Is the end of an event important?

Is the end of an event important? Animated graphic showing three illustrations: a trail through a landscape, a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, and a runner breasting a tape at the end of a raceIs the end of an event important?

It’s complicated.

12 years ago, I wrote about how to create especially memorable events. Including many different kinds of short experiences during our meetings, allows us to hack the peak-end rule to maximize the impact of an event on attendees.

Here’s what I said…

…the peak-end rule suggests that we judge experiences largely based on how they were perceived at their peak and at their end. This implies that we should concentrate on making sure that our events end powerfully. That’s because the peak-end rule implies that we’ll better remember an event with a peak and then a powerful finish than one with two peak experiences sandwiched in the body of the event.
Hack the peak-end rule to maximize conference impact, April 2013

So, clearly, we should ensure that events end with a “powerful finish”, so they’ll be especially memorable.

Right?

Well, maybe not.

What can we learn from professional speakers?

Think about good professional speakers for a moment. They know about the peak-end rule. Professional speakers invariably include one or more peak moments during their presentation and end powerfully. They do this to be memorable.

Good professional speakers have an emotional impact, which makes them memorable. But, as I’ve written elsewhere, there’s no guarantee you’ll learn anything more from them than a “poor” presenter covering the same content.

The danger of focusing on a powerful event ending

There’s nothing wrong with employing a powerful event ending to make it memorable.

Unless—we do so at the expense of making the entire event not only memorable but also useful.

Because memorability is great while it lasts. But it isn’t usually important in the long term.

What is important is that the entire event ends up satisfying stakeholders’ goals and objectives as much as possible.

Here’s Seth Godin’s take on the danger of what he calls the focus on the last thing:

“…We focus on the thing that happened just before the end. And that’s almost always an unimportant moment.

Things went wrong (or things went right) because of a long series of decisions and implementations…

When you get to the thing before the last thing, don’t sweat it. It’s almost certainly too late to make the outcome change. On the other hand, when you’re quietly discussing the thing before that before that before that before that, it might pay to bring more attention to it than the circumstances seem to demand. Because that’s the key moment.”

—Seth Godin, The focus on the last thing

So, is the end of an event important?

The answer is yes.

And, so is everything that leads up to it!

To make an event maximally useful and productive, concentrate on its conference arc rather than a grand climax.

That’s the way to create a truly memorable event for everyone involved.

Creating Conferences That Work with Adrian Segar

A photograph of Adrian Segar, illustrating a podcast "Creating Conferences That Work with Adrian Segar " by Leading Learning. Text: BY JACKIE HARMAN | LAST UPDATED: JANUARY 10, 2021 For almost three decades, Adrian Segar has been designing and facilitating participant-driven and participation-rich meetings. His book, Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love, is the how-to manual for stepping outside the realm of the traditional conference model to create peer conferences, which are highly interactive, attendee-driven events that uniquely leverage attendees’ expertise and experience. And his new book, Event Crowdsourcing: Creating Events People Actually Want and Need – available in November 2019 – addresses how to create conference programs that reliably become what your attendees want and need—each and every time.For an excellent summary of the work I do, check out this interview and podcast, Creating Conferences That Work by Celisa Steele of Leading Learning. The podcast recording is nicely summarized in the show notes, so you can just read about what interests you, and then listen to any or all of the interview sections from the links on the page.

Here’s an overview:

  • The six major reasons that conferences need to evolve from the traditional events we’re all used to.
  • What a peer conference is.
  • The Conference Arc: why conferences need to have a process-based beginning, middle, and end.
  • What event crowdsourcing is, and why it’s so important.
  • My new book: Event Crowdsourcing: Creating Events People Actually Want and Need.
  • Designing large peer conferences.
  • Four obstacles to holding peer conferences.
  • Integrating peer conference process into a traditional conference.

Creating Conferences That Work with Adrian Segar is a great introduction to why meeting planners and designers need to incorporate participant-driven and participation-rich design into their events. Recommended!

Leading Learning has published over 200 podcasts. Review the most popular ones here, and subscribe through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Android, Stitcher Radio, PodBean, RSS, or any podcatcher service or app you may use.

(A HT to Jackie Harman, who did an excellent job summarizing the podcast. Thank you, Jackie!)

The Conference Arc — the key components of every successful participation-rich conference

Traditional conferences focus on a hodgepodge of pre-determined sessions punctuated with socials, surrounded by short welcomes and closings. Such conference designs treat openings and closings as perfunctory traditions, perhaps pumped up with a keynote or two rather than key components of the conference design. Unlike traditional conferences, participant-driven and participation-rich peer conferences have a conference arc with three essential components: Beginning, Middle, and End. This arc creates a seamless conference flow where each phase builds on what has come before.

Participant-driven and participation-rich peer conference designs improve upon traditional events. They don’t treat openings and closings as necessary evils but as critical components of the meeting design.

Let’s examine each phase of the peer conference arc in more detail.

An illustration of The Conference Arc — the key components of every successful participation-rich conference. Beginning: —Uncover needs, wants, and resources in the room —Build program that matches desired needs and wants with the available resources Middle —Run the program End —Consolidate individual learning and determine desired changes & next steps —Publicly evaluate the conference and uncover new initiatives

Beginning

Conferences are full of sessions where attendees know as little about each other as when they arrived at the event. In contrast, peer conferences allocate time to introduce participants to each other through a discovery process. Then, they build a conference program that truly meets their wants and needs.

Allocating discovery time at the start pays rich dividends over the entire remainder of the event. Investing in such beginnings enriches even a one-day event. Longer event designs allocate more time — up to half a day — to produce detailed programs that are optimized to provide the best possible conference experience for each individual participant.

Though there are numerous ways to implement beginnings, all peer conference designs include the following.

Discovery — uncover the needs, wants, and resources in the room

This is the piece most meetings ignore entirely. And it’s the most important component of creating meetings that really work. In this post, I explain the importance and implementation of discovery.

Topic suggestions and offers

Discovery exposes participants to a smorgasbord of possible conference topics, issues, and ideas. They’ve also discovered others present who are potential resources. This phase employs various methods for participants to request or offer sessions to hold in the Middle of the peer conference.

Topic cleanup

Over the years, I’ve found it helpful to do some topic cleanup on the suggestions and offers that participants make. This involves using a small group of conference subject-matter experts and any interested participants to cluster suggestions appropriately, combine duplicates, and carefully discard any suggestions that are clearly impracticable (e.g., too broad) or unclear.

Topic rating

Participants now rate the cleaned-up topics using one of several methods. When the rating is complete we have all the information needed to build an optimum Middle for the event.

Session determination

The small group of subject-matter experts now uses the gathered information to decide on the sessions to run and one or more facilitators/presenters/panelists/moderators to lead them.

Session scheduling (leadership, time, and place)

Now, scheduling the resulting sessions into a conference program can be done, taking into account any programmatic and logistical constraints.

Middle

The middle of a peer conference corresponds to the program segments of traditional events, with two important improvements. First, thanks to the beginning process, the scheduled sessions genuinely reflect the wants and needs of the meeting participants. So they are almost always very well attended and appreciated. Second, the earlier scheduling process allows the scheduling group to consider the flow of sessions. This allows, for example, the scheduling of general sessions before specialized drill-downs on aspects of a popular topic.

Because it’s unlikely (though not impossible) that session leaders will give a carefully prepared standard presentation, sessions created via the beginning process are likely to be facilitated discussions focused around the expertise and experience of one or more leaders and incorporating additional expertise and experience of all those present. Thousands of evaluations over the years have shown that participant satisfaction with such informal facilitated formats is significantly higher than that reported for conventional lecture-style presentations.

End

Rather than closing a conference with a banquet, keynote, or other social event, peer conferences provide two vital and important opportunities that traditional conferences omit.

Guided introspection on learning from the conference and planned professional/personal change

When you attended a conference and nothing significant changed in your life, was it worth going? You might have had fun, a rest, or time hanging out somewhere nice, but was that really the point?

Most attendees learn something valuable at meetings and make new connections, but often, this value doesn’t translate into future useful outcomes because it isn’t reinforced in a timely fashion. The notes you made of new things to try at work get forgotten in a drawer, along with the business cards of the interesting people you met.

Yes, change is hard. To increase the likelihood that conference experience translates into appropriate positive change, peer conferences provide a structured opportunity for participants to determine what they want to change in their professional or personal lives as a result of their experiences at the event. This process is called a personal introspective.

Public evaluation of the event and exploration of improvements and new initiatives

During the personal introspective, attendees review their conference experience and learning and create a plan for future individual change. The last session at a peer conference, a group spective, provides the same opportunities for the entire conference community collectively.

The group spective starts with a simple public group evaluation of the entire conference experience. No “smile sheet” evaluations that only conference organizers see. Instead, participants share — via a structured, facilitated process — what was great about the event and how to make it even better. The information gleaned is, of course, immensely useful to the conference organizers, but it also does something even more important: it gives every participant a collective overview of the group’s conference experience, building a conference community around the shared experiences.

The group spective also offers the possibility to create something enduring, something more than an intense, one-time experience. During the session, participants begin to explore their future together.

The Conference Arc

The conference arc contains everything necessary for participants to discover, learn, connect, and engage with the topics or issues that brought them together. By its close, it has planted the seeds of future meetings built around the commonalities, learning, and connections that participants have uncovered and appreciated in each other.

In this way, the conference arc perpetuates itself.

How to crowdsource a conference program in real-time

Here’s a real-life example of how to crowdsource a conference program in real time.

In May 2017 Liz Lathan and Nicole Osibodu invited me to design and facilitate the session crowdsourcing at the first Haute Dokimazo unconference in Austin, Texas. Eighty invited participants from around the U.S. spent a joyful and productive day at the Austin Children’s Museum’s Thinkery where we crowdsourced a program focusing on event portfolio needs and wants of brands and agencies.

Watch this three-minute video for a taste of the event — then read on to learn how we crowdsourced the program.

Pre-crowdsourcing work

Every peer conference has an arc that includes and integrates three elements: a beginning, a middle (the program itself), and an end (reflecting, evaluating, and developing individual and group outcomes & next steps). The beginning is when crowdsourcing takes place. Before crowdsourcing it’s critical that participants get to learn about each other as much as possible in the time available. The best way I know to support initial inter-participant learning and connection is The Three Questions process I devised in 1995 (see my books for full details).

After quickly introducing and having the group commit to six agreements to follow at the event, we had forty-five minutes available for The Three Questions. To ensure each person had time to share, we split the participants into four equal-sized groups. Facilitators, trained the previous evening, led each group.

Once group members had learned about each other, we reconvened to crowdsource the afternoon program.

How we crowdsourced the Haute Dokimazo program

Crowdsourcing took just 25 minutes. Participants used large colored Post-it™ notes to submit session topics. We used pink notes for offers to facilitate or lead a session, and other colors for wants, as explained in the diagram below.
crowdsource a conference program
We read the topics aloud as they came in. Once we had everyone’s responses, the participants left for their morning workshops. Meanwhile, Liz Lathan and I moved the note collection to a quiet space, clustered them…
crowdsource a conference program
…and worked out what we were going to run, who would facilitate or lead each session, and where it would be held.

The resulting sessions

During lunch, we checked that the session leaders we’d chosen were willing and available for the schedule we’d created. Finally, we created a slide of the resulting sessions. We added it to the conference app and projected the afternoon program on a screen during lunch.

This is just one way to crowdsource a conference program in real time. Want a comprehensive resource on creating conference programs that become what your attendees actually want and need? My book Event Crowdsourcing: Creating Meetings People Actually Want and Need contains everything you need to know. Learn more here!