One of the most rewarding aspects of my work is training associations how to create powerful and effective participant-driven and participation-rich conferences. I love facilitating the learning that occurs. The training equips the organization with the tools needed to transform its events. Do you want to significantly improve your meetings? Then please don’t hesitate to get in touch!
When we enable people to meaningfully connect at a meeting, something extraordinary happens. We transform a conference from an impersonal forum for information exchange to a place where people feel they matter: their views, their experience, and their ability to contribute become seen.
Such a transformation is the essential work that we need in order to build a human community around the event. It becomes something special, standing out like a beacon from the humdrum conferences routinely inflicted on attendees.
The meeting feels different, is different, because it allows participants to be truly heard and seen. Because having people listen to us is a gift. And, as Seth Godin puts it:
“We like to see. But mostly, we’re worried about being seen…the culture of celebrity that came with TV has shifted. It’s no longer about hoping for a glimpse of a star. It’s back to the source–hoping for a glimpse of ourselves, ourselves being seen.” —Seth Godin, Mirror, mirror
It takes a few minutes at the start of a gathering to create agreements that help make it a safe place for participants to:
speak their minds;
ask appropriate questions; and
share possibly intimate yet important information about their work and lives that inform the entire event.
Immediately, the conference is subtly different, full of new possibilities, some of which might have been considered risky or even taboo. Everyone in the room begins to learn about each other in ways that matter. Everyone begins to discover how they can become a part of the gathering, how they can contribute, and how they can learn about issues and challenges that personally matter.
Make it easy for participants to be safely and truly heard and seen. Your conferences will be all the better for it.
Maximal intimacy. This is the big one. When I’m eating at a meeting I want to, well, meet people. I can eat alone any time, thank you very much. And if I want to converse with one or two other people, just about any seating configuration will work. But if I’m with five best friends, I want to be able to communicate with them without shouting or straining to hear them. And when banqueting strangers surround me, I’d like to maximize the number of new people I can effectively meet.
Lack of distractions. I can’t meet other people when our conversation is drowned out by emcees, dinner speakers, or (aargh!) “mood” music. Or when a sponsor is displaying a promo movie on every wall in the room.
Comfort. Please don’t make me sit on a cheap plastic chair or a wooden bench with no back support for an extended period while I nosh. It’s cruel and unusual punishment. (Meeting planners usually get this one right.) And if it’s too hot or cold, I’ll be miserable. If we’re going to be dining outside in the Sahara or the Arctic (cool!), let me know in advance so I can dress appropriately.
OK, got that? It’s time for a couple of specific suggestions.
Are you Tortured by Nights of the Round Table?
I am. The above link goes into detail, but from my audiologist-swears-my-hearing’s-normal-but-I-don’t-think-so perspective, traditional large rounds for seated meals — a staple of every meeting planner’s banquet design — conflict with criterion #1.
Typically, meals are served at 60″ rounds (eight seats per table), 66″ rounds (nine seats per table), or 72″ rounds (ten seats per table). I start having a hard time hearing everyone at 60″ rounds, and the larger sizes pretty much relegate me to talking with the two people on either side of me (and that’s assuming the table is full — often not the case with unassigned seating.)
If you’re going to use rounds, in my view, smaller ones are better. The problem is that many venues don’t stock them, so you may have to pay extra to use them. Nevertheless, consider using 54″ rounds (7 – 8 seats), 48″ rounds (6 seats), [or even 36″ rounds (4 seats) if your meal service isn’t super-formal]. Everyone is likely to be able to converse with everyone else at the table and maximal intimacy is yours!
The Fable of the Communal Table
Until relatively recently, most public dining occurred communally because only the rich could afford private dining rooms and there were far more poor folks around. Then we got hoity-toity and invented restaurants and conferences.
About ten years ago, communal tables started creeping back into restaurants. Some argued that this trend met a desire to return to a dining environment with greater “community”. The more cynical noted that establishments could now cram more people in the same space by seating them at long rectangular tables next to strangers.
While I think communal tables are great if they’re an integral part of an authentic cultural meal where dining involves lots of moving about — e.g. as pictured below, the deliciously messy outdoor calçotada I enjoyed in Catalonia last year — at traditional conferences they are poor places to converse with others.
So, if you’re using rectangular tables, don’t do this:
Instead, do this: But wait, there’s more…
Sorry, I’ll admit that this is not everything you need to know about seating while eating at meetings. But it’s a start, and, like Jude, you can make it better. Please feel free to add your contributions in a comment below.
Picture of Jesus with the Eucharist at the Last Supper by Juan de Juanes – [2], Public Domain, Link calçotada image by David Benitez
After watching Hannah Gadsby‘s stunning show Nanette — which I highly recommend — here’s a small piece worth sharing.
Gadsby starts with Vincent Van Gogh, looking at how we’ve come to lionize the idea of misunderstood genius. “Born ahead of his time,” she says. “What a load of shit. Nobody is born ahead of their time—it’s impossible.” —Annaliese Griffin, Hannah Gadsby rewrites the way we tell jokes in “Nanette”
Do you ever feel that the world isn’t ready for what you have to say?
I do sometimes.
And when I feel this, it’s easy to wonder: perhaps I was born “ahead of my time?”
I often design and facilitate workshops for association members most of whom haven’t met before. The desired outcomes are for each participant to gain useful and relevant professional insights, and to make significant new connections.
Here’s what you might see on a stroll through a typical workshop:
An example
At one workshop, association staffers noted that no one touched a cell phone, and intense conversations with frequent bursts of laughter filled the entire two-hour event.
A participant started crying and his group members rushed to console and support him. (We learned later that he had been unfairly fired earlier in the day.) Afterward, we saw many people swapping business cards and making arrangements to meet up again. Before leaving, the fired man told me that, despite his dire circumstances, he had had a very positive experience and made several good new friends in his group. Other participants shared during post-workshop conversations that the experience would be memorable because of their personal learning and the new connections made.
Follow-up evaluations confirmed that participants obtained meaningful peer support and advice, and began new friendships with other workshop participants.
Such workshops routinely meet the outcomes they’re designed to achieve: creating useful and memorable learning experiences and connections.
Why are these workshops successful?
These workshops are not successful because of the:
excellence of a speaker;
beauty/novelty of the venue/F&B/entertainment; or
extraordinary facilitation.
(Full disclosure: the facilitation needs to be competent!)
Adult professional peers can learn much from each other, and when they meet they are hungry to find solutions to current problems, explore issues, and make connections with others who work in the same sphere.
The successful workshops I’ve described above do not have a single expert sharing content. (Rather, it’s fair to say, they tap the expertise and experience of everyone present.) All they need for success is good process, competent facilitation, and a few low-tech items.
They are also simple. Every process element is a strategic ingredient of the workshop design. Running these workshops helps me continually refine the design, stripping away components that distract focus from the desired outcomes.
Many organizations focus on getting the “best” experts to speak at their meetings. Ironically, in my experience it’s almost always easier to create memorable learning and valuable connection for attendees by employing participatory workshop formats. Why? Because they take full advantage of the group’s combined expertise, hone in on what people actually want and need to learn, and build lasting relationships in the process.
Large meetings stroke owners’ and leaders’ egos, and can supply impressive spectacle. They are appropriate places to launch campaigns and mass announcements and can be very profitable. However, they are poor vehicles for creating the useful participant learning, connection, and outcomes that well-designed small conferences can deliver.
So if you are (un)fortunate enough to be the owner or designer of a large meeting, what can you do to maximize participant value?
You need to satisfy four core requirements for optimum learning and connection:
Provide sessions focused on content that participants care about.
Design for small sessions and/or have participants work together in small groups.
Use interactive formats.
Include closing sessions that consolidate learning, build community, and explore the group’s future.
Let’s take a look at each of these requirements in more detail.
Content that participants care about
Traditional large conferences use the “kitchen sink” {aka “spray and pray”} approach of stuffing sessions on every potentially interesting topic into the program. Slightly more sophisticated conferences attempt to determine in advance the topics that attendees say they want.
Unfortunately, years of research by yours truly has shown that when conference sessions are chosen in advance, the majority of them are not what attendees want and need {here’s an example}. It’s like John Wanamaker describing advertising: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted;the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
There’s no way to know in advance which sessions you’ve prescheduled will meet participants’ wants and needs.
To be sure of scheduling sessions about content that participants actually care about, you’ll need to uncover and satisfy their actual wants and needs at the event. Luckily, doing this isn’t rocket science — I’ve been crowdsourcing programs in many different ways for 33 years.
One of the reasons why small conferences with a well-defined niche audience work well is that participants don’t have to waste time meeting people with whom they have little in common. Large meetings attempt to create the same environment by scheduling multiple conference tracks and concurrent breakout sessions. Often, however, the resulting sessions are still too large for people to easily make useful connections and/or learn from each other.
Unless you use interactive formats (see below), not much useful learning can happen in an hour with a hundred attendees.
One simple approach to reduce the size of large sessions is to run them simultaneously in several rooms. Or you can repeat them at different times. Distribute interested participants between multiple sessions, either by preallocation (for simultaneous sessions) or personal choice. I use this approach to run The Three Questions as an opening plenary at large conferences.
Small sessions, with thirty or fewer participants, should be the goal. Such sizes invite less formal formats where it’s easier for participants to ask questions, influence what is covered and discussed, and contribute their expertise and experience to the learning environment.
Finally, large sessions can work effectively if they have a significant small group work component. For example, some of the session formats I design and facilitate — for example, The Solution Room, RSQP, and The Personal Introspective — scale to work with any number of participants because most of the important work is done in small groups.
Designing genuinely useful sessions for large groups is challenging work and typically requires incorporating small group work as described above. However, I have had great success facilitating highly interactive discussions of “hot topics” with hundreds of people. By interactive, I don’t mean that five people monopolize the entire discussion. Typically about forty people are “up on stage” at some point, most of whom had no inkling beforehand that they had something useful to contribute.
I call the format I’ve developed the Fishbowl Sandwich, and you’ll find full details on how to design and prepare such a session in Event Crowdsourcing.
Closing sessions
Most meetings squander the experiences they create. How? By failing to provide structured time to consolidate and reflect on individual and group learning and explore consequent future change. You can improve all meetings by including closing sessions that:
Help participants consolidate what they’ve learned during the conference and determine the next steps; and
Provide an opportunity for participants to reflect on the event, build community, and uncover new opportunities for future activities together.
Designing for connection and learning at large meetings by incorporating sessions like the ones I’ve outlined above? Bear in mind that interactive sessions typically require more time than traditional lecture-style presentations. Active learning is messy and risky, and creating an effective and safe learning environment takes more time than simply listening to or viewing speaker content.
About to schedule crowdsourcing, interactive formats, and closing sessions? Investigate the amount of time they’ll need, so you don’t sabotage them by cramming them into a timeslot that can’t do them justice. The links above are good resources. Investigate them, apply their principles, and make your large conferences better!
Destroy the conference to save it! When mistaken beliefs about methods and outcomes harden into dogma, harm follows. The professional meeting industry largely believes that:
The Solution Room is rapidly becoming a popular meeting plenary. Invented at MPI’s 2011 European Meetings and Events Conference, the session fosters active meaningful connections between attendees, and provides peer support and solutions to the real professional challenges currently faced by participants.
Participants rate The Solution Room useful and valuable. They really enjoy the opportunity to meet a small group of peers in a safe, intimate, and relevant manner, and be both a consultant and a consultee on a current professional challenge each group member chooses. Here are testimonials from an MPI session:
Unlike many participatory formats, The Solution Room scales beautifully, whether there are 30 or 1,000 people in the room. The resources needed are modest: paper-covered small roundtables, colored Sharpies, sound reinforcement, and a good facilitator.
Although the format was originally conceived as a closing session, I’ve found it to be a great opening plenary, especially if time or space constraints prohibit running The Three Questions roundtables. By ensuring that each small group contains a mixture of newcomers, experienced, and veteran professionals, first-time attendees get to know peers with industry experience (and the veterans often learn a thing or two from the younger folks at their table).
You can tell that Solution Room sessions are a success when they end — and no one leaves. Instead, the small groups go on talking about everything they’ve discussed; they don’t want to stop sharing. I see a lot of enthusiastic business card swapping at the end. Participants tell me that they made valuable long-term connections through the meeting and sharing that took place during the session.
Want to learn more about how to incorporate The Solution Room into your next event? You’ll find everything you need to know to run The Solution Room in Chapter 34 of The Power of Participation. Or contact me — I’d love to facilitate a session for you!
What’s the best way to fundamentally improve a dull conference?
I’ve been attending conferences for over forty years. Most of them are dull and largely irrelevant. This seems to be the norm because when you talk to attendees you find they set a low bar for satisfaction— e.g. “It’s OK if I learn one new thing a day, oh, and if I make a useful connection or two that would be great!”
For twenty years I assumed this was how conferences were supposed to be. When I began creating conferences myself, I used the same standard format: invite experts to speak to audiences.
Then in 1992, circumstances forced me to do one thing differently. Ever since, thanks to that happy accident, I have been designing and facilitating peer conferences that people have loved for over a quarter-century.
“…gets an award for most/best/most thoughtfully organized conference I think I’ve ever been to.”
“I’m an introvert. I’ve never shared as much at a conference before. Your process is brilliant. Thank you.”
“…the truest sense of community I’ve ever felt and it was beautiful to experience. I hope you have the opportunity to experience something like this in your lifetime. It changes everything.” —Three recent participants on their experience at three different peer conferences
What’s the one key thing I do that almost no one else does?
I facilitate the discovery of interesting people, ideas, and resources at the start of the event.
What does that mean and how do I do it? Read on!
The dreary reality of most conferences
How many conferences have you attended where you mostly meet someone interesting by chance? When you’re with colleagues, you hang out together because everyone else is a stranger. When you don’t really know anyone, you talk to the people you’re sitting next to at meals and hope they’ll be interesting.
Have you ever wondered whether someone who would be really great to meet is sitting three chairs away from you during a session or lunch? Well, you’ll never find out at a typical conference, and you won’t get to meet them.
In addition, think about all that time spent talking to people with whom you have little in common. You’re searching for useful connections, and solutions to professional challenges — but the conference provides no support for discovering and connecting with the most important resources in the room: the other interesting participants with the background and answers you want and need.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Here’s what I do to greatly improve a dull conference for everyone.
Facilitating the discovery of interesting people, ideas, and resources
Immediately after welcome and housekeeping announcements I run one or more opening sessions that use The Three Questions, allowing participants to learn about each other, share what they would like to learn and discuss, and proffer their relevant expertise and experience.
This single opening exercise, which takes between thirty minutes and two hours depending on the conference size and duration, is the most important component of creating a meeting that really matters. A meeting that makes possible the learning, connection, engagement, and outcomes that stakeholders and participants want.
Providing this safe discovery process allows each person to get immediate answers to the core questions that they want and need to know about the other participants. If there are people in your roundtable you’d like to meet, you’ll find out who they are. You’ll hear a wealth of topics and issues that are on participants’ minds, including great new ideas. You’ll discover the people in the room who can be valuable resources for you: people with experience and expertise to help you with your current challenges, and people who are interested in exploring or collaborating on common interests you find you share. And finally, you may well discover (to your surprise) that you are a valuable resource for other participants!
When the roundtables are over, you will have something that typical conferences never supply: key information about the people present that provides a fantastic introduction to the participants, current challenges, opportunities, and resources in the room.
You then have the rest of the conference to take advantage of everything you’ve learned.
Why early discovery works so well
There’s nothing I’ve described that can’t also be done through painstaking conversation with the strangers around you at an event. What three-question roundtables do so well is supply and support a simple process that makes this discovery efficient, and comprehensive. Your participants will share and receive the information they need to make the conference that follows maximally effective for them. And they will appreciate that!
Want to transform your next conference by facilitating early discovery?
There’s a better way to improve meetings than augmenting them with technology. As Finnish management consultant and polymath Esko Kilpi says:
“Human beings augmented by other human beings is more important than human beings augmented by technology” —Esko Kilpi, quoted by Harold Jarche
At face-to-face meetings, we can facilitate relevant connections and learning around participants’ shared just-in-time wants and needs. This is more effective than augmenting an individual’s learning via technology. We maximize learning when:
Participants first become aware, collectively and individually, of the room’s wants, needs, and available expertise and experience (i.e. “the smartest person in the room is the room” — David Weinberger, Too Big To Know);
We use meeting process that successfully matches participants’ needs and wants with the expertise and experience available; and
Time and space are available for the desired learning to take place.
And of course, this approach significantly improves the quantity and quality of relevant connections made by participants during an event.
So the smart choice is to invest in maximizing peer connection and learning. Do this via simple human process rather than elaborate event technology.
I’ve wasted time at many events trying to use apps to connect attendees in some useful way. Even when high-tech approaches use a simple web browser interface, getting 100% participation is difficult due to technical barriers: all attendees must have a digital device readily available with no low batteries or spotty/slow internet access.
Well-facilitated human process has none of these problems. The value of having a facilitator who knows how to do this work far exceeds the cost (which may be zero once you have invested in training staff to fulfill this function).
When push comes to shove, modern events thrive in supportive, participatory environments. Attendees appreciate the ease of making the connections they want and getting the learning they need from the expertise and experience of their peers. Once they’ve experienced what’s possible they rarely enjoy going back to the passive meetings that are still so common.
Yes, we can use technology to augment learning. But the majority of the high-tech event solutions marketed today are inferior and invariably more costly to implement than increasing learning and connection through radically improving what happens between people at our meetings.
When we enable people to meaningfully connect at a meeting, something extraordinary happens. We transform a conference from an impersonal forum for information exchange to a place where people feel they matter: their views, their experience, and their ability to contribute become seen.
It’s no 
I often design and facilitate workshops for association members most of whom haven’t met before. The desired outcomes are for each participant to gain useful and relevant professional insights, and to make significant new connections.
How can we design for powerful connection and learning at large meetings?
When mistaken beliefs about methods and outcomes harden into dogma, harm follows. The professional meeting industry largely believes that:
The Solution Room is rapidly becoming a popular meeting plenary. Invented at MPI’s 2011 European Meetings and Events Conference, the session fosters active meaningful connections between attendees, and provides peer support and solutions to the real professional challenges currently faced by participants.![The best way to fundamentally improve your dull conference: Photograph of Adrian Segar [back to the camera, purple shirt] facilitating at a Conference That Work. Participants are sitting in a single large circle in a large wood-paneled hall.](https://www.conferencesthatwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/VT-Vision-2012-Roundtable-640x370.jpg)
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