Learning Archives : Page 4 of 8 : Conferences That Work

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 »

Nine conference mythodologies

Monday, May 14th, 2018 by Adrian Segar

Long ago, consultant Tom Gilb coined the term “mythodology” to describe erroneous but commonly held beliefs about how something should be done. Here are nine conference mythodologies.

Mythodology: We know what our attendees want to learn about

Reality: No, you don’t. At least half the sessions programmed at traditional conferences are not what attendees want.

Mythodology: Event socials are a good way to meet people

Reality: People tend to stay with people they already know at event socials. Participant-driven and participation-rich events provide far more opportunities to meet people you actually want to meet.

Mythodology: A “conference curator” can improve the quality of your conference content

Reality: Sadly, conference curators don’t exist. However, discovering the content wants and needs of participants at the event and satisfying them with the collective resources in the room is routinely possible and significantly improves the quality of your conference content.

Mythodology: Learning occurs through events

Reality: Learning is a continual process; formal events only contribute a small percentage to the whole.

Mythodology: Conference programs should be stuffed full of sessions so there’s something of interest for everyone

Reality: Downtime is essential for effective learning and connection, so providing conference white space is essential. (Trick: Stuff your program if you must, but give attendees explicit permission to take their own downtime when they need it.)

Mythodology: Adding novelty to a meeting makes it better

Reality: Novelty is a one-time trick. Next time it’s old. But making your meeting better lasts. Go for better, not just different.

Mythodology: Big conferences are better conferences

Reality: Better for the owners perhaps (if the meeting is making a profit) but not better for participants. Today’s most successful conferences are micro conferences. (And, by the way, most conferences are small conferences.)

Mythodology: We know what attendees like, don’t like, and value about our meeting

Reality: If you’re using smile sheets or online surveys, you’re learning nothing about the long-term value of your meeting. This is the meeting industry’s biggest dirty secret. Use long-term evaluation techniques [1] [2] instead.

Mythodology: We can contract a venue for our meeting before we design it

Reality: Sounds silly when put like that, but it happens all the time. Designing your meeting and then choosing a venue that can showcase your design will improve your meeting experience (and can save you big bucks!)

I bet you can think of more than these nine conference mythodologies. Share them in the comments!

Image attribution: Flickr user dunechaser

Tags: conference curator, design, evaluations, ff0000, Learning, meeting size, Mythodology, Novelty, socials, Tom Gilb, venue contracting, white space| Posted in Event design | 2 Comments »

The best way to fundamentally improve a dull conference

Monday, February 12th, 2018 by Adrian Segar

What’s the best way to fundamentally improve a dull conference?

I’ve been attending conferences for over forty years. Most of them are dull and largely irrelevant. This seems to be the norm because when you talk to attendees you find they set a low bar for satisfaction— e.g. “It’s OK if I learn one new thing a day, oh, and if I make a useful connection or two that would be great!”

For twenty years I assumed this was how conferences were supposed to be. When I began creating conferences myself, I used the same standard format: invite experts to speak to audiences.

Then in 1992, circumstances forced me to do one thing differently. Ever since, thanks to that happy accident, I have been designing and facilitating peer conferences that people have loved for over a quarter-century.

“…gets an award for most/best/most thoughtfully organized conference I think I’ve ever been to.”

“I’m an introvert. I’ve never shared as much at a conference before. Your process is brilliant. Thank you.”

“…the truest sense of community I’ve ever felt and it was beautiful to experience. I hope you have the opportunity to experience something like this in your lifetime. It changes everything.”
—Three recent participants on their experience at three different peer conferences

What’s the one key thing I do that almost no one else does?

I facilitate the discovery of interesting people, ideas, and resources at the start of the event.

What does that mean and how do I do it? Read on!

The dreary reality of most conferences

How many conferences have you attended where you mostly meet someone interesting by chance? When you’re with colleagues, you hang out together because everyone else is a stranger. When you don’t really know anyone, you talk to the people you’re sitting next to at meals and hope they’ll be interesting.

Have you ever wondered whether someone who would be really great to meet is sitting three chairs away from you during a session or lunch? Well, you’ll never find out at a typical conference, and you won’t get to meet them.

In addition, think about all that time spent talking to people with whom you have little in common. You’re searching for useful connections, and solutions to professional challenges — but the conference provides no support for discovering and connecting with the most important resources in the room: the other interesting participants with the background and answers you want and need.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Here’s what I do to greatly improve a dull conference for everyone.

Facilitating the discovery of interesting people, ideas, and resources

Immediately after welcome and housekeeping announcements I run one or more opening sessions that use The Three Questions, allowing participants to learn about each other, share what they would like to learn and discuss, and proffer their relevant expertise and experience.

This single opening exercise, which takes between thirty minutes and two hours depending on the conference size and duration, is the most important component of creating a meeting that really matters. A meeting that makes possible the learning, connection, engagement, and outcomes that stakeholders and participants want.

Providing this safe discovery process allows each person to get immediate answers to the core questions that they want and need to know about the other participants. If there are people in your roundtable you’d like to meet, you’ll find out who they are. You’ll hear a wealth of topics and issues that are on participants’ minds, including great new ideas. You’ll discover the people in the room who can be valuable resources for you: people with experience and expertise to help you with your current challenges, and people who are interested in exploring or collaborating on common interests you find you share. And finally, you may well discover (to your surprise) that you are a valuable resource for other participants!

When the roundtables are over, you will have something that typical conferences never supply: key information about the people present that provides a fantastic introduction to the participants, current challenges, opportunities, and resources in the room.

You then have the rest of the conference to take advantage of everything you’ve learned.

Why early discovery works so well

There’s nothing I’ve described that can’t also be done through painstaking conversation with the strangers around you at an event. What three-question roundtables do so well is supply and support a simple process that makes this discovery efficient, and comprehensive. Your participants will share and receive the information they need to make the conference that follows maximally effective for them. And they will appreciate that!

Want to transform your next conference by facilitating early discovery?

The full nitty-gritty details of how to prepare for and run three-question roundtables can be found in my book The Power of Participation: Creating Conferences That Deliver Learning, Connection, Engagement, and Action. Or experience the power of a roundtable yourself (and many more ways to significantly improve your conferences) by attending one of my Participate! workshops.

Tags: connection, discovery, early discovery, engagement, interpersonal discovery, Learning, outcomes, peer conferences, roundtable, The Three Questions| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

Six reasons to change conferences

Monday, October 23rd, 2017 by Adrian Segar

In my keynote at Blend Abu Dhabi, the inaugural meeting industry conference at the new Yas Conference Centre, I shared six reasons to change conferences for them to remain relevant to today’s attendees.

Although I’ve written about these issues before, this is the first time I’ve summarized them in one place. Together they make a strong business case for the participant-driven and participation-rich meetings I’ve been advocating since 1992.

Enjoy!

Sessions provide no connection around content

Today, the most important reason why people go to conferences is to usefully connect with others around relevant content. But our conference programs still focus on lectures, where a few experts broadcast their knowledge to passive listeners: the audience. During lectures, there’s no connection between audience members and no connection around lecture content.

At traditional conferences, connection is relegated to breaks, meals, and socials! That’s why you so often hear, “The best part of that conference was the conversations in the hallways.” It doesn’t have to be that way! Peer conferences provide conference sessions where participants connect around relevant, timely content.

Lectures are a terrible way to learn

We’ve known for over a hundred years that lectures are a terrible way to learn something. Lectures are a seductive meeting format because they are very efficient ways of sharing information. Unfortunately, lectures are perhaps the least effective way of learning anything.

Why? Over time, we rapidly forget almost everything someone tells us. But when we engage with content, we remember more of it, remember it more accurately, and remember it longer. Every measure of learning increases drastically when attendees actively participate while learning in sessions.

The rise of online

Most broadcast content is now readily available online. An internet connection provides expert content anywhere, just in time when it’s needed. You don’t need to go to conferences for broadcast content (which you’ll probably have forgotten by the time you need it) anymore!

Professionals learn predominantly socially, not in the classroom

Until about twenty years ago, professionals learned most of what they needed to know to do their jobs in the classroom. Today we know that only about 10% of what we need to know to do our jobs involves formal classroom teaching. The other 90% is informal, provided by a combination of self-directed learning and social, active, experiential learning with our peers on the job or (what an opportunity!) at conferences with our peers.

Though ~90% of the learning modalities adult workers need these days are informal social learning from our peers, we persist in making the bulk of “education” at meetings formal presentations by a few experts! Instead, we need to concentrate on and provide maximum opportunities for the just-in-time peer learning our attendees need and want.

Today, everyone has expertise and experience to share

Everyone who has worked in a profession for a while is an expert resource for some of her or his peers. Instead of limiting content to broadcast by a few “experts”, peer conferences provide process and support to uncover and tap the thousands of years of expertise and experience in the room. Remember how David Weinberger puts it: “The smartest person in the room is the room.” We need conference process that uncovers and taps everyone’s experience and expertise while people are together at the conference!

Most pre-scheduled sessions don’t address actual attendee wants and needs

Because we’ll forget learning that isn’t currently needed and reinforced, conferences need to provide just-in-time learning. And you can’t predict most of the just-in-time learning by asking a program committee, or attendees for that matter, in advance. My research has found that 50 – 90% of all pre-scheduled conference sessions are not what attendees actually want and need! In contrast, just about all peer conference sessions, chosen and run by participants during the event, are rated highly because they provide the just-in-time learning and connection that participants want from the event.

Conclusion

My books explore these six reasons to change conferences in detail. To get the full story, buy ’em!

Tags: Abu Dhabi, active learning, Blend, change, connection, informal learning, just-in-time, Learning, lectures, rise of online, social learning, Yas Conference Center| 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 »

How to inspire transformational learning

Monday, August 21st, 2017 by Adrian Segar

Why do some learning experiences stay burning in our brains and others fade into oblivion? Transformational learning is the key!

I still vividly remember the first Event Camp held on February 6, 2010, in New York City. I learned so much at this one-day event, meeting many progressive meeting industry professionals for the first time and making what have turned out to be lasting connections and friendships.

And I believe that most participants experienced something similar.

Why did we have this shared learning and connecting experience? Was there a critical factor that made this meeting such a transformational experience?

Emotional connection

While reading J. Scott Wagner‘s wonderful book The Liberal’s Guide to Conservatives — a must-read for liberals and conservatives who want to communicate better with each other — I came across a passage that answers these questions:

“It’s easy to forget that inspiration is the only voluntary catalyst for transformation.

There’s only one way I’ve found that our adult unconscious mind can consistently be inspired to shed…heuristics and biases and learn something challenging from someone else. It’s actually miraculously easy, often: we experience a positive emotional connection together.”
—J. Scott Wagner, The Liberal’s Guide to Conservatives

Scott is not talking here about our routine day-to-day right-brain learning. Rather, he is describing transformational learning, the kind where real change can occur in how we view the world and our experience of it. He says, and I agree, that a positive emotional experience of connection inspires transformational learning.

That’s what happened at Event Camp 2010. We came together for the first time and discovered kindred souls who were thirsting to learn and share about how to make meetings better. And in one day, our positive emotional connection changed our preconceptions of what meetings could be.

The original participants at the first edACCESS conference, which I and others convened in 1992, felt the same way. The experience of this early peer conference led to an annual conference that’s still thriving 33 years later. Over time, it has become clear that the driving force behind the event’s success has been how its design fosters participants’ positive emotional experiences, creating and supporting opportunities for transformational change in how the professional attendees view and do their work.

Fostering learning experiences

Traditional meetings don’t treat sessions as times to foster positive emotional learning experiences but as times to learn from lectures. So, at such meetings, positive emotional experiences are restricted to non-session socials and non-session-entertainment. The official learning opportunities are segregated from exactly the kind of environments that can make them inspirational and transformative.

Paradoxically, we design special events to create positive emotional experiences—but special events don’t focus on learning! Rather, to inspire transformational learning, you need to create conferences and conference sessions designed around appropriate positive emotional experiences that relate to the participants’ real learning wants and needs. Do this, and you’ll discover how powerful, transformational, and unforgettable meetings can be!

Tags: connection, emotion, Event Camp, eventcamp, facilitating connection, Learning, positive emotional experiences, transformation, transformational learning| Posted in Learning | No Comments »

The Secrets Behind Conference Engagement

Monday, July 24th, 2017 by Adrian Segar

So you’re holding a conference. How are you going to get your audience tuned in and engaged?

I shared my thoughts on this topic on a 2017 episode of the weekly #EventIcons interview with good friend and host Brandt Krueger. Our hour together was packed with useful information, so feel free to watch the whole thing (scroll down to view the video) or check out the timeline below for the main themes we discussed.

Enjoy!

3:00 Adrian tells the unlikely story of how he got into the events industry.

8:10 What would Adrian be doing if he wasn’t in the events industry?

9:10 The one driving passion shared by so many event professionals.

10:10 Why event planners and stakeholders should care about engagement.

11:20 Why traditional meetings don’t meet attendee needs very well.

12:10 How building participation into meetings creates engagement that significantly improves learning, connection, and outcomes.

14:20 Why lectures are so ineffective.

15:50 How to work with speakers and attendees who are introverts.

18:50 How to create a safe environment for attendees to share, learn, and connect.

20:15 An explanatory journey through the stages of participant-driven and participation-rich meetings that use the Conferences That Work model.

26:30 The positive aspects of supporting engagement at events, and the neglected need to evaluate events’ long-term impact.

29:10 The value of incorporating white space into events and several ways to do it.

34:50 How to work with speakers to make sessions more participatory.

37:20 How to market participant-driven conferences.

42:30 Three examples of simple participation techniques you can use to improve meetings: body voting, large facilitated fishbowl discussions, and The Solution Room.

50:30 The biggest mistake meeting planners make when attempting to improve participation and engagement.

54:30 Where to find all kinds of ideas about meeting design — and Adrian’s next book on crowdsourcing events.

The Secrets Behind Conference Engagement

Tags: #EventIcons, body voting, Brandt Krueger, Conferences That Work, connection, crowdsourcing, engagement, fishbowl, Learning, marketing, meeting design, outcomes, participant-driven, safety, solution room, working with introverts, working with speakers| Posted in Interviews | No Comments »

Three prerequisites for lifelong learning

Monday, November 28th, 2016 by Adrian Segar

Three prerequisites for lifelong learning

When the renowned cellist Pablo Casals was asked why, at 81, he continued to practice four or five hours a day he answered: “Because I think I am making progress.” Here are my three prerequisites for lifelong learning.

Like Casals, I want to keep living lifelong learning by:

Trying new things;
Noticing what happens when I do; and
Soliciting and being open to observations and feedback.

As an example, here’s what I recently learned while leading a workshop.

Trying new things and noticing what happens

During the workshop:

I used a projected countdown timer and a 90-second piece of music to get participants back in their seats on time at the end of a short mid-workshop break. Outcome? It worked really well!
While facilitating body voting (aka human spectrograms) I verbally stated each question we were exploring. Outcome? It seemed like a few participants didn’t hear or understand what I’d said until I repeated myself. Verbal communication didn’t work so well.
I wore a red hat when I was explaining/debriefing and took it off when I was facilitating experiences. Outcome? This was the second time I’ve tried this approach, and I’m still not sure whether it’s effective/useful or not.

When you pursue risky learning, some things work while some don’t — and for some, the jury is still out. Whatever happens, you can learn something!

Soliciting and being open to observations and feedback

During the workshop:

Some of the questions I asked during body voting asked individuals to come up with a numeric answer, and then join a group line in numerical order. Someone had the bright idea of showing their answer with fingers raised above their head, so it was easy for others to see where to go in the line. Many participants copied the idea, which sped up forming the human spectrograms. I’d never seen this done before and will adopt this simple and effective improvement.
I love to use a geographic two-dimensional human spectrogram to allow participants to quickly discover others who live/work near them. The wide U.S. map I projected did not correspond to the skinny width of the room. A participant suggested that we rotate where we stood by 90º. I tried her suggestion and found that it was easy for people to move to their correct positions. Duly noted!
At the end of the workshop, I solicited public feedback at a group spective. One participant shared frustration with my verbal statements of the body voting questions and suggested that the questions also be projected simultaneously. An excellent refinement that I will incorporate in the future.

Notice how participants were able to point out deficiencies in processes I used and simultaneously came up with some fine solutions. Peer learning in action!

Final thoughts

I’ve been designing and facilitating participant-driven and participation-rich meetings for 33 years, and many participants have been kind enough to share that I’m good at what I do (check out the sidebar testimonials).

But I don’t want to rest on my laurels. I’m no Casals, but, like him, I keep practicing, learning, and — hopefully — making progress.

Photo attribution: Gus Ruelas

Tags: feedback, Learning, lifelong, lifelong learning, noticing, Pablo Casals, progress, risky learning| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

Guaranteeing audience engagement at your events

Monday, November 21st, 2016 by Adrian Segar

Most people won’t ask questions at meetings. So how can you get authentic audience engagement at your events?

In a thoughtful article “Audience Engagement – at the Heart of Meetings“, Pádraic Gilligan writes:

“…We all want audience engagement so why doesn’t it take place?…While the speaker can be to blame for lack of audience engagement, in my experience, it’s usually the fault of the audience!”

I disagree.

I’ve found that the lack of audience engagement is due to the generally poor process used during most meeting sessions.

A different workshop

In 2016 I led a two-hour workshop in Boston for 160 members of a national education association. Every participant was active during ~80% of the workshop:

Discovering the concerns and experience of other participants;
Moving around the room while forming human spectrograms to learn about each other and the group (I used three participant-created chair sets during the session); and
Learning and connecting around issues and topics relevant to them throughout.

The hardest task of the workshop was getting people to stop talking with each other so we could move on!

Pádraic suggests that hi-tech polling methods can be used to increase engagement. I agree that such technology can help engagement, but it’s not necessary. During my workshop, I showed 12 slides, but would have been fine without them. Other technology I used included 5″ x 8″ cards, pens, and large post-it notes. We used no high-tech, with one optional exception. We projected a Google Doc at the end, to capture and display feedback during the closing public workshop evaluation.

Facilitating connection

In 25 years of experience, I’ve found that most people have a fundamental need and desire to connect with others with whom they share something in common. When you use good group process to safely facilitate appropriate connection, ~98% embrace the opportunity and learn, connect, and engage effectively with their peers. Anonymity, if needed, can be readily supplied by no-tech/low-tech process. But it turns out that it’s needed a lot less than people think.

Every person in the workshop received a copy of my book The Power of Participation, which explains why participant-driven and participation-rich sessions are so important, how to create an environment for this kind of learning, connection, engagement, and resulting action, and how and when to use a large organized compendium of appropriate process tools. The participants I spoke with after the workshop told me how excited they were. They planned to read the book and start putting what they had experienced into improving their professional development work in education.

It’s possible to create amazing learning and connection through the approaches I’ve outlined above. When I facilitate longer conferences, almost everyone will ask questions in public at some point during the event.

Conclusion

If you aren’t getting excellent audience engagement, don’t blame the audience! Change the processes you use in your sessions, to guarantee engagement!

You can experience how to use process tools to significantly improve the effectiveness of your sessions and events at one of my Participate! labs. If you can’t participate in a workshop, buy a copy of The Power of Participation to learn the why, what, and how of building better learning, connection, engagement, and action outcomes into your events.

Tags: action, connection, engagement, Learning, process tools, workshop| Posted in Event design | 1 Comment »

Lessons From Improv: Make Sure Your Meeting Messages Are Received

Monday, October 17th, 2016 by Adrian Segar

Make Sure Your Meeting Messages Are Received!

Want to improve the learning at your meetings? Make sure your meeting messages are received. That’s what I learned from You. No, not you — “You“!

“You”

“You“ is a delightful improv game I played at the Mindful Play, Playful Mind retreat in Mere Point, Maine. Players stand in a circle and the first player points to someone and says, “You”. The pointed-to player does the same by pointing to someone else until the last person has pointed back to the 1st person, creating a pattern. The pattern is practiced a few times until everyone has it … and then another pattern is created, using names of a class of common objects such as junk food, birds, colors, etc. Once the players have got that pattern down … well, let’s run both patterns simultaneously! Then let’s start doing things like adding another pattern, changing places in the circle with the “next” player…

As the game gets more complicated, it becomes an exercise in concentration and dealing with potential chaos. You have to figure out how to deal with unexpected situations. An example? Two people point to you simultaneously with a pattern while you’re trying to pass a third pattern to someone else. It’s challenging — and a lot of fun!

Learning from a debrief

After you play a game at an improv workshop, it’s time for a debrief. So we held one in between adding further complexities to “You.” Then we worked on incorporating our incremental learning into the next round.

What did we learn?

We discovered that when we were playing with multiple patterns going around the circle, the game fell apart. This happened when we incorrectly believed we had passed on a pattern to the next person and mistakenly turned our attention back to the circle to deal with the next pattern passed to us. It’s easy to point to the pattern’s next recipient, then hear another pattern that you have to respond to and fail to make sure that the pattern you’re passing has been successfully received. This only has to happen once for a pattern to stop going around the circle.

We realized that when we got caught up in the excitement and high-attention needs of a complex game, we played too quickly to reliably pass on pattern messages to the next person in the sequence, leading to dropped patterns.

Switch the focus!

To play the game reliably, we needed to switch our focus from frantically keeping up to making sure that our pattern message for the next person was received. We had to wait until our desired receiver was giving us their full attention. Then we could pass the pattern and check visually that they had received it. Then we’d turn our attention back to receiving patterns from others in the group.

The beauty of this focus switch was that if everyone did it, the game automatically slowed down as needed to successfully deal with complex or new situations. For example, if Mohamed & Juanita both wanted to send me a pattern while I was supposed to send one to Laurie, I would wait until Laurie was free to receive my pattern before turning my attention to Mohamed & Juanita. Mohamed & Juanita would see that I was occupied and wait until I had successfully sent Laurie my pattern, whereupon one of them would get my attention while the other waited until I was finally free.

If you didn’t carefully read the previous paragraph with full understanding, I forgive you. It’s much easier to experience how this focus switch works than to explain it.

The Lesson. You’ve gotta ask! Twice!

Ever had someone tell you something, and you don’t understand what they said? Duh! Of course you have! When this happens, the obvious thing to do is to ask them to explain. Do we always do that? No! In Conferences That Work I tell the story of how an entire class of graduate students (including me) stopped understanding our math professor halfway through the semester, and none of us ever informed him we were lost. What a waste of everyone’s time!

When you teach, it’s important to provide clear, understandable information. When you facilitate or lead a group, it’s important to provide clear process instructions. But regardless of how “good” you are at this, there is no guarantee that your message has been received completely or correctly.

And so to our lesson:

To teach or facilitate effectively, check early and often that what we are saying has been received and understood. When we use the ask, tell, ask model of participative learning, the second ask — the follow-up check for reception and understanding — is the one that’s all too easy to omit.

In other words: Make sure your meeting messages are received!

When we improv players made sure that our pattern passes had been received, we were amazed at how complex a game of “You” we could successfully play. In the same way, faithfully using all three steps of the ask, tell, ask model allows us to check that our teaching and facilitation as been received and understood, allowing us to create complex and successful active learning at our meetings.

Tags: ask, communication, facilitation, improv, Learning, lessons, message, messaging| Posted in Event design | No Comments »