Soapbox Archives : Page 3 of 3 : Conferences That Work

A post about posting (on walls) at events – part 1

Friday, August 5th, 2011 by Adrian Segar

Recently I’ve felt frustrated and baffled. No less than three venues (two hotels and a conference center) in the last month told me that I couldn’t post anything on the walls of the room I was meeting in.

I couldn’t post anything. No flip chart paper, masking tape, stick pins, thumbtacks, sticky notes, or wall clips.

That’s a blanket “no”

To add insult to injury, none of the venues apologized or offered any suggestions on alternative ways I could display materials on a vertical surface. None of them had any substitute surfaces, like large portable notice boards or whiteboards available.

One conference organizer wondered if I could use tables instead. Unfortunately, tables are not a comparable substitute for walls for two reasons:

On walls, notes or cards can be placed anywhere in a seven-foot band between the floor and where people can reach. On tables, human reach limits us to a three-foot band.
Many more people can easily see information placed on a wall compared to a table.

Why we need to be able to post on walls at meetings

Some of the most powerful techniques available for group problem-solving require ways to display multiple pieces of information to an entire group. Members can easily and publicly move items around to cluster, list, sort, and map relationships. Schools have used blackboards (chalkboards) for two hundred years to display information to students. Thumbtacks (aka drawing pins) have existed for over one hundred years. Masking tape was invented in 1925. We’ve been using Post-it Notes for over thirty years. These are not new technologies, folks, why are venues banning them from their walls where we meet?

I understand that people use venues for many different purposes. Wall damage, through incorrect use of attachment technology or marker bleed-through, costs money to repair. But “wall work” is an essential component of group problem solving, and for a venue to prohibit its use while offering no alternatives makes it hard to hold many kinds of useful meetings.

In the second part of this post, I’ll cover some of the technologies now available for posting information on walls, including some that you may not know about. Stay tuned!

Have you had venues not allow you to post materials on their walls? What did you do?

Photo attribution: Flickr user pierrelaphoto

Tags: participation techniques, posting, presentations, venues, walls| Posted in Soapbox, Venues | 3 Comments »

Next practices, not best practices!

Thursday, March 24th, 2011 by Adrian Segar

Best Practices look backward, providing advice that worked in the past; Next Practices focus on what to do in the time ahead.
—The Internet Time Alliance

I always felt irritated, but never knew why, when I heard someone talk about best practices as the business processes we should strive for. Reading the excerpt quoted above, taken from the Working Smarter Glossary of the Internet Time Alliance led to an aha! moment.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with learning about and comparing different approaches to solving problems or satisfying business requirements. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel or repeat mistakes that others have made.

But when we limit ourselves to the best that others are doing, two things happen.

Status quo and complacency

First, we blind ourselves to the reality that our world is constantly changing. The “best” of today may become quickly obsolete. As examples, we only need to look at how the music & publishing industries continue to cling to outmoded business models as digital distribution becomes commonplace.

And second, we don’t think about ways we might come up with something better. Example? Unlike the rest of the airline industry, Southwest Airlines has been profitable for 37 consecutive years. Not by implementing well-established practices of the fiercely competitive air transportation business. But by introducing new ways (flying out of smaller airports, standardizing airline fleets, employee profit-sharing, etc.) to satisfy customers and grow their market.

Learning about what’s best is fine for novices who need to get up to speed on what an industry currently does. Implementing next practices can be scary, because they may require us to do things that we, and perhaps no one else, have ever done before.

But, if we restrict ourselves to what’s currently best, then at best we’ll maintain the status quo, with the ever-present danger that at any time a competitor could make our industry’s best practices second best. Instead, focus on next practices. Doing this allows us to be open to reinventing our work, leading us to the potential of a profitable (and interesting) future.

Photo attribution: Flickr user heygabe

Tags: best practices, next practices| Posted in Soapbox | 5 Comments »

Process not product

Thursday, October 28th, 2010 by Adrian Segar

Process not product.

“We shape our buildings, then our buildings shape us.”
—Winston Churchill

I spent the first twenty-five years of my life obtaining a Ph.D. What was more important, the achievement or the work and learning involved?

More recently, for about ten years I had a piece of paper thumbtacked at eye level on my office wall. It said:

Process not product.

I needed that piece of paper in plain view to remind me as I worked on projects that, ultimately, the process I use to achieve my goals is more important than the end result.

No, I’m not saying that the products of my work aren’t important; far from it. Rather, if I concentrate on my end goals to the extent that my awareness of the process I am using to obtain them suffers, then:

My end results will be inferior to what I could have achieved; and
I’ll be living a miserable life.

It took me ten years before I removed that piece of paper. Ten years to reliably remember not to plunge into achievement at the expense of mindful action.

Sometimes, old habits take a long time to change.

There’s a silver lining, though. By implementing change in small ways in our daily lives, we can better facilitate the change we seek.

Which is more important for you? Process or product?

Image attribution: Flickr user sixmilliondollardan

Tags: mindfulness, process, product| Posted in Soapbox | 3 Comments »

When will we wake up about the need to change our conference designs?

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 by Adrian Segar

When will we wake up about the need to change our conference designs?

Medicine in medieval times consisted of blood-letting, exorcism of devils, spells, incantations, and a proscription of bathing. It didn’t work. In fact, like traditional management, it made things worse. Doctors who had been taught to do it believed in it. The establishment defended it. The universities kept teaching it. So people went on doing it, despite all the evidence to the contrary. It took hundreds of years before these counter-productive practices were set aside in favor of modern medicine. Eventually, people awoke from their collective delusion.
—More or less innovation? Duh? by Steve Denning

In the above quote, Steve Denning describes the persistence of the fledgling medical establishment in inflicting medical treatments that didn’t work. He draws an analogy with how managers still cling to traditional management practices, despite a century of calls for change, and mounting evidence of the social and economic damages they are inflicting.

Let’s hope it isn’t much longer before we face the stultifying effects of traditional conference designs on hapless attendees, and take the necessary steps to change our designs, based on what we are learning about how adults best learn and connect.

Tags: Event design, Learning| Posted in Soapbox | 6 Comments »

Mission: Working for the earth

Thursday, July 8th, 2010 by Adrian Segar

Working for the earth. I came across this excerpt from an eloquent speech by Paul Hawken today, and want to share it:

We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. Think about this: we are the only species on this planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time than to renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.

—Paul Hawken, environmentalist and head of the Natural Capital Institute, from his commencement address to the University of Portland, May 3, 2009.

Image courtesy: NASA / Goddard Space Flight Center

Tags: earth, mission, Paul Hawken, Soapbox| Posted in Soapbox | 2 Comments »