Do you know what happens when you stretch a rubber band? After it’s stretched, it never entirely goes back to quite the length it had before.
Stretching the mind works the same way. When we are actively learning — motivated to respond to a question, discussion, or activity — change occurs. When we sit and listen passively, we’re like a rubber band lying in a drawer: nothing much happens.
Our ability to change when exposed to new opportunities and changes in circumstances is mediated by our capacity for implicit learning — adding new behaviors and responses to our repertoire without conscious effort.
A mind is a terrible thing to waste. Personal active learning practices and well-designed meetings stretch our minds, facilitating valuable and vital change in the process.
In my keynote at Blend Abu Dhabi, the inaugural meeting industry conference at the new Yas Conference Centre, I shared six reasons to change conferences for them to remain relevant to today’s attendees.
Although I’ve written about these issues before, this is the first time I’ve summarized them in one place. Together they make a strong business case for the participant-driven and participation-rich meetings I’ve been advocating since 1992.
Enjoy!
Sessions provide no connection around content
Today, the most important reason why people go to conferences is to usefully connect with others around relevant content. But our conference programs still focus on lectures, where a few experts broadcast their knowledge to passive listeners: the audience. During lectures, there’s no connection between audience members and no connection around lecture content.
At traditional conferences, connection is relegated to breaks, meals, and socials! That’s why you so often hear, “The best part of that conference was the conversations in the hallways.” It doesn’t have to be that way! Peer conferences provide conference sessions where participants connect around relevant, timely content.
Lectures are a terrible way to learn
We’ve known for over a hundred years that lectures are a terrible way to learn something. Lectures are a seductive meeting format because they are very efficient ways of sharing information. Unfortunately, lectures are perhaps the least effective way of learning anything.
Why? Over time, we rapidly forget almost everything someone tells us. But when we engage with content, we remember more of it, remember it more accurately, and remember it longer. Every measure of learning increases drastically when attendees actively participate while learning in sessions.
The rise of online
Most broadcast content is now readily available online. An internet connection provides expert content anywhere, just in time when it’s needed. You don’t need to go to conferences for broadcast content (which you’ll probably have forgotten by the time you need it) anymore!
Professionals learn predominantly socially, not in the classroom
Until about twenty years ago, professionals learned most of what they needed to know to do their jobs in the classroom. Today we know that only about 10% of what we need to know to do our jobs involves formal classroom teaching. The other 90% is informal, provided by a combination of self-directed learning and social, active, experiential learning with our peers on the job or (what an opportunity!) at conferences with our peers.
Though ~90% of the learning modalities adult workers need these days are informal social learning from our peers, we persist in making the bulk of “education” at meetings formal presentations by a few experts! Instead, we need to concentrate on and provide maximum opportunities for the just-in-time peer learning our attendees need and want.
Today, everyone has expertise and experience to share
Everyone who has worked in a profession for a while is an expert resource for some of her or his peers. Instead of limiting content to broadcast by a few “experts”, peer conferences provide process and support to uncover and tap the thousands of years of expertise and experience in the room. Remember how David Weinberger puts it: “The smartest person in the room is the room.” We need conference process that uncovers and taps everyone’s experience and expertise while people are together at the conference!
Most pre-scheduled sessions don’t address actual attendee wants and needs
Because we’ll forget learning that isn’t currently needed and reinforced, conferences need to provide just-in-time learning. And you can’t predict most of the just-in-time learning by asking a program committee, or attendees for that matter, in advance. My research has found that 50 – 90% of all pre-scheduled conference sessions are not what attendees actually want and need! In contrast, just about all peer conference sessions, chosen and run by participants during the event, are rated highly because they provide the just-in-time learning and connection that participants want from the event.
Conclusion
My books explore these six reasons to change conferences in detail. To get the full story, buy ’em!
How well do 4-hour lectures work? Here’s Anonymous Insider, a medical school student writing about his classroom experience:
“Three marathon 4-hour lecture sessions with infectious disease (ID) specialists. Some would cover over 10 different diseases caused by a specific bacterial strain in a mere hour time. Most of the information went in one ear and out the other, especially with the PhD microbiologists. About two-thirds of students stopped attending lecture after the first session. ‘I have to study this material on my own over several days to not suffer from information overload. I do not find getting bombarded at lecture is efficient use of my time.‘” —Anonymous Insider, Medical School 2020, Year 2, Week 2 [emphasis added]
I was talking late one night with my sister at her home in Burlington, Vermont, when her roommate came in. André, a first-year medical student, had just returned from celebrating his birthday and he was tired.
ANDRÉ: “I have a couple of hours of reading tonight before classes tomorrow.”
ALISON: “Why don’t you skip the reading tonight?”
ANDRÉ: “I can’t. We have team discussion groups on the reading first thing, and I won’t be able to participate if I haven’t done the reading. That’s how they teach us; we read and watch videos for homework and in class we learn together in teams. There’s a name for it.”
ME: “Flipped classroom?”
ANDRÉ: “Yes! How did you know?”
I told André about my interest in active learning, and how pleased I was to hear how his college education was going to be so much different from mine—three years of interminable lectures, plus two weeklong sets of exams that determined the “class” of my degree.
André’s medical school has adopted active learning because it’s a better way to educate doctors. As we’ll see, it’s actually a better way to learn just about anything, and many schools are increasingly incorporating active learning into their everyday teaching practices.
Changing the system
So, how well do 4-hour lectures work? It’s perhaps alarming to see such a wide disparity between teaching modalities used to educate our next generation of medical practitioners: from Anonymous Insider’s institution offering 4-hour lectures to schools like André’s that are phasing out lectures completely by 2019. And yet that’s how system change typically happens, slowly, one organization at a time, each institution at its own rate. What’s encouraging is that the overall trend is positive, as increasing numbers of teachers, presenters, companies, and institutions realize that lectures are one of the worst ways to learn.
Children and adults shouldn’t sit still in class. It’s amazing that we ignore established research on ways to improve children’s learning when designing adult learning environments.
Yet meeting programs are full of sessions where attendees sit and listen for an hour or more. Attendees learn less, and long-term learning accuracy and retention deteriorate.
“Kids aren’t meant to sit still all day and take in information. Adults aren’t wired that way either.” —Steve Boyle, one of the co-founders of the National Association of Physical Literacy
For decades, I’ve seen how as little as a minute of movement added into a conference session revitalizes participants.
Children and adults shouldn’t sit still in class. It’s not hard to incorporate movement into meeting sessions. Here are four easy ways with substantial benefits.
Why aren’t you doing it?
…Or are you? Share how you incorporate movement into your meetings in the comments!
Image attribution: Screen capture from X bytes video.
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 likely to make valuable connections with their peers during the event.
Ask a hard question every time we go to a meeting…
All of these are choices, choices that require no one to choose us or give us permission.
Every time I find myself wishing for an external event, I realize that I’m way better off focusing on something I can control instead. —Seth Godin, What Would Happen
All good, but Seth begs this question. What can meeting designers do to make it easier for attendees to participate more at meetings?
Three things to do for easier attendee participation
First, we need to model participation throughout our event. In Spain last month, I was invited for dinner at a local family’s home. Besides being treated to amazing food, drink, and conversation, I was casually encouraged to use a branding iron to melt the sugar on our crème brûlée. I was politely asked to help wash the dishes. Being an active participant during the evening, even in these small ways, made me part of the experience. I was not a passive consumer. Participating added significantly to my enjoyment and connection to the kind couple who had invited me into their home.
And third, always remember that we can’t make people do anything. Ultimately what they do is their choice. So it’s important to convey that participation is always optional. I’ve found that when attendees know they have the option to opt-out they are more likely to participate.
What approaches have you used to make it easier for your attendees to participate? Share your ideas in the comments below!
Replace “brain training” hype with something that works!
Driving home from the post office today, I finally heard one too many promotions for Lumosity brain training on my local NPR station. Lumosity, in case you somehow haven’t heard, is a subscription to online games that claim to improve memory, attention, cognitive flexibility, speed of processing, problem-solving, and, for all I know, world peace too.
Despite the Federal Trade Commission slapping Lumosity’s creator, Lumos Labs, with a $50 million judgment (reduced to a $2 million fine) in January to settle charges of deceptive advertising that claimed — with no “competent and reliable scientific evidence” — that the games could help users achieve their “full potential in every aspect of life”, the company continues to bombard consumers with ads. Meanwhile, research on the efficacy of such programs has found little or no evidence that they make any difference to global measures of intelligence or cognition.
“I think claims these companies have been making — and Lumosity is not alone — have been grossly exaggerated. They’re trying to argue that we’re going to take you out of [the] active world … that we’re going to put you in a room alone in front of a computer screen and you’ll play a game that will make you smarter.” “There is no compelling evidence for that.” —Dr. Laura Carstensen, founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity
At best, it turns out, these games somewhat improve the ability of players to … wait for it … play the games.
A simple suggestion
This leads to a simple suggestion. Replace “brain training” hype with something that works!
Don’t pay for programs that claim to “train your brain”. Instead, figure out what you want to do that actively engages your mind — and do it!
You’ll probably learn a thing or two about something that actually interests you. And, though I can’t guarantee that your mind will become healthier, your bank account definitely will be!
Illustration components from Flickr users isaacmao and gambort
In less than three minutes, you can use pair share to improve conference sessions. The technique is simple: after pairing up participants and providing a short period for individual thinking about an appropriate topic, each pair member takes a minute in turn to share their thoughts with their partner. (More details can be found in Chapter 38 of The Power of Participation.)
Pair share (aka think-pair-share) is not the same as conversation, because pair share gives each person an exclusive minute of active sharing and a minute of pure listening. This balance rarely occurs during conversation, because typically:
One party speaks more than another, and;
Whoever isn’t speaking is often not fully listening to what is being said because they’re thinking about something they want to say themselves.
Improve conference sessions
Pair share improves conference sessions by:
Resetting every participant’s brain to a state of active engagement;
Providing structured opportunities for participants to share expertise and experience with their partner, and (if built into the subsequent session design) with others in the room; and
Each assigned topic must be central to the session’s purpose;
If the session is presenter-content heavy, hold a pair share roughly every ten minutes to explore and consolidate participant learning; and
Design the session to build on relevant expertise and experience uncovered by each pair-share.
I also like to incorporate a closing pair-share where partners each share three takeaways they’ve acquired during the session. I’ve found that when I use this in a session design like the fishbowl sandwich, participants inevitably stay around deep in conversation after the session is officially over. (That always looks and feels good!)
Finally, you can use pair share as a tool for introductions. Invite everyone to pair up with someone they don’t know and have each person take a minute to introduce themselves to their partner.
Improve conference sessions with pair share: it’s quick, simple, versatile, and effective. Use it!
How do you use pair share? Share with everyone in the comments below!
What’s the best learning model for conference sessions? We don’t usually think about the learning models we employ during conference sessions. I believe our events would be better if we did. Conventional conferences assume a ready supply of experts. We listen to them while they cover the learning advertised for their sessions. Here’s how Jeff Hurt describes this approach, which he calls surface learning, contrasting it with deep learning where attendees discover through exploratory activity:
Content Covered Or Discovered “In surface learning, the session reflects the knowledge and skills of the speaker. Knowledge is considered a thing that can be deposited into the minds of the listener. The attendee consumes as much as the speaker says as possible and tries to store it in the mind. The speaker covers as much as they can as fast as they can.
In deep learning, attendees explore challenging questions, dilemmas and problems using new and past knowledge. A focus is put on the attendee testing ideas, correcting them as needed and opening up to new perspectives. Attendees spend time discovering and investigating.”
—Jeff Hurt, We Must Stop Promoting Conference Fast-Track, Artificial, Butt-In-Seat, Surface Learning
Active learning
As explained in my books, we know that the active learning that occurs through attendee discovery is indeed more effective than the learning that may result from sharing information with passive listeners. More is learned, more is retained, and overall retention is more accurate. So I agree with Jeff that discovered learning trumps covered learning. But from whom do we discover this learning?
Even when we incorporate active learning into a conference session, invariably the assumption remains that we are learning about content provided exclusively by a speaker or presenter. What we discover is limited to the content they can provide.
Improving active learning
While this approach is far better than the pour-information-into-their-minds model, I think we can almost always improve it. Unless the room is full of novices — attendees who know nothing about a session topic — using process during the session that uncovers knowledge and resources in the room opens up the quantity and quality of learning that’s possible.
I know this to be true from my own experience. When I’ve led a conference session using process that supports and encourages participants to contribute their own expertise and experience, I’ve always learned something new! Extending our resources for active learning to the entire room uncovers relevant and useful knowledge from everyone present. Active learning then becomes social learning, reflecting today’s reality that knowledge is a social construct, no longer something residing in an individual head. When we incorporate social learning into our events we all benefit. Because, as David Weinberger says: “The smartest person in the room is the room.”
Three learning models
Let’s summarize the three learning models I’ve described.
Covered learning is an outdated, inferior learning model.
Discovered learning is an improvement because we are actively involving attendees in the learning process, though the focus is just one person’s content.
Uncovered learning further improves discovered learning by increasing the resources for active learning to include the expertise and experience available in the entire room. If a presenter or facilitator knows how to effectively uncover learning, they will be using the best learning model available.
To successfully implement uncovered learning, we need to use process that, as Weinberger puts it: “improves expertise by exposing weaknesses, introducing new viewpoints, and pushing ideas into accessible form.” Such process is the focus of the peer conference designs and associated participation techniques that I’ve been developing and writing about here and in my books. Studying how to facilitate and then adopt this process is perhaps the most effective way you can improve the learning at your events.
This is a Public Service Announcement for meeting stakeholders everywhere.
When conferences focus on content delivery, there’s no downside to making sessions shorter. Program organizers of such conferences think like this:
“Let’s include more speakers than we originally planned. There’s no problem. We’ll just shorten presenter time and add more sessions. After all, if our speakers are given half the time, they’ll cover half their original content. Simple!”
However, in my experience, if you want to create conferences that blow attendees’ minds, you need to replace traditional brain-dump session formats.
Lectures rarely create significant change.
Instead, use participation-rich session formats that actively involve participants in learning and facilitate relevant connections during the session.
And here’s where the old idea of shortening sessions to cram more into the program breaks down, and Briefer Madness raises its ugly head.
Participatory formats are necessarily messy. Active learning, in pairs or small groups, takes time because everyone needs relevant opportunities to think and speak and share and respond, not just a single presenter. Consequently, participatory formats do not scale like broadcast-style formats!
…reveal[ing] the rich, messy complexity of the real world…takes time and often feels like a diversion from what we might think is the real work. People default to workaholic notions of what meetings should achieve; they should be efficient, follow an agenda, achieve set outcomes…but all of these pressures tend to keep us locked in stereotypes and assumptions.
Choosing to disrupt this can be risky. Proposing a playful approach, or suggesting a reflective walk, will sound crazy to some participants. Surely that would be a waste of time? I increasingly find the opposite is the case; the more disruptive approaches can dislodge fixed ideas that are really holding us all back. Stereotypes—Johnnie Moore
Give skilled meeting designers or facilitators enough time to do meaningful work during your meetings. Then they can design or facilitate sessions that are more likely to generate powerful individual and group change and outcomes.
If you succumb to Briefer Madness by cutting that time in half, then, at best, a whole redesign will be needed. At worst, you’ll be asking for something that’s impossible to do well.
Yes, meeting times are never unlimited. Yes, address vital content needs.
Don’t constrain designers and facilitators to time periods that guarantee mediocre outcomes. Try asking them how much time they’ll require to be truly effective. Respect their answers. Don’t treat what they suggest in the same way you’d treat a program of lectures that can be sliced and diced to satisfy a diversity of content needs without any ill effects.
Resist the seduction of Briefer Madness!
This has been a Public Service Announcement for meeting stakeholders everywhere. My apologies to devotees of the cult classic film Reefer Madness.
Not long ago, my friend Jeremy Birch told me about the recorded announcement you hear—in English—when Japanese buses approach a bus stop. “Please remember what you were about to forget.”
No, Japanese bus companies are not promoting distributed practice, where we spread out learning activities over time to improve overall learning. (Chapter 4 of The Power of Participation has more on this.)
Nor are they commenting on the unlearning process, which is crucial to facilitating change.
Instead, they are merely reminding people who are getting off the bus to check for anything they may be leaving behind.
Nevertheless, I like the (probably unintended) playful construction of “Please remember what you were about to forget”.
As we all get older, we are more likely to need this reminder.
And perhaps, having typed it a few times here, I’m a little more likely to carry it out…
Do you know what happens when you stretch a rubber band? After it’s stretched, it never entirely goes back to quite the length it had before.
In my keynote at Blend Abu Dhabi, the inaugural meeting industry conference at the new 
How well do 4-hour lectures work? Here’s Anonymous Insider, a medical school student writing about his classroom experience:
How do we get people to participate in meetings? How can we design for easier attendee participation?
In less than three minutes, you can use pair share to improve conference sessions. The technique is simple: after pairing up participants and providing a short period for individual thinking about an appropriate topic, each pair member takes a minute in turn to share their thoughts with their partner. (More details can be found in Chapter 38 of 
