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by Adrian Segar

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Category: Associations
- The highest meaning of a social group
- Does your association’s tail wag your membership’s dog?
- A healthy organization contains active cultures
- I am crazy… but I’m not alone!
- When association leadership loses its way
- A new kind of association service — Open Collective
- How to become one with your association’s strategic goals
- Associations exist only in the mind
- Lessons from my association leadership transitions
- Unmembership and unconferences
- Is unmembership the future of associations?
Category: Conference Spotlight
- How PCMA connected the dots at the 2015 Education Conference
- Live blogging PCMA Convening Leaders 2014
- Conferences That Work spotlight—Community Jam Northern California Harvesting/Gleaning Conference
Category: Connection
- Facilitation listening as meditation
- Connection, attachment, and meetings
- Someone to tell it to is one of the fundamental needs of human beings
- The hallway of learning
- Mediate connection in the Age of Entanglement
- On our different responses to adversity
- Trust, safety, and learning at meetings
- An excellent life story exercise for groups
- Facilitating change: The power of sharing our experience
- Bringing people together across divides
- Being Present in the Age of the Mind Outside the Brain
- Nobody is born ahead of their time
- What’s better than people augmented by technology at meetings?
- The parallel missions of journalism and participant-driven and participation-rich events
- Facilitation, rapt attention, and love
- Facilitate connection
- Thank you for your feedback
- Bringing people together
- Connection: A morning walk in Anguilla
- What it means to belong
- What happens when you truly listen
- Conferences as communities of practice
- Bigger meetings aren’t necessarily better meetings
- Is your content worth their time?
- Prepare workers for the new economy with connection-rich conferences
- Lessons from Anguilla: Getting meeting attendees to connect with one another
Category: Consulting
- Pros and cons of consulting for large organizations
- How to attract great consulting clients
- Who has more power, a consultant or a janitor?
- Don’t be a hero — solve small problems!
- The job you’ll be doing in the future hasn’t been invented yet
- Aim to serve rather than please
- Reasons to leave a job
- The rise of the generalist
- Ask, tell, ask
- Measurable work—it’s a trap!
- Dear Adrian—A Consultant’s Dilemma and The Thirty Minute Rule
- If you can’t sell it, you can’t build it. But.
Category: Dear Adrian
- Why people continue to speak for free at meeting industry conferences
- How to entwine content and connection during an online conference
- Dear Adrian — How does group size impact process design?
- Dear Adrian—How can we incorporate exercise into event programs?
- Dear Adrian—More questions about event process design
- Dear Adrian—A Consultant’s Dilemma and The Thirty Minute Rule
- Dear Adrian: Answers to participant-led event questions asked at a MeetingsNet webinar
- Dear Adrian—How do you market a new peer conference?
- Dear Adrian—How do I break in to the event services industry?
- Dear Adrian Episode 1—is there a way to crowdsource a conference program before an event?
Category: Event design
- Interaction is at the heart of cognition—and events!
- Standards for safer events
- Status and power at meetings
- The mechanics of explicit communication at meetings
- Five ways explicit communication improves meetings
- Event innovation, Disney, and souvenirs
- Six fundamental ways to make a better conference
- Doing peer conferences right
- A class is a meeting
- Engagement beats technical difficulties
- Making event choices
- The words we use for meetings matter
- Stop networking at meetings
- Improve meeting session learning with this simple tip!
- Scratching the surface
- Nervous excitement is back!
- Lessons I learned from an online workshop
- Free online Participate Lab — May 11, 2022
- Two novel hybrid meeting formats
- Working with suppliers and practitioners at meetings
- Competent logistics are the new meeting minimum
- Facilitating an online participation-rich workshop in Gatherly
- Someone to tell it to is one of the fundamental needs of human beings
- Poll: Attendees want more engaging activities
- Review of Butter, a smooth meeting platform for facilitators
- The hallway of learning
- Make the meeting bigger!
- How to stay on time at online meetings
- Stooa review — a free online fishbowl tool
- Focus on learning, not education
- Did anyone learn anything?
- The fairest rules for meetings
- Can you hear me now?
- Humanity’s problem is a meeting problem
- These aren’t the unconferences you’re looking for
- Presentation versus interaction at meetings
- How to provide new experiences at meetings
- Lessons learned from online meetings during the COVID-19 pandemic
- It’s not an entrance it’s a layer
- Good meeting design is cheaper than special effects
- Do they want to be here?
- Hub and spoke meetings
- Is the end of an event important?
- How meeting professionals can measure and improve event ROI in a post-pandemic world
- Powerful Panels interview with Adrian Segar
- Why our meetings are still full of lectures
- Social learning is humans’ true superpower
- Are Online Meetings Reducing Our Collective Intelligence?
- A novel way to assess consensus
- Ask Me Anything—a better alternative to guest lectures
- No, I do not hate in-person meetings
- Playing games, gamification, and the gulf between them
- Gamification makes about as much sense as chocolate-dipped broccoli
- Control versus freedom at meetings
- Designing conferences to solve participants’ problems
- Moderating Online Panels — Ideas and Resources
- When trio share works better than pair share
- How to run The Solution Room online
- Gatherly, Rally, and Wonder comparative review
- COVID-19, hybrid meetings, and the future
- A standing invitation for event and hospitality teachers
- Designing an online memorial service
- Review of online social platform Rally
- Stop treating adults like children at your conferences
- Which meeting design books should I buy?
- COVID-19, in-person meetings, and wishful thinking
- How to start online meetings on time
- How to create great online breakout sessions
- The best way to hold a discussion online
- How to entwine content and connection during an online conference
- Please don’t call them virtual meetings
- Two tools for online conference socials: Gatherly versus Yotribe review
- How to implement participant-driven breakouts in Zoom — Part 5
- How to implement participant-driven breakouts in Zoom — Part 4
- How to implement participant-driven breakouts in Zoom — Part 3
- How to implement participant-driven breakouts in Zoom — Part 2
- How to implement participant-driven breakouts in Zoom
- Schedule breaks during online meetings!
- Who goes first — protocols for online meetings
- Who goes next — protocols for online meetings
- How to support a community online during covid-19
- The meeting industry coronavirus silver lining
- Should meetings be efficient?
- Share information; don’t hoard it
- How to run a human spectrogram map
- How old are you?
- A free guide to creating peer conferences
- Are science conferences stuck in the Dark Ages?
- Give meeting-goers many options!
- How to facilitate a community discussion using fishbowl
- Make your entire conference a braindate
- David Adler BizBash Live interview: the best formats for live experiences
- Event Crowdsourcing free chapters!
- Creating Conferences That Work with Adrian Segar
- Why switching to active learning is hard — and worth it
- You can’t make people change. But…
- Introduction to my new book Event Crowdsourcing
- Can a rehearsal be better than a concert?
- The workshop that wasn’t
- Squaring the circle: creating room sets for connection
- Event design changes society
- I am the second sort of escapologist
- 27 years of peer conferences
- Events operate by stories
- Why I love conference facilitation and design
- Any questions? Rethinking traditional Q&A
- Liberating Structures 1-2-4-All has a big problem
- Q&A with Adrian Segar on Crowdsourcing
- Stay on time!
- Three differences between genuine and phony experiential conferences
- Dinner seating — a study
- The hive mind will see you now
- Improve meetings by de-emphasizing old-school status
- Handling a meeting question that isn’t
- Event Design is how it works
- Five Reasons to Change Conferences
- Many “experiential” events are just razzle-dazzle
- We are biased against truly creative event design
- Learning in community at conferences
- The top educational meeting format
- Scenes from a Participate! Workshop and Solution Room
- Being truly heard and seen at meetings
- Idea: Develop products and services with clients at conferences
- An innovative conference competition format
- Seating while Eating at Meetings
- Three better alternatives to the conference lecture
- Create memorable learning experiences and connections at simple workshops
- What’s most important about an event, the gift or the wrapping?
- How to design for powerful connection and learning at large meetings
- How to help meeting design clients figure out what they really want and need
- Rethinking event formats
- Three ways to create truly surprising meetings
- It became necessary to destroy the conference to save it
- Why you should run The Solution Room at your next event
- Nine conference mythodologies
- The tragedy of wasting valuable meeting time having experts presenting to “learners”
- Three creative event design tools that all #eventprofs should use
- The UnExpo Experiment
- Two scientists walk into a conference…
- How to create amazing conference programs that don’t waste attendee time
- Does the world of events need more exposure to the new?
- The Conference Arc — the key components of every successful participation-rich conference
- The best way to fundamentally improve your dull conference
- What’s better than people augmented by technology at meetings?
- The parallel missions of journalism and participant-driven and participation-rich events
- Why digital tools aren’t always the right choice for events
- How to get attendees to risk doing something new at your event
- When the audience can’t stop talking about what they did
- What your conference evaluations are missing
- Six reasons to change our conferences
- How to use dot voting to choose the sessions your attendees need and want
- How to crowdsource a conference program in real-time
- Impediments to AI matchmaking at events
- Avoid this common mistake when planning meeting programs
- The meeting industry’s biggest dirty secret
- The interpersonal dynamics of silent retreats
- Design your meeting BEFORE choosing the venue!
- Create Powerful Meetings Instead of Power-over Meetings
- Six ways to keep attendees comfortable and improve your event
- Children shouldn’t sit still in class — and neither should adults
- The architecture of assembly
- Dealing successfully with event complexity
- Three ways to make it easier for attendees to participate
- “Less Meetings, More Doing?” Nope!
- Lessons from Anguilla: What meeting designers can learn from religious services
- The dark side of stories at events
- To build connection and engagement at events — give up control!
- Why meetings are more important than you think
- Virtual Meetings Lower Costs … and Interaction
- Should presenter contracts include a no brown M&Ms rider?
- Three prerequisites for lifelong learning
- Guaranteeing audience engagement at your events
- Four reasons why traditional conferences are obsolete
- Lessons From Improv: Make Sure Your Meeting Messages Are Received
- Use pair share to quickly improve your conference sessions
- What’s the best learning model for conference sessions?
- Five reasons NOT to use a Conferences That Work meeting design
- When event covenants collide—a story
- The best way I know to radically improve your conferences
- Event design is not just visuals and logistics
- Ask Me Anything About Conference Panels—Annotated Video
- Panels as if the audience mattered
- Lessons for #eventprofs from an improv and mindfulness workshop — Part 2
- Lessons for #eventprofs from an improv and mindfulness workshop — Part 1
- Who owns your event?
- Reduce Chinese-style self-censorship at your meetings
- Feedback Frames—a low-tech tool for anonymous voting
- An introduction to participatory voting—Part 3: Public, semi-anonymous, and anonymous voting
- Participatory voting at events: Part 2—Low-tech versus high-tech voting
- Healthcare professionals want participant-driven events too
- Participatory voting at events: Part 1—Introduction
- A request for workshop help
- Improve your events in 5 minutes with covenants
- If you want passion and engagement, don’t lecture or test
- Briefer Madness
- Two ways to take a hard look at conference evaluations
- Design conferences for a connection economy
- Give attendees experiences, not things
- Nine learnings from the first Meeting Design Practicum
- Successful event outcomes, strange web traffic, and the psychology of motivation
- How a fishbowl sandwich can really get your attendees talking
- Why we shouldn’t (but do) play music at conference socials
- Venues on notice: meeting planners are demanding flexible meeting space!
- Pair share—What’s on your mind right now?
- The Reminder—a new way to obtain long-term evaluations of events
- Why meeting evaluations are unreliable and how we can improve them
- Covenants, not ground rules
- The tension between improv and planning at events
- Improve conference sessions and workshops with Color/Advance
- Eight pieces of information needed for event design
- Body voting 101 delightfully illustrated
- Can meeting professionals enjoy the meetings they create?
- How PCMA connected the dots at the 2015 Education Conference
- Recipe for better meetings: less perfection, more risky learning
- Six ways to avoid wasting attendee time
- Satisfy crucial attendee needs with Give and Get
- Why traditional conferences are dying like music albums
- Can we do better than novelty at our meetings?
- The advantages of supporting connection during meeting sessions
- Do you review event evaluations like a Chinese censor?
- Promise engagement at your meetings, not perfection
- Meetings in Day Million
- How to convert a traditional conference into a connection-rich conference
- Ground rules at the Lost Levels unconference
- Is your conference more like a pharmacy or a bookstore?
- Produce for a micro conference market
- 38 conference participation techniques
- We can talk about it
- Mom killed that idea: One way that kids are smarter than adults—and the implications for events
- Parallels between the evolution of journalism and events
- Should Linda go to TradConf or PartConf?
- Two powerful ways to open a conference
- Status and event design
- Publicly recognize the people who do the work
- RIP Conference Curator
- Meeting Design—the big picture
- Most meetings are small meetings
- A powerful question: Whom is your event for?
- How to sell me stuff right
- Becoming comfortable with silence at meetings
- Meetings are a mess—and how they got that way
- Serve up learning in small bites, not giant plates
- The value of maximizing social connection at events
- Cosmetic conferences
- Social physics and meetings
- Pick the right sustainability battles at conferences
- Please don’t call me a speaker
- Privacy issues in meeting apps
- If your event had a mouth what would it say?
- Conference size and “success”
- Event marketing—you can’t do it all yourself
- The biggest unconference mistake you can make
- Dear Adrian: Answers to participant-led event questions asked at a MeetingsNet webinar
- Attendance versus participation
- If we can improve a bucket, we can improve conferences
- Conferences need to be flexible!
- How to create a safe environment for learning at your event
- The surprising way adults learn 90% of what they need to know
- Event Technology: Don’t Reinvent The Wheel
- Who gets my information when I register at an event?
- Eight Global Meetings Megatrends
- How to create breakthrough meeting designs with Elementary Meetings
- “Do” beats “Show and Tell”
- Four important truths about conference evaluations
- Conferences are containers for ideas
- Re-envisage event technology to significantly improve your events
- Published—free update of Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love!
- Right and wrong ways to set theater seating
- Meeting participants deserve real choices, not just window dressing
- Do conference participants want less control?
- Comfort, cost, and…casters? Better chairs for your conference
- Are your meeting evaluations reliable?
- Two ways to make conferences better
- Do great speakers just provide a better emotional experience?
- Thoughts about entertainment at meetings
- How can we hold an effective realtime virtual discussion?
- Hack the peak-end rule to maximize conference impact
- Conferences as communities of practice
- The myth of the conference curator—part 2
- Bigger meetings aren’t necessarily better meetings
- Is your content worth their time?
- Don’t let the tech tail wag the event dog
- One way to build a movement at a conference
- The psychology of event sponsorship
- Human spectrograms—video from the FRESH Conference
- Giving people permission to connect
- Creating a Good Conference Impression: Ways to Welcome Attendees
- How to explore opposing viewpoints in a group
- 3 tips for facilitating group discussions
- How To Design Events That Get Amazing Participant Feedback
- Tortured by Nights of the Round Table
- Wirearchy not hierarchy
- How bad smells, hand sanitizer, and Israeli judges affect your evaluation of an event
- Another way to make conferences memorable
- The effects of three centuries on our conferences
- Two ways to create better connections at a seated meal
- Moving attendees from no where to now here
- Discover what attendees want to talk about with Post It!
- Why, sometimes, how is better than why
- The Mars Rover, cognitive science, and conference design
- Tip: Use a buddy system to welcome conference newbies
- One way to make your conferences memorable
- Are you serving up canned or live content at your Olympics?
- Why Conferences That Work continually evolve
- You had to be there
- Using Google Hangouts On Air to stream a keynote
- Testing consensus using Roman voting
- Should we fire the icebreaker?
- How to gauge the energy for creating a new conference
- Give me a break!
- Building conference programs: lessons from the $1 million Netflix Prize
- A short critique of Open Space
- Socials aren’t great ways to meet new people at conferences
- Jeremy Lin and the myth of the conference curator
- What kind of event tourist are you?
- Why I don’t like unconferences
- The science of white space at events
- Travel broadens the (event design) mind – part 1
- How do you facilitate change?
- Do conference attendees know what they want?
- Steve Jobs and the size of conferences
- The Tyranny of TED
- Hybrid event architecture ideas sparked by Event Camp Twin Cities 2011
- You can’t please everyone. Get used to it.
- The implicit ground rules of traditional conferences
- Two principles for designing conference ground rules
- Conversations => Relationships => Value (Part 2)
- Conference 2.0
- Tip for sharing new ideas at conferences
- An innovative experiential leadership session: The Music Paradigm
- Conversations => Relationships => Value (Part 1)
- Leadership, management, and meetings
- How participant-driven events can improve event ROI
- Create events that tug at heartstrings
- The new patron economy and its impact on events-Part 2
- The new patron economy and its impact on events-Part 1
- Lessons from Anguilla: A good conference is like a island vacation
- Six reasons you should hold multi-day events
- How the rise of online is changing your events
- The third way to make something happen
- Changing the way we come together at events
- Why hybrid events aren’t going away soon
- How to get great attendee evaluation response rates
- Demystifying the unconference
- Do you treat your conference attendees as adults?
- Providing clearings for your event
- The myth of control
- Anatomy of a name badge
- The cost of hybrid events
- How the Fisch Flip sparked an idea for conference design
- Three perspectives on crowdsourcing events
- A story about letting go of control at a conference
- How to improve your conference with explicit ground rules
- Why PK (Pecha Kucha) is OK
- Pecha Kucha, not Ashton Kutcher
- Comparing pre-conference and at-conference crowdsourcing
- Innovative participatory conference session: a case study using online tools
- Giving conference participants just what they want
- Leaving a good conference – Anguilla style
Category: Event professionals
- Standards for safer events
- What meeting planners who support women’s rights can do
- Air quality readings during my trip to Puerto Rico
- The meeting industry new normal – Part 3
- Poll: Attendees want more engaging activities
- Are in-person events COVID safe?
- The four meeting professionals you meet in heaven
- Why people continue to speak for free at meeting industry conferences
- The meeting industry new normal — Part 2
- The meeting industry new normal — Part 1
- How eventprofs are feeling during COVID-19
- The corrosive effect of commissions on the meetings industry
- Reassuring news for event professionals from WillRobotsTakeMyJob.com
- Is paid influencer marketing ethical in the event industry?
- A request for workshop help
- ‘Twas the Holidays Hangout …
- Will Airbnb impact traditional meeting room blocks?
- Re-envisage event technology to significantly improve your events
- Why don’t meeting conferences pay speakers?
- How can we better support event professionals?
- Participant-driven association meetings presentation slides and resources
- #eventprofs life-work balance survey results
Category: eventcamp
- Why The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Category: EventCamp East Coast
- Pecha Kucha presentations at EventCamp East Coast
- Undiscussed topics at EventCamp East Coast
- What I learned about event professionals at EventCamp East Coast
- EventCamp East Coast appreciations
Category: EventCamp Twin Cities
- Face The Fear—Then Change Your Conference Design!
Category: eventprofs
- Obsessed with conferences
- An alternative to Twitter for #eventprofs
- Ask Adrian Anything — a free online participant-driven workshop on the future of events
- Venue ventilation for COVID-19
- No, I do not hate in-person meetings
- Eventprofs Happy Hour — Feelings Edition
- Power in hotel rooms done right!
- Happy to Seize the Throne from King Content
- Reassuring news for event professionals from WillRobotsTakeMyJob.com
- Stepping down as community manager of the #eventprofs Twitter chat
- The future of #eventprofs chats
- Survey results on the future of #eventprofs chat
- A challenge to anyone who organizes an event
- #eventprofs chats are back!
Category: Facilitating Change
- Resolutions rarely work
- Building good habits: How I taught this old dog new tricks
- Scratching the surface
- The party after the war
- How to work with others to change our lives
- How to provide new experiences at meetings
- Achieve success one small step at a time
- The liberation of ignoring sunk costs
- Successful change requires integration and practice
- On our different responses to adversity
- Work on *what* to change, not just managing change
- The danger of our drive to make sense
- Contrasting examples of unlearning from Apple
- Some models of change are better than others
- Three criteria for working with others for change and action
- Unlearning is crucial for change
- The first hill is the hardest
- My two-word ikigai
- Facilitating change: The power of sharing our experience
- A healthy organization contains active cultures
- You can’t make people change. But…
- Events operate by stories
- Struggling to meditate daily
- Bringing people together across divides
- Making large scale change happen
- We are biased against truly creative event design
- The declining influence of leadership positional power in a network society
- One reason I like science fiction
- The tragedy of wasting valuable meeting time having experts presenting to “learners”
- Are SMART goals stupid?
- Stretching
- How to get attendees to risk doing something new at your event
- How to change an organization’s culture
- I stop talking for five days. You won’t believe what happens next.
- Asking for help
- Does your org chart guarantee stagnation?
- Lessons from Anguilla: Learning from what doesn’t change
- The simple consensus process that saved international climate change conferences
- Don’t believe those who tell you personal change is easy
- Mission Impossible
- Boredom is just a state of mind
- Trapped in a giant trash compactor? You always have a choice.
- Everyone I know who is changing the world…
- It’s not about me
- You can always be open to change
- Change is a verb not a noun
- A caveat on working with “human catalysts”
- Passive Programs Past Prime
- Change first, explain later
- Why measurable outcomes aren’t always a good thing
- Magic? Or same-old, same-old? Your choice.
- A magical question when I don’t know
- Fear of change at the fork in the road
- Two ways to handle a major obstacle to change
- Meeting participants deserve real choices, not just window dressing
- The center of inattention
- Facilitating change: Don’t confuse your product with your business
- Creatures of habit: Why change is hard
- Reflections on facilitating change
- Facilitating change: The value of knowing where you are
- Inspiring conference attendees to take action
- Facilitating change: Four lessons from the devolution of the British roundabout
- How do you facilitate change?
Category: facilitation
- Working with both sides
- Facilitation listening as meditation
- Tip to improve breakout gallery walks
- Stooa review — a free online fishbowl tool
- Support the bottom — a Thanksgiving reminder
- Can you hear me now?
- The loneliness of the long distance facilitator
- A novel way to assess consensus
- Trust, safety, and learning at meetings
- The danger of our drive to make sense
- Moderating Online Panels — Ideas and Resources
- When trio share works better than pair share
- How to start online meetings on time
- Facilitating change: The power of sharing our experience
- I am the second sort of escapologist
- How to improve your facilitation: an example
- Shut up and listen — part 2
- When consensus is dangerous
Category: Guest post
- How to make your workshop/meeting/conference middle-aged friendly
- Creating a Good Conference Impression: Ways to Welcome Attendees
Category: Humor
- Obsessed with conferences
- Wisdom from International Facilitation Week!
Category: Interviews
- Anca Trifan interviews me about participation-rich meetings and event design
- Powerful Panels interview with Adrian Segar
- Leadership, Events, Shackleton, Survival, and Hope
- David Adler BizBash Live interview: the best formats for live experiences
- Creating Conferences That Work with Adrian Segar
- Q&A with Adrian Segar on Crowdsourcing
- Adrian Segar Speaker Tips Interview
- The Secrets Behind Conference Engagement
- Happy to Seize the Throne from King Content
- Events Uncovered TV interviews Adrian Segar about Conferences That Work
- Integrating participation into conference sessions to improve learning and connection
- An introduction to Conferences That Work
- How To Design Events That Get Amazing Participant Feedback
Category: leadership
- The real job of leadership
- Does your association’s tail wag your membership’s dog?
- Don’t be a hero — solve small problems!
- Three criteria for working with others for change and action
- Leadership, Events, Shackleton, Survival, and Hope
- Why you should hire curious people
- A healthy organization contains active cultures
- You can’t make people change. But…
- Leadership for meetings
- The declining influence of leadership positional power in a network society
- Lessons from my association leadership transitions
- Get Rid Of Human Resources
- Is “learning” a dirty word to management?
- Group culture and event leadership
- Why presenters need to incorporate audience engagement
- An innovative experiential leadership session: The Music Paradigm
- Leadership, management, and meetings
- Leadership, conferences, and freedom
Category: Learning
- A class is a meeting
- My Top Digital Tools for Learning 2022
- Improve meeting session learning with this simple tip!
- The hallway of learning
- Focus on learning, not education
- Did anyone learn anything?
- Why our meetings are still full of lectures
- Social learning is humans’ true superpower
- The liberation of ignoring sunk costs
- Successful change requires integration and practice
- Trust, safety, and learning at meetings
- Gamification makes about as much sense as chocolate-dipped broccoli
- The danger of our drive to make sense
- Contrasting examples of unlearning from Apple
- Most classroom practice is astrology
- Are you old yet?
- A standing invitation for event and hospitality teachers
- Three criteria for working with others for change and action
- Working Smarter With Knowledge
- Share information; don’t hoard it
- An excellent life story exercise for groups
- Why switching to active learning is hard — and worth it
- What I remember from high school — and why
- Learning in community at conferences
- Today’s schoolrooms can teach adults the power of positive sharing
- Lessons From Improv: Seeing the Gifts in People and Events
- What’s better than people augmented by technology at meetings?
- The hype and reality of personalized learning
- Four tools for communities of practice
- How well do 4-hour lectures work?
- Why experiential learning is superior to every other kind
- How to inspire transformational learning
- Practice what you teach
- Children shouldn’t sit still in class — and neither should adults
- Replace “brain training” hype with something that works
- Look back to look forward
- Three key kinds of learning at events—Part 2
- Three key kinds of learning at events—Part 1
- Sometimes you CAN learn from experience
- A little humility leaves us open to learning
- From broadcast to learning in 25 minutes
- Cooperative Learning: Lessons from neutrino physics and pair programming
- What most schools don’t teach (and should)
- How to create a safe environment for learning at your event
- The surprising way adults learn 90% of what they need to know
- Drive-by experts at your conference
- When a guy brings bagpipes to your event
- What happens when you truly listen
- Why it’s hard to stop conference lecturing
- A story about turning win-lose into win-win
- Stream of Brad Rathgeber keynote at edACCESS 2012 on online learning
- Knowledge … you’ve come a long way, baby!
- Is “learning” a dirty word to management?
- Make better decisions with The Rule Of Three
- Learning is messy
- The importance of modeling listening
- There are no wrong answers to these questions
- What we can learn from the man who had no problems
- A story about the power of experiential learning
- Why presenters need to incorporate audience engagement
- What airline miles can teach us about relationships
- Tip for sharing new ideas at conferences
- Let’s make it suck
- How 1984 turned out like 1884
- A story about letting go of control at a conference
- The most powerful tool for improving your personal work environment
- How you can learn from personal stories
Category: Lessons from Anguilla
- Struggling to meditate daily
- Lessons from Anguilla — Resilience in the Face of Disaster
- Lessons from Anguilla: What meeting designers can learn from religious services
- Lessons from Anguilla: Learning from what doesn’t change
- Connection: A morning walk in Anguilla
- Lessons from Anguilla: Getting meeting attendees to connect with one another
- Lessons from Anguilla: A good conference is like a island vacation
- Anguilla supermarkets and the future of conferences
- Leaving a good conference – Anguilla style
- My Anguilla vacation – a 24/7 event
Category: life lessons
- Reincarnation in this life
- Movement
- Nervous excitement is back!
- The party after the war
- Sometimes I live on The Moors
- How to work with others to change our lives
- I remember it all too well
- Words will never hurt me
- Successful change requires integration and practice
- How to trust your gut
- On our different responses to adversity
- Distracting ourselves from what matters
- Knowing what you’re going to draw
- He can only do Segar
- Are you old yet?
- How eventprofs are feeling during COVID-19
- How I got here
- Life lesson: Rescuing the child in the coal cellar
- The first hill is the hardest
- My two-word ikigai
- An excellent life story exercise for groups
- Facilitating change: The power of sharing our experience
- Becoming Brave
- The job you’ll be doing in the future hasn’t been invented yet
- How I manage my life with Kanban and Getting Things Done
- Listening to the UPS guy
- Nobody is born ahead of their time
- Lessons from Anguilla — Resilience in the Face of Disaster
- How the Apple Watch Series 3 improves my life
- I know the world is crazy right now — and here’s what you can do about it
- How to live your life
- Shut up and listen
- Playing with myself
- My father’s death—should we force the terminally ill to accept sustenance?
- Look back to look forward
- Are you waiting for permission for your mission?
- How I got on my feet and danced again
- Alone in the woods with my MBTI
- Stuff breaks all the time
- How many mistakes have you made?
- Living from Being not Doing
- Mystery, play, and the suspension of belief
- The day I lost my mind
- The moment when you know
- How the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator changed my life
- What we can learn from the man who had no problems
- It wasn’t the lobster: How we often do work we don’t notice
Category: Marketing
- Smart marketers avoid web form spam
- Are NFTs the future of event marketing?
- My new book Event Crowdsourcing will be released this Fall
- How to trash your brand
- Another triumph of automated marketing!
- How to accidentally write a popular blog post
- Is paid influencer marketing ethical in the event industry?
- Paperback versus ebook popularity over time
- Suppliers and Vendors: To market to me—join my tribe!
- How to sell me stuff right
- 5 tips on how to market event apps to me
- Market your conference with an annotated schedule
- Useful free tools for Twitter analytics
- Should you self-publish your book?
- Stop the Generation XYZ baloney!
- Content Is Marketing; Profits Come From Somewhere Else
Category: Meeting industry
- COVID, duty of care, and the meeting industry
- What meeting planners who support women’s rights can do
- Scratching the surface
- Air quality readings during my trip to Puerto Rico
- Free online Participate Lab — May 11, 2022
- The meeting industry new normal – Part 3
- I remember it all too well
- An affordable air quality tool for meeting planners
- Are in-person events COVID safe?
- Are NFTs the future of event marketing?
- Venue ventilation for COVID-19
- The meeting industry new normal — Part 2
- The meeting industry new normal — Part 1
- A standing invitation for event and hospitality teachers
- COVID-19, in-person meetings, and wishful thinking
- Leadership, Events, Shackleton, Survival, and Hope
- Power in hotel rooms done right!
- Something is rotten in the state of meeting industry education
Category: Online event
- Free online Participate Lab — May 11, 2022
- Ask Me Anything About Conference Panels — Thursday, July 21, 4-6 pm EDT Blab!
- Create Your Dream Conference Collectively On This Friday’s #Eventprofs Happy Hour
- National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation Confab on Event Closings
Category: participation
- A class is a meeting
- A novel way to assess consensus
- When trio share works better than pair share
- Thoughts on participation from the mouths of babes…
- Sometimes words are not enough
- Do great speakers just provide a better emotional experience?
- The myth of the conference curator—part 2
- Discover what attendees want to talk about with Post It!
- The Power of Participation
Category: Peer conference
- Doing peer conferences right
- A free guide to creating peer conferences
- 27 years of peer conferences
- Scenes from a peer conference—part 2
- Scenes from a peer conference
- Being Schooled: Inside a Conference That Works
- Drive-by experts at your conference
- Market your conference with an annotated schedule
- Published—free update of Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love!
- A birthday present for you on the 21st anniversary of Conferences That Work
- Conferences That Work goes to Japan!
Category: Personal effectiveness
- How to work with others to change our lives
- Distracting ourselves from what matters
- Have I Met You Before? Three ways to minimize embarrassment when meeting people
- My treadmill desk — the next generation
- How to get better at doing anything
- My favorite to-do list manager
- How to spread your time jam
- How to continuously improve your work life
- My treadmill desk: some follow-up observations
- Why, sometimes, how is better than why
- Walking to work: loving my treadmill desk
- What I’ve learned about working productively
- Jack-of-all-trades and master of some
- 19 secrets of consulting that changed my life
Category: Presentations
- Three great tools for blog post illustrations
- A standing invitation for event and hospitality teachers
- Do great speakers just provide a better emotional experience?
- Motivational speaker topic needs a good home!
- Transforming Your Conference Sessions With Participative Techniques: EIBTM 2012 workshop
- How to moderate a Twitter chat
- Using Google Hangouts On Air to stream a keynote
- The right (way) to vote – part 1
- Torn About Technology
- Conference Weavers: a closing session for events
- Maarten Vanneste interviews me at EIBTM about participant-driven and participation-rich events
- Slideshare of my EIBTM presentation on participant-driven and participation-rich events
- Pecha Kucha posts and videos roundup
- Tips for organizing Pecha Kucha sessions
- Why presenters need to incorporate audience engagement
- Why requiring learning objectives for great conference presentations sucks
- Watch a little piece of Conferences That Work streamed live!
- Why PK (Pecha Kucha) is OK
- Pecha Kucha, not Ashton Kutcher
- Participant-driven association meetings presentation slides and resources
- Social media presentation May 13 2010
Category: Promo
- The Top 100 Most Influential People in the Event Industry for 2022
- Free online Participate Lab — May 11, 2022
- December ebook sale
- Ten years of Conferences That Work!
- Event Crowdsourcing free chapters!
- How to create amazing conference programs that don’t waste attendee time
- The Solution Room—an introductory video
- Designing participation into your meetings
- The Solution Room—a powerful conference session
- Participation techniques you can use in conference sessions
- Transform Your Sessions With These Participation Techniques
Category: Resources
- Tips on building a Corsi-Rosenthal Box for an airborne pandemic
- An affordable air quality tool for meeting planners
- Feedback Frames—a low-tech tool for anonymous voting
- Convenings 2.0: Connecting adult learning, communication strategies and event logistics to build stronger relationships
Category: Review
- Alternatives to Twitter
- Review of Butter, a smooth meeting platform for facilitators
Category: Running
- Why I (mostly) run every day
- What I wear for running
- The most important thing to wear for winter running
- The first hill is the hardest
Category: Satire
- Six Events At The Facilitator Olympics
- 5 tips on how to market event apps to me
- Breaking: Government concerned about privacy concerns of “eyes”
Category: Soapbox
- Veterans Day, masking, thoughts and prayers, and the ways the establishment deflects criticism
- My Seth Andrew story — a thief who got caught
- Guns and Power
- Private government
- The importance of music in our lives
- Something is rotten in the state of meeting industry education
- The Next Best Thing
- Like Water for Wi-Fi: an Event Manifesto
- Why don’t meeting conferences pay speakers?
- A letter to event technology companies trying to sell me stuff
- I and thou: blogging as if a person was actually there
- How to give your customers bad service the New York Times way
- A post about posting (on walls) at events – part 1
- Next practices, not best practices!
- Process, not product
- When will we wake up about the need to change our conference designs?
- Mission: Working for the earth
Category: Social media
- Alternatives to Twitter
- Why have my Twitter impressions suddenly risen?
- All I want for Christmas is an unFUBARed SM feed
- Everybody likes me, nobody tweets me, guess I’ll post on LinkedIn
- Why 2017 was a tipping point for Twitter
- Friends don’t let friends give away their content
- Stop drive-by following—you’re trashing your brand on social media!
- There are 213 comments in your spam queue right now
- Best picture of me in a suit ever
- Want to use Twitter effectively? Discard its biggest myth!
- Useful free tools for Twitter analytics
Category: Technology
- Three great tools for blog post illustrations
- Tips on building a Corsi-Rosenthal Box for an airborne pandemic
- Solving the Tesla Powerwall frequency problem
- Stooa review — a free online fishbowl tool
- An affordable air quality tool for meeting planners
- Venue ventilation for COVID-19
- How to fix Apple Watch heart rate monitor not working
- Fixing a Tesla Powerwall that isn’t charging
- Goodbye Quicken 2007 – Hello SEE Finance!
- Two free easy ways to create graphics for blog posts and presentations
- Power in hotel rooms done right!
- How to enable Verizon free call filtering
- AlphaZero, machine learning, and the future of work
- What’s better than people augmented by technology at meetings?
- How the Apple Watch Series 3 improves my life
- Four tools for communities of practice
- How to solve the infuriating HTTP error when uploading images or videos to WordPress
- The end of decent paid jobs and the need for basic income
- Reassuring news for event professionals from WillRobotsTakeMyJob.com
- 22 great Apple apps for event professionals
- Avoid this PayPal refund gotcha!
- 14 great iPhone/iPad apps for event planners—2015 update
- Facilitation tool: Capture sticky notes with Post-It Plus
- Don’t bet on Getty: the downside of “free” stock photos
- How to delete ALL mail messages from iPhone/iPad in one step
- 7 more great iPhone/iPad apps for event planners
- Event Technology: Don’t Reinvent The Wheel
- Re-envisage event technology to significantly improve your events
- How to move an unlimited AT&T data plan to a new iPad
- My 14 favorite WordPress plugins for a small business website
- Resources for using Pinterest for events
- Hybrid event architecture ideas sparked by Event Camp Twin Cities 2011
- How to recognize someone for their service to an organization when they can’t be present in person
- How to archive Twitter chats
- My new favorite site visit tool
- A better tool for conference calls: Maestro Conference
- “Dear Valued AT&T Customer”
- 13 great iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch apps for event planners
- One unexpected reason why I like my new iPad
- 4 reasons why I pre-ordered an iPad
Category: Tip
- Tip to improve breakout gallery walks
- Improve meeting session learning with this simple tip!
- Tips on building a Corsi-Rosenthal Box for an airborne pandemic
- Two free easy ways to create graphics for blog posts and presentations
- The two must-do steps to hire the best professional help
- Tip: Simple inexpensive effective appreciation of your volunteers
- How to delete ALL mail messages from iPhone/iPad in one step
- Make better decisions with The Rule Of Three
- Tip: How to live blog a public conference session without going crazy
Category: Travel
- Air quality readings during my trip to Puerto Rico
- Corporate hotel occupancy and car rentals up but plane travel unchanged
Category: Uncategorized
- Sparks: The best band you’ve never heard of
- A leak in the solar system
- Charles, Lawrence, David Bowie, and me
- Please remember what you were about to forget
- The internet is running out of…stuff
- How We Learn: Books That Changed Meetings
- Cheer up-it’s normal to be less popular than your friends on social media!
- How to add participation into a traditional conference and market it
- Jerry Weinberg’s Ten Laws of Pricing
- Acting
- Three things conference attendees really want to know about each other
- The Stranger on the Airplane
- 6 lessons I’ve learned about using volunteers at conferences
- Creating something beautiful with others
- Fifteen hundred years of broadcast learning
- Are you willing to be disturbed?
- A potential drawback to hybrid events
- Giving conference participants just what they want
- Can we measure ROI in social media? – Part 2
- Can we measure ROI in social media? – Part 1
- Five lessons event planners can learn from the iPad launch
- Expressing Our Feelings In Public
- Lessons From Improv: Giving Appreciations at Conferences
- Lessons from improv: Be Average!
- Jerry Weinberg’s ten laws of trust
- Conference facilitation lessons from improv: Say Yes!
- Content versus conversation
- Anguilla supermarkets and the future of conferences
- Helping conference attendees satisfy their curiosity
- My Anguilla vacation – a 24/7 event
- Minimizing vendor pitches during conference sessions
- Clay Shirky & my mission
- Does asking attendees in advance for program suggestions work?
- The potential of group process
- 14 things I learned at EventCamp 2010
- First impressions from EventCamp 2010
- The Difference Engine
- Encouraging risky learning at conferences
- Six principles of conversation
- The evolution of media’s business model
- Five fundamental questions about conference design
- Building the right conference
- The gift of listening
- Everyone Makes Mistakes
- 16 consequences of top-down conference process
- Interview on WGDR radio show “Relocalizing Vermont”
- Trapped in an elevator with a Nobel Prize winner
- Unquestioned traditional conference assumption #4: Conferences are best ended with some event that will hopefully convince attendees to stay to the end.
- Unquestioned traditional conference assumption #3: Supporting meaningful connections with other attendees is not the conference organizers’ job.
- Unquestioned traditional conference assumption #2: Conference sessions should be used primarily to transmit pre-planned content.
- Unquestioned traditional conference assumption #1: Conference session topics must be chosen and scheduled in advance.
- Four unquestioned assumptions of a traditional conference
- “Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased; thus do we refute entropy”–Spider Robinson
- Small is Beautiful: Conferences As If People Mattered
- Ride that – you must be joking!
Category: Venues
- Venue ventilation for COVID-19
- A post about posting (on walls) at events – part 2
- A post about posting (on walls) at events – part 1
Category: Workshop
- Free online Participate Lab — May 11, 2022
- Ask Adrian Anything — a free online participant-driven workshop on the future of events
- The best way I know to radically improve your conferences
Category: Writing
- 750 posts
- Paperback versus ebook popularity over time

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