group spective Archives : Conferences That Work

Use spectives to unlock the full potential of conferences

Monday, March 4th, 2024 by Adrian Segar

During a 1992 conference, I created the first of what I now call spectives. A spective is a plenary closing session that combines a retrospective (looking back at what just happened) with a prospective (looking forward into the future).

My visual metaphor for a spective is the two-faced Roman god Janus, who was “the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings”. [Fun fact: The month of January is named for Janus.]Over the last 33 years, I’ve led hundreds of spectives and introduced the format to many event professionals and facilitators. Spectives are popular and successful because, like peer conferences, they adapt beautifully to participants’ wants and needs. I’ve facilitated them for large (e.g. the 2015 PCMA Education Conference) and small (e.g. the 2023 BizBash Leadership Summit) conferences.

I won’t repeat the details of leading a spective here because they are covered comprehensively in all my books. (You can also learn a fair amount about spectives by searching the posts on this site.)

You’d think spectives would take more time the larger the group, but they scale surprisingly well. Most spectives don’t include facilitated discussion of uncovered themes and issues and typically take from fifteen to forty-five minutes. [TIP: I usually schedule an hour. This means the event usually ends early, which participants appreciate 😀.]

They are a perfect way to end a conference because:

Spectives rapidly and effectively provide a collective experience of what the conference has been like for everyone

I’ve found that spectives are a fantastic tool for participants to get a big picture of what an event has been like for the group. This informs their own experience. A participant may learn that others shared their specific experience (e.g., I liked/didn’t like a session/format/topic, etc.) Or they may discover that aspects that were negative for them were positive for others, or vice versa. Learning how your experience reflects that of the group is valuable information that leads to the consequence that…

Spectives build community

I’m not sure there’s a faster way for a group’s members to learn about what they have in common. Rapidly uncovering and expressing thoughts and feelings about what they’ve experienced together creates powerful bonds. The intense experience makes it likely (though not assured) that the event participants will want to meet again. And the spective provides valuable clues as to what forms such meetings might take.

Spectives are simple to lead, fun, informative, and bonding. They end your event on a high note. So make them the closing session of every conference you create!

A hat tip!

A hat tip to Nicole Osibodu and Kamryn Bryce for sparking me to write about the value of spectives, via their LinkedIn post (below) on how they use them at The Community Factory events!

Image attribution Wikipedia: The bust of Two-faced Janus (Ianus Bifrons) at the Cameron’s Gallery in Tsarskoye Selo 18th century, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International

Tags: bonding, community, group spective, sharing, spective| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

Six fundamental ways to make a better conference

Monday, October 10th, 2022 by Adrian Segar

The other day, a client booked an hour with me to discuss how to make their conference better. Not much time, but enough for us to uncover and for me to suggest plenty of significant improvements.

Thinking about our conversation afterward, I realized that all my recommendations involved six fundamental processes that, when implemented well and appropriately, will make any conference better.

Using participant agreements.
The Three Questions.
Pair/trio share.
Fishbowl.
A personal introspective.
A group spective.

So here’s a brief introduction to each of these core processes. Each section includes suggested links and resources to learn more.

Using participant agreements

Meeting ground rules, covenants, or agreements. Whatever you call them (I’ve used all three terms), explicitly naming and asking participants to commit to appropriate agreements at the start of a meeting fundamentally improves conference environments.

Participant agreements help to create an intimate and safe conference environment. They set the stage for collaboration and participation because they give people permission and support for sharing with and learning from each other

I’ve used the six pictured above for many years. You can read more about ways to create attendee safety and intimacy via agreements—and the benefits for your meetings—in Chapter 17 of The Power of Participation.

Creating agreements at the start of a meeting takes five minutes!

The Three QuestionsUltimately, there are three key things that conference attendees want to know about each other. As this post explains, they want to know about:

Attendees’ relevant pasts that bring them to the meeting;
What people personally want to learn and happen at the meeting; and
The valuable experience and expertise that’s available from others in the room.

I’ve covered the value and how to run The Three Questions in all three of my books, but the latest and most up-to-date description is in Chapter 18 of Event Crowdsourcing.

And check out this video (transcript included) where I explain The Three Questions with the help of my friends at Endless Events.

The Three Questions typically takes 60 – 90 minutes. When you add it to a one-day or longer conference it will significantly deepen participant connections made and strengthened during the event that follows.

Pair/trio share

Any conference session that doesn’t regularly use pair share (or trio share) is missing out on the simplest and easiest tool I know to improve learning and connection during the session. (Okay, if you’re running lightning talks, Pecha Kucha, or Ignite, you get a pass.)

The technique is simple: after pairing up participants and providing a short period for individual thinking about an appropriate topic, each pair member takes a minute in turn to share their thoughts with their partner. Read this post to learn why you should use pair share liberally throughout an event. More details can be found in Chapter 38 of The Power of Participation.

Fishbowl

Every good conference includes participant discussions (aka breakouts). The single best way to create a productive discussion that prevents anyone from monopolizing the conversation is the fishbowl format. (Which you can also use online.)

[TIP: You can use fishbowls to great effect in panel discussions too! Here’s how I do it.]

[BONUS TIP: There’s a fishbowl variant, the two sides fishbowl, which is great for exploring opposing viewpoints in a group.]

See this post’s conclusion for one more variant!

Fishbowls are flexible formats that you can adapt to the time available and the number of participants. Learn more about them in Chapter 42 of The Power of Participation.

A personal introspective

Much of the learning that occurs during a traditional conference is wasted because participants don’t have the time or opportunity to consolidate and integrate personal learning into their future life and work. Though a personal introspective takes about an hour to run, it’s the single best way I know to maximize the learning and future outcomes of an event. I recommend you use one at the end of any multi-day conference.

Check out this introduction, or Chapter 57 of The Power of Participation for full details.

A group spective

Every conference I design and facilitate has a final session that I call a group spective. The personal introspective described above allows participants to review what they have personally learned and to determine what they consequently want to change in their lives. A group spective provides a time and a place to make this assessment of the past, present, and potential future collectively.

The design of a group spective depends on the goals and objectives of the preceding event. These days, I invariably start with a beautifully simple technique, Plus/Delta, (see Chapter 56 of The Power of Participation) in which participants first publicly share their positive experiences of the conference. When that’s done, they share any changes they think would improve the event if it were held again.

Plus/Delta is an elegant tool for quickly uncovering a group’s experience of a conference. I’ve run them for hundreds of people in thirty minutes. (Some groups take longer; your experience may vary!) A Plus/Delta usually has an immediate emotional impact, drawing the group together right at the end of the event.

Check out this introduction, or Chapter 58 of The Power of Participation for more details.

[TIP: A variant, action Plus/Delta, is a great tool for a group to determine and commit to group action outcomes uncovered at a conference.]

Conclusion

It’s best to think of these six core processes as building blocks that can be used in multiple ways. Combining them appropriately allows you to create customized optimum process to meet different goals. A great example is using two pair shares around a fishbowl to create what I call a fishbowl sandwich: an incredibly effective way to create very large group discussions around a meaty topic.

It’s also helpful to see these processes as parts of the conference arc, which is how I envision the overall flow of a participant-driven and participation-rich meeting.

One final point. When appropriately incorporated into a good meeting design, these six core fundamental processes will make any conference better. But for maximum effectiveness, it’s important to use them in a congruent way.

For example, participant agreements are useless, even counterproductive, if conference and session facilitators don’t support them. Similarly, telling attendees they’ll have the opportunity to participate in their learning and then feeding them a diet of broadcast-style lectures will not be well received. In fact, competent facilitation is a prerequisite for these processes to be successful. (Yes, I’m here to help 😀.)

Tags: agreements, fishbowl, group spective, pair-share, personal introspective, The Three Questions, trio share| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

How to design for powerful connection and learning at large meetings

Monday, July 9th, 2018 by Adrian Segar

How can we design for powerful connection and learning at large meetings?

Although you’d never guess it from reading meeting industry trade journals, most meetings are small meetings, and this is a good thing if you want effective and relevant connection and learning to take place.

Large meetings stroke owners’ and leaders’ egos, and can supply impressive spectacle. They are appropriate places to launch campaigns and mass announcements and can be very profitable. However, they are poor vehicles for creating the useful participant learning, connection, and outcomes that well-designed small conferences can deliver.

So if you are (un)fortunate enough to be the owner or designer of a large meeting, what can you do to maximize participant value?

You need to satisfy four core requirements for optimum learning and connection:

Provide sessions focused on content that participants care about.
Design for small sessions and/or have participants work together in small groups.
Use interactive formats.
Include closing sessions that consolidate learning, build community, and explore the group’s future.

Let’s take a look at each of these requirements in more detail.

Content that participants care about

Traditional large conferences use the “kitchen sink” {aka “spray and pray”} approach of stuffing sessions on every potentially interesting topic into the program. Slightly more sophisticated conferences attempt to determine in advance the topics that attendees say they want.

Unfortunately, years of research by yours truly has shown that when conference sessions are chosen in advance, the majority of them are not what attendees want and need {here’s an example}. It’s like John Wanamaker describing advertising: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

There’s no way to know in advance which sessions you’ve prescheduled will meet participants’ wants and needs.

To be sure of scheduling sessions about content that participants actually care about, you’ll need to uncover and satisfy their actual wants and needs at the event. Luckily, doing this isn’t rocket science — I’ve been crowdsourcing programs in many different ways for 33 years.

Want to learn more? My 2009 book Conferences That Work describes one way to create an entirely crowdsourced multi-day conference. Here’s another way to do it for a one-day conference. If you have only a few hours Open Space is useful (though, in my opinion, overrated). Finally, check out my latest book Event Crowdsourcing which covers everything I’ve learned about crowdsourcing programs at meetings.

Small sessions and/or small group work

One of the reasons why small conferences with a well-defined niche audience work well is that participants don’t have to waste time meeting people with whom they have little in common. Large meetings attempt to create the same environment by scheduling multiple conference tracks and concurrent breakout sessions. Often, however, the resulting sessions are still too large for people to easily make useful connections and/or learn from each other.

Unless you use interactive formats (see below), not much useful learning can happen in an hour with a hundred attendees.

One simple approach to reduce the size of large sessions is to run them simultaneously in several rooms. Or you can repeat them at different times. Distribute interested participants between multiple sessions, either by preallocation (for simultaneous sessions) or personal choice. I use this approach to run The Three Questions as an opening plenary at large conferences.

Small sessions, with thirty or fewer participants, should be the goal. Such sizes invite less formal formats where it’s easier for participants to ask questions, influence what is covered and discussed, and contribute their expertise and experience to the learning environment.

Finally, large sessions can work effectively if they have a significant small group work component. For example, some of the session formats I design and facilitate — for example, The Solution Room, RSQP, and The Personal Introspective — scale to work with any number of participants because most of the important work is done in small groups.

Remember, small is beautiful!

Interactive formats

Designing genuinely useful sessions for large groups is challenging work and typically requires incorporating small group work as described above. However, I have had great success facilitating highly interactive discussions of “hot topics” with hundreds of people. By interactive, I don’t mean that five people monopolize the entire discussion. Typically about forty people are “up on stage” at some point, most of whom had no inkling beforehand that they had something useful to contribute.

I call the format I’ve developed the Fishbowl Sandwich, and you’ll find full details on how to design and prepare such a session in Event Crowdsourcing.

Closing sessions

Most meetings squander the experiences they create. How? By failing to provide structured time to consolidate and reflect on individual and group learning and explore consequent future change. You can improve all meetings by including closing sessions that:

Help participants consolidate what they’ve learned during the conference and determine the next steps; and
Provide an opportunity for participants to reflect on the event, build community, and uncover new opportunities for future activities together.

Luckily, formats that satisfy these important needs — The Personal Introspective and Group Spective — can be run for meetings of any size.

Include them!

Final thoughts

Designing for connection and learning at large meetings by incorporating sessions like the ones I’ve outlined above? Bear in mind that interactive sessions typically require more time than traditional lecture-style presentations. Active learning is messy and risky, and creating an effective and safe learning environment takes more time than simply listening to or viewing speaker content.

About to schedule crowdsourcing, interactive formats, and closing sessions? Investigate the amount of time they’ll need, so you don’t sabotage them by cramming them into a timeslot that can’t do them justice. The links above are good resources. Investigate them, apply their principles, and make your large conferences better!

Tags: care, closing sessions, connection, core requirements, crowdsourcing, group spective, interactive formats, large meetings, Learning, open space, outcomes, personal introspective, small group work, small is beautiful, small meetings| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

Shut up and listen — part 2

Tuesday, December 26th, 2017 by Adrian Segar

Sometimes, I just need to shut up and listen. When I close peer conferences with a Group Spective, there’s always a moment that is hard for me. It occurs during the Plus/Delta when people are sharing what they’d like to change in the event they’ve just experienced. Participants offer many suggestions, perspectives, and ideas that make the organization’s future activities and events better, and their sharing frequently helps me improve my own work.

And then someone, let’s call them John, comes up to the microphone and says something like this:

“Well, at the beginning of this conference we spent a lot of time choosing the sessions. I think it would be much better if we just asked everyone what they wanted to talk about before the conference. Then we could start the program right away and have more time for the sessions!”

I know John’s intentions are good. I know he’s genuinely trying to help to make the conference better.

Regardless, at this point, a voice inside me is saying:

“Aargh, not again! Do you think no one has ever suggested this before? If I’d found a way during the thirty years I’ve spent designing and facilitating events to create better conference programs by asking people what they wanted in advance, don’t you think I would be using it?

The reason we spent precious time at the start of this event learning about our wants and needs and experience and expertise and then co-creating a conference program optimized from what we discover is that I’ve found that taking this time creates a much better conference than one where the program is somehow determined in advance!”

And so on. I feel sad and misunderstood and disconnected listening to John who doesn’t get the essence of what I’ve spent years creating and fine-tuning, to whom I’ve failed to convey something that I believe is valuable and important.

I feel frustrated in much the same way as when I meet people who insist that the world is really less than ten thousand years old, are sure vaccines cause autism, or believe there’s a scientific conspiracy to falsely declare that recent human activities cause climate warming.

Regardless, I need to shut up and listen.

What happens if I don’t shut up and listen

On one occasion I couldn’t stop myself from responding to a participant who said that the initial roundtable and peer session sign-up we had used was a waste of time. I said that in my experience, it created a better conference. The participant, a state legislator, looked at me and said, “This is a time for me to share my opinions, not for you to share yours.”

And he was right.

Yes, it’s hard at moments like this for me to keep my mouth shut.

But it’s important that I do. My job is to facilitate the process that’s going on, not offer my own opinions.

The silver lining

In the end, it turns out that I don’t actually need to say anything. Invariably, other participants respond to John. They’ll come up to the microphone and say things like:

“Actually, John, I disagree, I liked what we did! Yes, it took a bit longer, but I:
— got to know many attendees in really helpful ways;
—made valuable connections with people who have useful expertise and experience;
—learned about interesting topics I hadn’t thought about before; and
—enjoyed some excellent sessions, many of which I suspect wouldn’t have been included in a traditional conference.”

And I feel better again.

Which teaches me something else. Though I experience my feelings in the moment as permanent and unchangeable, my feelings are transitory. This too shall pass.

Definitely something worth learning.

If I shut up and listen.

[If you missed it, here’s the first part of Shut up and listen.]

Tags: challenges, facilitation, feelings, group spective, listening, plus/delta, shut up| Posted in facilitation | No Comments »

Look back to look forward

Monday, August 17th, 2015 by Adrian Segar

Sometimes it’s good to look back to look forward.

From September 2002 through November 2009 I kept a journal, writing each day before going to bed. Every once in a while I’ll pick one of the five thick notebooks I filled during those seven years and read some entries at random.

Why do I do this?

I don’t revisit my journals to immerse myself in my past. Back then, I wrote to capture and reflect on my experience while it was still fresh, to explore how I responded to and felt about the day’s events. I didn’t write for posterity, and there are many raw experiences in these pages that are painful to recall.

Instead, I dip into what I wrote to compare where I was then with where I am now.

Sometimes I discover that life circumstances have changed. Perhaps certain issues that once preoccupied me no longer do. (For example, my financial situation has changed for the better.) Perhaps some issues are still part of my life, but my response to them is different (e.g., speaking in public no longer scares me as much as it once did.) And perhaps I’m aware now of issues that were absent from my journals (e.g., the implications of growing older.)

Whatever I discover, when I look back at what I used to think and do I receive important information.

Often I discover that I am continuing to change and grow in specific ways. As someone who wants to be a life-long learner, someone who doesn’t want to be “stuck”, that is good and encouraging information to have.

I also notice that certain aspects of my life haven’t changed significantly. Frequently, that’s because they are core aspects of who I am and the world I inhabit.

And sometimes, I become aware that I’m stuck in some pattern of behavior or response that I’d like to change. That’s good information too.

Look back to look forward. At the end of a peer conference, a personal introspective allows participants to explore new directions as a result of experiences during the event. On a longer timescale, old personal journals (or any records of past personal introspection) can be a great tool for learning about ourselves and mapping our future path on life’s journey.

Creative Commons image of Janus courtesy of Wikipedia

Tags: being stuck, group spective, growth, journaling, looking back, looking forward, personal introspective, reflection| Posted in Learning, life lessons | No Comments »