What approach should we use to teach participation techniques for meeting sessions? Here’s my answer to this question, illustrated by a story about the power of experiential learning. With the rise of social learning and the decline in the importance […]
I’ve written before about how to improve your conference with explicit ground rules. Though it’s interesting and enlightening to compare the ground rules embedded in conference designs—for example, Open Space Technology has five ground rules, while Conferences That Work and […]
You may not think of yourself as a consultant, but you probably are. Peter Block, in his classic book Flawless Consulting, defines a consultant as someone who has influence but not the authority to make changes. While some, like myself, […]
Here’s what I learned about event professionals at EventCamp East Coast. One of the reasons I love to facilitate Conferences That Work is that I get to learn interesting things about the culture of the participants. Whoever they are! Young […]
The myth of control. Misconception 7: Conflict is bad…The reality is that whenever you have more than one living person in a room, you’ll have more than one set of interests, and that’s not a bad thing. —The Change Handbook […]
Yes, the Fisch Flip has sparked an idea for conference design. This post by Jeff Hurt on applying the Fisch Flip to your conference model got me thinking. If you haven’t read about it already, the term Fisch Flip was […]
Here’s why PK (Pecha Kucha) is OK.“Being architects and having been to countless lectures, we knew that once people start to talk about their work and have a mic in their hands they just go on about details forever…” —Mark […]
How can you learn from personal stories? After I met Glenn Thayer on a warm Colorado evening a couple of months ago, I kept remembering a story that he told me about a celebrity charity event he was emceeing. This […]
There are three things conference attendees really want to know about each other. Connections with people are formed by our experience with them over time. (Yes, Buddhists and Taoists, the present moment is our only reality, but we still experience […]
Fifteen hundred years of broadcast learning. In 1980, I was one of the students in this picture — the physics lecture theatre at Oxford University. (There were few female students then, so some things have improved.) They’ve repainted the walls […]