Reminiscent of my first book, Conferences That Work, AST’s guide provides a comprehensive entry-level guide to starting, preparing for, and running a peer conference. While it doesn’t offer the level of detail in Conferences That Work, it’s an excellent introduction to the key issues. Although it’s written for software testing conferences (hence the references to Lean Coffee and k-cards) first-time organizers of small conferences of any kind will learn a lot.
This short guide includes useful sections on:
defining the conference’s mission;
codes of conduct;
diversity;
dissemination; and
email templates and helpful checklists.
The text includes many links to more detailed explanations. As a result, the guide is a compact resource for anyone with little or no experience who wants to offer a great, well-run, conference.
So I strongly recommend this free guide to creating peer conferences. (Did I mention it’s free?)
Photo attributions: 2018 “QA or the Highway” software testing conference {top}. My old friend Fiona Charles (on right) at UKSTARConf 2019 {bottom}
I’m proud to have written three books (the latest was published this week) and over six hundred blog posts in the last ten years. After writing each book I was sure it would be the last one I wrote. Actually, I still am. Perhaps I’ll be wrong again about that…
To my amazement, this website has had over forty-nine million page views. That’s quite a jump from twenty-four thousand in the first year. These days, this site gets about six million page views per year, making it, as far as I know, the most popular website in the world on meeting design.
Although I’ve been designing and facilitating participant-driven and participation-rich meetings since 1992, I feel especially good about the last decade. It was in 2009 that I decided to switch my professional focus to creating and championing Conferences That Work. Since then I’ve done my best to convince the meeting industry to change how it thinks about meeting design; to concentrate on meeting process as well as logistics.
I’ve met a lot of wonderful people and had tons of fun and adventures along the way. I’ve done my best to share ideas and experiences of value and continue to learn from every meeting and everyone I meet. Thank you everyone whose life I’ve touched and whose life has touched mine.
And the journey isn’t over yet. I’m excited!
Stay tuned.
Original graphic with obscure reference, modified into almost complete irrelevance, courtesy of the incomparable xkcd
So you’re holding a conference. How are you going to get your audience tuned in and engaged?
I shared my thoughts on this topic on a 2017 episode of the weekly #EventIcons interview with good friend and host Brandt Krueger. Our hour together was packed with useful information, so feel free to watch the whole thing (scroll down to view the video) or check out the timeline below for the main themes we discussed.
3:00 Adrian tells the unlikely story of how he got into the events industry.
8:10 What would Adrian be doing if he wasn’t in the events industry?
9:10 The one driving passion shared by so many event professionals.
10:10 Why event planners and stakeholders should care about engagement.
11:20 Why traditional meetings don’t meet attendee needs very well.
12:10 How building participation into meetings creates engagement that significantly improves learning, connection, and outcomes.
14:20 Why lectures are so ineffective.
15:50 How to work with speakers and attendees who are introverts.
18:50 How to create a safe environment for attendees to share, learn, and connect.
20:15 An explanatory journey through the stages of participant-driven and participation-rich meetings that use the Conferences That Work model.
26:30 The positive aspects of supporting engagement at events, and the neglected need to evaluate events’ long-term impact.
29:10 The value of incorporating white space into events and several ways to do it.
34:50 How to work with speakers to make sessions more participatory.
37:20 How to market participant-driven conferences.
42:30 Three examples of simple participation techniques you can use to improve meetings: body voting, large facilitated fishbowl discussions, and The Solution Room.
50:30 The biggest mistake meeting planners make when attempting to improve participation and engagement.
54:30 Where to find all kinds of ideas about meeting design — and Adrian’s next book on crowdsourcing events.
I’ve been promoting the Conferences That Work meeting format for so long that some people assume I think it’s the right choice for every meeting. Well, it’s not. Here are (drum roll!) two meeting types and three situations when you should NOT use a Conferences That Work design:
Most corporate events
Many corporate events have a tight focus. Management has desired outcomes for the meeting, e.g., developing new products and services, communicating changes in company strategic goals, training and incentivizing sales teams, implementing successful product launches, etc. The function of such meetings is primarily top-down: effectively communicate management objectives, answer questions, and get employee buy-in. Fixed-agenda corporate meetings are not a good fit for peer conference designs. Why? Because they are predominantly about one-way broadcast-style communication. Participants are there to listen and learn rather than to determine what’s individually useful to them or to build intra-company connections.
Special events
Special events involve a mixture of entertainment, celebration, and raising money. While some may include impromptu participant involvement, they concentrate on creating a wonderful experience for attendees. Special events are carefully choreographed in advance and participant interaction is generally limited to the traditional social forms of meals and parties. So they are not a good fit for the spontaneous generation of topics, themes, and participant-determined process that peer conference designs generate.
When simultaneously scheduled alongside traditional meeting formats
Much as I would like to tell you that participant-driven and participation-rich event formats are common these days, it just ain’t so. As a result, many conference attendees have not encountered these designs before and have not experienced how effective they can be in creating valuable connections and learning with their peers. When meeting planners add participant-driven sessions as a track to an existing schedule of traditional presentations, few attendees will pick the unfamiliar. Unfortunately, this convinces the organizers that few people are interested in these formats, reinforcing a return to a familiar predetermined program.
If I had a nickel for every time I’ve seen this mistake made … well … that would pay the bill for a very nice dinner out.
When time is short
Participant-driven and participation-rich events are messy and, by the standards of a content-dump-into-listeners-ears event, relatively inefficient. You can share some good information in a ten-minute talk. (Even if most of the audience will have forgotten it a month later.) But try to build connections and learning in a group of a hundred people in ten minutes? Little of any significance is going to happen in such a short time.
I’ve run the core Conferences That Work design in a day numerous times, and it’s always a rush. A day and a half is the minimum for a group to really benefit. A peer conference design such as Open Space doesn’t need so much time—a few hours can be useful—though it omits some of the features that make Conferences That Work so effective.
Valuable peer learning and connection take time. It’s worth it. If you don’t have enough time, a peer conference isn’t like a podcast you can speed up and still understand. Schedule the time actually needed for the process to work and wonderful things will happen. Shortchanging the time guarantees frustrated and unhappy attendees.
When a meeting is significantly about status rather than learning and connection
Sadly, in my view, some meetings are primarily about asserting and demonstrating status. Government, political, and, to a lesser extent, academic conferences often fall into this category. If your conference attendees come from a culture where power and influence are firmly controlled by the people in charge, a Conferences That Work meeting design will be a poor fit. A format that does not reinforce their dominance threatens high-status individuals.
So when should you use the Conferences That Work design?
I thought you’d never ask. If you have all attendees’ attention and enough time for the process to work (see above), a Conferences That Work meeting design is a fantastic (I would argue, the best) approach for meetings of communities of practice (this link explains in detail what communities of practice are). That includes all conferences, colloquia, congresses, conventions, and symposia.
Association and client conferences are clear candidates for Conferences That Work. Traditional conference elements, such as keynotes, up-to-the-minute research findings, recognition ceremonies, social events, etc., can easily be integrated into the design.
By carefully incorporating the peer conference process into future events, you can make existing conferences more participant-driven and participation-rich. Over the years, I have helped many associations successfully make this transition.
But the best time to implement Conferences That Work is at a brand-new conference! (A good example is the edACCESS peer conference, now in its 26th year and still going strong.) Why? Because people typically create new conferences when they find the need to meet for a new purpose. At that moment in time, invariably, there are no obvious experts to invite. Opening with a peer conference design allows a group of relative strangers with a common interest to make fruitful connections and learn productively about and from the expertise and experience in their midst. The experience is so powerful that I don’t know of a group that has decided to stop using the format.
I love David Adler‘s creativity, support, drive, ingenuity, and enthusiasm. The first time I met him—at the premier EventCamp in 2010—he immediately purchased my just-published book, sight unseen. The following year, David was kind enough to honor me in his flagship publication BizBash as one of the most innovative event professionals. Whenever I’ve had the pleasure of meeting David (not often enough!), he has proved to be a continual source of great ideas and encouragement, as well as a masterful conversationalist.
However, one recurring theme in David’s magazine irritates me, because it perpetuates a common misconception in the events industry.
BizBash consistently uses the term “event design” to mean “visual design”
As an example, consider the 2016 Design Issue. The cover proclaims, “What’s Next in Event Design?”
The sixty pages of this issue concentrate exclusively on visual and F&B ideas and treatments. While its article “8 Fresh Faces of Event Design 2016” says it is about “industry newbies who dream up and create an event’s visuals as opposed to those that handle the logistics like a planner,” this really misses the point.
Event process design determines the logistics and visuals we use. Logistics and visuals are secondary issues that support the primary design choices we make.
First, decide what your event is designed to do—what you want to happen during it. Then determine appropriate logistics and visuals that support and enhance the process design.
There is nothing in the 2016 BizBash Design Issue that explores the heart of event design. Namely, what will happen at the event? As I’ve written elsewhere, we are so steeped in traditional process rituals that society has used for hundreds of years—lectures, weddings, business meetings, galas, shows, etc.—that we don’t question their continued use. These forms are essentially invisible to us and previous generations because they have been at the heart of social and professional culture for so long.
But when someone takes time to reexamine these unquestioned forms, startling change becomes possible. Here are three examples:
Finally, my own contribution. Re-imagining a conference as a participant-driven and participation-rich event, rather than a set of lectures, increases effective learning, participant connection, and individual and organizational change outcomes far above what’s possible at traditional passive broadcast-style meetings.
Prolonging the misconception, as BizBash implicitly does, that meeting design is principally about sensory design is slowing the adoption of fundamental and innovative process design improvements that can significantly improve our meetings. Instead, let’s broaden our conceptions of what meeting design is. Our work and industry will be better for it—and our clients will appreciate the results!
Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love is featured in this reprint of the first half of Kelsey Ogletree‘s article How We Learn: Books That Changed Meetings, published in the January/February 2014 issue of CONNECT.
In an era of ultraportable tablets, smartphones, glasses and even watches connecting us to the Internet, Google can find the answer to all of your big questions in .0001 seconds. For our gotta-have-it-now culture, knowledge is instantaneous and everywhere, because we demand it. But there’s still something to be said for books, especially when it comes to thought leadership. The shelf for meeting planning help books isn’t a crowded one, as the industry is still relatively young. But within the collection, there are three authors who stand out: Adrian Segar with “Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love”; Paul O. Radde, Ph.D., with “Seating Matters”; and Marcia Conner, an outside expert who found her way into the meetings and events space with “Creating a Learning Culture: Strategy, Technology and Practice,” among others. The ideas that each book offered up have fundamentally changed the way planners approach meetings, as well as sparked conversations that shake up centuries-old ways of thinking about how we learn.
Starting out as an academic, Adrian Segar went to a lot of conferences. “I hated them,” he says. “They were very little about learning and more about broadcasting information, and also status.” When he moved on to owning a manufacturing company and also working in IT, he began organizing conferences around those topics because he wanted to get together with people who were in his field. “I started a conference where there were no experts,” Segar says.
“Ninety percent of what we learn today is not in the classroom but from our peers or from ourselves.” —Adrian Segar
“All you needed was a collection of adults that had something in common that they wanted to learn about together.” After about 15 years of putting on these peer-learning conferences (“totally as an amateur, not as my day job,” he says), he decided to write a book about it. And what that effort amounted to was Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love which focuses on a way of doing events that turn into what the attendees, not necessarily the planner, want them to be.
“In the pure form of the event, people come together with a common interest,” says Segar. “The first half-day of the event, you learn about who else is there, why they came, what they want to learn, what problems they have, what they want to discuss, and what expertise and experience people have. People always have expertise that other people want to know. Those people end up running the sessions, because people want to learn that.” A smaller group then takes that information and turns it into a schedule for the remainder of the conference, which is now optimized for what the people there really want to discuss.
Most people are cautious about this less-formal, on-the-spot format. But the key is to create a safe environment so participants feel comfortable. Segar advises planners to help people move slowly into a participatory environment so they gradually realize the value of it. “About 1 in 50 people do not like this style of event once they’ve actually been exposed to it,” says Segar “But the other 98 percent prefer it. If you try to make everyone happy, you’ll never do anything different.”
In Conferences That Work, Segar explains the main reason that traditional conferences no longer facilitate quality learning: The rise of easily available information online has been the game-changer. “Up to about 20 years ago, it was true that most of what you needed to do your job was learned in the classroom,” he says. “Traditional meetings were an extension of that and were a very good fit. People knew things we didn’t, and we could go listen to them. But that is no longer true. What has been called ‘social learning’ is now the dominant way we learn what we need to know to do our jobs.”
Segar cites “The Teaching Firm: Where Productive Work and Learning Converge,” a study published by Education Development Center, to prove his point. According to the study, 70 percent of what people need to know comes from experiential learning. About 20 percent is self-directed learning; if you need to know something, you look it up. The final 10 percent is classroom-style learning.
“These are rough figures and depend on the industry, but 90 percent of what we learn today is not in the classroom but from our peers or from ourselves,” Segar says. “Meetings need to match how we learn these days. People often say, ‘the best learning was in the hallway.’ What we need to do is bring that learning into sessions and make it the core part of the event.”
When planning a Conferences That Work-style meeting, Segar says planners have to measure success in a different way, by looking past the attendance figure. “Social learning does not work with 1,000 people in a room; you can’t learn from 1,000 people simultaneously,” he says. “But you can learn a tremendous amount in a day from 50 people. These conferences may be small by traditional standards, but success is measured by feedback from attendees.”
Since his first book came out, Segar has surprised himself and decided to write another. This one will focus on participative learning and specific techniques that planners can employ at their own events to involve people in learning. One such technique is body voting or human spectrograms. “It’s having people get up out of their chairs and show their opinion on a particular topic by where they’re standing in a room,” he explains. “It’s a way of physically replicating what happens with audience-response systems. With clickers, the information is confidential. But it’s interesting to learn more about who thinks what. In 45 seconds, you can get a visual picture of the feeling in a room about a particular topic.”
What we’ve known for many years, Segar emphasizes, is that experiential learning is far more effective in creating long-lasting, accurate, more valuable ideas than passive learning. “Learning is about taking risks, to some degree,” says Segar. “You don’t learn anything new if you don’t stretch yourself in some way.”
I’m happy to announce that a free 9,000-word update to my book Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love is available!
Many improvements and refinements are included—the outcome of four years of feedback and experience since the book was published in 2009. Highlights include a long-awaited chapter on extending Conferences That Work to larger events, and important additions that make the established format (now tried and true for over twenty years!) even better.
Here’s a list of the contents:
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1 Why did I write this supplement?
CHAPTER 2 What’s included?
CHAPTER 3 Acknowledgements
GENERAL CHAPTERS
CHAPTER 4 Avoid one-day peer conferences
CHAPTER 5 Running Conferences That Work with more than 100 participants
IMPORTANT IMPROVEMENTS
CHAPTER 6 Give people permission and the opportunity to take a break!
CHAPTER 7 Break up roundtables approximately every twenty minutes
CHAPTER 8 Make peer session determination more efficient
CHAPTER 9 Improve personal introspectives by running them in small groups
CHAPTER 10 How to choose what to do at a group spective
OPTIONAL IMPROVEMENTS
CHAPTER 11 Include a first-timers session for repeat events
CHAPTER 12 Consider implementing a buddy system
CHAPTER 13 Use shared Google Docs for roundtable themes and plus/delta sharing
CHAPTER 14 Have people stand while speaking during the roundtable
CHAPTER 15 Use alternate colors when recording on flip charts
CHAPTER 16 Focused discussion = fishbowl — and an alternative format
ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES
CHAPTER 17 Consider using a conference app instead of a face book
CHAPTER 18 Consider running plus/delta with tape columns on the floor
CHAPTER 19 Use plus/delta as a tool for action
CHAPTER 20 Consider adding “Curious about?” column to plus/delta
MISCELLANEOUS TIPS
CHAPTER 21 Where to buy stiff 5 x 8 index cards
CHAPTER 22 A closing note about appreciations
The supplement, provided as a free ebook <pdf>, will be updated from time to time, and the latest version will always be available for free on this website. Comments and corrections are always welcome.
Simon Waddell‘s ten-minute video interview of me at EIBTM 2012. How Conferences That Work were developed, why they are growing in popularity, and the problem of getting meeting owners to buy into participant-driven events.
Ten Years of Conferences That Work! Ten years ago today, I started this website and published my first book: 
I’ve been promoting the 
