consolidating learning.
Facilitating individual and community growth.
Ask Adrian Anything: using a fishbowl sandwich to facilitate group discussion on meeting design and facilitation.
This workshop is limited to 100 attendees, so register now!
I’ve been writing about hybrid meetings for a long time; my first post was in February 2010. The COVID19 pandemic created an explosion of interest in hybrid meetings, and the marketplace and event professionals are still defining what “hybrid” means. (No, sticking a streaming camera in the back of the room does not make an in-person meeting hybrid.) It turns out that hybrid events offer rich design possibilities. To illustrate, I’ll describe the objectives and subsequent design of two novel hybrid meeting formats. Both are unique, as far as I know, in that the in-person and online participants are the same people! Sounds crazy, yes, but stay with me!
The first novel hybrid meeting format was invented by Joel Backon back in 2010. The second is a design I’ll be using in a conference I’ve designed and will be facilitating in June 2022.
1—In-person attendees participate in an online session!
Back when hardly anyone used the term “hybrid” for a meeting, let alone participated in one, I had the good fortune to participate in a novel session “Web 2.0 Collaborative Tools Workshop” designed by Joel Backon at the 2010 annual edACCESS conference. During the session, all the in-person participants had an online experience, followed by an in-person retrospective. The online portion felt eerie…
Check out my original post for the details of the session, which explored the unexpected advantages of working together online even when the participants are physically present. The experience certainly opened my eyes to the power of collaboratively working on a time-limited project using online tools.
You can use this novel hybrid meeting format to explore the effectiveness of employing appropriate online tools to work on problems at an in-person event. Following up the exercise with an immediate in-person retrospective uncovers and reinforces participants’ learning.
These days it’s even easier to implement similar hybrid sessions at in-person meetings. Participants will learn a lot while exploring the advantages and disadvantages of collaborating online!
2—Crowdsourcing a program online the day before an in-person conference
As I write this I’m designing a one-day, in-person peer conference for 150 members of a regional association. As readers of my books know, running a peer conference for this many people in one day would be a somewhat rushed affair. Unfortunately, the association practitioners simply couldn’t take off more than a day to travel to and attend the event.
Squeezing The Three Questions, session topic crowdsourcing, the peer sessions themselves, and at least one community building closing session into a single day is tough. In addition, the time pressure to quickly crowdsource good sessions and find appropriate leadership is stressful for the small group responsible for this important component.
To relieve this pressure I’ve designed a hybrid event that once again uses the same participants for both the online and in-person portions.
The online portion
The day before the in-person meeting, participants will go online briefly twice, in the morning and in the afternoon. During the morning three-hour time slot, participants can suggest topics for the in-person conference. We’ll likely use a simple Google Doc for this. They will be able to see everyone’s suggestions and can offer to lead or facilitate them.
Around lunchtime, a small group of subject matter experts will clean up the topics. Then, during the afternoon three-hour time slot, participants will vote on the topics they’d like to see as sessions the following day. The evening before the conference, the small group will convene and turn the results into a tracked conference program schedule that reflects participant wants and needs. They will also decide on leadership for each session. (Read my book Event Crowdsourcing to learn in detail how to do these tasks.)
Moving the program creation online the day before the in-person event allows participants to spend more time together in person. This choice sacrifices the rich interactions that occur between participants during The Three Questions. But in my judgment, the value of creating a less rushed event in the bounded space of a single day is worth it.
Conclusion
[Want to read my other posts on hybrid meetings? You’ll find them here.]
I believe we’ve barely started to explore the capabilities of hybrid meeting designs. Including both online and in-person formats in a single “event” multiplies the possibilities in time and space. I’m excited to see what new formats will appear in the future!
Have you experienced other novel hybrid meeting formats? Share them in the comments below!
Over the years I’ve designed and facilitated hundreds of meetings. One of the most common issues I address that is rarely acknowledged openly is the tension between the wants and needs of suppliers and practitioners at meetings. By “suppliers” I mean vendors of products or services, and sponsors. By “practitioners” I mean the folks who do what the meeting is about; e.g., doctors at a medical event or scientists at a conservation conference.
Sometimes these groups are given well-defined opportunities to interact in a familiar way. Often, vendors meet with practitioners at a tradeshow, and sponsors (who are usually vendors too) get opportunities to address practitioners. Such forms of interaction are well understood and I won’t address them further here.
But what happens when both suppliers and practitioners at meetings attend sessions?
What happens when suppliers attend event sessions
I’ll start by saying that I’ve found that the smartest suppliers attend relevant meeting sessions. Even if they keep their mouths shut during the session, good suppliers can learn about content that’s relevant to what they sell. And in addition, they can also learn about practitioners’ wants, needs, and concerns — both as individuals and as a group — that will make a smart supplier’s work easier.
Having both suppliers and practitioners at meetings attend sessions has both positive and negative consequences. Unfortunately, supplier and practitioner perspectives on having suppliers present don’t usually align.
The practitioner’s perspective on including suppliers at meeting sessions
Typically, practitioners:
Really don’t want suppliers to pitch what they’re selling during a session.
May not want to talk about supplier products and services when suppliers are present.
Less frequently, practitioners may appreciate suppliers with subject matter expertise who contribute to the value of sessions without overt pitching.
The supplier’s perspective on attending meeting sessions
Typically, suppliers are looking for opportunities to sell and perhaps get some education.
Smart suppliers will do this by contributing to session value without blatant pitching, and by learning more about practitioners’ wants, needs, and concerns.
Unfortunately, some suppliers will alienate practitioners by inappropriately pushing what they sell. (A tip: don’t do this!Few people want to be hustled. You will alienate most if not all of your potential sales prospects.)
How to maximize the benefits of meetings and sessions that include both suppliers and practitioners
Most meetings simply don’t address the conflicting wants and needs described above. That’s a shame. With a little forethought, it’s possible to maximize the benefits of meetings and sessions that include both suppliers and practitioners while minimizing undesired outcomes.
Here’s what you can do.
Understand practitioners’ and suppliers’ wants, needs, and expectations in advance
First, you need to understand before the meeting what your practitioners and suppliers want, need, and expect. As a meeting designer, if a meeting is going to include both practitioners and suppliers I always ask my clients about the relationship between these groups and their wants and needs.
Some associations, for example, know both groups well and are confident that their members are comfortable with suppliers in their sessions. Others tell me that their members don’t want suppliers present in some or all of their sessions. For example, I once worked on the design of a legal conference where the practitioners worked at large law firms and the suppliers were outside counsel attorneys eager to get a slice of lucrative legal business. Discussing what level of access outside counsel would have to the law firms during the event was the most difficult part of the meeting design.
Another key factor is the expected ratio of practitioners to suppliers at event sessions. If a minority of attendees are suppliers, it’s usually fairly easy to ensure constructive behavior in sessions. But sometimes the reverse is true. Recently I attended an online speed dating platform’s meeting industry event. I wanted to meet some other meeting planners and get to know them a little. But as I was matched with supplier after supplier it became clear that few meeting planners were present, and I had to politely listen to pitch after pitch from suppliers. The experience turned out to be a waste of my time and did not endear me to the platform.
To avoid unpleasant (at least to practitioners) experiences like this, do the following.
Facilitate active learning about who’s present and their roles
Uncovering who’s at a meeting and the relevant roles they play is one of the important things I do at meetings I facilitate. Body voting (aka human spectrograms) is the key technique I use. The specifics depend on what is useful for the people in the room to know. In the context of this post, at a minimum I’ll have attendees move into two groups: practitioners and suppliers in different areas of the room. All attendees can then see who else “like them” is present. Invariably, I’ll ask participants to divide into more specific sub-groups — determined in advance via client consultation. I’ll then give each grouping a little time for members to get to know each other.
For example, at a conference for librarians, I might first have them move into groups by the kind of library they work at: e.g. public, K-12 school, college, specialty, and “other”. Then I’ll ask them to organize themselves by role: e.g. director, cataloging/technical services, reference/adult, youth, trustee, or friend. During this exercise, if anyone wants to know about a grouping I haven’t included it’s easy to have people regroup to supply that information.
Doing this simple exercise allows participants to quickly get a sense of the sizes of pertinent groups present. In addition, they get the opportunity to meet other attendees who are “like them”.
Unless you’re facilitating a local conference, also include a human spectrogram map, which helps attendees meet others who live near them. Doing this also allows regional suppliers to meet nearby practitioners.
Discovering at the start of an event or session others who live near you, the proportions of practitioners to suppliers present, and other “similar to you” individuals is valuable information that every meeting should make available.
Tell suppliers not to pitch in sessions
While most attendees expect and tolerate brief scheduled pitches from sponsors, impromptu marketing during sessions is rarely appreciated. Most suppliers know that aggressive pitching during sessions is not a productive approach, but some don’t. Minimize this behavior by telling suppliers that marketing is not allowed during meeting sessions. A brief announcement to this effect at the opening of the meeting won’t hurt either. Finally, before the event, ask leaders to curtail pitches occurring in their sessions.
Restrict supplier-led sessions to topics where the supplier has significant subject matter expertise
I’m not against sessions being led or presented by suppliers per se. (Suppliers explicitly identified as sponsors, of course, get to pitch a little.) But I have attended too many events where a supplier leading a session uses most of their time to hawk their product or services. These sessions — often misleadingly advertised as containing useful content — leave a bad taste in most attendees’ mouths. Before you assign a supplier to lead or present at a session, check that they have significant subject matter expertise, and tell them directly that they should avoid any pitching.
I still remember vividly a conference I convened forty years ago where a vendor ignored this request and pitched their products for twenty minutes to the entire event. These days I would have interrupted them, but back then I felt too embarrassed to intervene. There are no guarantees that every supplier will respect your request. But making it explicitly before the event should minimize all but the most brazen behavior.
When appropriate, consider offering “practitioner-only” sessions
Practitioners sometimes don’t want suppliers present during certain sessions. For example, consider a session where practitioners want to discuss the pros and cons of various commercial solutions to a common problem. At such sessions, the inclusion of suppliers inhibits free and frank discussion. It also introduces the possibility that suppliers will then pursue individual practitioners who shared they’re ready to buy. So state in the session description that it’s for practitioners only. If suppliers turn up they can be asked politely to leave.
Conclusion
Integrating practitioners and suppliers appropriately in meeting sessions can improve everyone’s experience. Practitioners appreciate the experience and expertise that knowledgeable suppliers can bring, while suppliers build better relationships with practitioners without aggressive marketing.
If your meetings involve suppliers attending sessions, please use these simple approaches to maximize the synergy by including both groups, while minimizing the all-too-common downsides. Your participants will appreciate the results!
Do you have additional suggestions or comments on integrating suppliers appropriately into meeting sessions? Share them in the comments below!
All too often, clients planning an event don’t spend enough time making hard but important event choices.
The words we use for meetings matter. Unfortunately, familiar terms often perpetuate conventional meeting thinking. By changing the words we use, we can change how we think about events. Here are three examples of better words to use when talking about meetings.
It’s time to stop networking at meetings. No, I’m not saying we should only listen to lectures at meetings. Rather, I’m going to explain why using the term “networking” for all occasions when attendees get to talk with one another subtly directs attention away from can be the most valuable outcome of well-designed meetings: connecting with others.
In 2022, I ran a 
A rare opportunity! Hosted by 
I’ve been writing about hybrid meetings for a long time; 
Over the years I’ve designed and facilitated hundreds of meetings. One of the most common issues I address that is rarely acknowledged openly is the tension between the wants and needs of suppliers and practitioners at meetings. By “suppliers” I mean vendors of products or services, and sponsors. By “practitioners” I mean the folks who do what the meeting is about; e.g., doctors at a medical event or scientists at a conservation conference.