Learning Archives : Page 6 of 8 : Conferences That Work

From broadcast to learning in 25 minutes

Monday, April 21st, 2014 by Adrian Segar

From broadcast to learning in 25 minutes

Last week’s Green Meetings Industry Council’s 2014 Sustainable Meetings Conference opened with a one-hour keynote panel: The Value of Sustainability Across Brands, Organizations and Sectors. Immediately after the presentation, my task was to help over two hundred participants, seated at tables of six, grapple with the ideas shared, surface the questions raised, and summarize the learning and themes for deeper discussion.

Oh, and I had twenty-five minutes!

For a large group to effectively review and reflect on presented material in such a short time, we have to quickly move from individual work to small group work to some form of a concrete visual summary that’s accessible to everyone.

Here’s what I did

[Added August 2023: I documented this entire process, named RSQP, in more detail in my book Event Crowdsourcing.]

Stand up!

1) My audience hadn’t moved for over an hour, and their brains had, to varying degrees, gone to sleep. So, for a couple of minutes, I had people stand, stretch, twist, and do shoulder rolls.

Explain!

2) Next, I summarized what we were about to do. I

- - Outlined the three phases of the exercise: a) working individually; b) sharing amongst the small group at their table, and c) a final opportunity to review everyone’s work in a short gallery walk.
  - Pointed out the tools available. Each table had a sheet of flip-chart paper (divided into a 2 x 2 matrix), 4 pads of different colored sticky notes, and a fine-tip sharpie for each person.

- - Explained the four categories they would use for their responses. After introducing each category I asked a couple of pre-primed volunteers to share an example of their response with the participants.
    - REMINDERS. “These are themes with which you’re already familiar that the keynote touched on. You might want to include ideas you think are important. And you might want to include themes that you have some expertise or experience with. More on that in a moment. Write each REMINDER on a separate blue sticky note, which will end up in the top left square of the flip chart.”
    - SPARKS. “Sparks are inspirations you’ve received from the keynote; new ideas, new solutions that you can adopt personally, or for your organization, or at your meetings. Write your SPARKS on yellow sticky notes; they’ll go in the top right square.
    - QUESTIONS. “These are ideas that you understand that you have questions about. Perhaps you are looking for help with a question. Perhaps you think a question brought up by the keynote is worth discussing more widely at this event. Write your questions on a green sticky note; they’ll go in the bottom left square.
    - PUZZLES. “Puzzles are things you feel that you or your organization or our industry don’t understand and need help with. Write your puzzles on a violet sticky note; they’ll go in the bottom right.”
  - Gave these instructions. “In a minute I’m going to give you about five minutes to work alone and create your REMINDERS, SPARKS, QUESTIONS, and PUZZLES. Don’t put your notes on the flip chart paper yet; we’ll do that communally soon. Any questions?” [There were none.] “Two final thoughts:
    - 1) Words are fine, but feel free to draw pictures or diagrams too!
    - 2) Consider adding your name to any of your notes. We’re going to display your notes on the wall over there. If you have expertise or experience in one of your themes, adding your name to your note will allow others who are interested in the topic to find you. Have a question or puzzle you need help with? Adding your name will allow others who can help to find you.”

Get to work alone!

3) I gave everyone five minutes to create their notes, asking them to shoot for a few responses in each category.

Share at your table!

4) For the second phase of the exercise, I asked each person to briefly explain their notes with the others at their table, placing them on the appropriate quadrant of the flip chart as they did so. I allocated each person a minute for this and rang a bell when it was time for the next person to begin.

Review everyone’s work!

5) The final phase was a gallery walk. I asked one person from each table to go and stick their flip chart page on a large blank meeting room wall. Once done, I invited everyone to go to the gallery and explore what we had created together.

The results

Here’s one end of the resulting sharing wall.

6) Later that evening I had a small number of subject matter experts cluster the themes they saw. (If I had had more time, I would have had all the participants work on this together during my session.) The resulting clusters were referred to throughout the conference for people to browse and use as a resource. Here’s a picture, taken later, showing the reclustered items in our “sharing space”.

Yes, you can go from broadcast to learning in 25 minutes! Even when time is short, an exercise like this can quickly foster huge amounts of personal learning, connection (via the table work and named sticky notes), and audience-wide awareness of interests and expertise available in the room. Use reflective and connective processes like these after every traditional presentation session to maximize their value to participants.

Tags: affinity grouping, clustering, facilitation, group process, Learning, maximizing meeting value, process, reflection, reviewing, sharing, sticky notes| Posted in Learning | 1 Comment »

How many mistakes have you made?

Monday, February 24th, 2014 by Adrian Segar

How many mistakes have you made? It depends.

From one perspective: millions. The step you attempted at eleven months but fell and skinned your knee. Your shame on hearing the gasps in class on announcing a sixty percent pop-quiz test score because you were supposed to be smarter than that. The time when you were so nervous at the interview that IBM turned you down for an internship. Girlfriends you fell for who dumped you. The partner who kicked you out of your solar energy business after five years of hard work. The decision to adopt infant twins that led to so much heartache during their adolescence.

From another perspective: none. How else could you find out how to walk without all the attempts and resulting falls? Would you have ever dealt with false shame if you’d never become aware of it? How long would it have taken to discover your dislike for working in large organizations? If your first girlfriend had been the woman who has now been your wife for 48 years, how would that have turned out? What other way could you have learned so much about running a business and managing employees in such a short time? Would you have absorbed so many vital liberating lessons about yourself without the hard truths you were forced to confront during the painful process of being a better parent?

All the learning that grows out of every single mistake.

How many mistakes have you made? Millions or none? It all depends on your perspective.

Tags: growth, Learning, lessons, lessons learned, life lessons, mistake| Posted in life lessons | No Comments »

Why measurable outcomes aren’t always a good thing

Monday, January 6th, 2014 by Adrian Segar

What could be wrong with requiring measurable outcomes?

“Enough of this feel-good stuff! How do we know whether people have learned anything unless we measure it?”
—A little voice, heard once in a while in learning designers’ heads

Ah, the lure of measurement! Yes, it’s important. From a scientific perspective, a better understanding of the world we live in requires doing experiments that involve quantifying properties in a statistically meaningful and repeatable way. Science has no opinion about ghosts, life after death, and astrology, for example, because we can’t reliably measure associated attributes.

The power of scientific thinking became widely evident at the start of the twentieth century. It was probably inevitable that it would be applied to management. The result was the concept of scientific management, developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Even though Taylorism is no longer a dominant management paradigm, its Victorian influence on how we view working with others still persists to this day.

But we can’t measure some important things

I’m a proponent of the scientific method, but it has limitations because we can’t measure much of what’s important to us. (Actually, it’s worse than that—often we aren’t even aware of what’s important.) Here’s Peter Block on how preoccupation with measurement prevents meaningful change:

The essence of these classic problem-solving steps is the belief that the way to make a difference in the world is to define problems and needs and then recommend actions to solve those needs. We are all problem solvers, action oriented and results minded. It is illegal in this culture to leave a meeting without a to-do list. We want measurable outcomes and we want them now…

…In fact it is this very mindset, one based on clear definition, prediction, and measurement which prevents anything fundamental from changing.
—Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging

One of my important learning experiences occurred unexpectedly in a workshop. A participant in a small group I was leading got furious after something I had said. He stood up and stepped towards me, shouting and balling his fists. At that moment, to my surprise, I knew that his intense anger was all about him and not about me. Instead of my habitual response—taking anger personally—I was able to effectively help him look at why he had become so enraged.

There was nothing measurable about this interchange, yet it was an amazing learning and empowering moment for me.

The danger of focussing on what can be measured

So, one of the dangers of requiring measurable outcomes is that it restricts us to concentrating on what can be measured, not what’s important. Educator Alfie Kohn supplies this example:

…it is much easier to quantify the number of times a semicolon has been used correctly in an essay than it is to quantify how well the student has explored ideas in that essay.
—Alfie Kohn, Beware of the Standards, Not Just the Tests

Another reason why we fixate on assigning a number to a “measured” outcome is that doing so can make people feel they can show they’ve accomplished something, masking the common painful reality that they have no idea how to honestly measure their effectiveness.

Measured learning outcomes can be relevant if we have a clear, performance-based, target. For example, we can test whether someone has learned and can apply cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) by testing them in a realistic environment. (Even then, less than half of course participants can pass a skills test one year after training.)

This leads to my final danger of requiring measurable outcomes. It turns out that measurements of learning outcomes aren’t reliable anyway!

For nearly 50 years measurement scholars have warned against pursuing the blind alley of value added assessment. Our research has demonstrated yet again that the reliability of gain scores and residual scores…is negligible.
—Professor Trudy W. Banta, A Warning on Measuring Learning Outcomes, Inside Higher Ed

Given that requiring measurable outcomes often inhibits fundamental change and is of dubious reliability, I believe we should be considerably more reluctant to insist on including them in today’s learning and organizational environments.

[This post is part of the occasional series: How do you facilitate change? where we explore various aspects of facilitating individual and group change.]

Image attribution: xkcd

Tags: Alfie Kohn, Learning, learning objectives, measurable, measurement, outcomes, Peter Block, Taylorism, Trudy Banta| Posted in Facilitating Change | 3 Comments »

Conferences need to be flexible!

Monday, December 16th, 2013 by Adrian Segar

Conferences need to be flexible!

We are informed about conferences by email, we arrive by airplane, and we gaze at fancy PowerPoint presentations, but, year after year, over a hundred million people experience a conference process that has changed very little since the 17th century.
—Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love

We need to make our conferences flexible. We need an exercise program for our events. Why? Here are three reasons.

1) Broadcast-style presentations are moving online

We spend over one hundred billion dollars every year on conferences. This figure does not include the value of attendees’ time. We routinely spend these huge amounts of money and time to bring people together to meet face-to-face. Only to feed them a program that was determined six months before. What is the point?

These days, real-time content can be shared online as soon as it’s available. It’s no longer necessary to waste time and money flying people to a common physical location where they then sit and listen to predetermined presenters. Online videos and webinars can handle known and/or mandatory content distribution efficiently and at much lower cost.

So what can we do at face-to-face conferences that we can’t do well online? Provide on-the-fly learning and connection opportunities that take maximum advantage of the people in the room!

2) Human knowledge is exploding

The current explosion of knowledge and, hence, associated conference topics, is driving a need for flexible conference approaches that can handle the increasingly complex and faster-paced real-time needs of today’s attendees. This is just-in-time learning. Surprisingly, there are effective and tested ways of putting attendees in charge of what they wish to learn and discuss. But you cannot give conference participants opportunities to determine what they wish to learn and discuss if you freeze your program before they arrive.

3) How we need to learn has changed

The final significant trend inexorably shaping adult learning is that adults now only learn about ten percent of what they need to know to do their jobs formally: in the classroom or at meeting presentations. Ninety percent of relevant adult learning today is informal; supplied through on-the-job experience and practice, connections with our peers, and self-directed learning.

Conferences—where attendee peers come together at one time and place—are the perfect place to create a rich environment for informal peer learning. We can’t continue to waste this opportunity with the rigid pre-determined sessions of the past. Instead, we need to set up opportunities for relevant peer learning to flourish in the sessions themselves.

Exercise flexibility for a healthy event

All conference organizers know the truism that to keep people coming to your events you need to provide an experience that meets their needs. Unfortunately, many believe that this is just a question of providing the “right content”. Not anymore! Truly successful events these days need to provide the right environment and formats for desired and appropriate learning and connecting to flourish.

You can respond to this challenge by adopting participant-driven and participation-rich meeting formats and techniques that adapt to the unpredictable, individual, and constantly changing requirements of today’s attendees. This exercise, while perhaps a little painful to start, will keep you and your events flexible. Remember, the quicker you start, the healthier your events will become!

Photo attribution: Flickr user theloushe

Tags: exercise, flexibility, flexible, just-in-time, Learning| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

What most schools don’t teach (and should)

Monday, December 9th, 2013 by Adrian Segar

What most schools don’t teach

First, watch the video above.

I learned to code at school when I was 15. No big deal? It was 1966. Learning to program a computer changed my life. Far more important than nearly everything else—facts I have long since forgotten—that I was “taught”.

Learning to code didn’t change my life because I could then make big bucks writing software, though my fourth career, as an IT consultant, was very kind to me. And the important truth of the video’s opening quote by Steve Jobs, “Everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer…because it teaches you how to think,” isn’t the main reason my life was changed.

No. The most important lesson from learning to code was that I could be creative. I discovered I had the potential to do things that no one else had done before. Programming showed me that I could make my own stuff, the way I wanted to make it.

I learned this despite the fact that this was at a time when my program was punched onto teletype paper tape, brought on public transport to a London university computer five miles away, and run through an Elliott 803, one of the world’s first semiconductor-based computers. I got to run one program a week. If it had errors, I had to wait another week before fixing it and trying again.

No one knew how to “teach programming” to fifteen-year-old kids then. Our teachers just handed us an Algol manual and asked us to figure out what we could do with it. (The IF statement was a revelation.)

I still remember my first two programs. The first found all the prime numbers less than a thousand. A nerdy task that took several weeks to get right.

My second?

I wrote, with a friend, a program that could play chess.

I never finished that second program, of course.

Only being able to run it once a week, we didn’t get much further than code that knew the rules of chess and was able to make legal moves. But what a leap for a fifteen-year-old British schoolboy—to have the freedom to choose an ambitious project that has occupied human minds for over half a century, culminating in the computer Deep Blue’s defeat of World Chess Champion Kasparov in 1997.

Today, it’s simple for children to work with inexpensive computers that can do far more, far easier, than the computers of my youth. The ability to create movies, graphics, sound, writing, and games is now at our fingertips. We know how to introduce children to the potential of these incredible machines far better than my teachers did.

The immediate feedback, wonder, opportunity for self-expression, power to create—and, yes, learning how to think—are all available in the potential of this amazing device. What most schools don’t teach? Make algebra, geometry, and calculus optional; teach programming to all children instead!

Photo attribution: Vintage ICL Computers

Tags: coding, education, Learning, programing, Steve Jobs, teaching| Posted in Learning | 3 Comments »

The surprising way adults learn 90% of what they need to know

Monday, November 25th, 2013 by Adrian Segar

It’s a common belief that classroom training and meeting presentations are the most important ways for adults to learn what they need to know to do their jobs.

This is an understandable belief. Why? Because it was largely true for hundreds of years until around the end of the twentieth century. Until about twenty years ago, adults learned most of what they needed to know to do their jobs in the classroom.

But the whole nature of “work” has changed dramatically since the last century. Today, it turns out, adults learn the majority of what they need to know in order to do their jobs informally: through on-the-job experience and practice, connections with our peers, and self-directed learning.

How adults learn: on-the-job experience and practice

Research that began in the 1980s at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) found that about 70% of managerial learning came from the job itself. Additional research, published by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1998, suggested that people learn about 70% of their jobs informally and the 70% figure appeared again in a two-year study of workers at large companies published by the Education Development Center.

Peer and self-directed learning

Well, perhaps classroom learning makes up the majority of the rest of the ways we need to learn? Nope. The CCL study referenced above also concluded that about 20% of individual professional development comes from peer learning: informal coaching, personal networks, and other collaborative and cooperative actions. The EDC study concludes that approximately 20% of what we need to know is provided by self-directed learning. This is learning we control ourselves, such as:

asking colleagues for help;
reading a relevant book or article; searching for answers on the internet; and
watching online instructional or lecture videos.

Learning from your peers is also called social learning. Increasingly, these days, we don’t have the luxury of being able to wait for scheduled training opportunities in order to respond to new job challenges. Instead, when we need to learn something professionally we tend to consult our peers and professional networks first. This is an example of just-in-time learning: we learn what we need to learn when we need it.

The 70:20:10 model

Put together, this research indicates that informal learning—experiential, social, and self-directed—makes up about 90% of the learning modalities that professionals use today. Only 10% of adult learning uses formal classroom or meeting presentation learning formats. This ratio of experiential:peer/self-directed:formal learning is known as the 70:20:10 rule. Here’s a quick overview by Charles Jennings:

What are the implications for event design?

90% of the learning modalities adult workers need and use these days are informal. So, why do we persist in making the bulk of “education” at most meetings formal presentations by experts?

Instead, we need to mirror the learning approaches that professionals need and use in their work environments. Our conferences provide a unique opportunity to tap the peer expertise and experience of assembled participants. Rather than listen to experts using broadcast models that today can be largely replaced by books, recordings, articles, and online resources, we should be using session formats that supply and support the experiential and peer-to-peer learning that attendees actually need and use.

“You send your child to the schoolmaster, but ’tis the schoolboys who educate him.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Culture,” The Conduct of Life (1860).

Ralph Waldo Emerson knew 150 years ago that adults learn mostly from their peers and by themselves. It’s time that our meeting designs reflected this reality.

Photo attributions: Flickr users petrol alt gone and herrberta

Tags: 70:20:10, Learning, peer learning, self-directed learning, social learning| Posted in Event design, Learning | 4 Comments »

Do great speakers just provide a better emotional experience?

Monday, June 3rd, 2013 by Adrian Segar

Do great speakers just provide a better emotional experience?

Feeling good—for a while

At MPI’s 2011 World Education Congress, I heard the best motivational speaker I’ve ever seen. Bill Toliver gave an amazing twenty-minute speech.

I felt inspired by Bill. Here’s what I tweeted at the time.

But three months later, I didn’t remember a thing Bill said. (In fact, I didn’t even remember his name when I came to write this post and had to ferret it out from an archive.)

Now this may be simply because my memory is declining with time—though I suspect that you may have had a similar experience. But I don’t think my dying brain cells are to blame.

As a counter-example, I still vividly remember the workshops I attended over ten years ago.

Why do I remember what happened at those workshops but not what Bill said? We’ll get to that shortly, but first….

Testing two styles of lecture learning

I am not surprised by the results of research published in the May 2013 issue of Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. Here’s the experimental setup:

“Participants viewed one of two videos depicting an instructor explaining a scientific concept. The same speaker delivered the same script in both videos. The only difference was in how the information was delivered. In the fluent speaker condition, the speaker stood upright, maintained eye contact, displayed relevant gestures, and did not use notes. In the disfluent speaker condition, she hunched over a podium, read from notes, spoke haltingly, and failed to maintain eye contact.”
Appearances can be deceiving: instructor fluency increases perceptions of learning without increasing actual learning—Shana K. Carpenter, Miko M. Wilford, Nate Kornell, Kellie M. Mullaney

Right after watching their video, participants were asked to estimate how much of the information in the video they would be able to recall after about 10 minutes:

“Participants who viewed the fluent speaker predicted that they would remember a greater amount of information than those who viewed the disfluent speaker. However, actual performance did not differ between the groups [emphasis added]…

…It is not clear precisely which aspects of the lecturer’s behavior influenced participants’ judgments, and the experience of fluency may be subjective. What is clear, however, is that a more fluent instructor may increase perceptions of learning without increasing actual learning [emphasis added].”

What can we conclude from these results?

It’s just one experiment, but it does support something I’ve believed to be true for years. A great speaker may well provide a more enjoyable and emotionally satisfying presentation—but the learning that results is not significantly better than that provided by a mediocre lecturer!

Am I saying that we should discount the value of the quality of a speaker’s presence, examples, stories, and presentation as a whole? No! If we’re going to learn something from a speaker, there’s value in having the experience be emotionally satisfying.

What I am saying, though, is that it is a mistake to correlate the quality of a speaker’s presentation with the learning that occurs for those present. That is a big mistake.

Highly paid speakers may provide a better emotional experience, but that doesn’t mean their listeners learn and retain what they hear especially well.

But there’s another mistake we’re making when we fill our conferences with speakers.

What’s the use of lectures?

Back to those workshops I attended. Why do I remember vividly what happened in 2002 but not what Bill, the magnificent motivational speaker, said in 2011? Because in the workshops I was participating in my learning. I was interacting with other participants, receiving feedback and insights about what I said and did, and what happened led to deep learning that has stayed with me ever since.

When we give center stage at our events to presentations at the expense of participative engagement, learning suffers. The best speakers may be far more entertaining and emotionally satisfying than the worst ones, but, according to the above research, we’re not going to learn any more from them. Perhaps a truly great speaker may inspire her audience to take action in their lives—and that can be a good and important outcome—but I wonder how often that happens at our events. (There’s an idea for more research!)

What we have known for some time, though, is that if we are truly interested in maximizing learning at our events, hiring the best speakers in the world will not do the trick. Instead, we need to incorporate participative learning into every session we program. That’s the subject of my next book. Stay tuned!

So, do great speakers just provide a better emotional experience?

What do you think is the real value of good speakers? How much have you learned (and retained) from presentations compared to interactive workshops?

Photo attribution: Flickr user psilocybes

Tags: Learning, lecture, participation, presentations, speakers, workshop| Posted in Event design, participation, Presentations | 10 Comments »

The effects of three centuries on our conferences

Wednesday, October 10th, 2012 by Adrian Segar

“Our organizations are built on 19th century learning styles coupled by 20th century leadership models fused with 21st century technologies.”
—Dan Pontefract, Future of Work

Replace “organizations” with “conferences” in Dan’s great quote, and you encapsulate much of what is wrong with conferences today.

What are you going to do about it?

(Ironic) Powerpoint photo courtesy of Flickr user wmcap

Tags: conferences, history, leadership, Learning, Technology| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

Is “learning” a dirty word to management?

Monday, June 4th, 2012 by Adrian Segar

Is “learning” a dirty word to management?

“I rarely use the word learning these days. Business managers hear learning and think schooling and don’t want to invest a dime in it. I’m tired of having doors slammed in my face, so I now talk about Working Smarter. I’ve yet to meet a manager who didn’t want her organization to work smarter (even though learning is a major component of doing so).”
—Bringing Informal Learning Up To Date, by Jay Cross

Given Jay’s experience, it surprises me how often people ask me how to justify attending participant-driven conferences that don’t have a nice neat program of sessions to show to the “I-decide-whether-you-go” boss. I’d like to think that managers are able to:

trust their employees possess the inclination and ability to learn what they need to know to do their job better.
be enthusiastic about conferences that effectively leverage the combined knowledge and experience of all participants rather than that of a few “experts”.

Sadly, it’s clear that many managers see learning as a dirty word however their minds define it: whether as schooling/training or as just-in-time, focused, relevant peer learning. Having to recast “learning” into “Working Smarter” to get management on board reveals management with a fundamental misunderstanding of modern business realities.

The industrial age, when employees trained in a static skill set generated long-term returns, is over. Management needs to embrace this simple truth. Continuous, self-directed learning in all its forms—experiential, social, and formal—is key to sustained business success today. To paraphrase Derek Bok: if you think learning is dirty, try ignorance.

Have you experienced push-back from management when you’re making a case for learning? Do tell!

Photo attribution: Flickr user happeningfish

Tags: Jay Cross, Learning, management, managers, working smarter| Posted in leadership, Learning | 1 Comment »

Learning is messy

Monday, April 30th, 2012 by Adrian Segar

Learning is messy.

Johnnie Moore wrote about this sketch: “I think it captures very succinctly the perils of retrospective coherence – the myriad ways we tidy up history to make things seem more linear.” And: “I think learning needs to be messier; amid all those twists and turns are the discoveries and surprises that satisfy the participant and help new things stick.”

Great points, Johnnie, and I’d like to add one more. Models of success and learning like the one on the left lead to tidy, simplistic conference models (with those deadening learning objectives). When we embrace the reality of messy and/or risky learning, embodied by the sketch on the right, we become open to event designs that mirror this reality and provide the flexibility and openness to address it.

I’ve been designing and facilitating participant-driven and participation rich conferences for over thirty years. It’s true that carefully prepared broadcast-style sessions can provide important learning from lectures by experts to a less-well informed audience. But, in my experience, most of the deepest learning that occurs at events is unexpected. It’s a product of the serendipity that interactions and connections create. And the event’s design facilitates (or restricts) the level of serendipity that is possible.

That’s why fundamental learning is messy.

Sketch attribution: Babs Rangaiah of Unilever (“& learning” added by me)

Tags: Learning, learning objectives, risky learning| Posted in Learning | No Comments »