Uncategorized Archives : Page 3 of 6 : Conferences That Work

Five lessons event planners can learn from the iPad launch

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 by Adrian Segar

Seth Godin wrote a powerful post—Secrets of the biggest selling launch ever—about why Apple sold 300,000 iPads on the first day of the iPad launch. Here are five of his secrets that are 100% relevant to the fundamental challenges facing event planners today.

2. Don’t try to please everyone. There are countless people who don’t want one, haven’t heard of one or actively hate it. So what? (Please don’t gloss over this one just because it’s short. In fact, it’s the biggest challenge on this list).

Designing events so that they will appeal to the least adventurous attendee guarantees the same-old snooze-fest. Event planners need to aim higher and use innovative formats, even at the risk of jolting people who didn’t expect to be jolted.

3. Make a product worth talking about. Sounds obvious. If it’s so obvious, then why don’t the other big companies ship stuff like this? Most of them are paralyzed going to meetings where they sand off the rough edges.

How many events have you attended that you still remember years later? (Or a month later?) It’s possible to create memorable events. And the best ones are memorable not because they had great content or great presenters, but because wonderful, unexpected things happened there. We know how to create events like this: by using participant-driven approaches. But we are afraid to take the risk of trying event formats that are different. Apple took that risk with the iPad launch. If we event planners won’t take the risk, who will?

6. Create a culture of wonder. Microsoft certainly has the engineers, the developers and the money to launch this. So why did they do the Zune instead? Because they never did the hard cultural work of creating the internal expectation that shipping products like this is possible and important.

Until we fully embrace the belief that it’s possible to successfully employ powerful interactive formats at our events, we’re going to be churning out more Zunes than iPads.

7. Be willing to fail. Bold bets succeed–and sometimes they don’t. Is that okay with you? Launching the iPad had to be even more frightening than launching a book…

Apple has been willing to make mistakes: the Lisa and the Newton come to mind. You can’t have great success without risking some failure.

Every time I facilitate an event I welcome the possibility of failure. Not the kind of failure where the event is a total bust—I’m not that far out on the edge—but the failure of a session’s process, or the discovery of a flaw in a new approach. And you know what? The new things I try that succeed more than outweigh the failures I experience. And, bonus, I get to learn from my mistakes!

So take some risks with your event designs. Have the courage of your convictions, trust your intuition, and be willing to make mistakes.

9. Don’t give up so easy. Apple clearly faced a technical dip in creating this product… they worked on it for more than a dozen years. Most people would have given up long ago.

We event designers can learn a lot from the success of the iPad launch.

I think we face a long hard road in changing people’s perceptions of what is possible at an event. It’s not easy to challenge hundreds of years of cultural history that have conditioned us to believe that we should learn and share in certain prescribed ways. But the rapid rise of the adoption of social media has shown that people want to be active participants in their interactions with others, and we need to change our event designs to satisfy this need when people meet face-to-face.

I’m willing to work on these issues over the long haul. Will you join me?

Tags: event-planning, failure, giving up, iPad, lessons learned, mistakes, Seth Godin, taking risks, wonder| Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Expressing Our Feelings In Public

Monday, April 5th, 2010 by Adrian Segar

It’s O.K. to express your feelings at weddings and funerals. But when was the last time you heard someone share their feelings in public at a conference? When was the last time you did?

I go to the theater

A play, like a straight line, is the shortest path from emotion to emotion
—George Pierce Baker

Last weekend I went to “Raising Our Voices“, a local theater gala by children, youth, and adults with disabilities. I got goosebumps and a little teary. And I finally figured out why this invariably happens when I watch kid’s theater.

You see, when I was growing up my education emphasized thinking. Learning important facts and concepts and being able to apply them to solve problems led to high marks on tests. Getting the right answers, preferably quicker than anyone else, got me to the top of the graded class roster, displayed publicly on the school notice board twice a semester.

No time to feel

However, the educational agenda allocated no time for understanding or expressing my feelings. The only kinds of grading that occurred as a consequence of my emotions were the dramatic reprisals taken when I infrequently misbehaved. All of us in school had feelings, of course, and they greatly affected how and what we did. But no one encouraged us to talk about or explore them. It was repeatedly implied that being near the bottom of the class list would be shameful, without ever giving us any insight as to what shame was!

Over the years I’ve learned to be more in touch with my emotions. And so, when I see kids in a play, encouraged to display joy, anger, fear, guilt, shame, grief, and all the subtle variants of these basic human emotions, I’m taken back to my youth, and the little child in me both rejoices and aches for what I missed out on: the childhood opportunity to express and share integral aspects of who we are that were part of the human psyche long before the development of analytical thought.

A wise therapist friend of mine once told me that he believes when you feel that ache of simultaneous joy and pain, healing is going on.

A safe environment for sharing feelings

I think it’s important for conferences to offer a safe environment for attendees to share feelings that may come up during the event. Conferences That Work designs do this. Agreements explicitly give participants the right to speak their truth and promise privacy for anything said.

I don’t want to give the impression that Conferences That Work are full of emoting attendees who rush to share their deepest feelings with anyone they can buttonhole. Far from it. I think I’ve seen more joy and passion at our sessions than at most other events I’ve attended. But, by and large, sharing about emotional issues doesn’t happen often.

But feelings do surface. For example, when people talk about difficulties they’re having in their workplace or their uncertainties surrounding a potential career or job change. I feel happy that our event supports and encourages them to do so. And from the feedback I’ve received, I know it’s important and empowering for the attendees who have the courage to express how they feel.

Have you felt safe to express your feelings at a conference? Do you think it’s appropriate and/or important to be able to do so? Under what circumstances? And what factors make it safer or harder for such sharing to occur?

Tags: agreements, education, emotions, event-planning, feelings, ground rules, safety, sharing, theater| Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Lessons From Improv: Giving Appreciations at Conferences

Sunday, March 28th, 2010 by Adrian Segar

We can and should be giving appreciations at meetings.

Thoughts triggered while rereading Patricia Ryan Madson’s delightful, straightforward, and yet profound improv wisdom.

“…once we become aware of the level of support involved to sustain our lives we quickly realize how our debt grows daily in spite of our efforts to repay it.”
—Greg Krech, Director of the ToDo Institute

Patricia Madson’s ninth maxim is “Wake Up to the Gifts.” Gifts? What gifts? Well, although this post is about giving appreciations at conferences, first we need a little context.

The Japanese practice of Naikan, an art of self-reflection, uses three questions to examine our relationships with others:

What have I received from (person x)?
What have I given to (person x)?
What troubles and difficulties have I caused to (person x)?

When I meditate on the answers to these questions for a significant person in my life, I usually quickly discover that my list of what I have received is far longer than what I have given. When you extend these questions to the things that surround and support us in our daily lives this imbalance immediately becomes apparent. I owe an incalculable debt of gratitude to the countless people who grew and prepared the food I eat, who designed, manufactured, and delivered the computer I’m writing this on, who made it possible for me to live in and enjoy this world in so many ways.

It’s hopeless for us to be able to “pay off” these debts. But one thing we can do is to acknowledge them. And that’s why I include time for appreciations at every conference.

Appreciations are more than thanks. Imagine that Susan is standing before the gathered attendees, publicly thanking people, including you, Bob, for your work organizing a conference. Here are some examples of what she might say. After you read each one, take a moment to notice how you feel.

[Susan faces audience]
“The organizers contributed a lot of hard work putting on this conference.”

[Susan faces audience]
“Bob worked hard to get out the face book.”

[Susan faces audience]
“Thank you, Bob, you worked hard to get out the face book.”

[Susan points to you and then faces the audience]
“I appreciate Bob, who worked hard to get out the face book.”

[Susan asks you to come out from the audience, faces you, makes eye contact, and speaks directly to you]
“Bob, I appreciate you for working hard to create the draft face book in time for our conference roundtable, and for rapidly producing an accurate and attractive final version. This helped all of us get to know each other quickly, and gave us a valuable reference for keeping in touch after the conference ends.”

Did you find that you felt appreciated more by each successive version, and that the final version had much more power than the others? If so, you’re not alone. In the final version, Susan:

Invited Bob out in front of the room;
Spoke to Bob directly, making eye contact;
Used an “I” message—“Bob, I appreciate you…”; and
Described specifically to Bob what she appreciated and why.

Each of these four actions strengthened the power of Susan’s message.

There’s more about giving appreciations in my book. They offer a simple, effective, and powerful way to significantly increase bonding and connection in your conference community. And, regrettably, good appreciations are so rare in our everyday life that, when people receive one, they are likely to remember it for a long time.

So, wake up to the many gifts you are receiving every day! And actively, openly, appreciate the givers when you can. You will be giving a great gift yourself when you do.

Image attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/min_photos/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Tags: appreciations, debts, event-planning, gifts, gratitude, improv, Madson, Naikan, thanks| Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Lessons from improv: Be Average!

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 by Adrian Segar

Be average!

Thoughts triggered while rereading Patricia Ryan Madson’s delightful, straightforward, and yet profound improv wisdom.

“The poet William Stafford used to rise every morning at four and write a poem. Somebody said to him, “But surely you can’t write a good poem every day, Bill. What happens then?” “Oh,” he said, “then I lower my standards.”
—from Radical Presence by Mary Rose O’Reilley

Patricia Madson’s fifth maxim is be average. Be average? Who wants to be average?! Hear me out.

Back in January I wrote Everyone Makes Mistakes about how many of us were taught while growing up that we had to do things perfectly in order to feel good about ourselves. Eventually, I discovered this doesn’t work. The emotional stress incurred in attempting the impossible task of being perfect far outweighs any small increase in the perfection of work, and, most of the time, that same stress leads to a decrease in effectiveness. But there’s more to being average than letting go of perfectionism.

Because being average is a great approach to being creative. Here’s how.

When we’re working on being creative, there’s an assumption that we must try to come up with something that’s different, something that’s “outside the box”. Not necessarily, says Patricia Madson, and she quotes Marcel Proust: “The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” In other words, she suggests that we look more carefully inside the box.

When I was an information technology consultant, clients would often expect a shiny new high-tech answer to their problems. Instead, I usually came up with mundane but creative solutions that took the best advantage of available resources. My clients were momentarily disappointed—until they heard how inexpensive my proposals would be. (Luckily for them, I just charged for my time rather than the amount of money I saved.)

Think about Magritte’s pipe that isn’t:

or Duchamp’s Fountain:

These artists expressed their creativity through household objects depicted in new ways.

One of the nice things about this kind of creativity is that we can all practice it using the gifts we already have. I find that dreaming up “way out” ideas is hard. It’s simpler for me to concentrate on seeing something familiar in a new way and be open to what pops into my consciousness.

There’s a delight in this kind of relaxed creativity. Be average and focus on the obvious. And, if nothing fantastic occurs to you right away, don’t worry.

Just lower your standards.

Tags: be average, creativity, Duchamp, improv, lessons, Madson, Magritte| Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Jerry Weinberg’s ten laws of trust

Monday, March 15th, 2010 by Adrian Segar

Jerry Weinberg’s ten laws of trust are shared in his fantastic book, published forty years ago and still in print: The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving & Getting Advice Successfully:

Nobody but you cares about the reason you let another person down.
Trust takes years to win, moments to lose.
People don’t tell you when they stop trusting you.
The trick of earning trust is to avoid all tricks.
People are never liars—in their own eyes.
Always trust your client—and cut the cards.
Never be dishonest, even if the client requests it.
Never promise anything.
Always keep your promise.
Get it in writing, but depend on trust.

Ten laws of trust. Obey them, and transform your consulting!

P.S. For more gems from Jerry Weinberg, check out his 19 Secrets of Consulting that Changed my Life and his Ten Laws of Pricing.

Tags: Jerry Weinberg, secrets of consulting, trust| Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Conference facilitation lessons from improv: Say Yes!

Friday, March 12th, 2010 by Adrian Segar

Say Yes!

Thoughts triggered while rereading Patricia Ryan Madson’s delightful, straightforward, and yet profound improv wisdom.

Patricia Madson’s first improv maxim is “Say Yes!” This reminds me of a harrowing incident not so long ago…

Will this closing session achieve closure?

I was facilitating the closing session of a three-day West Coast peer conference using a fishbowl format. It wasn’t going that well. People were eager to talk, but instead of a conversation developing we were jumping disjointedly from topic to topic.

And then things got worse.

“Selma”, a senior state official, began to speak. Listening, my heart sank as she shared that the conference had failed to adequately involve the significant numbers of minority and low-income attendees who were present. I felt shocked and dismayed. The conference organizers had made heroic and successful efforts to make it possible for a wide variety of people to attend, so Selma’s verdict seemed like a serious indictment of the conference process we had used, a process for which I was responsible.

Looking around the room, it was clear that people were upset by what they had just heard.

Then things got even worse

Instead of responding to Selma’s comments, “John,” the next person to speak, started talking about something entirely different. I felt the credibility of the session shrink rapidly toward zero. People were disengaging. We couldn’t even face a difficult issue head-on—instead, we were going to avoid it and change the subject!

John finished, and I knew we were at a tipping point. And if, as an exercise, someone had described the situation and asked me what I would do, I would have drawn a complete blank.

But this wasn’t an exercise.

What could I do?

Somehow, at that moment, I accepted the situation and acted from my gut.

“John,” I said, my voice quavering a little, “please excuse me, but I feel we need to talk about what Selma just said. If we don’t discuss the issue she’s brought up, then I think we are all going to feel pretty dissatisfied with our time together today.” I turned to Selma. “Selma, I want to hear more about how you think we’ve failed some of the attendees at this event.”

That was enough for Selma and the group to enter an intense discussion of the issues she had raised. There was no more rambling conversation. Though the resulting dialog was difficult at times, the tension in the room subsided as the participants shared and felt heard. The session became an authentic reflection on tough topics, a fitting end to a conference that had raised more questions than could be fully answered in the time we were together. And that was just fine with me.

I said yes

I’m proud of how I responded at the crucial moment. In Madson’s words, I said yes to the situation and responded from my authentic self. It wasn’t easy for me. It would have been safer to say nothing and let the group ramble on disconnectedly. But amazing things can happen when we say yes to the challenges that come our way. Try it!

P.S. If you’re interested in the inspiring organizational and cultural consequences of saying yes, I wholeheartedly recommend Peter Block’s great book, The Answer to How Is Yes: Acting on What Matters.

Have you said yes at a difficult moment? Share that moment below!

Image attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/feastoffools/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Tags: event-planning, facilitation, improv, lessons, Madson, say yes| Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Content versus conversation

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 by Adrian Segar

At our events, what should be the mix between content versus conversation?

A few days ago during an #eventprofs chat, I tweeted Cory Doctorow’s remark (made in 2006 in a boing-boing post): Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about. This inspired a variety of comments from such #eventprofs luminaries as @JeffHurt @MichaelMcCurry @lyksumlikrish @JaredGoldberg @camerontoth and @samuelsmith.

Here’s the point I was trying to make.

Sure, we need to have content at our events – something to talk about. But content is everywhere—I don’t need to go to an event to get content! If I never left my office again (now there’s a thought), as long as I paid my internet provider’s bill each month, I could choose, receive, and absorb content for the rest of my life.

And what a miserable life that would be.

I need connection, engagement, and conversation to make my life meaningful. And, in my experience, so does most of the human race.

Content these days is ubiquitous. Face-to-face events are the places for powerful, life-changing connection and engagement. That’s why we need to make them the best possible environments for conversation we can. And when we do, our conversations will naturally encompass the content that is meaningful for us.

That’s why, for me, conversation is king.

Image attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tonz/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Tags: content, conversation, eventprofs, events, hybrid events| Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Anguilla supermarkets and the future of conferences

Friday, March 5th, 2010 by Adrian Segar

What do Anguilla supermarkets have in common with the future of conferences? Read on to find out!

This is the third blog post I wrote while vacationing in Anguilla.

A little about Anguilla and its supermarkets

Anguilla is a country of 14,000 people and four supermarkets. I like Anguillan supermarkets. None of them are chains and each has its own character, which makes shopping interesting, rather than the typically predictable American experience.

Nearly everything is imported. When we first started vacationing here, food arrived by ship once a week, usually making Thursday night peak shopping time. As the days passed, popular items like milk and vegetables vanished, only to reappear shortly after the container ships steamed into the harbor at Sandy Ground. Nowadays the shelves are stocked more regularly, but you still never quite know what you may find when you venture inside one of these idiosyncratic stores.

Not all Anguilla supermarkets are the same

Each store has different strengths and weaknesses. One boasts an extensive liquor department but seems to have something against vegetables. Another targets ex-pats, with a fine display of British brand name staples and household knickknacks, while everyday staples are shortchanged. And a third provides the best assortment of local foods, but little in the way of candy for the kids.

What’s interesting is the evolution of these establishments over time. The older supermarkets used to have a monopoly on certain goods; if you wanted cream you had to go to Supermarket A, while Supermarket B was the sole supplier of Pampers. With more sources of supply, the possibilities have multiplied—and the stores have responded in very different ways.

Six years ago, Supermarket C was the most haphazardly stocked of the three we patronized. Its marketing philosophy seemed to be we’ll take anything we can get out hands on, stack it in an aisle, and see if it sells. Their stock gyrated so widely from visit to visit that we avoided shopping there unless we wanted surprises. Not surprisingly, it was rare to see more than a few cars in the parking lot. Meanwhile, Supermarkets A & B relied on their exclusive arrangements to offer, between them, a fairly comprehensive, if somewhat unreliable, selection of useful food and household products.

Fast forward to today

Supermarket C has been transformed. The premises are the same, but the shelves now include a comprehensive range of useful goods. And in addition, unlike competitors A & B, the store is open every day until late. As a result, it’s hard to find a space in the parking lot.

Meanwhile, Supermarkets A & B have rested on their laurels. We don’t have to shop in both places to get what we want anymore. C is now our go-to store. And yet, though their traffic is down, we still notice customers shopping at A & B.

These days, those of us who don’t live on a small island know that failure to keep up with competitors in a commodity-driven retail market invariably leads to swift economic extinction. In Anguilla’s laid-back environment, such change will probably occur more slowly, but eventually, unless they make significant changes, Supermarkets A & B will not survive.

The future of conferences

You’ve probably guessed how this relates to the future of conferences. Think of Supermarkets A & B as set-in-their-ways organizers of traditional conferences. Think of C as progressive event planners who realize that people prefer to attend events that give them what they want rather than going to multiple events to get a piece here and a piece there.

In Anguilla, people’s needs for supermarket goods didn’t change, but improvements in the supply of imported goods into Anguilla allowed Supermarket C to change what it offered to better match what people wanted. Likewise, people’s professional needs for relevant content, meaningful engagement, and networking haven’t changed. But we now have a host of new ways to supply content outside the traditional conference, and a host of new ways to find out what conference attendees want to do while they’re together. Ignore the future of conferences at your peril. See you in the aisles at Supermarket C!

Image attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ame/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Tags: Anguilla, future, supermarkets, vacation| Posted in Lessons from Anguilla, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Helping conference attendees satisfy their curiosity

Friday, February 26th, 2010 by Adrian Segar

How can we help conference attendees satisfy their curiosity?

“Satisfaction of one’s curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life.”
—Linus Pauling

When I was a graduate student I used to dislike going to academic conferences. Despite having won a senior scholarship to Oxford University I was scared of walking into a room of people I didn’t know and trying to start up conversations. When I sat next to random folks at lunch and we talked, I always had the sneaking suspicion that there were probably other people present at the conference whose company I’d enjoy even more—but I had no way to figure out who they might be.

We are curious about other people, especially if we share a common interest. And every culture has its conventions for meeting and learning about strangers. Unfortunately, in a conference setting these conventions limit the number of people we can meet. For example, in my experience, even an extreme extrovert will find it challenging to meet a majority of the people at a 100-attendee two-day conference.

So in the 80’s, when I began to have opportunities to design my conference formats, I knew that I wanted to include the opportunity for participants to learn about each other, right at the beginning of the event.

Over the years, this desire shaped the first Conferences That Work session: The Three Questions. Each attendee in turn answers the following three questions to a group.

The Three Questions

“How did I get here?”
“What do I want to have happen?”
“What experience do I have that others might find useful?”

I describe in detail how to explain these questions to attendees in my book Conferences That Work. There are no wrong answers to the three questions. Participants can answer them by publicly sharing as little or as much as they wish. What I find wonderful about the sharing is how the atmosphere invariably changes as people speak; from a subdued nervousness about talking in front of strangers to an intimacy that grows as people start to hear about topics that engage them, discover kindred spirits, and learn of unique experiences and expertise available from their peers. When sharing is over, both a sense of comfort and excitement prevail. Comfort arising from the knowledge attendees have of their commonalities with others. Excitement at the thought that they now have the rest of the conference to explore the uncovered connections and possibilities.

Switching the responsibility for initial introductions from attendees to the conference model bypasses normal social conventions – replacing them with a safe place for people to share about themselves with others. This simple conference process gives attendees the openings they need to further satisfy their curiosity about their peers. It works amazingly well.

Tags: curiosity, event-planning, roundtable, satisfaction, three questions| Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

My Anguilla vacation – a 24/7 event

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 by Adrian Segar

This is the first of my blog posts written while vacationing in Anguilla.

I’m in the middle of a three-week idyllic vacation in Anguilla, a tiny Caribbean island. Colonized by the British in the 17th century, Anguilla today is an internally self-governing overseas territory (Google it!) that still retains charming traces of its colonial past: driving on the left, Cadbury’s chocolate, the ubiquitous use of “Good morning”, etc.

It’s getting harder to think of topics for blog posts as Celia & I are plied with fiendish rum drinks concocted by Susan, one of the three women doctor friends who are visiting us this week. (Yes, I know I’m on vacation, but, after lying for hours on a stunning powder-sand beach in the shade of a coconut palm, watching the hypnotic ebb and flow of perfect blue translucent waves, I begin to worry that I will never be able to think a coherent thought again – and, alarmingly, this is starting to seem O.K.)

This is our fifth vacation in Anguilla. Besides some of the most beautiful beaches in the world (with almost no one on them), goats that ramble all over the place, excellent restaurants, and plentiful mango coladas, there are about 14,000 other reasons why we keep coming back.

The people.

Just about everyone I’ve met who lives here has been friendly and engaging. Once in a while, all of us have a bad day, but Anguillans seem to stay upbeat regardless. There is a sense of acceptance of life’s realities here, and a tendency to look on the bright side of everyday trials and tribulations.

Anguilla’s economy is almost totally dependent on tourism. So how locals respond and interact with tourists like me is critical to their livelihood. In my experience, Anguillans are uniformly pleasant without being obsequious. From my outsider’s point of view, they are running a 24/7 event which I’m attending. And they do it with style and an open heart, just being themselves.

Event planners like me can learn a lot from them.

Tags: 24/7, Anguilla, event, tourism, vacation| Posted in Lessons from Anguilla, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »