William Gibson & Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine introduces us to an alternative world where we never discovered electronics, where computers are made of polished brass and powered by steam.
Sometimes I dream I’m living in an alternative conference universe. One where we’ve never discovered that people who travel thousands of miles to be in the same room with one another don’t want to spend most of their time listening to people at the front of that room. These same people try to talk to each other but are drowned out by loud music. And they never get to meet the five people in the room who could change their lives. It’s the conference Difference Engine!
Think of the last time you were with a group of people and made a stretch to learn something. Perhaps you admitted you didn’t understand something someone said, wondering as you did whether it was obvious to the others present. Or you challenged a viewpoint held by a majority of the people present. Or you proposed a tentative solution to a problem, laying yourself open to potentially making a mistake in front of others. These are all examples of what I call risky learning.
Whatever happened, was the learning opportunity greater compared to safe learning—the passive absorption of presented information?
Traditional conferences discourage risky learning. Who but a supremely confident person (or that rare iconoclast) stands up at the end of a presentation to several hundred people and says they don’t understand or disagree with something someone said? Who will ask a bold question, share a problem, or state a controversial point of view? Many don’t, fearing it may affect their professional status, job prospects, or current employment with others in the audience. People who brave these concerns are more likely to be exhibiting risky behavior than practicing risky learning.
Yet it is possible to provide a safe and supportive environment for risky learning. Here’s how we do it at Conferences That Work.
Confidentiality
First, and perhaps most important, is the commitment attendees make at the very beginning of the conference to keep confidential what is shared. This simple communal promise generates a level of group intimacy and revelation seldom experienced at a conventional conference. As a result, participants are comfortable speaking what’s on their minds, unencumbered by worries that their sharing may be made public outside the event.
Size
Second, because Conferences That Work are small, there is an increased chance that attendees will be the sole representatives of their organizations and will feel comfortable fruitfully sharing sensitive personal information with their peers, knowing that what they say won’t filter back to coworkers. Even when others are present from the same institution, the intimacy of our conferences helps to develop amity and increased understanding between them.
No presuppositions
Third, our conference process makes no presuppositions about who will act in traditional teacher or student roles during the event. This creates fluid roles and learning that are driven by group and individual desires and abilities to satisfy real attendee needs and wishes. There’s an environment where it’s expected that anyone may be a teacher or learner from moment to moment. Participants overcome inhibitions about asking naive questions or sharing controversial opinions.
Modeling
Finally, Conferences That Work facilitators model peer conference behavior. When they don’t know the answer to a question, they say, “I don’t know.” If they need help, they ask for it. When they make mistakes, they are accountable rather than defensive. Consistently modeling appropriate conduct fosters a conference environment conducive to engaged, risky learning.
Ultimately, each attendee decides whether to stretch. But Conferences That Work supplies optimum conditions for risky learning. This makes it much easier for participants to take risks and learn effectively.
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?
“Patiently Smiley waited for the speck of gold, for Connie was of an age where the only thing a man could give her was time.” from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John Le Carré
I was facilitating a peer conference roundtable recently when a young man began to speak. He was obviously nervous: his voice a monotone, when it wasn’t quavering. I was peripherally aware that some people didn’t seem to be listening. He paused for a moment and his eyes swept around the circle, searching for a sign that anyone cared about what he had to say. He found me.
I was leaning forward, looking directly at him, giving him my full attention. Our eyes locked and I nodded slightly. He took a breath and continued. His voice became stronger. I saw people turn back to him and he finished well.
I had just given the gift of listening, and this young man had been nourished by it.
Active listening
When I am facilitating it’s my responsibility to actively listen to what is going on, focussing my full attention on what others say and do. When I’m successful, those who are present know that there is at least one other person who is listening to them and who takes seriously what they have to say.
Listening like this is hard work. To conscientiously listen to participants for over two hours at a large roundtable is extremely challenging for me. But it’s very important. People need to be heard, and if they believe they will not be heard, why should they bother to speak? By offering good listening at the start of a peer conference, I model and encourage a conference environment where openness twinned with receptiveness becomes a safe option for participants.
There’s a wider benefit from the cultivation of this skill. Practicing listening when required by my role has helped me to be a better listener during all the times when I’m not facilitating—when I’m a participant, or with my family, or as a customer. You, too, may find that developing your ability to fully listen pays rich dividends.
Here are some consequences of concentrating on top-down (traditional) rather than bottom-up (non-traditional) conference process:
Everyone gets assigned their role in advance.
Top-down implies that some people have “the knowledge”; the rest don’t.
There’s less opportunity to engage attendees who aren’t invested; they can zone out as they choose.
Passive reception of knowledge is the dominant learning modality.
There may be less stress for attendees, knowing that no personal contribution is expected.
There are, at best, few expectations for attendees, apart from paying for the conference.
Tradition coupled to prestige confirms legitimacy—” This is the way it’s done”.
The conference confers status by association; you’re a professional in this field because professionals in this field go to this conference.
Top-down imposes control of what’s going to happen: who speaks, who listens, who’s in, who’s out.
Conference structure and content are fixed; they’re very difficult to change even if circumstances cry out for a different direction.
The top-down model can put pressure on presenters, who may feel they need to be comprehensive, all-knowing, and coherent to justify the program committee’s choice of them as presenters.
The power to create conference structure and session topics is confined to the conference program committee.
Top-down supports and perpetuates cliques: the presenters versus the audience; the old hands and the in-crowd versus the newbies.
Everyone knows what is supposed to happen, minimizing the fear of the unknown.
The conference tends to mirror and/or reinforce perceived hierarchy or status in a profession or field—“Here are the experts”.
Meeting and connecting with like-minded people during the formal conference program is largely a matter of chance or careful preparation.
Can you think of other consequences of top-down conference process? Share them in the comments below.
Image attribution: Flickr user flynnwynn/ / CC BY-ND 2.0
How to end a conference? Trainings and conferences that professionals must attend to maintain certification can close with the triumphant presentation of certificates of completion or attendance. But other traditional conferences have no such obvious conclusion. All too often, the conference finale is manufactured. Organizers add an awards ceremony, a closing keynote, a fancy dinner, a raffle, a celebrity speaker, or some combination thereof.
The reason for this artificiality is simple: Traditional conferences that are not training-oriented don’t provide any kind of progression through their theme. Logistical, political, and speaker availability considerations guide the sequence of session topics rather than logical flow. One session doesn’t follow from another. Such a conference doesn’t have a beginning. So, how can we expect it to have an end?
Some conferences dispense with the pretense of closure. This, at least, is honest, though the effect of “transmit content, go home” is somewhat blunt.
How to end a peer conference
In contrast, peer conferences provide a progression, not through content, but through several processes designed to increase attendee connections as the conference proceeds. Typically, two closing spective sessions, personal and group, build on the generated intimacy to provide a powerful and appropriate conference ending.
Are your conferences in the business of supporting meaningful connections between participants?
At peer conferences, on arrival, attendees immediately receive a printed face book (that’s face book: small f, two words) that includes photographs, names and contact data, and additional pertinent information about each participant.
They tell me that it’s rare to receive such a document at conferences. How sad that conference organizers don’t bother to provide this basic tool for learning about fellow attendees. (Perhaps it’s not too surprising, since no books on conference management mention providing an attendee face book.) The absence speaks volumes about the lack of support for participant interaction at traditional conferences.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Actively supporting meaningful connections is an integral part of every peer conference. When the information, openings, and opportunities needed to meet like-minded attendees are provided, not only during session breaks but also as part of the formal conference structure, it becomes attendee-centered rather than session-centered, greatly increasing the intimacy and enjoyment of the event.
Planners of traditional conferences assume that the primary purpose of conference sessions is to transmit pre-planned content.
The three communication modes used among a group of people are one-to-one (individual conversations), one-to-many or broadcast (presentations and panels), and many-to-many or conferring (discussions). Traditional conference sessions are predominantly one-to-many, with perhaps a dash of many-to-many at question time.
One-to-one conversations are infinitely flexible; both participants have the power to lead the conversation along desired paths. Many-to-many conversations are powerful in a different way—they expose the participating group to a wide range of experience and opinions.
In contrast, one-to-many communication is mostly pre-planned, and thus relatively inflexible if the presentation involves a passive audience. At best, a presenter may ask questions of her audience and vary her presentation appropriately, but she is unlikely to get accurate representative feedback when her audience is large. Some presenters can create interactive sessions with significant audience participation, but they are the exception rather than the rule.
Presentations and panels are appropriate when we are training, and have expert knowledge or information to impart to others. But today we have a rich variety of alternative methods to train adults. For example: reading books and articles, watching recordings of presentations, and searching for information and downloading answers on the Web.
What can you not replicate at a face-to-face conference? The spontaneous conversations and discussions! So why do we still cling to conference sessions that transmit pre-planned content, employing the one communication mode for which a variety of alternatives can substitute?
Most conference planners think that meeting organizers need to choose and schedule conference session topics in advance.
One of the questions I asked when interviewing conference attendees for my book was:
“Most conferences have a conference schedule and program decided in advance. How would you feel about a conference where, at the start, through a careful conference process, the attendees themselves determine what they want to discuss, based on what each person wants to learn and the experience each attendee has to share?”
Forty-five percent of my interviewees were unable to conceive of a conference that did not have a schedule of conference sessions decided on and circulated in advance.
The most common response? Interviewees weren’t sure they’d want to go to such a conference without knowing what was going to happen there.
The next most common response? The idea sounded great/interesting/intriguing. But interviewees had no idea of how one would create a relevant conference program at the start of the conference.
What if we could create conference session topics that actually reflect attendee wants and needs
Suspend disbelief for a moment, and assume that at the start of a conference it is somehow possible to use available resources to create conference session topics that actually reflect attendee wants and needs. Then imagine attending such a conference yourself, a conference tailored to your needs. (You might want to reflect on how often this has happened to you.) Wouldn’t it be great?
What is the origin of the assumption that one must pre-plan a conference program? Perhaps it arose from our experience of learning as children, from our teachers in school who knew or were told what we were supposed to learn following a pre-planned curriculum. Certainly, if one thinks of conferences as training by experts, a pre-planned schedule makes sense. But conferences are for adult learners, and adults with critical thinking skills and relevant experience can learn from each other. We’ll see that there are ways of putting conference attendees in charge of what they wish to learn and discuss. But this cannot be done effectively if a conference’s program is frozen before attendees arrive.
The peer conference model described in Conferences That Work does indeed build a conference program that automatically adjusts to the actual needs of the people present. Read the book to find out how.
Four unquestioned assumptions lurk behind the traditional conference format—assumptions so deep-seated that they go unquestioned by most conference organizers. These assumptions embody, and consequently help perpetuate, a distorted and outdated way of thinking about conference purpose and structure, leading to a conference model that, according to a majority of the people I interviewed while writing Conferences That Work, does not well serve conference attendees.
Here are the assumptions:
Conference session topics must be chosen and scheduled in advance.
Conference sessions should be used primarily for transmitting pre-planned content.
Supporting meaningful connections with other attendees is not the conference organizers’ job; it’s something that happens in the breaks between sessions.
Conferences are best ended with some event that will hopefully convince attendees to stay to the end.
In my next four posts, I’ll examine these assumptions individually. And I’ll explain why they lead to conferences that don’t work as well as they could.
William Gibson & Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine introduces us to an alternative world where we never discovered electronics, where computers are made of polished brass and powered by steam.
