Event design Archives : Page 2 of 4 : Conferences That Work

What’s most important about an event, the gift or the wrapping?

Monday, July 23rd, 2018 by Adrian Segar

What’s most important about an event?

While writing about seeing the gifts in people and events I remembered one of my favorite scenes in Love Actually (2003). With his wife shopping nearby, Harry (Alan Rickman) impulsively purchases an expensive necklace for his mistress — only to be tortured by the fear of discovery as Rufus (Rowan Atkinson) slowly wraps his gift.

Watch the 2-minute video clip.

Discussing this amusing scene, my wife pointed out that the two components of a present, a gift and a wrapping, suggest a metaphor for an event. The gift symbolizes the purpose of the event — the connections made, the learning that takes place, and the consequent outcomes. Similarly, the wrapping equates to the event’s logistical necessities and sensory glitz (people need to eat and drink, have somewhere to stay, and enjoy entertainment).

The answer to “What’s most important about a present, the gift or the wrapping?” is easy. A beautifully wrapped empty box is, at best, a joke, at worst, an insult. A naked gift, shorn of all wrapping, is still a present.

A beautiful box of chocolates

And yet, all too often, we attend events that are like beautiful yet ultimately disappointing boxes of chocolates. The wrapping is gorgeous. Our excitement mounts as we open the box, only to discover that the chocolates are missing, sparse, or stale.

Without a useful, meaningful, and successfully implemented purpose, the most beautiful event is a hollow shell. A stunning wrapping that contains no valuable core. Attendees can be sumptuously fed and entertained, but if the event’s purpose remains missing, obscured, or unsuccessfully delivered, then, as Shakespeare said, the event becomes something “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

No budget for meeting design

As an event designer, I frequently hear that there’s “no budget” for meeting process design. Design that would make an event fundamentally better by significantly improving the realization of its purpose. Curiously, there always seems to be enough money budgeted for meeting logistics: the nice venue, F&B, fancy decor and AV, and the seemingly obligatory entertainment and big-name speaker(s). That’s sad, because competent meeting process design costs far less than any of these traditional logistical components.

When we design and implement an event, its purpose must remain at the center of our attention, energy, and budget. Focusing on the wrapping at the expense of the gift makes an event a tragic waste of everyone’s time.

Tags: budget, decor, Event design, event logistics, gift, present, purpose, wrapping| Posted in Event design | 2 Comments »

How to help meeting design clients figure out what they really want and need

Monday, July 2nd, 2018 by Adrian Segar

Here’s a powerful way to help meeting design clients figure out what they really want and need.

Great — a client who doesn’t know what they want!

Recently, a client asked for help designing a new conference. Thirty minutes of discussion with three stakeholders revealed they hadn’t yet settled on the event’s specific purpose, scope, and format.

From my perspective, this is actually a great problem to have.

Why? Because most clients engage me after they are committed to programs and logistics that are not optimum for what they’re trying to accomplish!

The needs assessment trap

Conference design clients who “know what they want” have already decided on their “why?” and “who?“, have often fixed their “when?” and “where?“, and typically bring me in to consult at the “how?” stage. I understand their perspective because I also feel the temptation to pin down specifics — number of participants, duration, venue, budget, etc. I hope that in the process the event’s purpose and desired outcomes will become clearer.

It’s true that focusing on these details can help uncover what the client wants, and whether it’s realistic. {“Hmm, I think we’d need a lot more than $10K to bring together 200 scientists to plan how to eradicate malaria in Southern Africa.“} But this is a roundabout way of avoiding the all-important question that is rarely fully and productively explored:

“What is the meeting for?”

How to explore what meeting design clients want and need

As a designer, when you have the opportunity to work with clients on the “why?” and “who?” questions, you receive a gift: the possibility of creating an event that truly meets their wants and needs.

So how can we help meeting design clients figure out what they really want and need?

I doubt there’s a definitive process, but I’ve had great success with the following approach, adapted from Eric de Groot’s and Mike van der Vijher’s excellent book Into the Heart of Meetings.

Rather than talking with clients about what they want and need, I ask them to visualize and draw it.

First, I ask each individual stakeholder to observe a picture that comes to mind when I ask them what the meeting is for. I encourage them not to censor what first comes up, and give them a little time to embroider and notice details. No discussion takes place.

Then I point out that an effective meeting changes something. {“If you go to a meeting and nothing important changes for you, it probably wasn’t worth attending, right?”} I ask each person to visualize the meeting as something concrete, and then visualize how that thing is changed by the meeting.

While this is going on, I lay out large sheets of flip chart paper and plenty of fine tip color Sharpies, spread around the room so no one will worry about other people watching them draw. After checking everyone has something in mind, and reassuring them that the quality of their drawing is totally unimportant, I ask my clients to simultaneously draw what they have visualized.

I give people the time they need to make their drawings.

Once drawings are complete, we explore each drawing together, one at a time.

Part of the beauty of this work is that the resulting drawings are somewhat self-explanatory, so I will simply share here the three drawings my clients made, with a brief summary of our subsequent interpretation and discussion.

Stakeholder A

This stakeholder saw the conference as a place for defining a vision for future work. She envisioned professionals and volunteers from various relevant constituencies (health, disability, housing, transportation, etc.) attending without ego, supporting self-advocacy, and creating “a yellow brick road” participants could then walk on to eventually get to Kansas (the home destination).

Stakeholder B

This stakeholder saw the conference as a plate of tasty foods mixed into a plate of spaghetti — a nourishing meal for attendees who would then use the resulting connections and relevant combinations of important ingredients to work on specific projects.

Stakeholder C

Stakeholder C saw the conference as a sky of “tricky clouds” that bumped into each other and created new combinations, via regrouping and exchange, of weather conditions that fell like rain to a lake of subsequent experiments and further sharing.

Observations from this exercise

The drawings are vague. This accurately reflects the still-forming perspectives that the three stakeholders were forming during our first meeting. Should this be a local/regional/multi-state conference? We don’t know yet — and that’s OK.
All three stakeholder’s visions were consistent, with many common themes. This is a good sign that further event design development will be relatively harmonious. Often, this is not the case. The drawing process provides an effective and gentle way of uncovering important differences between stakeholders at an early stage. Then they can be recognized, acknowledged, and faced honestly.
Some of the conference stakeholders could not be at the meeting. The drawings provided useful and concise summaries to the absentees.

General process observations

Here’s what happens when I facilitate this exercise for clients:

Stakeholders’ visualizations surprise and please them.
Exploring the drawings together quickly yields additional insights and creative ideas that were not obvious at first sight.
One of the best features of this approach is that the stakeholders create/uncover the vision for the event themselves. They own their vision, rather than having one imposed on them from the outside. The meeting designer’s role, then, is to help interpret and guide what is uncovered and help turn it into a specific meeting design that is faithful to the stakeholder collective vision.

Conclusion

This is one approach to help meeting design clients figure out what they really want and need. Taking the time to do event visualization is only one part of a comprehensive design process. However, it includes early exploratory and creative work that, to the best of my knowledge, meeting planner education and textbooks ignore. Doing this work before an event design becomes limited by unconscious assumptions and/or logistical decisions pays rich dividends. If you use this or a similar process to explore early event design, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below!

Tags: Eric de Groot, Event design, exploring design, meeting design process, Mike van der Vijver, needs, visualization, wants| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

Three creative event design tools that all #eventprofs should use

Monday, April 30th, 2018 by Adrian Segar

I’m about to share three powerful creative event design tools.

You can use these tools for every aspect of event design. Stylists working on the look and feel of an event often use it to stimulate fresh thinking about the venue, the décor, the lighting, the food and beverage, entertainment, and so on.

Rarely, however, are these tools used to design events that creatively incorporate, illuminate, and support core desires and outcomes for the meeting.

With them, you can generate something truly original — like in 2009, when Jill and Kevin Heinz invented a brand new trope: the wedding entrance dance.

What are the tools? Seth Godin gives us a clue.

What does this remind you of?

What does this remind you of?
That’s a much more useful way to get feedback than asking if we like it.

We make first impressions and long-term judgments based on the smallest of clues. We scan before we dive in, we see the surface before we experience the substance.

And while the emotions that are created by your work aren’t exactly like something else, they rhyme.

It could be your business model, your haircut or the vibrato on your guitar.

“What does this remind you of” opens the door for useful conversations that you can actually do something about. Yes, be original, but no, it’s not helpful to be so original that we have no idea what you’re doing.
—Seth Godin, What does this remind you of?

Seth is talking about getting feedback; we’re interested in being creative so let’s flip the focus. The word “remind” is the key; how do we re–mind ourselves to come up with something new?

Guided visualization
It turns out that guided visualization (aka guided imagery) is one of the most powerful modalities for tapping our creative and unconscious wisdom. A wide variety of visualization techniques exist and they can be customized to provide creative insights into specific challenges — like event design.

Surprisingly, there are few resources available on how to sculpt guided visualizations for exploration of a specific creative challenge. Most books and posts describe how to use guided visualizations for meditation, health, mental state change, and artistic creativity. Once you’re familiar with the basic principles, however, it’s not hard to adapt these methods for creative event design.

So here are three creative event design tools to use guided visualizations to take a fresh look at an existing event or create a vision for a new one.

Resonant imagery

One technique I’ve used is to display to clients a large number of the fantastical cards (sample shown above) from the popular game Dixit and ask them to pick a few that speak to them in some way about their current event and a few that say something about what they would like the event to become. I encourage people to pick cards without trying to analyze the attraction. We then look at the chosen cards in more detail and explore and uncover what the chosen cards reveal about the current and future potential of the event. Invariably, my clients discover powerful and enlightening perspectives and objectives they weren’t aware of. They are fertile beginnings for a fresh and relevant design.

Drawing

My colleagues Eric de Groot & Mike van der Vijver use another guided visualization approach: they ask a meeting owner to think of the meeting content as some kind of material and describe the “motion” of the meeting content. Clients draw pictures of their answers, which can then be mined for insights. A variant is to ask clients their answer to the question: “If your event had a mouth what would it say?” I’ve used this approach as well and highly recommend it.

Guided journey

Alternatively, an event designer can guide clients on a journey to and through the event in their mind. You can adapt scripts like this one to your needs. Replace traveling to a private garden with a journey to the event venue (if it’s already known and familiar) or an ideal venue that appears in your mind as you walk along the path. Guide your clients through the venue where your future event is in full swing and ask questions. If you are working with a single client, they can answer aloud, which may spark clarifying questions. Multiple clients on the journey mentally note their answers.

What does it look like? What does it sound like? Who is there as you enter the lobby? The meeting rooms? The social areas? What are they doing? How are you feeling? How are the attendees feeling? What are you experiencing that isn’t in your current event? What else are you noticing during your journey?

When the guided journey is over, lead a retrospective to discuss what the clients experienced and learned. In my experience, there will be at least one key insight on how to create or improve the event.

Conclusion

Besides the power of creative event design tools to uncover great ideas for an event, another big benefit is that they generate persuasive client buy-in for the ultimate meeting design. Why? Because the clients “dream up” the ideas themselves! Anything that eases the adoption of a fresh approach to event design makes my (and your) job easier.

Tags: client buy-in, creativity, Dixit, drawing, Event design, eventprofs, guided imagery, guided journey, guided visualization, resonant imagery, Seth Godin| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

Event design is not just visuals and logistics

Monday, August 29th, 2016 by Adrian Segar

Event design is not just visuals and logistics.

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:

1 — The world of weddings

In 2009, Jill and Kevin created the JKWeddingDance for their Big Day, and the traditional Western wedding was enriched forever.

2 — Elementary Meetings

Eric de Groot and Mike van der Vijver’s book “Into the Heart of Meetings” contains numerous examples of using Elementary Meeting metaphors to discover new congruent meeting forms.

3 — Conferences That Work

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!

Tags: BizBash, Conferences That Work, David Adler, Elementary Meetings, Event design, logistics, visual design, visuals, wedding dance| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

Dear Adrian—More questions about event process design

Monday, December 21st, 2015 by Adrian Segar

Dipesh Mody, writing from Mumbai, India, asks five great questions about event process design. I’ve interspersed my answers after each question.
Q. Dear Adrian,

I have now read both your books and have truly enjoyed reading them. Your work has been very inspiring to many; and I am certainly one of them.

While your book is very well written and structured, I had a few questions for you and I am hoping that you will find the time to respond.

Question 1

After the peer group session sign-up and once the time and space are allocated, who decides which technique to use? Is it the volunteer facilitator of the peer group? If yes, what if the volunteer is not familiar with these techniques? Will he invariably choose a roundtable technique?

Yes, the volunteer facilitator(s) of a peer session is/are responsible for determining the format used in the session. As covered in The Power of Participation, there are a number of basic formats you can use. I give every attendee a one-page peer session facilitation handout (free download) at the start of the event. This short document explains session facilitation, offers a suggested step-by-step process, and includes some tips for effective facilitation.

Analyzing thousands of evaluations of Conferences That Work format events, it’s very rare to see a complaint about the quality of peer session facilitation. So I believe this simple handout is an effective tool for volunteer facilitators. While I could include some additional opening techniques such as Post It, described in The Power of Participation, it’s possible that making the handout longer might reduce its overall effectiveness.

In India, and other regions where organizational cultures tend to be more hierarchical than those in North America and Europe, participants may be less comfortable taking responsibility for leading a session. Under such circumstances, taking twenty minutes at the opening of a peer conference to explain basic peer session leadership techniques can be helpful.

Question 2

From what I understand that certain sessions only a trained facilitator can run them such as World Café, fishbowl, or a human spectrogram. Is my understanding correct? If yes, then such techniques can only be used involving the entire group. For e.g., if the conference size is 50 people then all 50 people need to be in that one session when a human spectrogram technique is being used? Is my understanding correct?

It depends on what “trained” means. I have not received any “formal” facilitation training, but I experienced World Café, fishbowl, and human spectrogram process run by others before I attempted to facilitate them myself. I think many people who have experienced a human spectrogram once could successfully facilitate it under similar circumstances. There are plenty of good resources (including The Power of Participation😄) for other group work techniques.

As participative techniques become more frequently used at conferences, attendees are increasingly likely to be capable of facilitating them. So, I expect the requirement for a “trained” facilitator will decrease over time.

Question 3

About the beginning and the end sessions, I am quite clear but for the middle sessions is there a particular sequence (s) that works best based on your experience? For e.g., use fishbowl to gain a deeper understanding of the top six issues and then follow it up with World Café to discuss solutions to these issues (assuming we have 6 tables with five people on each table: Conference size 30 people). Then use a human spectrogram to vote on the proposed solutions and to select the most plausible ones.

Again, the answer to your event process design question depends on the circumstances—in this case, a session’s desired outcomes. It sounds like you are asking about process to explore and choose solutions to problems. Because we hold meetings for many different reasons, there’s no single process sequence that’s appropriate for every situation.

The Conferences That Work format, for example, works very well for a group of peers who are meeting to learn and connect for individual reasons, determine common ground, and discover and act on opportunities available to the group.

If, as per your example, the meeting is to learn and discuss six pre-determined important issues, you might well use techniques like fishbowl and World Café as opening and mid-course process. If attendees don’t know each other well, an opening roundtable would be useful. Or if the important issues were unknown or unclear at the start of a meeting, introductory educational sessions plus affinity grouping might be appropriate.

As far as discussing solutions is concerned, while human spectrograms are a useful tool to gauge sentiment, process prescribed by the norms of the group, organization, association, or corporation stakeholders typically determines outcomes.

Question 4

About World Café or human spectrogram or voting, while a volunteer team can assist in framing the right questions as pre-work but my experience shows that getting them to contribute to the questions is difficult as they don’t have time to devote to such pre-work activities due to work-related and other commitments. Further, on page 222 of Power of Participation, you have identified questions for collective attention, for finding deeper insights, for forward movement, etc. In light of this, would it be a good idea for the attendees to frame the questions during the conference beginning? Would this work in your experience?

If you are going to use World Café at an event, pre-work defining good table questions is essential. While there are frameworks that can be helpful in devising Café question rounds (e.g. those for sense-making by Chris Corrigan and strategic planning by John Inman), I think it’s very hard to build consensually-good questions on the fly at the event unless participants are patient and willing enough to spend a significant amount of time. It’s akin to bringing a large group of people to a building site and asking them to collectively design and erect a building from scratch. Not impossible, but difficult!

Question 5

While your book does provide model conference schedules, it falls a bit short of getting a real sense of what a real schedule looks like. It would be really great if you could add a few real examples of conferences you facilitated. And useful to get a sense of how you mixed and matched various techniques (fishbowl, World Café, spectrograms, etc.) during a let’s say three-day conference around a particular theme. It would be a great addition to what a truly amazing book it already is.

Dipesh, I think that’s a good idea in principle. However, I’m wary of supplying such examples unless they include extensive background on why the specific types and flow of process techniques were used in the event process design. The danger of providing condensed examples is that some readers will be tempted to copy them verbatim for events that involve participants, logistical constraints, and desired outcomes that are significantly different from those that generated the example design. End result—a design that doesn’t satisfy stakeholder needs, leading to poor evaluations and, perhaps, the conclusion that these new-fangled event designs “don’t work.”

There are so many factors involved in creating a good event design that I estimate a useful case study of a single event design that comprehensively covers the reasons for the design choices made might require 10,000+ words and many days of work! A worthy project, but one that may have to wait a while…

Best regards,

Dipesh Mody, India

Thanks for your thoughtful questions about event process design, Dipesh. I hope these answers help a little in your quest to produce fine events in India!

Best wishes,

Adrian Segar

Another issue of an occasional series—Dear Adrian—in which I answer questions sent to me about event design, elementary particle physics, solar hot water systems, and anything else I might conceivably know something about. If you have a question you’d like me to answer, please write to me. (Don’t worry, I won’t publish anything without your permission).

Tags: dear Adrian, Event design, fishbowl, human spectrograms, voting, World Cafe| Posted in Dear Adrian | 2 Comments »

Mom killed that idea: One way that kids are smarter than adults—and the implications for events

Monday, January 19th, 2015 by Adrian Segar

Mom killed that idea

In his fascinating and thought-provoking book The Educated Mind, professor of education Kieran Egan tells the story of kids at a lemonade stand where a customer jokingly asked if they had any beer or scotch. The five-year-old proprietor went into the house and asked Mom “whether he could have some beer and scotch for the stand. He emerged a minute or so later, shrugged, and told his siblings, ‘Mom killed that idea.'” His three and four-year-old siblings had no difficulty interpreting this sentence.

The importance of metaphor in learning

Egan emphasizes the important role of metaphor in learning. Studies have shown that very young children are capable of “prodigal production” of metaphors. Such metaphorical capacity declines as children become older. “Younger children’s production and grasp of metaphor are commonly superior to that of older children and adults.”

Young children’s effortless invention of wonderful words to describe objects in their lives amuses us. My grandchildren’s lovely constructions passerports (passports) and glovins (gloves) come to mind. These are delightful reflections of their minds’ ability to conjure up melanges of ideas and words that express their reality.

We often assume that we get smarter as we get older. By “smarter,” I mean our abilities are superior, and the likelihood we’ll use them is higher. While this is true in many respects, our demonstrated decline in metaphorical capacity means that we are less likely and less able to use metaphors as adults.

The lack of metaphor in education

This is a loss for event education, as metaphor is one of the most powerful methods for extending learning. The philosopher Max Black said, “It would be more illuminating…to say that metaphor creates the similarity than to say it formulates some similarity antecedently existing.” Metaphor then, Egan says, “becomes a key tool in aiding flexible, productive learning”. It “helps us to acquire knowledge about new domains, and also has the effect of restructuring our organization of knowledge.”

So, how do I describe my recent experience of trying to get internet service restored at my home? By comparing it to being stuck on an airplane for days waiting for it to take off without any announcements about what’s going on or when we might leave (if ever). Similarly, my mentor Jerry Weinberg published a book about writing employing a single metaphor—building a fieldstone wall—to illustrate every stage of the process. Both examples illustrate our harnessing a metaphoric plow to prepare the ground for seeds of learning [oops, I did it again.]

Further, I wish more attention had been paid to metaphoric fluency in my early education. As a result, I find it hard to summon up useful metaphors for ideas I’m trying to convey. For this, we can perhaps blame Plato and his successors, who insisted that the “poetic” be eliminated from intellectual inquiry. Consequently, literacy education discourages our use of metaphors.

Some people seem to have a natural ability to dream up apt metaphors. They are usually engaging and memorable presenters (great comedians frequently share this gift too.) Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” and Reagan’s “Break down this wall” speeches obtain great power from metaphor.

Metaphor and event design

How does all this relate to event design? Two examples. Eric de Groot & Mike van der Vijver‘s techniques for formulating meeting objectives and their Elementary Meetings model rely on the power of metaphor to create stakeholder buy-in for meeting objectives and design. Also, good production designers know the importance of choosing event themes that connect at a metaphorical level with underlying goals for the associated meeting.

In conclusion, I believe it’s worth cultivating our skill at employing metaphors or seeking out those who are good at it. So let’s not have to say “Mom killed that idea!” Better events may well be the result.

Photo attribution: Flickr user adwriter

Tags: Eric de Groot, Event design, Kieran Egan, metaphor, Mike van der Vijver| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

Parallels between the evolution of journalism and events

Monday, January 12th, 2015 by Adrian Segar

There are fascinating parallels in the ways that journalism and events are evolving. Listen to the first minute of this interview of “journalism maverick” Jeff Jarvis by David Weinberger.

Here’s the relevant quote:

“What the internet changes is our relationship with the public we serve…What is the proper relationship for journalists to the public? We tend to think it’s manufacturing a product called content you should honor and buy…That’s a legacy of mass media; treating everybody the same because we had to…So we now see the opportunity to serve people’s individual needs. So that’s what made me think that journalism, properly conceived is a service.”

In parallel fashion, events are moving away from broadcast formats that treat everybody the same and evolving towards designs that allow individual participants to learn what they individually want and need to learn, as well as connect with peers and peer communities that have real value for them.

Seeing your conference as a service that can provide what people want—rather than what you’ve decided they want, like the journalists of old—is key to keeping your events relevant, competitive, and successful.

[The rest of the interview is well worth the listen; David Weinberger always asks good questions! Jeff’s book Geeks Bearing Gifts: Imagining New Futures for News looks like a good read too.]

Tags: David Weinberger, Event design, evolution, Jeff Jarvis, journalism| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

Bigger meetings aren’t necessarily better meetings

Monday, March 25th, 2013 by Adrian Segar

Bigger meetings aren’t necessarily better meetings

Mine is bigger than yours

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!

Tags: connection, content, Event design, event size, events, meetings| Posted in Connection, Event design | No Comments »

The science of white space at events

Thursday, January 19th, 2012 by Adrian Segar

Conference organizers have an unfortunate tendency to stuff their programs full of sessions. It’s an understandable choice; if participants have committed all this time and money to be present, shouldn’t we minimize white space at events and give them as many sessions as we can cram in?

Unfortunately, filling every minute of your conference schedule does not lead to an optimum experience for attendees. We need white space: free time for attendees to do what they want and need to do. Here are some science-based, light-hearted, yet serious reasons why.

Biology

Yes, all of us need to use the bathroom every once in a while. The good news is that just about all event organizers remember this.

Physics

But what many forget is that Star Trek technology is not currently available; we cannot instantaneously teleport from one meeting room to another. At a minimum, breaks between sessions need to be long enough for attendees to walk leisurely between the two session locations that are furthest apart. But don’t program the minimum; people also need time to check their messages (otherwise they’ll just do it in the sessions, right?), get a cup of coffee, fall into a serendipitous conversation, etc.

Physiology

On average, conference session attendees sit 99.13% of the time.
OK, I made that up. But I’m not far off. And here’s a cheerful graphic about the perils of sitting created by Jan Jacobs:

Give your attendees more time to stand up and move about between sessions (and during them, see below) and, who knows, they may live longer.

Social science

According to social scientist Dr James House, “The magnitude of risk associated with social isolation is comparable with that of cigarette smoking and other major biomedical and psychosocial risk factors.” Why expose your attendees to such an unhealthy environment? We need to create conference environments that encourage and support connections with others, rather than leaving attendees to their own devices, and it turns out that conference mixers don’t provide as good opportunities for attendees to meet new people as you might think. We need additional kinds of white space at our events.

Neuroscience

Neuroscience supplies the most important rationale for providing white space at your events. As molecular biologist John Medina describes in his book Brain Rules: Learning occurs best when new information is incorporated gradually into the memory store rather than when it is jammed in all at once. Brains need breaks.

We need white space not only between sessions but also during them to maximize learning. Medina suggests that presentations be split into ten-minute chunks to avoid the falloff in attention that otherwise occurs. (Back in the ’70s, Tony Buzan, the inventor of mind maps, recommended studying in cycles of twenty minutes followed by a short break, a technique that has served me well for forty years.)

In addition, Medina tells us that multisensory environments provide significantly more effective learning than unisensory environments; recall is more accurate, has better resolution, and lasts longer. So make sure your sessions include multisensory input (participatory exercises, participant movement, smells, touch, etc.) and that your conference locale provides a pleasant multisensory environment.

So, what to do?

How do we find a balance between providing white space during and between conference sessions and our desire to provide as much potential content and opportunities for our attendees?

During sessions, it’s important to provide white space between every ten to twenty-minute chunk of learning, so that the learning that has occurred can be processed and retained. This is something that we should all be doing to optimize the learning experience at our events.

Between sessions, it’s important to include significant unstructured time. A ten-minute break between two one-hour sessions is the absolute minimum I’ll schedule, followed by long refreshment or meal breaks. I am not a fan of providing intrusive entertainment during meals—eating together is one of the most intimate bonding activities humans have—for goodness sake, let your attendees talk to each other during this time!

I’ve saved my best advice for last. Instead of deciding how much white space should exist at your conference, let the attendees decide! At the start of the event, explicitly give people permission to take whatever time they need to rest, recuperate, think, etc. It may seem silly, but I find that if you publicly define the event environment as one where it’s expected and normal for people to take whatever time they need for themselves it becomes easier for attendees to give themselves permission to do so.

[Thanks to Joan Eisenstodt for providing the initial impetus for writing this post! And check out Give Me a Break! for another viewpoint on the topics of this post.]

White space—it’s not just for advertising anymore! What’s been your experience of white space at events? What suggestions do you have for improving its use?

Image attribution: Flickr user zavie.

Tags: breaks, downtime, Event design, socials, white space| Posted in Event design | 11 Comments »

Travel broadens the (event design) mind – part 1

Wednesday, December 21st, 2011 by Adrian Segar

Who knew that travel broadens the (event design) mind? I’ve returned from a long-planned European vacation with my wife Celia, spending two weeks in Italy and one in England. Here are some event design musings triggered by living, albeit briefly, in different cultures from my own.

There’s more than one way to travel

In just twenty-four days we used a splendid variety of modes of transportation on our journey. Each of them had their unique characteristics:

Airplanes between the US and London

The only way to travel several thousand miles in a day. And a quick way to get from London to Italy, our first destination, so we could begin the vacation promptly.

A rental car in Italy

To explore the remote delightful hill towns of Tuscany at our own pace, we needed a car as public transportation in the region was limited. We stopped often, at will, to admire the scenery and take pictures.

Walking

Part of the charm of tiny Tuscan towns is that cars are more or less banned from their ancient hearts. Celia & I walked everywhere we could, up and down steep steps impassable by any other means, through narrow passageways, into tiny churches, and we spent considerable time sitting in cafes watching the world go by. Sadly, we can’t walk as far as we used to. But when possible, personal locomotion is the most flexible and intimate form of traveling.

Ferries on Lake Como

We arrived at our hotel on the shore of Lake Como, having survived the impatience of numerous Italian drivers on the somewhat hair-raising, twisting narrow road around the lake. Having happily parked the car, we didn’t use it again until we left, six days later. Every day we’d explore a different lake town, traveling there by lake ferry from the stop near our hotel. Every trip unfolded a new experience of the lake, enhanced by the ever-varying mists and light of day. It was wonderful to avoid the stress of driving and to be chauffeured smoothly from place to place.

Trains

Rather than flying back to London, we decided to take trains, stopping in Zurich overnight, as our goal was to travel by land over the Alps. Driving would have taken too long and been too tiring; the high-speed European trains satisfied our desire. Once in London, we traveled extensively. We used overground trains for two-day trips outside the capital and the Tube inside London. The overground trains took us efficiently to our destinations while providing satisfying vistas of the English countryside. The Tube got us where we needed to go faster than any other transportation.

Buses

And when we were in less of a hurry in London, we took buses, allowing us to re-familiarize ourselves with the city we once lived in for many years.

What has all this got to do with event design?

There were alternatives to all the transportation modalities we used. We could have traveled to Europe via ocean liner. We could have braved the scorn of Italian race car drivers on the lake roads we avoided. Heck, we probably could have hired sedan chairs to transport us around the hill towns, just as the Medici did centuries ago.

Celia & I made our travel choices for many different reasons: cost, practicality, accessibility, speed, intimacy, and beauty, to name a few. It would have been simpler to surrender our ability to choose; we could have booked a tour, giving up our freedom to spontaneously travel and explore for the ease of making a single payment and leaving our itinerary and travel arrangements to others.

We make the same kinds of choices every time we organize an event. Do we do things the easy way, the way we’ve done them a hundred times before? Do we trade the opportunity to be creative for the ease and safety of uniformity? These questions were emphasized for me because travel broadens the (event design) mind.

There’s no one right answer. If you’re like me, one attraction of designing, organizing, and running events is the creative opportunities available for even at-first-sight mundane commissions. Maybe you prefer to get good at doing a certain kind of event with the same methodology, process, and location over and over again. Whatever your preference, when designing and organizing events what’s important to remember is that you always have choices.

Tags: Event design, travel| Posted in Event design | 2 Comments »