Skip to content
Conferences that Work - Creating Events That People Love
  • Home
  • My Books
    • Read Books
    • Reviews
    • Buy Books!
    • My latest book
  • Free Downloads
  • Events & Labs
    • Participate! Labs
    • Upcoming Events
    • Past Events
    • Peer Conference Calendar Submission
  • Blog
    • Subscribe to my blog posts!
  • About Peer Conferences
    • Characteristics
    • Beginnings
    • Middles
    • Ends
  • Meet Adrian Segar
    • Consulting Services
    • Testimonials
    • Clients
    • Media Kit
    • Training Opportunities
    • GDPR for Conferences That Work
  • Contact

conference facilitator

How PCMA connected the dots at the 2015 Education Conference

Monday, July 20th, 2015 by Adrian Segar

So many conferences are a collection of unrelated sessions. But the June 2015 PCMA Education Conference in Fort Lauderdale showed how a coherent set of meeting goals can be embedded in a congruent conference arc, improving learning and connection amongst attendees. Here’s how PCMA connected the dots.

PCMA connected the dots: Photograph of Adrian Segar facilitating at the 2015 PCMA Education Conference, taken by and licensed from Jacob Slaton
Adrian at the 2015 PCMA Education Conference

PCMA Education Conference design and duties

Although PCMA asked me to be the “conference facilitator” and “connect the dots” for EduCon, most of the credit for the conference design goes to the PCMA team. Pre-conference collaboration with the team was a pleasure.

My consequent jobs over the three days of conference sessions were to:

  • open and close the conference;
  • interview John Medina on stage and at a “deep dive” breakout;
  • run a crowdsourcing experiment and a personal introspective; and
  • facilitate a closing public evaluation of the conference.

The conference boasted a record 675 attendees, plus several hundred following the live stream. Being up on stage so much, interviewing, and providing event continuity for as many as a thousand people was a new experience for me—definitely risky learning! Connecting the dots immediately after presentations is hard when you don’t know what presenters are going to say!

When I accepted the offer of facilitating the conference, I only had a rough outline of the presentations. I wondered about the content/learning arc of the event. To my pleasant surprise, EduCon delivered a coherent set of sessions that shared common themes around predetermined goals.

The opening

At the opening, I told a story and shared the EduCon design goals: experiential learning, risky learning experiments, and meaningful engagement. I’ll use [EL], [RL], and [ME] respectively to indicate how these three themes were woven throughout the event.

John Medina’s opening session immediately touched on some of these themes. He described how prospect-refuge theory suggests that a mixture of private and public spaces provides an optimum environment for events, balancing the needs for safety [RL], frankness, growth, and confidentiality with the openness required to spread content.

John also spoke about the importance of high Theory Of Mind—the ability to reason about the mental states of others, what some might call empathy—for creating effective work teams that have high collective intelligence. (There’s a great test of your Theory of Mind ability Reading The Mind In The Eyes take it for free here!) It turns out that women have better theory of mind than men, which is perhaps why there are so many female meeting professionals—empathy is important in our industry [ME].

Interviewing John—who must surely be the easiest person in the world to interview—was a blast! I had 15 minutes with him on stage, followed by 75 minutes in a breakout. For the breakout I simply had the audience sit in curved theater seating facing John and me plus a couple of empty chairs. Audience members with questions walked to the front of the room and talked with him. We could have easily spent another hour with John.

Crowdsourcing sessions

Read my earlier post to learn more about the session crowdsourcing experiment I facilitated the following morning, which incorporated all three goals for the event [EL] [RL] [ME]. A few of the sessions chosen:

  • Women’s leadership in the event industry (described to me afterward by several participants in glowing terms);
  • Cultural issues in international meetings (run by Eli Gorin, who seemed very pleased); and
  • Selling sponsorship (held in the round).

The personal introspective

After lunch, I facilitated a personal introspective breakout session [EL] [RL] [ME], which provided participants the opportunity to think about what they had experienced so far, how their experiences might impact their lives, and what changes they might want to make as a result. Afterward, I received the same feedback independently from many people. They had gone into the session thinking they had little to say and discovered during the process that there was a lot to get excited about. I have heard this kind of feedback for many years now. Nevertheless, it’s still gratifying to hear the conversation volume rise steadily and observe the palpable reluctance of people to leave their small groups when the session is over.

I attended a few of the other breakout sessions during the conference and observed a good mixture of [EL], [RL], and [ME] in all of them. The interactivity of the sessions I witnessed was unusually high for a meeting industry conference. All the presenters I talked to had incorporated trying something new during their sessions.

The gift of failure

The second plenary speaker, Sarah Lewis, author of The Rise, spoke to several themes related to the “gift of failure”:

  • the “deliberate amateur” who avoids the traditional route of learning [RL];
  • the need for “private domains” that allow creativity to flourish [EL]; and
  • the “supple grit” needed to know when to keep working on an idea and when to stop before the work becomes dysfunctional persistence [EL].

A group spective

On the final day of EduCon, I ran a public evaluation of the conference—a format I call a spective—in 45 minutes using plus/delta. Having attendees publicly evaluate a conference they have just experienced was clearly an [RL] activity! I think it went well; the scribes’ Google doc summary (projected in real-time as the session took place) gives a taste…

PCMA EduCon closing plus:delta

Our fear of change

The first question Sarah was asked at the conclusion of her talk was on overcoming fear [RL], which segued nicely into the subject matter of the closing session by Mel Robbins, author of Stop Saying You’re Fine. Mel delved deep (and interactively) [ME] [EL] into our fear of change and introduced her 5-second rule—if you have a game-changer impulse, act on it within five seconds or else it dies [RL]—another formulation of improv’s “say yes”.

Mel closed with a powerful call to action, a key component of a compelling conference arc, to take ownership of our lives. After this powerful session, I made brief closing remarks, pointing out how PCMA’s conference goals had been achieved. Finally, I asked the audience to stand and applaud themselves, as the people who, collectively, through their own interactions, risk-taking, and engagement had made the achievement of those goals possible.

It felt good!

Awesome photo of me at the 2015 PCMA EduCon taken by and licensed from Jacob Slaton!

Tags: conference facilitator, crowdsourcing, Education Conference, experiential learning, John Medina, meaningful engagement, Mel Robbins, PCMA, personal introspective, risky learning, Sarah Lewis, spective| Posted in Conference Spotlight, Event design | No Comments »

Book covers

Thirty minutes free consulting included with book purchase on this site!

Download five free chapters of each book!

Where To Buy

Purchase all 3 eBooks ($49.99); single eBook ($19.99) or paperback ($26) or both ($38) at lowest available prices via PayPal on this site. Signing and U.S. shipping included. Paperback versions also available from online bookstores.

Follow on LinkedInBlueskyTwitter

Testimonial

"[edACCESS] is the best technical and peer-driven conference for IT professionals that I have ever attended." • "It's changed my life. I have met people here who are my close friends. I've learned so much. I've been able to give my own knowledge, give of myself, help others. It is truly a different kind of experience." • "I've definitely found a lot of people I can go to talk about snmaller IT issues that I have. Just little nit-pickey things that I do in my environment and come up with all kinds of solutions and also hear about what other schools that are similar are doing as well." • "It's refreshing to just be able to say 'Hey! I'm dealing with that! I've been there! Let me tell you what I got through it with! It's amazing and the people both in and outside the peer sessions are really what make it possible. And I love it. I love edACCESS!"Spoken testimonials from edACCESS 2022 1½ minute video at vimeo.com/662359751 [

Subscribe to my posts

Location * *

Please check your inbox or spam folder now to confirm your subscription.

Recent posts

  • Are You Feeling the Squeeze? The Cost of Meetings in 2025
  • Tame the Creative Mind During Meditation
  • Teaching Less, Learning More
  • Why trust is the deciding factor in whether I attend your conference
  • The Right Place: Three Encounters with Strangers in Crisis

Recent Comments

  • my blog on Alexander von Humboldt: A meeting designer way ahead of his time
  • Joan Eisenstodt on Teaching Less, Learning More
  • Adrian Segar on Why trust is the deciding factor in whether I attend your conference
  • Adrian Segar on Why trust is the deciding factor in whether I attend your conference
  • Darryl Diamond on Why trust is the deciding factor in whether I attend your conference

Popular posts

  • Reducing No-Shows at Free Events: A Bold Approach

  • Are for-profits muscling in on association events?

  • Why trust is the deciding factor in whether I attend your conference

  • Authentic connection platforms: the future of disintegrating social media

  • Why event planners often overlook the importance of attendee conversations

  • More about dealing with assholes

  • From Heroic Leadership to Collective Heroes

  • How to deal with a “quick question”

  • We need alternative platforms for communities and events

  • Learn how to transform conferences with my meeting design workshop

Blog Post Archive

©2009-2025 Adrian Segar | site by WebWerk
Home | Buy Books | Read Books | Free Downloads | Events | Workshops | Blog | About Peer Conferences | Meet Adrian Segar | Webmaster | Site Map
Mastodon