“I am crazy but I’m not alone.” —participant evaluation comment
Someone wrote “I am crazy but I’m not alone” on the paper evaluation form for the first edACCESS peer conference in 1992. The next year we printed it on a banner above the entryway to the event, and it’s been edACCESS’s official motto ever since.
There’s more behind this simple phrase than meets the eye.
Everybody’s weird
We live in a culture that simultaneously values “being normal” while often glorifying those who are different. A long time ago, I concluded that this dissonance is reduced when you realize that, in reality, everybody’s weird in one way or another. Yes: you’re weird, I’m weird, everybody’s weird! (Don’t believe me? Introduce me to anyone I can communicate with, and I bet I can find something about them in five minutes or less that most people would think of as weird.)
When a group of people with something in common come together to share and learn, peer conferences like edACCESS allow people to discover that things that have been driving them crazy have been driving their peers crazy too. The relief of being in an environment where it’s safe to share what you thought was your craziness alone, and discovering that you’re not alone is immense!
And that leads to my preferred variant of this powerful motto.
I’m not crazy and I’m not alone!
How many times have you thought “This issue is important to me, but no one else seems to feel the same way.” or “Am I the only person who’s having trouble with this?” Perhaps you feel stupid, or out of touch with others, i.e. alone?
When you discover that challenges you thought were unique to you are actually shared and validated by peers, you realize “I’m not crazy! Here is a community that is having similar experiences to me! I’m not alone!”
The beauty of “I’m not crazy” is that it redefines your very-real weirdness as normal, because everybody’s weird. This frees you up to work on being who you are, rather than focussing negatively on what makes you different.
Good things come in threes. Though I usually overlook anniversaries, I noticed one this morning. The first peer conference I convened and designed was held June 3 – 5, 1992 at Marlboro College, Vermont. So, as of today, the community of practice that eventually became edACCESS has enjoyed 27 years of peer conferences. [That’s 3 x 3 x 3. I told you good things come in threes.]
Twenty-three people came to the inaugural conference. At the time, I had no idea that what I instinctively put together for a gathering of people who barely knew each other would lead to:
a global design and facilitation consulting practice;
over 500 posts on this blog, which has now become, to the best of my knowledge, the most-visited website on meeting design and facilitation;
three books (almost!) on participant-driven, participation-rich meeting design; and
plentiful ongoing opportunities to fulfill my mission to facilitate connection between people.
However, none of this happened overnight. For many years, designing and facilitating meetings was a vocation rather than a profession, usually unpaid. Furthermore, it was an infrequent adjunct to my “real” jobs at the time: information technology consulting, and teaching computer science.
27 years of peer conferences. From little acorns, mighty oaks. I would never have predicted the path I’ve traveled — and continue to look forward to the journey yet to come. Above all, thank you everyone who has made it possible. I can’t adequately express the gratitude you are due.
In June 2016 I stepped down as President and Executive Director of edACCESS, an association I co-founded 25 years ago. This was the third time I’ve left an association leadership position. Here are some valuable lessons learned from these association leadership transitions.
The Solar Association of Vermont
Although the rapid growth of the solar energy industry may appear to be a recent phenomenon, North American boomers will remember the late 70s and early 80s when the 1979 “oil crisis” hit and interest in alternative energy generation soared. I moved to Vermont in 1978 and joined the management of a fledging solar hot water manufacturing business. After a couple of years, I helped to found the Solar Association of Southern Vermont. Eventually, we became the Solar Association of Vermont (SAVE!) We’d hold monthly meetings in the tiny rural town of Brattleboro and sixty people would show up. SAVE went on to produce many of the earliest alternative energy conferences in the United States.
But in the 80s Reagan was elected. He removed the solar collectors that a colleague of mine had installed on the White House. By the mid-80’s oil prices had returned to pre-crisis levels. Interest in solar energy dried up and SAVE meeting attendance shrank to a few people.
What did we do?
We shut SAVE down.
We held a big end-of-the-association party, inviting everyone who had been part of this brief flowering of community interest. Little did we know that our work would set the stage for the meteoric rise of solar photovoltaic systems today.
Lessons
As time passes, the key motivations for an association’s existence can transmute, or even disappear. I’ve worked with hundreds of associations, and seen some continue to struggle on long after their mission has become irrelevant. Check regularly that your association’s mission remains congruent with its circumstances. If not, change your mission or your operations to stay relevant. Or, if necessary, close up shop (not forgetting to celebrate all your good work if you do!)
A local association
After a number of years serving as a board member of a local chapter of a national association, the board offered me the presidency. The national was recommending that chapters fundamentally change the way they operated, a change I agreed with. I told the board that I would happily accept the presidency if we allocated the resources needed to make this transformation happen, arguing that the change would improve our financial resources by allowing us to significantly increase our community fundraising.
Unfortunately, the board refused to allocate the resources I requested.
Consequently, I reluctantly turned down the presidency and left the board, as I did not want to lead an association whose board did not support the vision I had for its future.
Looking back on the subsequent evolution of the association, I don’t regret my decision, though I wish I’d been better able to convince the board that my approach was a better alternative to staying with the status quo.
Lessons
Before taking an association leadership role, share your vision for the future and make sure the rest of the association buys into it. If they don’t, don’t take the job!
edACCESS
In 1991 I co-founded edACCESS, a 501(c)6 that supports information technology staff at small schools. Initially, I had a professional interest in the organization’s mission for many years and served for free. As my consulting focus shifted increasingly towards meeting design, I moved into a paid part-time executive director role.
In May, 2016, I decided to give up the position, with the goal of making the handover to new leadership as smooth as possible. I announced my intent at the June annual conference and offered to stay for a year in a supervisory role, coaching new leadership as needed.
The existing leadership handled my announcement very well. I told them I would provide any desired assistance and advice around leadership changes, but felt it was important not to be intimately involved in ongoing decisions. I was gratified by the response, which to me reflects the fundamental health of the association I helped to create.
The transition went well. The full year’s notice allowed me to take new and existing leadership through an entire life cycle of the core association process. The association stayed in good shape after I left.
Lessons
I have seen (and experienced) a number of associations that were severely stressed by the sudden departure of leadership and the total lack of any leadership succession planning. To be honest, edACCESS is small enough that we did not have a formal plan in place. I am glad I have the flexibility to offer what will hopefully be sufficient time and support to allow the association to continue effectively carrying out its mission. Don’t assume that key association staff or board members, will stay with the organization forever, or give you ample warning before they depart! Pre-emergency planning for leadership, staffing, and succession will minimize the turmoil that can be generated without warning when key personnel leave unexpectedly.
Association leadership transitions
Have you made association leadership transitions? What lessons have you learned that others may value? Share in the comments!
“There was a frankness you’re not going to get anywhere else.”
“What a unique opportunity!”
“That was eye-opening.”
“We got a one-time look behind the curtain.”
“That was an incredible session.”
“I’m so grateful that session was available.”
Those were some of the comments I heard while waiting outside the door of Room 102 as attendees streamed out after the first peer session at the 21st edACCESS annual conference held at the Peddie School, Hightstown, New Jersey. Sadly, I’ll never know what I missed—and neither will you unless you were there.
“When I think of how meetings are marketed, I never see anything, at least for our industry, that tugs at heartstrings. That’s where many of us connect. Imagine if say there were words and visuals of founders of organizations who were still active in some way…it just seems we forget.” —Joan Eisenstodt, from a March 6, 2011 comment on Facebook
In 2003, at a conference I was facilitating, I noticed a couple of participants wandering around with a camcorder. (This was a somewhat novel occurrence at the time; inexpensive camcorders were just appearing.) They were shooting footage of conference events and seemed to be interviewing people. No one had asked them to do this, and I assumed they were videoing for their own purposes. This was fine by me, and, in the usual press of conference process, I forgot about what they were doing.
Six months later, out of the blue, I received this:
Watching, I had one of those rare but so special conference choked-up moments. Without asking anyone, Tom Flanagan and Whitney Donnelly decided to make a movie about our conference and offered it to us for promotional purposes. When conference attendees do something like this unsolicited, you know there’s something good going on.
Today, it’s easy to make such movies. But we haven’t made any more. The video is still available for viewing on the edACCESS home page. Nothing out of the ordinary by today’s standards, it remains as a reminder of something very special made by Whitney & Tom because their heartstrings were tugged back in 2003.
Do you create events that tug at heartstrings? If so, you should feel proud. I know I do.
I’ve written about my skepticism of attempts to crowdsource session topics before a conference. After running edACCESS 2010 last month, I realized I could analyze the success of our pre-conference crowdsourcing. So here is a real-life comparison of pre-conference and at-conference crowdsourcing.
A few of the topic suggestions at edACCESS 2010
Conference details
edACCESS is a four-day conference for information technology staff at small independent schools that has been held every year since 1992. In 2010 there were 47 attendees, 9 of whom had not attended before. The conference uses the Conferences That Work event design.
Before the conference, we solicited suggestions for session topics via messages to the edACCESS listserv and email to registrants. Ideas could be posted on the edACCESS wiki, which requires registration. Some of the new attendees did not register on the wiki before the conference, but all returning attendees were registered (since most of each year’s conference content and discussion is posted there.)
Seven attendees (15%) posted a total of fourteen topic suggestions to the wiki before the conference.
In contrast, during the conference roundtable, 147 topics were suggested, an average of over three per participant.
The schedule for edACCESS 2010 included a vendor exhibit, two predetermined sessions (an attendee-created Demo Showcase and a Web 2.0 Demo Tools Workshop), and nine one-hour time slots for peer sessions with topics crowdsourced through the Conferences That Workpeer session sign-up process, for which 78 topics were suggested.
We had space to run four simultaneous sessions in each of the nine time slots and ended up scheduling the 33 most popular (and feasible) of the 78 suggestions.
Findings
Of the 14 topics suggested prior to the conference, only 5 ended up being chosen for sessions by attendees at the event. So only 15% of the 33 actual conference sessions were predicted by attendees in advance of the event.
Of the 147 topics suggested during the conference roundtable, 26 were subsequently chosen for sessions. That’s 80% of the final sessions. Interestingly, seven of the final session topics were not mentioned in the roundtable notes. It’s quite common for participants to think of new topics after the roundtable is over. Once seen by other attendees, some of these ideas turn into desirable sessions.
Conclusions
It’s hard to know how to improve on our process of soliciting session ideas before the conference, short of forcing attendees to make suggestions during registration—something that would not go over well with the typical edACCESS attendee. In my experience, the above analysis is pretty typical for peer conferences I run. Having session topics and formats that fit participants’ needs is vital for the success of any conference. Given the poor showing for pre-conference topic crowdsourcing, (and, by extension, efforts of a conference’s program committee) I feel that having attendees brainstorm and then propose topics at the start of the event, as is done at Conferences That Work, is well worth the work involved.
I hope this comparison of pre-conference and at-conference crowdsourcing is informative. Do you think we should even be trying to crowdsource topics for a conference? Are you still skeptical of the utility of crowdsourcing topics at the beginning of a conference? What would you do to improve the success of crowdsourcing sessions before an event?
Interested in an innovative participatory conference session alternative to talk-at-the-audience formats? Then you’ll want to learn about a brilliant session format we used at the edACCESS 2010 Web 2.0 Collaborative Tools Workshop.
I’ve been running peer conferences for edACCESS, an association of information technology staff at small independent schools, since 1992. We just wrapped up our 19th annual conference, held this year at Williston Northampton School in Easthampton, Massachusetts. The four-day conference did not include a single traditional didactic session. We only scheduled two sessions in advance: a Demo Session in which attendees, scattered around the exhibit area, gave short presentations on cool technology and applications used at their school, and the case study described below. We crowdsourced all other topics and formats (33 in all!), using the Conferences That Work methodology, during the first few hours of the conference.
Before the conference
Joel Backon of Choate Rosemary School designed and facilitated the Web 2.0 Collaborative Tools Workshop session, with input from Bill Campbell and a dose of “inspiration from reading Adrian’s book“. Before the conference, Joel described some of his thoughts in an email to me:
“I will provide structure, but I don’t want to be too prescriptive or we won’t learn anything. For example, if there is disagreement about which tools will be best to use for the project, that is a message everybody should know about Web 2.0 tools. There are so many, it is difficult to obtain agreement regarding which to use, and that impacts the productivity of organizations. At this point, I’m looking for feedback because I am clearly taking a risk.”
I told Joel that I loved the idea of using a case study format for the session. I suggested he add a little more detail (about the IT operations at the school) to his case study. Here are the final case study materials that attendees received. We posted them on the conference wiki several days before the session took place. You may want to check out the link before reading further.
Setting the stage
As we listened in the school theater, Joel spent ten minutes introducing the case study materials. He gave us a list of tools, including a blog already set up on Cover It Live, projected on a large screen. Joel told us we had to collaboratively create a one-page report of recommendations on how to cut a (fictitious) $1,000,000 school information technology annual budget by 50%.
Oh, and we couldn’t talk to each other face-to-face! We could only communicate online.
Normally, a project of this type would take an experienced IT staff days to complete, requiring extensive discussion of every facet of the organization’s infrastructure, personnel, services, and budget.
Oh, and we had ninety minutes! In that time, we had to:
choose appropriate collaborative online tools;
divide up the work;
discuss options;
make decisions and recommendations;
and write the report.
Finally, Joel explained, after the exercise was complete, we’d have half an hour to debrief using good old-fashioned talking to one another, face-to-face.
My experience
Some participants had traveled thousands of miles to edACCESS 2010. Now here we were, sitting in a theater auditorium, silently working at our computers.
During the first twenty minutes of the session, I was highly skeptical that we would be able to accomplish anything meaningful. (In the debrief, it turned out that most people had had the same expectation.) To see what transpired you may want to check out the complete blog conversation transcript, which provides moment-by-moment documentation of our online conversation. Notice that tweets that included the conference hashtag, #edaccess10, were merged in real-time into the transcript.
At around 8:50 a.m., the group started to get organized. Communicating through the blog, people started to suggest online tools to work on specific projects. The tools mentioned were Google products: Wave, and Docs. Our sophisticated attendees knew that Google had upgraded Docs in April to support simultaneous editing by multiple (up to 50) users and they even knew that you had to choose the “new version” on the Editing Settings tab.
Up to this point, I had not been working on the project but was monitoring the blog conversation as a process observer. I asked to receive an invitation to the Google Wave, but a link never came. Eventually, I found out that only a few attendees had adopted the Wave.
Google Docs is adopted
But when I clicked on the link for a Google Docs spreadsheet that had been set up I was astounded. (Check it out!) Attendees had created a multitab spreadsheet with a summary page that showed the current savings in different budget areas that people were working on linked to separate detailed tabs for each area. I felt amazed at the work we had done. I immediately added a small contribution of my own—a column showing the percentage budget savings so we could tell when we’d reached our 50% goal. People used free cells to annotate their suggestions and decisions.
Bill Campbell, who was moderating the blog, used Cover It Live’s instant poll so we could discover the tools we were using. The poll showed that most of us were working on the spreadsheet.
Thirty minutes before the end of the exercise, I suggested someone set up a Google Doc for the report. (I didn’t know how to do this myself.) Within a few minutes someone created a report and people started writing. I added a starting introductory paragraph and corrected a few typos. It was truly remarkable to see the report evolve keystroke by keystroke in real time, being written by a ghostly crew of 30-40 people.
With fifteen minutes to go, it became clear we could reach the 50% reduction goal. The report would be ready on time! The release of tension led to an outbreak of silliness (starting around 10:00 a.m. in the blog transcript) to which I must confess I contributed.
So what did we learn? Here are some of my thoughts. Feel free to add your own as a comment at the end of this post.
First of all, everyone was surprised by how successful our effort had been. I think all of us underestimated the advantages of working together online, where multiple channels of communication and collaboration can coexist simultaneously. This is so different from meeting face to face, where, in general, at any moment one person is monopolizing the conversation. I am pretty sure that if we had done the same exercise face to face, we would not have come up with such a high-quality solution!
I think the case study worked well because we trusted each other. The group members knew each other to varying degrees. We were prepared to accept individual judgments about self-selected areas where each of us chose to work. The exercise would not have gone well if we had been concerned about the abilities of some of the participants.
One interesting observation is that we were working collaboratively on publicly accessible documents. As a result, we don’t actually know how many people contributed to our work. (Or even if they were all at edACCESS 2010!) This made it very easy to add new workers. Anyone who had the link to a document could start editing it right away. A private workspace would have required some kind of registration process, which would have encumbered our ad hoc efforts.
One weakness in our approach is the lack of any formal checking mechanism for the report we generated. A few people went over the report during the last ten minutes and commented that it “looked good”. But if one of us had made a serious mistake there’s a good chance it would have been missed. This exercise was akin to what happens when a group of people responds to an emergency. Everyone does the best they can and is grateful for the contributions of others.
It surprised me that no obvious leaders emerged, although several people (including me) made group-directed suggestions that seemed to have been accepted and acted on.
A number of people commented early on that they couldn’t use their iPads effectively for the exercise. We needed multiple windows open to be able to work efficiently, and the Cover It Live transcript wouldn’t scroll in Safari on the iPad (though there appears to be a work-around).
Conclusion
It’s hard for me to think of a more innovative participatory conference session format. For two hours we were spellbound, working and playing hard on our laptops, and then excitedly discussing and debriefing. I wager that all the participants at the edACCESS 2010 Web 2.0 Collaborative Tools Workshop will remember this experience and their associated learning for a long time.
What other lessons can we learn from this experiment? Are there ways we could improve this participatory conference session?
Good things come in 
In June 2016 I stepped down as President and Executive Director of 
