Recently, I’ve been practicing what Susan Pollak calls “letting go of whatever isn’t serving you right now”. Perhaps your first thought is “That sounds nice”, quickly followed by a second thought along the lines of “Huh, easy to say, hard […]
Through attending decades of Vermont Town Meetings, I learned that effective facilitation requires respect. For over two hundred years, my little hometown of Marlboro, Vermont, met at least once a year for “town meeting”: a form of local government where […]
Seth Godin points out that many organizations fear connecting because their leadership fears losing control. Even though the control they think they have is a myth. “Organizations are afraid of connecting. They are afraid of losing control, of handing over […]
I am not a psychologist or neuropsychologist. However, I have spent thousands of hours as an amateur, supervised by therapists, leading small group workshop explorations of individuals’ struggles to make sense of their lives. And I’ve learned that confusion about […]
On Tuesday, March 26, 2024, I sat down with Martin Duffy and Paul Nunesdea on LinkedIn Live for an hour’s deep dive conversation about peer conferences: the participant-driven, participation-rich events I’ve designed and facilitated for over thirty years. You can […]
Here’s an independent review of my conference design work, published as a case study in Chapter 25—Designing and Developing Content for Collaborative Business Events—of the book The Routledge Handbook of Business Events. (Tip: The hardback version is expensive, the ebook […]
I joined the social media platform Mastodon a year ago. Given recent turbulent social media trends, I’m glad I took the plunge. Having been on Twitter (yes, I know it’s been renamed “X”, sue me) since 2009, I’d describe Mastodon as the […]
I’m indebted to Martin Sirk for sharing remarkable information about an 1828 conference designed by the German geographer, naturalist, and explorer Alexander von Humboldt. Read what follows to discover that Humboldt was also a meeting designer way ahead of his […]
Though I’ve been a professional consultant of one kind or another for over forty years, I sometimes still fall victim to the Consultant’s Curse.
It’s time for a “sound of silence” roundup of meetings industry pet peeves. “…the vision that was planted in my brain Still remains Within the sound of silence” —Simon & Garfunkel – Sound Of Silence (1965) Venue air quality is […]