The myth of control
The myth of control.
Misconception 7: Conflict is bad…The reality is that whenever you have more than one living person in a room, you’ll have more than one set of interests, and that’s not a bad thing.
—The Change Handbook by Peggy Holman, Tom Devane, and Steven Cady
Why do we cling to traditional event structure?
One powerful reason is that we want to avoid dealing with messy differences of opinion. When we give attendees the power to choose what happens at our conferences, people will disagree. And when people disagree, there’s the possibility of controversy and conflict. Who’d want that at their event?
Perhaps you believe learning is some kind of linear process that happens painlessly. That’s certainly the paradigm we’re fed in school. Even though most of us struggle to learn there, the underlying message is usually “If you were smart enough, this would be easy”.
If you do believe conference learning should be painless, I ask you this. Think about the most important things you’ve learned in your life. How many of them came to you without disagreement, pain, or conflict? And how many of them did you learn while sitting in a room listening to someone talk for an hour?
Do you want your conferences to maximize learning, even at the cost of some disagreement or discomfort? Or would you rather settle for a safe second best?
Conference conveners are scared about not having control of our lives and our events. That’s why they lock down conferences, forcing their essence into tightly choreographed sessions. Attendees are carefully restricted to choosing, at most, which concurrent session room they’ll sit in.
The myth of control
The reality is that you never had control to begin with, just the myth of control. You’ve been kidding yourself all these years. Unless your constituency is bound to your event via a requirement to earn CEUs, members can withhold their attendance or avoid sessions at will.
Fortunately, there are multiple ways to give up the unnecessary control exercised at traditional conferences and give attendees the freedom and responsibility to make the event theirs. All participant-driven event formats like Open Space, Conferences That Work, and Future Search treat attendees like intelligent adults.
What’s amazing to discover is how liberating these event designs are for conference organizers too. When we give up over-control, we become largely freed of the responsibility to choose the content, format, and instigators of our conference sessions, concentrating instead on supervisory, facilitation, and support roles. Yes, the result is an event that is less predictable, and often more challenging. But the richer experience, the creation of an event that reflects what participants truly need and want, and the joy of uncovered valuable, unexpected, appropriate learning make it all worthwhile for everyone involved.
