In 2005, a quarter of the homes built in the United States were spec homes—homes that builders start, and sometimes finish, before selling them. Today (2010), in the aftermath of the bursting of the housing bubble, almost no one is building spec homes. From 25% market share to 1-2% in just four years.
A traditional conference is like a spec home. The program is designed and built for you based on what a program committee thought people like you would want.
I don’t think the traditional conference market is going to implode like the market for spec homes. On the other hand, I’ve found during my 33 years of experience running Conferences That Work that the best program committees predict only half the topics that participants at attendee-driven conferences actually request.
In contrast, participant-driven and participation-rich meetings reliably build the right conference for participants. How? By creating a meeting that satisfies their actual wants and needs.
If conference organizers continue to believe they can predict what their attendees want to share, learn, and do at their conferences they may, at some point, experience the bursting of a bubble of their own.
“Patiently Smiley waited for the speck of gold, for Connie was of an age where the only thing a man could give her was time.” from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John Le Carré
I was facilitating a peer conference roundtable recently when a young man began to speak. He was obviously nervous: his voice a monotone, when it wasn’t quavering. I was peripherally aware that some people didn’t seem to be listening. He paused for a moment and his eyes swept around the circle, searching for a sign that anyone cared about what he had to say. He found me.
I was leaning forward, looking directly at him, giving him my full attention. Our eyes locked and I nodded slightly. He took a breath and continued. His voice became stronger. I saw people turn back to him and he finished well.
I had just given the gift of listening, and this young man had been nourished by it.
Active listening
When I am facilitating it’s my responsibility to actively listen to what is going on, focussing my full attention on what others say and do. When I’m successful, those who are present know that there is at least one other person who is listening to them and who takes seriously what they have to say.
Listening like this is hard work. To conscientiously listen to participants for over two hours at a large roundtable is extremely challenging for me. But it’s very important. People need to be heard, and if they believe they will not be heard, why should they bother to speak? By offering good listening at the start of a peer conference, I model and encourage a conference environment where openness twinned with receptiveness becomes a safe option for participants.
There’s a wider benefit from the cultivation of this skill. Practicing listening when required by my role has helped me to be a better listener during all the times when I’m not facilitating—when I’m a participant, or with my family, or as a customer. You, too, may find that developing your ability to fully listen pays rich dividends.
In 1977 I immigrated to the United States and first heard the classic Sesame Street song Everyone Makes Mistakes. I’d quote it here, except my teacher Jerry Weinberg shared the following in his writing workshop. “Never, never, never, quote the lyrics from any song in your published writing.”
So I’ll take the coward’s way out and link to a video.
It was a shock to me to learn that everyone makes mistakes. In the hot-house competitive educational atmosphere of the 50’s and 60’s in England, I believed my smartness determined my self-worth. It had been drummed into me that smart people didn’t make mistakes. So I felt shocked when Big Bird told my three-year-old daughter that it was OK to make mistakes. Everyone did it! Up until that afternoon, with the voice of Big Bird issuing from the scratchy record player, I had felt embarrassed when anyone discovered that I didn’t know the answer to something I thought should have known.
It took me a while to get over this shame, which, I’ve discovered, many people experience. If you are one of them, listen to Big Bird’s message and read Chapters 13 and 15 of Jerry’s “Becoming a Technical Leader.” (Heck, read the whole book—it’s that good!)
Eventually, of course, I found out that giving yourself the freedom to make mistakes is a gift to yourself. The gift of freedom to explore new possibilities for your life and work. That’s why the environment at every peer conference encourages and supports making mistakes—an important way for us to learn and grow.
Here are some consequences of concentrating on top-down (traditional) rather than bottom-up (non-traditional) conference process:
Everyone gets assigned their role in advance.
Top-down implies that some people have “the knowledge”; the rest don’t.
There’s less opportunity to engage attendees who aren’t invested; they can zone out as they choose.
Passive reception of knowledge is the dominant learning modality.
There may be less stress for attendees, knowing that no personal contribution is expected.
There are, at best, few expectations for attendees, apart from paying for the conference.
Tradition coupled to prestige confirms legitimacy—” This is the way it’s done”.
The conference confers status by association; you’re a professional in this field because professionals in this field go to this conference.
Top-down imposes control of what’s going to happen: who speaks, who listens, who’s in, who’s out.
Conference structure and content are fixed; they’re very difficult to change even if circumstances cry out for a different direction.
The top-down model can put pressure on presenters, who may feel they need to be comprehensive, all-knowing, and coherent to justify the program committee’s choice of them as presenters.
The power to create conference structure and session topics is confined to the conference program committee.
Top-down supports and perpetuates cliques: the presenters versus the audience; the old hands and the in-crowd versus the newbies.
Everyone knows what is supposed to happen, minimizing the fear of the unknown.
The conference tends to mirror and/or reinforce perceived hierarchy or status in a profession or field—“Here are the experts”.
Meeting and connecting with like-minded people during the formal conference program is largely a matter of chance or careful preparation.
Can you think of other consequences of top-down conference process? Share them in the comments below.
Image attribution: Flickr user flynnwynn/ / CC BY-ND 2.0
“We don’t have a word for learning and teaching at the same time, but our schooling would improve if we did.”—Kevin Kelly, Out of Control.
One afternoon in 1975, I entered an elevator at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, Switzerland. In the elevator was Professor R, the future recipient of a Nobel Prize, and generally regarded by lowly graduate students like me as a physics god. We were alone, on our way to a lecture he was giving. As he ignored me, the door slid shut, and we began to rise.
Abruptly, the elevator shuddered to a stop between floors.
We stood, not speaking, waiting for something to happen. Some thirty seconds went by, but we did not move.
Professor R swung towards the elevator control panel. He started pushing the buttons. Nothing happened. He pushed the buttons again. We remained motionless.
I was trapped in an elevator with a physics god.
And then Professor R began to shout.
It was clear to me that panic didn’t drive his outburst. He yelled at the elevator because he was angry that a mere elevator could delay an important man. His anger was automatic, a habitual response when things didn’t go his way.
I stood, saying nothing. There was an intercom on the elevator panel, and I wondered how long it would be before Professor R calmed down enough for me to suggest we use it. Meanwhile, we were trapped in an elevator together.
He was still shouting when the elevator started upwards smoothly as if nothing had happened. Professor R stopped yelling. We stood for a few seconds, avoiding eye contact until the elevator arrived at our floor and the door opened. The physics god rushed out.
The lecture started ten minutes later. As I sat in the audience, Professor R showed no sign that our little elevator incident had ever occurred.
Later I learned that my momentary elevator companion was notorious for angry outbursts when he didn’t get his way. No one who knew him was surprised to hear my experience.
Initially, I thought my brief encounter with a famous person had just given me a good story to tell. It took a while before I realized what I had learned in the elevator.
***
Our children are born dependent on us. We supply sustenance, shelter, and protection from perils. As they grow they learn. At first sight, it seems that their learning is a one-way street. What can we learn from children?
We can relearn how to learn—if we pay attention. When my younger granddaughter, Kayla was two I’d see her every few weeks. The changes I noticed between visits were striking. At one visit it was clear from how she reacted that she understood what I said to her, but she didn’t speak more than a word or two. Three weeks later, she repeated the last word of everything I said to her; at the following visit she was creating two-word sentences; at the next, I heard a four-word phrase; at the next when she said something I didn’t understand, she patiently repeated herself, perhaps changing a word or two. Now four years old, she is still fearless at experimenting with her world through ceaseless play, is cheerfully curious, life fascinates her, she is resilient and persistent, she is open to new ideas and experiences, and she is spontaneous.
Professor R, on the other hand, had forgotten how to learn in the ways that Kayla does. We all seem to move in this direction later in childhood, perhaps because our increased awareness of social context causes us to self-censor natural curiosity and willingness to experiment. Right now, Kayla is out of control of her life most of the time because there are so many things she doesn’t understand, and because the adults around her steer her life in so many ways. And she responds to this state of affairs with great curiosity and ingenuity. For less than a minute Professor R experienced being out of control of his life, but for him, a new situation, a stuck elevator, evoked only anger.
Professor R understood more about physics than I ever have or will, but that day I discovered that I was wiser than him in at least one way. I knew that when you experience minor setbacks, there are better alternatives than exploding with anger. Until that day at CERN, I had assumed that the people society had provided as my teachers must be smarter than me in every way. Professor R showed me that this belief was wrong, and, over time, this realization has fundamentally blurred how I see the relationship between student and teacher.
I now believe I have something to contribute to everyone and I can learn something from everyone. And that this is true for other adults too.
***
And this is why a peer conference de-emphasizes pre-determined official roles. Attendees figure out for themselves who and what is of value to them, and the conference format supports the resulting connections with relevant topics and people. No one makes prior assumptions about who is valuable and what should be discussed, and people move as needed between teaching and learning, moment to moment.
One can look back at a moment between two individuals and say: at that moment she was the teacher and he was the student. But in the present moment, we have no way of knowing the role we may be in. There is a joy in living in a way that avoids preconceptions about our role, and that, in the process, opens us up to new experiences and learning that would otherwise pass us by.
I don’t recommend being trapped in an elevator with a Nobel Prize winner. But I certainly learned a lot during my short time with Professor R.
How to end a conference? Trainings and conferences that professionals must attend to maintain certification can close with the triumphant presentation of certificates of completion or attendance. But other traditional conferences have no such obvious conclusion. All too often, the conference finale is manufactured. Organizers add an awards ceremony, a closing keynote, a fancy dinner, a raffle, a celebrity speaker, or some combination thereof.
The reason for this artificiality is simple: Traditional conferences that are not training-oriented don’t provide any kind of progression through their theme. Logistical, political, and speaker availability considerations guide the sequence of session topics rather than logical flow. One session doesn’t follow from another. Such a conference doesn’t have a beginning. So, how can we expect it to have an end?
Some conferences dispense with the pretense of closure. This, at least, is honest, though the effect of “transmit content, go home” is somewhat blunt.
How to end a peer conference
In contrast, peer conferences provide a progression, not through content, but through several processes designed to increase attendee connections as the conference proceeds. Typically, two closing spective sessions, personal and group, build on the generated intimacy to provide a powerful and appropriate conference ending.
Are your conferences in the business of supporting meaningful connections between participants?
At peer conferences, on arrival, attendees immediately receive a printed face book (that’s face book: small f, two words) that includes photographs, names and contact data, and additional pertinent information about each participant.
They tell me that it’s rare to receive such a document at conferences. How sad that conference organizers don’t bother to provide this basic tool for learning about fellow attendees. (Perhaps it’s not too surprising, since no books on conference management mention providing an attendee face book.) The absence speaks volumes about the lack of support for participant interaction at traditional conferences.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Actively supporting meaningful connections is an integral part of every peer conference. When the information, openings, and opportunities needed to meet like-minded attendees are provided, not only during session breaks but also as part of the formal conference structure, it becomes attendee-centered rather than session-centered, greatly increasing the intimacy and enjoyment of the event.
Planners of traditional conferences assume that the primary purpose of conference sessions is to transmit pre-planned content.
The three communication modes used among a group of people are one-to-one (individual conversations), one-to-many or broadcast (presentations and panels), and many-to-many or conferring (discussions). Traditional conference sessions are predominantly one-to-many, with perhaps a dash of many-to-many at question time.
One-to-one conversations are infinitely flexible; both participants have the power to lead the conversation along desired paths. Many-to-many conversations are powerful in a different way—they expose the participating group to a wide range of experience and opinions.
In contrast, one-to-many communication is mostly pre-planned, and thus relatively inflexible if the presentation involves a passive audience. At best, a presenter may ask questions of her audience and vary her presentation appropriately, but she is unlikely to get accurate representative feedback when her audience is large. Some presenters can create interactive sessions with significant audience participation, but they are the exception rather than the rule.
Presentations and panels are appropriate when we are training, and have expert knowledge or information to impart to others. But today we have a rich variety of alternative methods to train adults. For example: reading books and articles, watching recordings of presentations, and searching for information and downloading answers on the Web.
What can you not replicate at a face-to-face conference? The spontaneous conversations and discussions! So why do we still cling to conference sessions that transmit pre-planned content, employing the one communication mode for which a variety of alternatives can substitute?
Most conference planners think that meeting organizers need to choose and schedule conference session topics in advance.
One of the questions I asked when interviewing conference attendees for my book was:
“Most conferences have a conference schedule and program decided in advance. How would you feel about a conference where, at the start, through a careful conference process, the attendees themselves determine what they want to discuss, based on what each person wants to learn and the experience each attendee has to share?”
Forty-five percent of my interviewees were unable to conceive of a conference that did not have a schedule of conference sessions decided on and circulated in advance.
The most common response? Interviewees weren’t sure they’d want to go to such a conference without knowing what was going to happen there.
The next most common response? The idea sounded great/interesting/intriguing. But interviewees had no idea of how one would create a relevant conference program at the start of the conference.
What if we could create conference session topics that actually reflect attendee wants and needs
Suspend disbelief for a moment, and assume that at the start of a conference it is somehow possible to use available resources to create conference session topics that actually reflect attendee wants and needs. Then imagine attending such a conference yourself, a conference tailored to your needs. (You might want to reflect on how often this has happened to you.) Wouldn’t it be great?
What is the origin of the assumption that one must pre-plan a conference program? Perhaps it arose from our experience of learning as children, from our teachers in school who knew or were told what we were supposed to learn following a pre-planned curriculum. Certainly, if one thinks of conferences as training by experts, a pre-planned schedule makes sense. But conferences are for adult learners, and adults with critical thinking skills and relevant experience can learn from each other. We’ll see that there are ways of putting conference attendees in charge of what they wish to learn and discuss. But this cannot be done effectively if a conference’s program is frozen before attendees arrive.
The peer conference model described in Conferences That Work does indeed build a conference program that automatically adjusts to the actual needs of the people present. Read the book to find out how.
How can we build the right conference?
