When will we wake up about the need to change our conference designs?
Medicine in medieval times consisted of blood-letting, exorcism of devils, spells, incantations, and a proscription of bathing. It didn’t work. In fact, like traditional management, it made things worse. Doctors who had been taught to do it believed in it. The establishment defended it. The universities kept teaching it. So people went on doing it, despite all the evidence to the contrary. It took hundreds of years before these counter-productive practices were set aside in favor of modern medicine. Eventually, people awoke from their collective delusion. —More or less innovation? Duh? by Steve Denning
Let’s hope it isn’t much longer before we face the stultifying effects of traditional conference designs on hapless attendees, and take the necessary steps to change our designs, based on what we are learning about how adults best learn and connect.
Remember kindergarten? O.K., I barely do either. But when I go into my local elementary school to read to the kids, I see ground rules like these posted on the classroom walls. The teachers create them for the younger classes, and I’m told that the Junior High comes up with their own (probably with some judicious teacher input). So it seems that explicit ground rules are useful in the pre-adult classroom.
Moving to the adult world, professional facilitators who work for more than a few hours with a group or team will usually have the members establish their own ground rules. Why? There are two reasons. First, group-developed ground rules handle the specific needs of the group. And second, the process of development creates buy-in for the chosen rules.
However, traditional conferences don’t have explicit ground rules!
So perhaps you’re thinking: We’re adults, we know how to behave! Or What’s the point, we’re only together for a few days!
Here’s why the right explicit ground rules will improve your conference.
The right ground rules fundamentally change the environment of a conference.
The six ground rules used at Conferences That Work are not about nitpicking issues like turning off cell phones & pagers in sessions (good luck!) Instead, they create an intimate and safe conference environment by sending participants these powerful messages:
“While you are here, you have the right and opportunity to be heard.”
“Your individual needs and desires are important here.”
“You will help to determine what happens at this conference.”
“What happens here will be kept confidential. You can feel safe here.”
“At this conference, you can create, together with others, opportunities to learn and to share.”
Introducing and having attendees commit to the right ground rules at the start of the event sets the stage for a collaborative, participative conference. The rules give people permission and support for sharing with and learning from each other.
When attendees feel safe to share and empowered to ask questions and express what they think and how they feel, what happens at a conference can be amazing.
Consequently, setting good ground rules at the start of a conference may be the single most transformative change you can make to improve your event!
Two tips on adding ground rules to your conference design
Before you rush to add ground rules to your conferences, bear in mind two points:
Don’t attempt to brainstorm and negotiate ground rules amongst attendees at a first-time conference! The time required to do a good job would be prohibitive. Use some time-tested rules, like mine (here are four of them), or the four principles and one law of Open Space events.
Think twice before adding ground rules that embody participant empowerment to a traditional event that consists mainly of pre-scheduled presentation-style sessions. Your ground rules and your design are likely to be seen as conflicting!
Do you use explicit ground rules in your events? What has your experience been? Want to know more about using ground rules at conferences? Ask away in the comments below! (If you can’t wait, <shameless plug> you could also buy my books, which describe in detail both the ground rules used at Conferences That Work and how to successfully introduce them to attendees.)
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?
Here are five fundamental questions about conference design that event stakeholders rarely ask.
No one expects that every conference attendee will have the same needs as every other participant and contribute an equal amount to the event. Each of us has a unique set of interests, knowledge, and skills. And there will be people present who have much to offer and those who, for whatever reason, add little to the available pool of relevant knowledge and experience.
This raises five questions:
What are the best ways to use conference time to respond to a variety of attendee knowledge and experience?
How can we discover the topics that have energy for attendees?
What experience and expertise exist for exploring these topics?
What processes provide the best way to match uncovered needs with available conference resources?
How can we effectively support the resulting conference sessions?
Sadly, most conference organizers shy away from considering these important concerns. That’s unfortunate, because exploring better answers to these questions has the potential to dramatically improve just about any event!
If you agree that these fundamental questions about conference design are important, have you answered them to your satisfaction for your events?
