Because, as social neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman explains, human beings are wired to be social:
“The message is clear; our brain is profoundly social, with some of the oldest social wiring dating back more than 100 million years. Our wiring motivates us to stay connected.” —Matthew Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired To Connect
The value of being social
There are significant practical benefits that arise from being social. Lieberman documents the measurable increase in well-being from such social activities as volunteering, (equivalent to moving from a $20K/year to a $75K/year salary), giving to charity (equivalent to doubling one’s salary), or having a good friend (equivalent to making an extra $100K/year). He notes that colleges have found that it makes sense to design their dorms for social connection, with modern dorms devoting about 20% of their expensive floor space to places for social connection. (Compare that to the amount of social space available in a modern apartment!) And he references the work of economist Arent Greve, who found that in the companies he studied, social capital, as opposed to human capital, accounted for most of the increased benefits in productivity.
How do we maximize social connection at events? Well, don’t rely on traditional socials to do a good job. Instead of filling our sessions with content, we need to make connection an integral component of every session. Carefully interspersing content (short bursts, twenty minutes max) with time for connection (reinforcing and reflecting on the content, and developing ideas with others) increases the quality of learning that takes place. This also strengthens personal connections around relevant content and consequently builds engagement and community. When we maximize social connection around relevant content we maximize the event’s value to participants.
I’m lucky. Facilitating productive event process like this for tens or hundreds of people is one more thing that brings me joy.
It’s time for my morning walk in Anguilla. I’ve written about it before. Out of bed, a little sleepy, I throw on swim trunks, shirt, socks, and shoes, perch my white Tilly on my head, and I’m off before the sun gets too hot.
A feast of the senses
The warm air on my skin. The sweet smell of almond croissants—alarming numbers of calories beckoning, reluctantly resisted—waft from the French bakery. Bass notes thud from several houses, random patterns until I am close enough to hear the melody. I pass trailers cradling gleaming powerboats: Pure Pleasure, Wet Dreamz, Drippin’ Wet, and Royal Seaduction (notice a theme here?) The gentle return uphill gradient calls for a quick dip in our pool. As I cool down I hear the clamor of bananaquits on the veranda railing gobbling up the raw sugar we’ve set out for them.
The warmth I feel during my walk doesn’t just come from the slanting rays of the morning sun. Every day, another kind of warmth envelopes me; the warmth of the people I meet.
Almost everyone I see on my walk responds in some way. On foot, the standard greeting is mornin’. The people who drive past me raise a hand in greeting and sometimes hoot the horn. These are not, usually, people I know or have ever met before, and I may never meet them again. And yet, there’s invariably a moment of connection.
Every day, unexpected responses
A speedy truck driver takes both hands off the wheel, palms facing me to say hi as I walk towards him, the hedge on my right leaving me no place to go if his steering is not true. A beautiful woman shoots me a dazzling smile as she leaves her driveway for work. Two locals walking in the same direction who, as I pass with a mornin’, say fast walkin’ admiringly to my back. Nuanced respectful nods from respectable Anguillan lady drivers. A grandmother pivots from conversation to pipe a melodious good morning. Her granddaughter in a cream blouse and green skirt uniform, waiting for her ride to school, murmurs hello as I pass. A businesswoman gripping the top of her steering wheel, fingers flying up like rabbit ears when I wave. The minister, waiting for a ride to preach to his church lifts his hand and our eyes connect. Then I’m past, turning the corner, moving towards the next meeting.
My morning walk in Anguilla. Such simple moments of connection. So little to give, so much received. Growing warmth. A wonderful way to start any morning.
I love Sparrow’s aphorisms, but this one especially snagged my heart. It speaks of the space I inhabit when I facilitate effectively—becoming a creator of process that works for others and is not about me. Photo attribution: Flickr user hjiang196
It’s common to be impressed by a big meeting. Size implies status—and seemingly success. Walking onto the floor of IBTM World—a European tradeshow attended by more than 15,000 event professionals each year—you’re probably blown away by the size of the event. (The video above shows perhaps a third of the tradeshow floor.) You think to yourself: this event must be successful because it’s so [expletive] big.
But size isn’t everything.
A quick exercise
(Have someone read this to you s…l…o…w…l…y for the full effect.)
Close your eyes.
Relax.
Now think of the most important conversation you ever had in your life.
Take your time—I’m not going to ask you what it was about.
Here’s the question. How many other people took part in your conversation?
It’s a small world
I’ve run this exercise at numerous presentations and asked the audience to share their answers via a show of hands. The most common answer is “one”, followed by 2-3, with a few people reporting small group numbers.
No one has yet reported a most important conversation with ten or more people.
Want significant connection (and effective learning) at your events? Then attendees need to spend significant time talking, interacting, and thinking in small groups. Not just at meals or socials, but in the conference sessions!
Design for content versus design for connection
We know that the two most important reasons people attend meetings are for content and connection. Every meeting includes a mixture of these. Let’s concentrate on some differences between meetings that concentrate on content (100%-content versions are called trainings) and those that concentrate on connection around content.
Content-delivery meeting economics improve with size. The income from more attendees covers the cost of the expensive keynoter. To a lesser extent, it’s often possible to get more glitz for the buck at bigger events, where those little touches for decor, food, and beverage become feasible for larger numbers of attendees.
Meetings that concentrate on connection, however, aren’t significantly cheaper per person as meeting size increases. This is because you can’t spread significant fixed costs over more attendees. In fact, to provide the same level of connection at a large meeting that’s possible at a small meeting requires sacrificing valuable face time at the event in order to get everyone into the right small groups needed for effective participation.
Participation is not everyone doing the same thing
If you believe that when a large number of people are in one place they need to all be doing the “same” thing, then you will fail to run an effective participation-rich event. Two hundred people cannot “participate” simultaneously in a traditional meeting format (though elaborate, carefully designed simulations can be valuable). The trick is to determine how to divide a large group into smaller sub-groups that can use any one of a number of tested designs to facilitate and support participative learning and connections.
For example, I designed an afternoon for a 500-attendee medical conference. For this group, we split the attendees into ten groups by medical specialty, allowing each group independently to use small group techniques to determine the topics they wanted to cover and then explore them.
Size isn’t everything
Large meetings are not going away. When there is a clear need for them, someone will capture the market by executing the demanding logistics of a large meeting better than anyone else. But we are often so stuck on a size definition of success—my 2,000-delegate conference is better than your 100-delegate conference—that we overlook the limitations and frustrations that working effectively with a large group imposes.
Unlike broadcast learning (which doesn’t work very well for adults), participative learning (which research has shown over and over again is superior) doesn’t scale. At a large conference, it’s very difficult to deliver the just-in-time learning that attendees need via the rich stew of connection generated by small group process. By carefully dividing up large groups, we can create conference environments that mirror the intimacy and effectiveness of small conferences, but it’s significant work to do this and requires facilitators who know how to do it right. A well-designed small meeting with carefully targeted attendee demographics offers a much simpler environment for supporting effective connection, interaction, and engagement. That’s one good reason to keep your meetings small!
How can we get meeting attendees to connect with one another?
Walking in Anguilla
Every morning for the last three weeks I’ve been taking a brisk 25-minute walk in Anguilla, a 35 square-mile British Overseas Territory in the Virgin Islands. Today I kept track of interactions on my walk. (Yes, I know this sounds weird but keep reading and you’ll see the point.) Here’s what happened:
——– Interaction type ——–
# passing me
Waves
Hoots
Verbal
None
Cars
14
10
3
2
On foot
1
1
Twelve of the fourteen cars that passed me waved or hooted (one driver waved and hooted). I swapped a “morning” with the one guy I passed on foot. The two cars with no interaction were driven by an Anguillian woman and a tourist.
Based on my three weeks’ experience, this is typical in Anguilla. Almost everyone says hello in one way or another. Exceptions? Well, tourists rarely interact as you pass. Most female Anguillian drivers don’t either, but they wave more frequently than tourists, about the same frequency as Caucasian locals. (You can tell an Anguillian local’s car because the license plates start with “P” for personal. Isn’t that fun?)
Friendly culture
The behavior I’ve described is built into Anguillian culture. As native Anguillian Denise Crawford says:
“Anguillians are a friendly lot. To pass someone and not greet him with a wave or a ‘good morning’ whether you know the person or not is considered ill-mannered.”
—Leaving Island Life, Denise Crawford
This makes it simple to get to know Anguillians. They will respect your privacy if you don’t want to talk, but otherwise, it’s easy to fall into conversation with them. Anguillians are brought up to be this way.
Can we “Anguillianize” conference attendees?
Although we know that conference attendees crave appropriate connection with their peers at least as much as their desire for appropriate content, most conferences do not supply an environment for easy connection. We’ve all had the experience of being thrust into a room of strangers, wondering how and with whom to strike up a conversation. If most attendees have never grown up in a culture like Anguilla’s, can we at least make it easier for attendees to connect—”Anguillianize” them?
Getting meeting attendees to connect
Though we can’t change the past cultural experience of conference attendees, we can provide an environment that supports and encourages connection. Getting meeting attendees to connect isn’t rocket science. Here are three ways to create such an environment:
Provide opportunities for attendees to connect during conference sessions
Stop hoping that attendees will meet each other during meals, mixers, and socials. That’s the old model, and you’re doing your attendees a disservice if you stick to it. The best way for attendees to connect with each other is via shared experience—and there’s no better place to provide this than the conference sessions themselves.
Use small group and pair work regularly
Attendees do not connect with each other while listening to someone talking at the front of the room. They connect when they are discussing content with one other person, or in small groups of not more than a few people. (They also learn better too; an added plus.) Providing attendees regular opportunities—every ten minutes or so—to work with their peers on a topic of mutual interest turns them into participants in their learning and creates a host of safe places for connections to occur.
Set up small group and pair work to include the exchange of contextual information
Anguillians invariably strike up conversations with tourists with the question “Firs’ timer?” The answer and how it’s communicated leads to further possible questions: why did you come, how long you’ve been coming, where you’re from, etc. We can adopt this approach as well. When designing interactive small group and pair work in conference sessions, incorporate reasons for participants to share appropriately about themselves in the context of the discussion. For example, instead of simply asking participants which course of action they would choose in a given situation, have them share the relevant past experience that leads them to make that choice.
Lessons from Anguilla
I’ve been vacationing in Anguilla for the last twelve years and always seem to learn something during my time on this delightful island. Here are some other Lessons from Anguilla.
Photo attribution: “The site formerly known as Bob Green’s Anguilla News”
Sitting on the chartered hotel bus on the first day of the conference, I noticed something. I was presenting at EIBTM: a huge hosted buyer tradeshow, held in Barcelona every year with the principal purpose of acting as a matchmaking service between venues and meeting planners. At EIBTM, making connections is why people come, spending hundreds of millions of dollars and over a thousand person-years in the process.
The bus was full of event industry professionals. Yet hardly anyone on my bus was talking to anyone else.
When I got on the bus, I sat next to a woman about my age and said good morning. From the tone of her reply, she was clearly not interested in talking to me. As the bus crawled through morning traffic, I thought about the opportunity I was squandering. And I seriously considered inviting everyone to introduce themselves to their seatmates.
<stands up>
“Good morning everyone! I’m Adrian Segar. I’d like to invite all of you to introduce yourselves to the person sitting in the seat next to you. And the people sitting across the aisle too, if you like.”
<sits down>
I would have been just a crazy American doing something a little weird—something that doesn’t bother me much these days.
I was tempted to do this.
But I didn’t.
Can we talk?
We are often victims of our social conventions. Sure, some of the people on the bus, including my seatmate, may well have had good reasons for not wanting to chat. And, yes, most of us don’t want every stranger who sits next to us on our travels to engage us in conversation. But we were not on public transport. Every person on my bus that day was being paid, one way or another, to meet with each other. Yet here we were, sitting together and ignoring our neighbors.
I bet that if I had bobbed up that morning and given my little speech, many of the people on the bus would have grinned sheepishly and introduced themselves to their neighbors—and some of them would have discovered they had things of value to share. Perhaps people would have exchanged business cards; perhaps they’d schedule follow-up meetings.
Environment affects behavior
Interestingly, at the trade show itself, people acted differently. Empty seating was hard to find during the hosted buyer meals and I had to share tables with strangers. Each time, everyone introduced themselves right away and exchanged interesting information and business cards. Same people, different behavior!
Give people permission to connect
We are all social animals under the right circumstances. Given the increasing importance of incorporating participation and connection into conferences, we must get better at giving people ways to connect that make it more comfortable to meet and engage new peers. Just being a good host—explicitly giving people the opportunity and permission to introduce themselves to each other is often all that’s needed. This may seem hokey, but it’s effective. I’m sure you can think of occasions where a small ritual like this would have made it easier for you to meet people.
Giving ourselves permission to act
I’m sorry I didn’t perform my little introduction that day. If I’m at EIBTM again under similar circumstances, I’m going to do it. (I’ll let you know what happens.) And if you find yourself in a situation where you’re able to host connection, take a deep breath, Say Yes, and do it! I think you’ll like the results–and some of the people you invite to connect will too.
Photo attribution: Flickr user seattlemunicipalarchives
Sometimes you meet someone again, perhaps someone you haven’t seen for a long time, and you connect through the eyes and you both know, in that moment, the love you have for each other. The love may be buried deep in one of you. Hidden under hard, seemingly impenetrable layers that have built up over the years. The moment is only a flicker and it’s gone—buried again. But in that moment you know.
There’s been a lot of interest in The Solution Room, a session that I co-facilitated last July at Meeting Professionals International World Education Congress in Orlando, Florida. It is one of the most popular sessions I’ve facilitated at conferences this year. So here’s some information about the session…oh, and don’t miss the two-minute video of participant testimonials at the end of this post!
A facilitator trained in running The Solution Room.
Enough round tables seating 6-8 people for every participant to have a seat.
Flip chart paper that completely covers the tables, a plenty of colored markers at each table
Sufficient clear space in the room to hold a one-dimensional human spectrogram for all participants
Brief description
The Solution Room is a powerful conference session, which not only engages and connects attendees but also provides peer-supported advice on their most pressing problems. It typically lasts between 90-120 minutes and can handle hundreds of participants. A session of 20 or more people starts with a short introduction followed by a human spectrogram that demonstrates the amount of experience available in the room. Participants are then given some time to think of a challenge for which they would like to receive peer advice. A second human spectrogram then maps participants’ comfort levels.
Next, the facilitator divides participants into small groups of 6-8 people. Each group shares a round table covered with flip chart paper and plenty of colored markers. The group members individually mindmap their problem on the paper in front of them. Each participant then gets a fixed time to explain their challenge to their table peers and receive advice and support.
Finally, there’s a public group evaluation. Two human spectrograms map the shift in comfort level of all the participants and the likelihood that participants will try to change what they’ve just shared.
A two-minute video of testimonials from my Solution Room session at the 2011 Meeting Professionals International World Education Conference in Orlando, Florida
There are many reasons why you should hold multi-day events.
I have held a number of one-day conferences. One (very full!) day is the minimum time needed to process the essential components of a peer conference: the roundtable, some peer sessions, and a minimal spective. Frankly it’s a rush to complete even these basics in a day. —Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love, Adrian Segar
Occasionally, I’m asked to design one-day peer conferences. When I ask why the event can only be a day long, I hear answers like these:
“Our members are very busy and can’t take more than a day off.”
“Then we’d have to arrange for somewhere for people to stay overnight.”
“Our conference has always been a single day.”
“It’s too expensive to make it longer.”
“Our venue only serves lunch.”
Here are six reasons why you should overcome these objections and make your conferences longer than a single day.
Making connections takes time
Research has shown that people attend conferences for two principal reasons of roughly equal importance: educational opportunities and networking. (Note: I believe networking is becoming more important.) Networking—making connections with people and building relationships with them—takes time. At a one-day event full of traditional presentation sessions, typically, the only opportunities for people to meet each other are during lunch and a couple of short refreshment breaks. That’s very little time to network. Adding the dinner, evening social, and breakfast of a single overnight doubles, at a minimum, the time for connection available at a one-day event.
Getting there
A non-local attendee incurs fixed time and travel costs to get to and return from an event, irrespective of its duration. If your conference’s value to participants increases with its duration—if not, why are you making it longer? —amortizing these fixed costs over a longer event reduces the hourly expense of attending.
Attendees who eat together bond together
Academics may argue as to whether the reasons are biological, cultural, or both, but few would disagree that people bond over communal meals. A one-day conference provides a single lunch plus, usually, two refreshment breaks. Add just an extra half day and we get three refreshment breaks, perhaps an evening social with munchies, dinner, breakfast, and lunch. That’s a big difference!
Something magical happens overnight
In my experience, overnights during a conference facilitate the processing of experiences from the previous day’s events. This is especially important at the start of a peer conference, where the first half day exposes attendees to a large variety of ideas and resources. But the effect is useful at any event. Although we all appreciate the time to consciously process our experience, there’s growing evidence that short-term memories are turned into lasting long-term memories during sleep. I find that the rapid torrent of information shared during the first day of a conference seems to acquire shape and form in my mind overnight—the next morning brings clarity to the dominant themes and interests shared by the participants.
The above multi-day rationales apply to any conference. The following apply to peer conferences.
Reserving enough time for content
The standard Conferences That Work design employs four sessions that wrap around its content heart. For a fifty-person one-day event, a roundtable, peer session sign-up, personal introspective, and group spective consume more than four hours of traditional session time, leaving little time for the peer sessions. This has two consequences. The first is that a one-day peer conference has to drop the personal introspective. The second is that I won’t run a one-day peer conference anymore, and recommend that you don’t either.
The minimum time I now recommend for a peer conference is a day and a half. Even at this length, there really isn’t sufficient time to add a traditional session like a keynote. But participants consistently report that it’s long enough to provide excellent connection and community-building time, as well as four sets of peer sessions tuned to their needs.
Peer session preparation
Many first-time participants are surprised by how well the vast majority of peer sessions are led and/or facilitated when there’s such a short time between the choice of a peer conference session topic and the resulting session. And the volunteer leaders/facilitators themselves are surprised and empowered by how well they fulfill their role, despite sometimes worrying beforehand whether they will do a good job knowing the limited time available to prepare. Even so, a longer conference gives leaders more time to think about their sessions, consult with other peers, and prepare.
What other roadblocks have you experienced when promoting longer events? What other reasons do you suggest for holding them?
When I was living in England in the 1960s, finding a telephone number was cumbersome. Five huge telephone books, each requiring both hands to lift, sat in a cupboard in our hallway, with millions of alphabetized names and associated numbers in microscopic print. The books quickly became out of date and were updated sporadically. And, if you didn’t know the exact spelling, or had only an address, you were out of luck.
Books were a key way to obtain information. Wealthy families (not mine) purchased the Encyclopedia Britannica and proudly displayed the 24+ volumes on sturdy bookshelves. The local free library was a key resource. For current information, I could watch three TV channels and read several rather good print newspapers. For specialized information, I subscribed to, or read in the library, a bewildering variety of magazines and journals.
And, of course, I talked to people. My parents, my teachers, my friends, and, later, my professional colleagues were all valuable resources. I found my friends through face-to-face social events or through my work. Finally, if I needed to know more about a subject of interest, I would attend a conference and listen to papers delivered by experts in the field.
How I find information today
The rise of online has changed everything. I don’t remember the last time I consulted a paper telephone directory. Ten years ago I checked eBay to see if an Encyclopedia Britannica set was worth anything. Reluctantly, I ended up recycling the books, because no one wanted to buy them. Today, apart from a local paper and a few paper magazine subscriptions, online is where I find telephone numbers, email or physical addresses, and information on just about any subject that, in quantity and mostly quality, dwarfs the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
People are still a major resource for me, but the primary way that I first meet new people professionally these days is online, via a variety of social media, rather than an initial face-to-face encounter.
And, of course, these days I am a creator of conferences rather than a passive consumer of them. For me, a good conference is one where I can interact, connect, share, and learn with others, and can influence what happens at the event in a way that is useful and meaningful to me.
How the bountiful availability of online content changes events
Today there is amazing one-way content on the web. The internet is where we go for information about people, places, facts, processes, techniques, and solutions to problems. Our resources have migrated from cumbersome books and broadcast media to browsable indexed data servers in the internet cloud.
For face-to-face attendees, this makes vanilla delivery of content at events far less compelling.
In the future, people are not going to travel to your event to listen to a speaker they could watch streamed live, or as a recording at a time and place of their choosing. Providing a ten-minute opportunity for questions at the end of a presentation isn’t going to cut it either. Viewing one-way content over the internet is cheaper and more convenient for attendees. If broadcast content is mostly what you have to offer people will gravitate to obtaining it online; either from you or a competitor.
As a result, traditional events concentrating on the transfer of predetermined content from experts to a local audience are dying. I don’t know how long it will be before rigor mortis sets in. Perhaps some events will remain viable as training opportunities for novices, or as vehicles for CEUs to be awarded or certifications to be maintained. Over time, however, the majority of professionals who care about their profession and the best use of their time will stop going to face-to-face events that don’t incorporate significant opportunities for connection, peer-to-peer sharing, and participant-driven sessions. And, no, a lunch and an evening social or two aren’t going to be enough anymore. Instead, you need to put opportunities for connection front and center of your events, because connection around content is becoming the most important reason that people attend face-to-face events.
Why you should care
Since my first book on participant-driven conferences was published, I have been amazed and delighted by the flood of interest from meeting professionals, peer communities, and business & association leaders. And I’ve also been disturbed. A common story I hear is of long-running conferences in trouble: conferences where attendance, evaluations, and consequent income are falling. The organizers who are contacting me have realized that the traditional conferences-as-usual models are not working like they used to. Attendees are starting to defect or ask for something different. I’ve heard this story from professionals in many different fields.
In my opinion, it’s only a matter of time before the importance of the shift in emphasis away from content towards connection at face-to-face events becomes apparent and generally accepted by the events community. As usual with industry trends, the people who recognize and respond well to them early will be the beneficiaries. Those who continue doing things the old way will lose out. If you’re not currently investigating ways to restructure your events to significantly increase attendee connections and participation, I recommend you start.
Do you see a trend of increased attendee dissatisfaction at traditional events? If so, why do you think it’s happening, and what are you doing about it?
Recently I wrote about my joy in the simple moments of connection that take place during my morning walks in Anguilla. Why do moments like this bring us joy? And how can we maximize social connection?
