To evaluate an event, conveners focus on knowing key conference metrics. Our analytic minds seek numbers to quantify the experiences of event stakeholders. Metrics such as ticket sales, KPIs, social media mentions, booth visits, and net promoter scores create a picture of event outcomes, satisfaction levels, and areas for improvement.
But is there value in not knowing at conferences?
A poem about knowing
Mary Oliver‘s poem Snowy Night beautifully explores the tension between knowing and not knowing. She describes a snowy evening when she heard an owl:
“I couldn’t tell which one it was – the barred or the great-horned ship of the air – it was that distant.”
Instead of chasing certainty, Oliver chooses to embrace the mystery:
“But, anyway,
aren’t there moments
that are better than knowing something…”
Hearing this poem the other day reminded me of a similar tension at conferences—between the need for data and the value of embracing the intangible.
Metrics and their limits
As Oliver writes,
“I suppose if this were someone else’s story they would have insisted on knowing whatever is knowable – would have hurried over the fields to name it – the owl, I mean.”
Metrics provide a finite “map” of what happened at a conference. They transform rich human experiences into statistics—valuable, yes, but inherently incomplete. Metrics don’t capture the intangible: the awe, learning, and life-changing connections a good conference can inspire.
In conferences, as in life, there is value in both knowing and not knowing. By balancing data with the immeasurable, we can create richer, more meaningful events.
Since 2009 I’ve maintained an informal calendar of peer conferences (aka unconferences) on this site. It’s informal because I only list events I hear about, a minuscule fraction of the unconferences people hold every day. Even so, the calendar lists hundreds of events.
Currently, I add a few peer conferences a month. For example, as I write this the May 2024 listing includes an online peer conference and in-person events in Vienna, Austria; Raleigh, North Carolina; and two in Nepal.
For fun, I extracted a sampling of geographic locations from the calendar and plotted them on a Google map. Click the image below to view the detailed map.
As you can see, peer conferences take place all over the world!
World map of some major geographic locations of peer conferences listed in the Conferences That Work peer conference calendar. Click on the map for details.
Who holds peer conferences?
Look at the calendar to see the fascinating variety of communities that hold peer conferences. Some groups, like software developers and testers, are big fans and it’s interesting to see how often finance, healthcare, and food industry professionals, as well as religious groups, universities, and small businesses hold unconferences.
It’s also amusing to see groups you might not even know about who hold peer conferences. Associations for casino security, veterinarians, voiceover coaches, independent gardening stores, makers, builders, attorneys, teachers and education, sports commissions, product managers, cybersecurity, transportation, and many other communities of interest are listed. And then there are plenty of unconferences focussed on social and cultural issues, like leadership, DEI, the environment, peace work, political movements, good government, animal welfare, veterans rights—the list goes on!
Why I do this work
The incredible diversity of communities, organizations, and businesses that use participant-driven and participation-rich event formats is astounding. This calendar provides strong evidence that any group with something in common who wants to connect and learn can benefit from peer conference designs. As a perpetually curious person, I love the hundreds of opportunities I’ve had over the last few decades to learn about many kinds of communities, topics, and issues and the people who grapple with them.
Seeing how peer conference designs benefit these folks when they come together warms my heart.
“The W.K. Kellogg Foundation is a relationship-based and an event-based organization. We love to bring our grantees together so they can learn, network, and share best practices.” — Sterling Speirn, President and CEO, W.K. Kellogg Foundation
Published in 2013, this report is just as relevbant today. You can download for free the beautifully designed Convenings 2.0 report (click on the report cover above). Convenings 2.0 describes a wealth of thoughtful approaches, proposals, and standards for meetings hosted by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation for its grantees. Containing extensive research by Carol and Mike Galle, and Sharon McMurray of Special D Events, I believe this document deserves wide circulation to associations, foundations, and event and association professionals.
Thirty-five subject matter expert contributors from foundations, the meeting industry, and adult learning/academia contributed to the report, including my friends and colleagues Mitchell Beer, Michelle Bruno, Sandy Heierbacher, Carolyn Ray, Maarten Vanneste, and myself. The bibliography includes books and reports by Joan Eisenstodt, Jackie Mulligan, Maarten, myself, and many others.
The report scope includes meeting and event logistics, knowledge management, integrated communications, technology, foundation considerations, design and execution, communication and branding, a set of twenty-one recommendations, and an outline of design, execution, and evaluation process, with an appendix covering adult learning theory and its application to meetings and a glossary. Apposite quotes are sprinkled throughout the fifty-two pages.
There’s something for everyone here, folks. It’s well worth reading!
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. And to a lesser extent, it’s often possible to get more glitz for the buck at bigger events, where those little touches for decor and 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 in running 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 is going to 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!
When I was an IT consultant I used to build custom database management systems—complicated, company-specific software that handled the unique way an organization did things. The normal way to do this is the Microsoft Word or kitchen-sink approach. Add every feature and ability you can think of (or that any important customer asks for) into the application. Then, let the user work with the entire glory of what you’ve created.
Over the years I found I could make a good living creating integrated systems that did things a little differently. Instead of company staff facing a complete set of menus, choices, and features, most of which they never used, I built interfaces where users only saw the functionality they required. Once logged on to the system, it appeared to contain only the functions and information needed to do their work. Yet, because the software spanned the entire company, any departmental changes were immediately available elsewhere in the organization.
Employees loved these systems because they gave them just what they wanted and no more. Without unneeded menus, options, and reports, employees worked with minimal distraction, leading to less stress and higher productivity.
Large traditional conferences exemplify the kitchen-sink approach I described above. The thinking goes: “If we have a program that includes sessions on anything that attendees might want, then they’ll come and be happy”. And perhaps this seems like the only answer, given that traditional conferences, at best, do a poor job of predicting and then offering what attendees really want.
Give attendees just what they want
Well, we can do better. When we ask attendees what they want to have happen, it turns out they are remarkably good at telling us. Especially if you’ve just presented them with a smorgasbord of possible topics gleaned from the entire group. That’s what the Conferences That Work roundtable and peer session sign-up sessions do. First, they uncover participants’ needs, experience, and expertise. Next, within a couple of hours, they turn these discoveries into a conference program that optimally matches just what attendees want, and no more.
Attendees love these conference programs because they contain just what they want and no more. Wouldn’t you?
What do you think about the feasibility of determining your conference program at the start of the event?
At our events, what should be the mix between content versus conversation?
A few days ago during an #eventprofs chat, I tweeted Cory Doctorow’s remark (made in 2006 in a boing-boing post): Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about. This inspired a variety of comments from such #eventprofs luminaries as @JeffHurt @MichaelMcCurry @lyksumlikrish @JaredGoldberg @camerontoth and @samuelsmith.
Here’s the point I was trying to make.
Sure, we need to have content at our events – something to talk about. But content is everywhere—I don’t need to go to an event to get content! If I never left my office again (now there’s a thought), as long as I paid my internet provider’s bill each month, I could choose, receive, and absorb content for the rest of my life.
And what a miserable life that would be.
I need connection, engagement, and conversation to make my life meaningful. And, in my experience, so does most of the human race.
Content these days is ubiquitous. Face-to-face events are the places for powerful, life-changing connection and engagement. That’s why we need to make them the best possible environments for conversation we can. And when we do, our conversations will naturally encompass the content that is meaningful for us.
Instead of chasing certainty, Oliver chooses to embrace the mystery:
Here’s a simple challenge to anyone who organizes an event and asks for evaluations.
