How do we get people to participate in meetings? How can we design for easier attendee participation? We know that participants — people who are active learners — learn more, retain more, and retain more accurately than passive attendees. They are also far more […]
Sometimes, the best thing we can do is to ask for help. I ask for help I had been fretting for several months on how to move ahead on convening and facilitating more of the participation technique workshops that are dear to my […]
Learn to Design Participation-Rich Conferences Learn to design participation-rich conferences at Participate! Labs. “You don’t take a workshop. You are part of one.” —Seth Godin We’ve known for a long time that lectures are terrible ways to learn. Today’s attendees […]
Magical events change people’s lives. Great events foster passion by providing well-designed opportunities for significant engagement with peers. For passion and engagement, you need a tribe—be it two or a hundred other people—with whom you relate and connect while you’re together at the event, […]
Let’s take a hard look at conference evaluations. Seth Godin wrote a great blog post about survey questions, and applying two of his insights will improve any conference evaluation. First, ask yourself the following about every question you ask: Are you asking questions capable of […]
Useful knowledge increasingly resides in our social networks, not in our individual heads. Consequently, we are moving from an industrial economy to a connection economy. One which creates value by concentrating on building relationships rather than stuff. In the connection economy, there’s […]
Do you think that personal change is easy? We: have moments when we wish our lives were easier. sometimes struggle with change we would like to see in our lives but can’t seem to make happen. are continually exposed to […]
Is your mission impossible? If you know your mission — you do have a mission, right? — then your long-term strategy becomes much clearer. You know where you want to go; now, all that remains is how to get there. Of course, life is rarely […]
Less perfection, more risky learning — an experiment Right after the 2015 PCMA Education Conference Tuesday breakfast, I facilitated an experiment that allowed 675 meeting planners to choose sessions they would like to hold. In 45 minutes, hundreds of suggestions were […]