Assumptions Archives : Conferences That Work

Unquestioned traditional conference assumption #4: Conferences are best ended with some event that will hopefully convince attendees to stay to the end.

Monday, December 21st, 2009 by Adrian Segar

How to end a conference? Trainings and conferences that professionals must attend to maintain certification can close with the triumphant presentation of certificates of completion or attendance. But other traditional conferences have no such obvious conclusion. All too often, the conference finale is manufactured. Organizers add an awards ceremony, a closing keynote, a fancy dinner, a raffle, a celebrity speaker, or some combination thereof.

The reason for this artificiality is simple: Traditional conferences that are not training-oriented don’t provide any kind of progression through their theme. Logistical, political, and speaker availability considerations guide the sequence of session topics rather than logical flow. One session doesn’t follow from another. Such a conference doesn’t have a beginning. So, how can we expect it to have an end?

Some conferences dispense with the pretense of closure. This, at least, is honest, though the effect of “transmit content, go home” is somewhat blunt.

How to end a peer conference

In contrast, peer conferences provide a progression, not through content, but through several processes designed to increase attendee connections as the conference proceeds. Typically, two closing spective sessions, personal and group, build on the generated intimacy to provide a powerful and appropriate conference ending.

Image attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ilike/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Tags: Assumptions, ending, event-planning, spective| Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Unquestioned traditional conference assumption #3: Supporting meaningful connections with other attendees is not the conference organizers’ job.

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 by Adrian Segar

Are your conferences in the business of supporting meaningful connections between participants?

At peer conferences, on arrival, attendees immediately receive a printed face book (that’s face book: small f, two words) that includes photographs, names and contact data, and additional pertinent information about each participant.

They tell me that it’s rare to receive such a document at conferences. How sad that conference organizers don’t bother to provide this basic tool for learning about fellow attendees. (Perhaps it’s not too surprising, since no books on conference management mention providing an attendee face book.) The absence speaks volumes about the lack of support for participant interaction at traditional conferences.

Typically, conventional conferences solely provide opportunities to mingle at meals and social events. Attendees have to initiate learning who else is at the conference, seeking out interesting people, and introducing themselves to others. They must surmount these barriers before conversations and discussions can occur. Consequently, attendees who are new to a conference are disadvantaged compared to the old-timers who already know other participants, reinforcing the formation of cliques.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Actively supporting meaningful connections is an integral part of every peer conference. When the information, openings, and opportunities needed to meet like-minded attendees are provided, not only during session breaks but also as part of the formal conference structure, it becomes attendee-centered rather than session-centered, greatly increasing the intimacy and enjoyment of the event.

Tags: Assumptions, connection, event-planning, face book| Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Unquestioned traditional conference assumption #2: Conference sessions should be used primarily to transmit pre-planned content.

Monday, December 14th, 2009 by Adrian Segar

Planners of traditional conferences assume that the primary purpose of conference sessions is to transmit pre-planned content.

The three communication modes used among a group of people are one-to-one (individual conversations), one-to-many or broadcast (presentations and panels), and many-to-many or conferring (discussions). Traditional conference sessions are predominantly one-to-many, with perhaps a dash of many-to-many at question time.

One-to-one conversations are infinitely flexible; both participants have the power to lead the conversation along desired paths. Many-to-many conversations are powerful in a different way—they expose the participating group to a wide range of experience and opinions.

In contrast, one-to-many communication is mostly pre-planned, and thus relatively inflexible if the presentation involves a passive audience. At best, a presenter may ask questions of her audience and vary her presentation appropriately, but she is unlikely to get accurate representative feedback when her audience is large. Some presenters can create interactive sessions with significant audience participation, but they are the exception rather than the rule.

Presentations and panels are appropriate when we are training, and have expert knowledge or information to impart to others. But today we have a rich variety of alternative methods to train adults. For example: reading books and articles, watching recordings of presentations, and searching for information and downloading answers on the Web.

What can you not replicate at a face-to-face conference? The spontaneous conversations and discussions! So why do we still cling to conference sessions that transmit pre-planned content, employing the one communication mode for which a variety of alternatives can substitute?

Image attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/plakboek/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Tags: Assumptions, event-planning, program, schedule| Posted in Event design, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Unquestioned traditional conference assumption #1: Conference session topics must be chosen and scheduled in advance.

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 by Adrian Segar

Most conference planners think that meeting organizers need to choose and schedule conference session topics in advance.

One of the questions I asked when interviewing conference attendees for my book was:

“Most conferences have a conference schedule and program decided in advance. How would you feel about a conference where, at the start, through a careful conference process, the attendees themselves determine what they want to discuss, based on what each person wants to learn and the experience each attendee has to share?”

Forty-five percent of my interviewees were unable to conceive of a conference that did not have a schedule of conference sessions decided on and circulated in advance.

The most common response? Interviewees weren’t sure they’d want to go to such a conference without knowing what was going to happen there.

The next most common response? The idea sounded great/interesting/intriguing. But interviewees had no idea of how one would create a relevant conference program at the start of the conference.

What if we could create conference session topics that actually reflect attendee wants and needs

Suspend disbelief for a moment, and assume that at the start of a conference it is somehow possible to use available resources to create conference session topics that actually reflect attendee wants and needs. Then imagine attending such a conference yourself, a conference tailored to your needs. (You might want to reflect on how often this has happened to you.) Wouldn’t it be great?

What is the origin of the assumption that one must pre-plan a conference program? Perhaps it arose from our experience of learning as children, from our teachers in school who knew or were told what we were supposed to learn following a pre-planned curriculum. Certainly, if one thinks of conferences as training by experts, a pre-planned schedule makes sense. But conferences are for adult learners, and adults with critical thinking skills and relevant experience can learn from each other. We’ll see that there are ways of putting conference attendees in charge of what they wish to learn and discuss. But this cannot be done effectively if a conference’s program is frozen before attendees arrive.

The peer conference model described in Conferences That Work does indeed build a conference program that automatically adjusts to the actual needs of the people present. Read the book to find out how.

Tags: Assumptions, conference session topics, event-planning, program, schedule, wants and needs| Posted in Event design, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Four unquestioned assumptions of a traditional conference

Monday, December 7th, 2009 by Adrian Segar

Four unquestioned assumptions lurk behind the traditional conference format—assumptions so deep-seated that they go unquestioned by most conference organizers. These assumptions embody, and consequently help perpetuate, a distorted and outdated way of thinking about conference purpose and structure, leading to a conference model that, according to a majority of the people I interviewed while writing Conferences That Work, does not well serve conference attendees.

Here are the assumptions:

Conference session topics must be chosen and scheduled in advance.
Conference sessions should be used primarily for transmitting pre-planned content.
Supporting meaningful connections with other attendees is not the conference organizers’ job; it’s something that happens in the breaks between sessions.
Conferences are best ended with some event that will hopefully convince attendees to stay to the end.

In my next four posts, I’ll examine these assumptions individually. And I’ll explain why they lead to conferences that don’t work as well as they could.

Image attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/un-sharp/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Tags: Assumptions, event-planning| Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »