experiential Archives : Conferences That Work

Three differences between genuine and phony experiential events

Monday, March 18th, 2019 by Adrian Segar

“Experiential” is the new hot adjective used to describe events. “No more listening to speakers; you’re going to have experiences!” But there are genuine and phony experiential conferences.

Sadly, many so-called experiential events are phony. The promoters slap a novel environment (e.g., clowns walking around or chairs suspended from the ceiling) onto a conventional format (e.g., a social or a group discussion) and claim their event is now “experiential”.

So what are the differences between genuine and phony experiential conferences?

Here are three.

At a genuine experiential conference…

Participants’ experiences satisfy their actual in-the-moment wants and needs

People attend conferences to learn and connect. They arrive with specific personal challenges for which they hope to get help and support. For example,

“I’m having a hard time handling my boss’s unrealistic expectations of what I can accomplish.”

“Our security system needs an upgrade and I’m overwhelmed by the choices available.”

“Are there other people here with whom I can explore how AR is going to impact our jobs?”

Hiring clowns to walk around and entertain attendees or immersing attendees in an elaborately themed environment does nothing to help attendees learn and connect around the issues and topics that matter to them. (Rare exception: an environment designed to dramatize and support the exploration of known concerns.)

Uncovering participants’ challenges, interests, expertise, experience, and passions early at the event and then building conferences that respond directly leads to genuine experiential conferences that effectively satisfy attendee needs.

Participants’ experiences significantly impact their lives

If you go to a professional conference and nothing significant changes in your professional life as a result, what was the point of attending? Yes, you might have had a good time and been entertained, but you can get that faster and cheaper by eating out at a great restaurant, watching a good movie, or attending a show or concert. (And “I had a great time” is likely not the kind of justification for attending your boss wants to hear.)

Design genuine experiential conferences to deliver experiences that change professional lives by:

Effectively connecting attendees with relevant colleagues (no more lunches sitting next to strangers with whom you have little in common); and
Providing sessions that meet real wants and needs, and which use formats that support appropriate interaction, discovery, and active learning.

Participants enjoy group experiences that build a community around conference commonalities

“Experiential” event programs today feature “experiences” like SoulCycle, axe throwing, and wine tastings. Sessions like these are, of course, experiences — as is all of life. What such sessions fail to do is build any kind of event community around the theme or constituency of the conference. So, at a phony experiential event, having a good time with colleagues qualifies the event as “experiential”.

In contrast, genuinely experiential conferences include group experiences that deepen learning and connection around pertinent material, and, in the process, build community that speaks to the wants and needs of the participants.

Examples? Hold sessions where attendees work together to solve carefully chosen topical or individual challenges. Or, include a closing session where participants share what was great about the entire event and how it could be made even better.

A genuine conclusion

Putting attendees in a novel environment does not make a meeting “experiential”. Genuine experiential events use active uncovered learning formats that maximize the likelihood of meaningful learning and connection for each attendee.

There’s nothing wrong with razzle-dazzle environments, except when they (all too often) divert money, energy, and focus from what’s important. Instead, concentrate time and resources on functional meeting design that provides genuinely useful and meaningful experiences to participants.

Tags: community, conferences, effective, experiential, fake, genuine, phony| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

Many “experiential” events are just razzle-dazzle

Monday, December 17th, 2018 by Adrian Segar

Beware of “experiential” events that are just razzle-dazzle.

“Experiential” has become a buzzword to use to describe hip events. Instead of listening to speakers, you’re going to have — wait for it — experiences! Sounds so much better, doesn’t it?

The problem is that most events touted as experiential simply add irrelevant novelty to a familiar event process.

For example, the much-hyped C2 Montréal.

C2 attendees have:

Sat back to back wearing virtual reality goggles, conversing with one another’s avatar (2015);
Shared an umbrella under fake snow with a stranger (2016); and
Been given the opportunity to talk to four other people while sitting in chairs suspended from the ceiling (2017).

These “experiences” are simply gussied-up conversations held in novel visual and sensory environments. What is the value, other than novelty, created by adding virtual reality to a conversation between two people in the same room? By conversing in a fake outdoors setting rather than taking a walk outside? By talking to people from a chair hanging from the ceiling?

Conversation is a human practice so old we have no idea when it began. C2, and many other “hot” events, add expensive technological glitz to a conversation, slapping a skin of irrelevant novelty onto a core human activity. Rebrand the result as “experiential”, and voilà — you have a hip FOMO event.

All this is a slightly more sophisticated version of what, unfortunately, passes for creative event design these days. Adding an entertaining overlay to what happens routinely at an event and calling it “experiential” is ultimately no different from defining “creative” event design as novel decor, venues, production, or food and beverage.

What to do instead
Every event provides experiences, so all events are experiential! So let’s decouple the term “experiential” from what are actually “glitzy” events. The right question stakeholders need to ask is how well the experiences events provide fulfill attendees’ actual wants and needs.

For example, every event provides opportunities for conversations. So how can we design an event to create the best possible conversations?

You don’t get better face-to-face conversations in virtual reality or by suspending participants from the ceiling.

Instead, focus on finding and offering the best questions and topics for conversation. This includes providing group and session processes that support participants in uncovering and choosing conversations that will be most useful and meaningful to them.

Also, concentrate on providing supportive environments for ad-hoc conversation. So quieten or eliminate background music during meals and socials, supply a variety of quiet places close to session locales for participants to meet, avoid large rounds and assigned seating at meals, incorporate plenty of white space, etc.

Ironically, such meeting design tweaks cost little or nothing, unlike the flashy C2 examples. So you can provide a significantly better experience for attendees for less cost by applying simple effective meeting design principles. (Unsubtle hint: Working with someone who knows how to design and facilitate relevant attendee experience could be the most cost-effective improvement you could make.)

There’s nothing wrong with novelty. But instead of putting tons of time, effort, and money into dressing-up meetings with novel razzle-dazzle, concentrate your efforts on functional meeting design that provides genuinely useful and meaningful experiences to participants.

Tags: C2, conversation, Event design, experiential, experiential events, FOMO, Montreal, Novelty, virtual reality| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

Why experiential learning is superior to every other kind

Monday, September 11th, 2017 by Adrian Segar

Why is experiential learning superior to every other kind? In a word: feedback. Jerry Weinberg explains simply and concisely.

“Why is reading or writing something different from doing something?

First consider reading. Reading is (usually) a solitary activity, with no feedback. Without feedback, there’s no check on what you believe you’re learning.

Now, writing. Unless you put your writing in the hands of someone (or perhaps some computer analysis app), there’s also no feedback, so there’s no check on whether you wrote sense or nonsense.

When you do something, you interact with the real world, and the world responds in some way. With the world’s feedback, you have the possibility of learning, confirming, or disconfirming something. That’s why we strongly favor experiential learning over, say, lecturing or passive reading or writing.”
—Jerry Weinberg, Why is reading or writing something different from doing something?

Photo attribution: Flickr user mikebaird

Tags: experiential, experiential learning, feedback, Jerry Weinberg, Learning| Posted in Learning | 1 Comment »

Change first, explain later

Monday, June 23rd, 2014 by Adrian Segar

Sometimes an experience is worth a million words.

In 1982, Australian physicians Barry Marshall and Robin Warren proposed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori was the cause of most ulcers, challenging the established medical doctrine that ulcers were caused by stress, spicy foods, and too much acid. Their claim was ridiculed, so Barry drank a Petri dish containing cultured Heliobacter and promptly developed gastritis. His self-experiment eventually helped change medical thinking. In 2005, both men were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

So, how do we convince people?

Changing events

Often when I’m working with a client on implementing experiential and participant-driven events, he wants to understand how what I’m proposing will work.

It’s perfectly reasonable that he wants to understand. The trouble is, unless he’s had the experience of participating in an experiential and participant-driven event, he simply may not be able to understand how the format works.

If you think about it, this seems silly. Every day we experience unexpected things, and some of them change our world for the better in ways we’d never rationally expect. Right? So why are we skeptical that this can happen at our events?

Because most meetings and conferences are tightly scripted and controlled. So we’ve likely never experienced the intense conversations, learning, and facilitated connection around topics and issues that we, not a conference program committee, chose. We’ve never had the opportunity to discover the empowerment and joy when we get to meet, face-to-face, peers who share and have insights on our specific challenges. We’ve never seen a solid, long-lasting community of fellow participants being built before our eyes. And we’ve never encountered an event that galvanized participants into appropriate and effective action.

The need to understand

So when someone like me proposes a “different” way to design events, clients want to “understand” how it works before they’ll give me a go-ahead. When they don’t, I’ll get responses like this [verbatim extract from an email I received this week]:

“We presented our program to [our board] last week and got some push back on having two full days of the format/program devoted to the unconference. The primary concern is being able to effectively market the program such that potential attendees can show the published programming/topics and get manager support for the expense to attend/travel to the event. Without a descriptive agenda with topics – the fear is that managers won’t be able to justify that it is a relevant agenda for professional development.”

In fact, everyone who experiences a well-designed participant-driven event knows that on-site development of an agenda that is truly relevant to the attendees’ professional development is not a problem. Yet without that experience, most people cannot understand how such a format can work.

If I get sufficient access to the decision-makers, I can usually provide enough “understanding” to convince them to go ahead. But experiencing the design itself is far more effective. Here’s a post-event communication excerpt from a decision-making former skeptic:

Thank you for your efforts in making our very first [foundation] meeting a huge success. The meeting far exceeded my expectations and I have been reporting the success of the event to the leadership here at [foundation].

And here’s a participant’s feedback from the same event:

Thank you Adrian! I was skeptical at first of the conference format. But now I’m really glad that it was organized that way!

Experience to understand

Sometimes you need to experience to understand. Seth Godin puts it like this:

It turns out, humans don’t use explanations to make change happen. They change, and then try to explain it.
—Seth Godin, Clarity vs. impact

When I have the opportunity and authority to facilitate an experience that can lead to powerful, appropriate learning and change, I don’t spend much time explaining why it might do so. I just start. The hardest part is being given the authority to do it. Because that requires trust in my ability to deliver what I’m offering.

I don’t blame the skeptics out there. The world is full of people who promise miracles and don’t deliver. That’s why, besides attempting to explain why what I do works, I also encourage clients to talk to some of the tens of thousands of people who have participated in one of my experiential sessions or conferences. If they take the time to check, this usually does the trick.

Taking a leap

Yes, it’s hard to take a leap and trust something you haven’t experienced and don’t yet understand. Ask me to be the first person to ever jump from a plane with something called a “parachute” on my back? I’d turn you down. But you’re not the first person to jump! Talk to people you trust who have already made it safely and wonderfully to the ground. You may well realize that if they did it, you can do it too.

Then, go for the change. You can work on understanding it later.

This post is part of the series How do you facilitate change? In this occasional series, we explore various aspects of facilitating individual and group change.

Photo attribution: Flickr user victius

Tags: action, change, experiential, facilitating change, Learning, understanding| Posted in Facilitating Change | No Comments »

A story about the power of experiential learning

Thursday, July 28th, 2011 by Adrian Segar

What approach should we use to teach participation techniques for meeting sessions? Here’s my answer to this question, illustrated by a story about the power of experiential learning.

With the rise of social learning and the decline in the importance of formal learning, perhaps we should use experiential learning. On the other hand, in the same time we need to experience a limited set of participation techniques we can comprehensively describe many more. Then again, perhaps experiencing a participation technique directly is a more effective way to cement both learning it and truly understanding its relevance. So, if we are teaching participation techniques, which of these two approaches is a better path for learning?

J’s light-bulb moment

Earlier this week I led a workshop at Meeting Professionals International’s World Education Congress (WEC). The 150-minute session covered a variety of techniques that foster and support meaningful participation during meetings. Participants spent most of their time using these techniques to learn about and connect with each other. They also explored questions about their experience at WEC and in the session itself.

As the workshop progressed, and I heard from the forty-six participants, it became clear that one of them, whom I’ll call J, had considerable prior experience with the techniques I was facilitating.

Near the end of the workshop, I ran Plus/Delta (described in Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love): a method that provides a fast, public evaluation of a session or entire meeting. As an advocate for transparency and feedback, I chose the subject of our Plus/Delta to be a group evaluation of the workshop itself. During the evaluation, J commented that he had hoped that I would cover more techniques by talking about them rather than having attendees experience them directly. He then contributed a simple and ingenious way to extend Plus/Delta that was new to me.

My heart sank a little

Here was J, an experienced facilitator of participation techniques, proposing that I should spend the workshop talking about techniques rather than facilitating experiences of them. Could I be going about this wrong?

I moved immediately into the last technique of the workshop, running fishbowl. This is a simple way to facilitate focused discussion with a large group. All participants sit in a large circle of chairs. Only people in the “fishbowl”, a small circle of chairs at the center, can speak. After a few minutes of comments, J entered the fishbowl.

J said that he had read about fishbowls many times before. He understood how they worked, but he had never tried one.

And then, to my surprise and delight, he told us that experiencing the fishbowl had been a revelation to him. Why? Because he had directly experienced the power of the technique in a way that significantly enhanced his understanding of it, which he had previously believed to be sufficient. It was poignant for me to hear J express a new point of view that contradicted what he had said only a few minutes earlier. I admired his courage in sharing his learning with us all.

I too have struggled over the years to define the best balance between understanding techniques through description and understanding them through direct experience. J’s light-bulb moment fits for me; these days I am content to let attendees learn participation techniques, first through direct experience and then, if necessary, via reflection and discussion.

Postscript

At the end of the workshop, J and I talked while I was packing up for a flight home.

He told me that his fishbowl sharing had unexpectedly reminded him of a session he had once attended. It was entitled “One hundred icebreakers in one hundred minutes”, and consisted of rapid descriptions of a hundred ways to introduce attendees to each other.

His rueful comment?

“I don’t remember any of them.”

Tags: experiential, fishbowl, Learning, light-bulb moment, MPI, plus/delta, World Education Congress| Posted in Learning | 2 Comments »