Click to vote for The Most Influential People in the Events Industry for 2024!
Dear colleagues and friends,
I hope you’re thriving in your event industry endeavors! I’m excited to share that I’ve been nominated again for the Eventex Index as one of The Most Influential People in the Events Industry for 2024.
This year marks my sixth consecutive nomination, and it’s all thanks to your continued support!
I would be grateful for your vote, which supports not just me, but also our shared commitment to participant-driven and participation-rich event design.
How To Vote
Voting for the Eventex Index is a straightforward process. Here’s what you need to do:
Cast your vote: Find my name in the list of nominees (it’s near the top!) and click to vote. Remember, you can vote for up to ten people, so please support other deserving #eventprofs too.
Spread the word: Spread this post with your colleagues, friends, and peers to encourage their support!
Your vote isn’t just for me—it’s for our collective dedication to innovation, excellence, and the future of our industry.
Thank you for your support, and let’s continue this incredible journey together!
On Tuesday, March 26, 2024, at 10:00 EDT I’ll sit down with Martin Duffy and Paul Nunesdea on LinkedIn Live for a deep dive into peer conferences: participant-driven, participation-rich events I’ve designed and facilitated for over thirty years. They’ve called it “Peer Conferences Unveiled: A Conversation with Adrian Segar”.
You will learn a lot from this free session if you’re a meeting industry professional and want to improve meetings. Our conversation will range from the big picture of peer conferences to specific details of some formats you can use to solve unique meeting needs. (And I’ll try to sneak in the story of how I was trapped in an elevator with a Nobel Prize winner somewhere 😀.)
Here’s how Martin and Paul describe our upcoming conversation:
“Join us for an enlightening episode of Talk to Your Meeting Doctors, where our esteemed co-hosts, Martin Duffy PhD and Paul Nunesdea PhD, engage in a riveting discussion with Adrian Segar, the pioneering mind behind Peer Conferences. In this third episode of our 2024 series, we delve deep into the world of innovative conference formats, uncovering the insights and inspirations behind Adrian’s groundbreaking approach. Whether you’re a meeting professional, an academic, or simply passionate about the evolution of collaborative gatherings, this episode offers valuable perspectives and expert knowledge. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to learn from the experts—tune in and explore the future of conferences with us!”
I’m looking back on 2023. And, dear reader, get 20% off my ebooks until the end of the year!
2023 in review
I slowed down in 2023. Before 2020, I was designing and facilitating around a dozen in-person meetings and conferences a year. After COVID decimated the meeting industry, I focused on the design and facilitation of online meetings. In 2023, in-person is back! But our industry still faces ongoing challenges, such as:
These pressures impact the demand for value-add independents like me. Even though I significantly improve meetings and conferences with better design and expert facilitation, it’s tempting for stressed clients to “just do what we did last year”. So I designed and facilitated fewer in-person events this year, while my online business continues apace. And, you know what? Though I love my work, it was nice to reduce the number of high-intensity workdays booked in 2023!
To give you an idea of what my professional 2023 was like, here are three different in-person events I enjoyed immensely.
#1 • Las Vegas, April: The BizBash Leadership Summit
I always like working with David Adler! The Chairman and Founder of the legendary BizBash, David is smart, curious, creative, energetic, and fun to hang out with. He has stayed on top of new meeting trends and technologies for decades. I don’t know how he does it.
So I was honored when he asked me to design and facilitate a small three-day meeting for movers and shakers working in the events industry (including the heads of events for Google, Meta, Amazon, JP Morgan Chase, The New York Times, Dell Technologies, Fidelity Investments, and Delta Air Lines). And David gave me a free hand with the design. Thank you, David! (And thank you Michela Giovannotto for superb support!)
The design
I designed and facilitated a classic peer conference. We ran The Three Questions on the first day and used the sharing to create three sets of participant-chosen breakout sessions. Something unusual happened, which is a healthy sign when participants create the agenda. The participants decided that the first two time slots would both be plenaries…
“Share the coolest ideas in meetings/events you’ve seen/experienced recently.” [Everyone had something to share, and we heard some amazing ideas.]
Generative AI: How do we use it and benefit from it in the world of events?
…with three simultaneous sessions for the last time slot:
Barriers to get to Yes.
How can events advance social justice and change the world.
Managing and incentivizing event and meeting teams.
The event was a blast, both for me and the participants!
“I raved about the format to my friends!”
—Lesly Simmons, Head of Community Innovation, Amazon
“Thank you to Adrian Segar for getting us to think, share and collaborate – and personally making me step outside my comfort zone…The real tell as to how special this event was: at the end, we all asked for more time.”
—Jessica Connolly, Head of Global Events, Meltwater
The above program was interspersed with interesting visits to venues and fun activities (e.g. David’s trademark Jeffersonian Dinner, helicopter flights over the Strip, and a private dinner on the Raiders Field at Alegiant Stadium). The conversations, connections, and learning were intense, and the group spective feedback was extremely positive.
I loved working on this event, and hope to do more with David and his crew!
#2 • Philadelphia, May: One-day association conference
The majority of my clients are formal communities of practice, aka associations. For over forty years, I’ve enjoyed bringing together groups of people with something in common and giving them the tools and facilitation to create the best possible peer conference for both individuals and the group.
A trade industry group celebrating its 50th anniversary asked me to design and facilitate a day-long conference, culminating in an evening awards gala. The design parameters were interesting. The association wanted to explore the possibilities of creating the future together in a highly dynamic and interactive way, effectively tapping the centuries of expertise in the room. To this end, they contracted a well-known futurist who offered a short opening keynote on how to think about the industry’s future, followed by a panel of leading industry experts who discussed how his ideas could be applied in detail.
Having given the 200+ participants a wealth of information and ideas, my job was to get participants to critically respond to what they had heard. This involved uncovering and processing:
what was already familiar;
what had sparked their interest;
questions involving deeper understanding; and
puzzles in need of solutions.
Luckily my process toolkit includes RSQP, a powerful method for rapidly exposing all this information and making it visible for all to see.
In 30 minutes, hundreds of categorized sticky notes were on the wall, and a subsequent gallery walk allowed participants to see what their peers were thinking.
While a set of predetermined breakouts ran, a small group reviewed this display and chose session topics and leaders for two more sets of breakouts. All the resulting sessions were well attended, high-energy, and gathered rave reviews.
A short creative session Let’s Design the Future!, led by association members, and an even shorter plus/delta closed the day.
Feedback
“I’m loving the concept of this conference. I think we’re getting a lot more interactive information, and the ability to participate and meet with others in the field is just wonderful!”
“The concept has been amazing, connecting with great people and fresh ideas. My brain is on fire!”
—Testimonials from two conference participants
“This event was everything we dreamed it to be and more! We wanted our industry to talk about and confront the future, and did they ever! The conversations were so rich and so relevant! We MUST do this again! Stay tuned for [our conference] 2.0!”
—Testimonial from the association CEO
Although I don’t usually get much involved in the logistics of the meetings I design, it was the first time this association had put together such an ambitious event. Consequently, I spent more time than usual helping with precon preparation and the real-time run of show to ensure things ran smoothly. The show must go on! But, as always, I loved helping make this event a success.
#3 • Rome, November: Workshop at Bea World – The International Festival of Events and Live Communication
It was exciting to end 2023 with an opportunity to lead a workshop in Rome at the Best Event Awards International Festival. This annual two-day event, first held in 2006, is an opportunity for event agencies from forty countries to present their best projects in person to juries and BEA World delegates. The winners receive the “Golden Elephant” trophy at a black-tie awards ceremony.
For this trip, the first time I’d been back to Europe since an Estonian meeting design conference in 2020, I decided to spend a week in Rome. This gave me time to get over jet lag before the workshop—plus a few days as a tourist!
Typical Participate! workshops last between ½ and 2 days. This one was a little challenging to design since I only had 75 minutes! That was just enough time for agreements, some human spectrograms to get to know each other, pair share work, a fishbowl sandwich, and a closing retrospective plus/delta.
The workshop was great fun, though it was over in a flash.
“Special thanks to the experts that made the Best Events Awards Festival 2023 even more valuable for me…Adrian Segar for an inspiring workshop about meaningful participation at events.”
—Magdalena Olszewska, Brand Engagement Leader Maybelline NY & NYX PM | L’Oréal Poland & Baltics
“I brought with me new knowledge and skills that Adrian Segar conveyed so impressively in the “Meeting Design” workshop and inspired me to implement new event formats [translation from Lithuanian].”
—Aurimas Kamantauskas, Director at ReKurai
I also immensely enjoyed the company of Serena Ferrari, whom I met by chance on Brandt Krueger‘s weekly EventTech Chat. Though we’d never met in person before, Serena, who once lived and worked in Rome, was kind enough to spend a weekend with me exploring the city. It was a treat to hang out with a local, and we became friends.
2023 wrap-up
Well, that’s my summary of some of my professional activities in 2023. I also continued to run a couple of small local associations, actively participated in local civic life, enjoyed plenty of visits with family, and snuck in a few short vacations too!
It was a good year, and I hope that 2024 will be at least as interesting, challenging (in a good way), and fun.
Happy Holidays!
2023 book sale!
(If you skipped straight here, I understand and forgive you 😀.)
I have a hard time offering a sale on my paperback books. Why? Because this blog has a global audience and differing distribution requirements, I can’t offer the same deal in every market. But since I’m the sole source for my ebooks, I’m happy to offer 20% off any ebook (including the already-discounted bundle of all three) until the end of 2023. [Note, only ebooks; this does not apply to ebook/paperback combo purchases.]
Go to my Buy Books page and add the ebooks you want to your cart. Then use the coupon 2023ebooksale at checkout.
I am delighted and honored to be featured in ‘Harnessing Serendipity,’ a unique book that explores the magic of facilitating connection that leads to collaboration. It includes the stories of 66 “talented connectors” who share insights on how they create transformative experiences. The primary professions of the collaboration artists the authors include are wide-ranging—to say the least. We are actors, impresarios, meeting designers, diplomats, teachers, musicians, creative directors, facilitators, management experts, sports team owners, fundraisers, journalists, experiential marketers, retreat leaders, event producers, philanthropists, coaches, and dealmakers!
I appear in the section on fostering community and belonging. However, the work of everyone included in this book incorporates most if not all of these approaches. They are all important modalities that support people coming together to meaningfully connect and collaborate.
The authors define a collaboration artist as follows:
A “Collaboration Artist” knows how to bring people together, enroll them in a common mission, create idea flow, and translate ideas into new solutions to solve problems and drive achievement of important goals. From modest challenges like moving a small corporate initiative forward, to eradicating a disease, whether in small or large endeavors…collaboration equals success!
—”An Invitation”, Harnessing Serendipity
My take on Harnessing Serendipity
Harnessing Serendipity celebrates the art of connection and collaboration. It’s an easy and absorbing read; you can dip into it and pick up little gems everywhere. The book opens your mind to what is possible, yet it’s sobering to realize that it just scratches the surface. I know quite a few of the featured collaboration artists. All of them have much more value to share than can be included in this book.
Perhaps the authors’ greatest gift is to introduce the reader to people who can change how the world thinks about convening, connecting, and collaborating. Certainly, that’s been my focus for the last forty years. I encourage all readers to explore working with any of the people featured in the book, and thank the authors for making us more visible, and perhaps a little more influential than we were before.
For the 4th year in a row, I’m honored to be voted one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in the Event Industry in Eventex‘s annual poll. The award “recognizes event professionals who have left a mark on the industry with their creativity, vision, and capacity for innovation”. Learn more about me here.
Public voting entirely determines who’s on the list. Industry experts first get to nominate and then vote for those they believe have the most notable impact on the world of events and experiential marketing. This year, a total of 454 professionals were honored with a nomination. There were over 20,000 votes, and those with the most votes made the Top 100 list.
Many of my good friends and colleagues are also on the list; check it out.
And thank you to everyone who voted for me in the last four years (2019 – 2022) as one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in the Event Industry!
P.S. I’ve been working on a “mammoth” post on alternatives to Twitter this week. I expect to return to my normal Monday weekly publishing schedule next week!
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’m proud to have written three books (the latest was published this week) and over six hundred blog posts in the last ten years. After writing each book I was sure it would be the last one I wrote. Actually, I still am. Perhaps I’ll be wrong again about that…
To my amazement, this website has had over forty-nine million page views. That’s quite a jump from twenty-four thousand in the first year. These days, this site gets about six million page views per year, making it, as far as I know, the most popular website in the world on meeting design.
Although I’ve been designing and facilitating participant-driven and participation-rich meetings since 1992, I feel especially good about the last decade. It was in 2009 that I decided to switch my professional focus to creating and championing Conferences That Work. Since then I’ve done my best to convince the meeting industry to change how it thinks about meeting design; to concentrate on meeting process as well as logistics.
I’ve met a lot of wonderful people and had tons of fun and adventures along the way. I’ve done my best to share ideas and experiences of value and continue to learn from every meeting and everyone I meet. Thank you everyone whose life I’ve touched and whose life has touched mine.
And the journey isn’t over yet. I’m excited!
Stay tuned.
Original graphic with obscure reference, modified into almost complete irrelevance, courtesy of the incomparable xkcd
Want to get a taste of my new book Event Crowdsourcing: Creating Meetings People Actually Want and Need? Here are some Event Crowdsourcing free chapters for your enjoyment.
Buy Event Crowdsourcing (ebook or paperback or both) at the lowest possible price here!
What’s the book about?
The book explains both program and session crowdsourcing: how to routinely create conference programs that reliably include the right sessions and the session content attendees actually want and need. There is some overlap between this book and my earlier book, The Power of Participation. But Event Crowdsourcing includes new techniques, plus significantly more critical details and enhancements. (The enhancements to my core technique The Three Questions, alone, justify getting this book.) If you want to create events that are far more responsive to participant wants and needs than the dominant unconference paradigm — Open Space — this is the book for you!
Do your conference programs include pre-scheduled sessions you belatedly discover were of little interest or value to most attendees? If so, you’re wasting significant stakeholder and attendee time and money — your conference is simply not as good as it could be.
Now imagine you could learn how to routinely create conference programs that reliably include the sessions attendees actually want and need. Imagine you could create amazing conference programs that don’t waste attendee time. How much value would that add to your event; for your attendees, your sponsors, and your bottom line?
If you’re serving up a program that’s 100% pre-determined, if you’re not crowdsourcing part or all of your conference program at the meeting, I guarantee you are not creating the best possible conference program.
In fact, my research has shown that at least 50% of the sessions you’re offering are not what attendees actually want.
It doesn’t have to be this way!
I’ve put everything I’ve learned from 33 years of participant-driven conference program design experience into my new book Event Crowdsourcing: Creating Meetings People Actually Want and Need which covers all you need to know and do to successfully integrate effective real-time program crowdsourcing into your events and sessions.
Event Crowdsourcing will teach you how to create conference programs that are what your attendees actually want and need.
Every single time.
You’ll learn that to build the perfect program, every successful conference requires the following components:
Discovering in real-time attendee needs, wants, and resources.
Uncovering the most important topics and issues to include by:
— efficiently obtaining suggestions and offers.
— cleaning up potential topics.
— selecting the most highly rated topics.
Determining the right sessions to hold.
Scheduling sessions to create an optimum conference program.
Designing sessions that meet attendees’ needs and wants.
You’ll learn how to select the best techniques to crowdsource all or part of any event. Whether it’s a one-day meeting with thirty participants or a four-day conference with thousands.
You’ll learn, detailed step by step, how to apply these techniques to successfully crowdsource your event.
Event Crowdsourcing: Creating Meetings People Actually Want and Need is now available! Buy it here!
I’m looking back on 2023. And, dear reader, get 20% off my ebooks until the end of the year!
I always like working with 
For the 4th year in a row, I’m honored to be voted one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in the Event Industry in 
A rare opportunity! Hosted by 
Ten Years of Conferences That Work! Ten years ago today, I started this website and published my first book: 
