One of the most satisfying outcomes of the peer conferences I design and facilitate is how they bring people together who would never otherwise have met — and in doing so change the world.
This is important, but why do world-changing connections seldom occur at conventional conferences?
Here’s an illuminating story from the pages of a New Yorker article about Jim Simons, the noted mathematician founder of Renaissance Technologies, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, and a funder of a variety of research projects:
On November 3rd, a “bio-geoscientist” from Caltech, John Grotzinger, came to talk to the Simonses, two of the three division heads, the computing chiefs, and a few others…
…Grotzinger, who was advising, not seeking a job, elegantly guided the group through the challenges of climate modeling. “Most of the data actually gets ignored,” Grotzinger explained. And there was a problem of collaboration. He was a specialist in historical climate change-specifically, what had caused the great Permian extinction, during which virtually all species died. To properly assess this cataclysm, you had to understand both the rock record and the ocean’s composition, but, Grotzinger said, “geologists don’t have a history of interacting with physical oceanographers.” He talked about how his best collaboration had resulted from having had lunch with an oceanographer, and how rare this was. Climate modelling, he said, was an intrinsically difficult problem made worse by the structural divisions of academia. “They will grope their way to a solution probably in the next fifty years,” Grotzinger said. “But, if you had it all under one umbrella, I think it could result in a major breakthrough.” —Jim Simons, The Numbers King from The New Yorker Dec 18 & 25, 2017 issue [emphasis added]
Academic conferences
I used to be an academic, and know traditional academic conference designs. They are tightly confined by professional specialty, with few if any formal opportunities to connect with experts in other areas.
Peer conference designs, by contrast, facilitate participants’ discovery of core important information about each other during the opening. Grotzinger and the oceanographer would have learned about each other right at the start of a peer conference. They’d have the rest of the event available for building a fruitful professional relationship. So much modern science is interdisciplinary that to improve the pace at which cutting-edge science proceeds it’s now vital to redesign academic conferences to support the inter-specialty discovery that leads to subsequent groundbreaking collaborations.
That’s why I’m excited to be designing an international science conference for one of the world’s largest conservation organizations. The organization approached me because the biggest criticism of the prior conference was that it was full of presentations. This left little opportunity for inter-field discovery and connection. This year, four hundred scientists from many different fields will get to learn about each other’s work and interests at the start, creating numerous possibilities for future interdisciplinary collaborations.
Who knows, when those scientists walk into the conference, perhaps it will be the starting point for scientific collaborations that improve the health of the lands and waters on which all our lives depend. I’m happy to help make such important outcomes more likely!
Traditional conferences focus on a hodgepodge of pre-determined sessions punctuated with socials, surrounded by short welcomes and closings. Such conference designs treat openings and closings as perfunctory traditions, perhaps pumped up with a keynote or two rather than key components of the conference design. Unlike traditional conferences, participant-driven and participation-rich peer conferences have a conference arc with three essential components: Beginning, Middle, and End. This arc creates a seamless conference flow where each phase builds on what has come before.
Participant-driven and participation-rich peer conference designs improve upon traditional events. They don’t treat openings and closings as necessary evils but as critical components of the meeting design.
Let’s examine each phase of the peer conference arc in more detail.
Beginning
Conferences are full of sessions where attendees know as little about each other as when they arrived at the event. In contrast, peer conferences allocate time to introduce participants to each other through a discovery process. Then, they build a conference program that truly meets their wants and needs.
Allocating discovery time at the start pays rich dividends over the entire remainder of the event. Investing in such beginnings enriches even a one-day event. Longer event designs allocate more time — up to half a day — to produce detailed programs that are optimized to provide the best possible conference experience for each individual participant.
Though there are numerous ways to implement beginnings, all peer conference designs include the following.
Discovery — uncover the needs, wants, and resources in the room
This is the piece most meetings ignore entirely. And it’s the most important component of creating meetings that really work. In this post, I explain the importance and implementation of discovery.
Topic suggestions and offers
Discovery exposes participants to a smorgasbord of possible conference topics, issues, and ideas. They’ve also discovered others present who are potential resources. This phase employs various methods for participants to request or offer sessions to hold in the Middle of the peer conference.
Topic cleanup
Over the years, I’ve found it helpful to do some topic cleanup on the suggestions and offers that participants make. This involves using a small group of conference subject-matter experts and any interested participants to cluster suggestions appropriately, combine duplicates, and carefully discard any suggestions that are clearly impracticable (e.g., too broad) or unclear.
Topic rating
Participants now rate the cleaned-up topics using one of several methods. When the rating is complete we have all the information needed to build an optimum Middle for the event.
Session determination
The small group of subject-matter experts now uses the gathered information to decide on the sessions to run and one or more facilitators/presenters/panelists/moderators to lead them.
Session scheduling (leadership, time, and place)
Now, scheduling the resulting sessions into a conference program can be done, taking into account any programmatic and logistical constraints.
Middle
The middle of a peer conference corresponds to the program segments of traditional events, with two important improvements. First, thanks to the beginning process, the scheduled sessions genuinely reflect the wants and needs of the meeting participants. So they are almost always very well attended and appreciated. Second, the earlier scheduling process allows the scheduling group to consider the flow of sessions. This allows, for example, the scheduling of general sessions before specialized drill-downs on aspects of a popular topic.
Because it’s unlikely (though not impossible) that session leaders will give a carefully prepared standard presentation, sessions created via the beginning process are likely to be facilitated discussions focused around the expertise and experience of one or more leaders and incorporating additional expertise and experience of all those present. Thousands of evaluations over the years have shown that participant satisfaction with such informal facilitated formats is significantly higher than that reported for conventional lecture-style presentations.
End
Rather than closing a conference with a banquet, keynote, or other social event, peer conferences provide two vital and important opportunities that traditional conferences omit.
Guided introspection on learning from the conference and planned professional/personal change
When you attended a conference and nothing significant changed in your life, was it worth going? You might have had fun, a rest, or time hanging out somewhere nice, but was that really the point?
Most attendees learn something valuable at meetings and make new connections, but often, this value doesn’t translate into future useful outcomes because it isn’t reinforced in a timely fashion. The notes you made of new things to try at work get forgotten in a drawer, along with the business cards of the interesting people you met.
Yes, change is hard. To increase the likelihood that conference experience translates into appropriate positive change, peer conferences provide a structured opportunity for participants to determine what they want to change in their professional or personal lives as a result of their experiences at the event. This process is called a personal introspective.
Public evaluation of the event and exploration of improvements and new initiatives
During the personal introspective, attendees review their conference experience and learning and create a plan for future individual change. The last session at a peer conference, a group spective, provides the same opportunities for the entire conference community collectively.
The group spective starts with a simple public group evaluation of the entire conference experience. No “smile sheet” evaluations that only conference organizers see. Instead, participants share — via a structured, facilitated process — what was great about the event and how to make it even better. The information gleaned is, of course, immensely useful to the conference organizers, but it also does something even more important: it gives every participant a collective overview of the group’s conference experience, building a conference community around the shared experiences.
The group spective also offers the possibility to create something enduring, something more than an intense, one-time experience. During the session, participants begin to explore their future together.
The Conference Arc
The conference arc contains everything necessary for participants to discover, learn, connect, and engage with the topics or issues that brought them together. By its close, it has planted the seeds of future meetings built around the commonalities, learning, and connections that participants have uncovered and appreciated in each other.
In this way, the conference arc perpetuates itself.
How do we build conference programs that attendees actually want and need? Since 1992 I’ve experimented with multiple methods to ensure that every session is relevant and valuable. Here’s what happened when I incorporated dot voting into a recent two-day association peer conference.
For small (40 – 70 participants) one-day conferences I often use the large Post-it™ notes technique described in detail in my post How to crowdsource conference sessions in real-time. Participants simply post desired topics, which are then clustered and used to determine sessions and facilitators/leaders.
What we did
The September 2017 two-day conference had 160 participants, so I decided to add interest dot voting to obtain additional information about the relative popularity of topics. This added a couple of extra steps to the process used in the post above.
We had three one-hour time slots available the following day, and six separate rooms for participants to meet. This allowed us to schedule a maximum of eighteen peer sessions.
After twenty minutes of obtaining topic offers and wants, a small group of volunteers clustered the~150 topics posted, combined them appropriately, and, when needed, rewrote session titles on a fresh Post-it. Participants then returned to dot vote on the cleaned-up topics.
Each participant received three colored dots, which they could assign to the topics however they wanted — including all three to a single topic if desired.
Handing out dots for dot voting
In addition, we gave each participant a black fine-point Sharpie. They wrote a number between 1 and 3 on each of their dots to indicate their level of interest in the dotted session. Here’s a 22-second video excerpt of the dot voting, which was open for 35 minutes during an evening reception.
Finally, the small volunteer group spent about ninety minutes using the peer session selection process described in my book Conferences That Work and associated supplement to create the conference program for the next day.
Observations
The entire process went very smoothly.
It became clear that there were fifteen topics with significant interest. So we ended up scheduling five simultaneous sessions in each time slot, leaving one room empty. We advertised the empty room as a place for impromptu meetings on other topics.
The ninety minutes needed to analyze the voting and create appropriate sessions compares favorably with the time needed for the more detailed process described in Conferences That Work.
I had expected that most people would choose “3 — High Interest” for their dots. Although a majority of the dots were indeed 3’s, there were a significant number of 1’s and 2’s. This was helpful for rejecting topics that had a number of dots with mostly “medium” or “low” interest. Without the interest level information, it would have been harder to pick the best topics to schedule.
Every one of the scheduled sessions had good attendance. In addition, we scheduled sessions that seemed to be more popular (many dots) in the larger rooms. This worked out well.
Although at the time of writing, session evaluations are not yet available, the conference closing Group Spective made it clear that participants were very happy with the program they had created.
Conclusions
I was pleased with how well adding dot voting to Post-it topic selection worked. It’s a simple tool that provides useful information on participants’ session preferences. This approach fits nicely between the most basic crowdsourcing methods, like Post-it topic choice, and the more information-rich approach used for classic Conferences That Work peer conferences.
I expect to use the technique again!
Have you used sticky notes and/or dot voting to crowdsource sessions at your events? Share your experience in the comments below!
I’ve been promoting the Conferences That Work meeting format for so long that some people assume I think it’s the right choice for every meeting. Well, it’s not. Here are (drum roll!) two meeting types and three situations when you should NOT use a Conferences That Work design:
Most corporate events
Many corporate events have a tight focus. Management has desired outcomes for the meeting, e.g., developing new products and services, communicating changes in company strategic goals, training and incentivizing sales teams, implementing successful product launches, etc. The function of such meetings is primarily top-down: effectively communicate management objectives, answer questions, and get employee buy-in. Fixed-agenda corporate meetings are not a good fit for peer conference designs. Why? Because they are predominantly about one-way broadcast-style communication. Participants are there to listen and learn rather than to determine what’s individually useful to them or to build intra-company connections.
Special events
Special events involve a mixture of entertainment, celebration, and raising money. While some may include impromptu participant involvement, they concentrate on creating a wonderful experience for attendees. Special events are carefully choreographed in advance and participant interaction is generally limited to the traditional social forms of meals and parties. So they are not a good fit for the spontaneous generation of topics, themes, and participant-determined process that peer conference designs generate.
When simultaneously scheduled alongside traditional meeting formats
Much as I would like to tell you that participant-driven and participation-rich event formats are common these days, it just ain’t so. As a result, many conference attendees have not encountered these designs before and have not experienced how effective they can be in creating valuable connections and learning with their peers. When meeting planners add participant-driven sessions as a track to an existing schedule of traditional presentations, few attendees will pick the unfamiliar. Unfortunately, this convinces the organizers that few people are interested in these formats, reinforcing a return to a familiar predetermined program.
If I had a nickel for every time I’ve seen this mistake made … well … that would pay the bill for a very nice dinner out.
When time is short
Participant-driven and participation-rich events are messy and, by the standards of a content-dump-into-listeners-ears event, relatively inefficient. You can share some good information in a ten-minute talk. (Even if most of the audience will have forgotten it a month later.) But try to build connections and learning in a group of a hundred people in ten minutes? Little of any significance is going to happen in such a short time.
I’ve run the core Conferences That Work design in a day numerous times, and it’s always a rush. A day and a half is the minimum for a group to really benefit. A peer conference design such as Open Space doesn’t need so much time—a few hours can be useful—though it omits some of the features that make Conferences That Work so effective.
Valuable peer learning and connection take time. It’s worth it. If you don’t have enough time, a peer conference isn’t like a podcast you can speed up and still understand. Schedule the time actually needed for the process to work and wonderful things will happen. Shortchanging the time guarantees frustrated and unhappy attendees.
When a meeting is significantly about status rather than learning and connection
Sadly, in my view, some meetings are primarily about asserting and demonstrating status. Government, political, and, to a lesser extent, academic conferences often fall into this category. If your conference attendees come from a culture where power and influence are firmly controlled by the people in charge, a Conferences That Work meeting design will be a poor fit. A format that does not reinforce their dominance threatens high-status individuals.
So when should you use the Conferences That Work design?
I thought you’d never ask. If you have all attendees’ attention and enough time for the process to work (see above), a Conferences That Work meeting design is a fantastic (I would argue, the best) approach for meetings of communities of practice (this link explains in detail what communities of practice are). That includes all conferences, colloquia, congresses, conventions, and symposia.
Association and client conferences are clear candidates for Conferences That Work. Traditional conference elements, such as keynotes, up-to-the-minute research findings, recognition ceremonies, social events, etc., can easily be integrated into the design.
By carefully incorporating the peer conference process into future events, you can make existing conferences more participant-driven and participation-rich. Over the years, I have helped many associations successfully make this transition.
But the best time to implement Conferences That Work is at a brand-new conference! (A good example is the edACCESS peer conference, now in its 26th year and still going strong.) Why? Because people typically create new conferences when they find the need to meet for a new purpose. At that moment in time, invariably, there are no obvious experts to invite. Opening with a peer conference design allows a group of relative strangers with a common interest to make fruitful connections and learn productively about and from the expertise and experience in their midst. The experience is so powerful that I don’t know of a group that has decided to stop using the format.
Since 2012, I’ve had the privilege of designing and facilitating the annual Vermont Vision for a Multicultural Future Peer Conference. It’s an honor to work on a classic Conferences That Work-style peer conference that’s turned out to be one of the most powerful tools for building inclusive, equitable, and sustainable communities in my home state. So I’m happy to share some scenes from this peer conference.
A traditional conference is like a pharmacy. Content is prescribed, and you pick it up in a session. Hopefully, it will fix what ails you. Have you met anyone interesting in a pharmacy? Did you create one of the drugs sold there? Probably not.
A peer conference is like a friendly bookstore. Browse the shelves looking for what interests you, and satisfies your wants and needs. Relax on a comfy sofa, and check out anything that looks interesting. Fall into conversation with other folks nearby. Yes, you can be guided by those little “staff picks” notices, but perhaps the guy sitting opposite you has some suggestions. And perhaps, one day, you’ll write a book of your own…
What impact does a good process have on the learning environment?
Ask me about an environment for learning. I recall sitting in a classroom full of ancient wooden desks. Their hinged lids are inscribed with the penknife carvings, initials, and crude drawings of generations of semi-bored schoolboys. A thin film of chalk dust covers everything. Distant trees and blue sky beckon faintly through the windows at the side of the room. The teacher is talking and I am paying attention in case he asks me to answer a question. If it’s a subject I like—science, math, or English—I am present, working to pick up the wisdom imparted, motivated by my curiosity about the world and the desire not to appear stupid in front of my classmates. If it’s a subject I am not passionate about—foreign languages, history, art, or geography—I do what I need to do to get by.
When asked to think about creating an environment for learning we tend to focus, as I just did, on the physical environment and our motivations for learning.
But there’s a third element of the learning environment that we largely overlook. Did you spot it? If you’ve read my post Meetings are a mess—and how they got that way you probably did; we have not yet mentioned the learning processes we use as a key component of our learning environment. These processes are so deeply associated with our experience of learning in specific environments that we’re rarely conscious of how much they affect what and how we learn.
Let’s meet Linda, who’s about to discover why using a good process can be so impactful.
About Linda
Linda’s waiting to get her badge and information packet at a conference registration table. She’s nervous because she’s new to the industry. She has only previously briefly met a couple of people on the list of registered attendees. Linda likes her profession. She came principally in order to receive continuing education credits that she needs to maintain her professional certification. She wants to learn more about certain industry issues, get some answers to specific questions, and hopes to meet peers and begin to build a professional network.
At this point, let’s see what happens when Linda experiences two somewhat different conference designs.
Linda goes to TradConf
Before TradConf
Linda is a first-time attendee at TradConf, a small annual association conference that has pretty much the same format since it was first held in 1982. She received a conference program six months ago and saw a few sessions listed that look relevant to her current needs.
During TradConf
After picking up her preprinted name badge she enters the conference venue. Linda sees a large number of people chatting with each other in small groups. There isn’t anyone there she knows. She drifts over to a refreshment table and picks up a glass of soda water, hoping to be able to finesse her way into one of the groups and join a conversation.
Linda meets a few people before the opening session, but no one who she really clicks with. Still, she’s grateful that she can at least associate a few names with faces.
Linda doesn’t find the opening keynote especially interesting. The speaker is entertaining but doesn’t really offer any useful takeaways. And sitting and listening for 80 minutes has taken a toll on her concentration. She follows the crowd to the refreshments in the hallway outside and tries to meet some more people. Linda’s not shy, but it’s still daunting to have to repeatedly approach strangers and introduce herself. By the end of the first day, Linda has met one person with whom she has a fair amount in common, and she bumped into one of the people she knew before the conference. The three of them spend the evening talking.
Days 2 and 3
The next couple of days’ sessions are a mixed bag. Some of the sessions are a rehash of things Linda already knows rather than covering new techniques. Another turns out to focus on something very different from the description in the conference program. Linda picks up a few useful nuggets from a couple of sessions and gets one of her pressing questions answered. She connects with someone who asks an interesting question at the end of a presentation. She spends most of her time between sessions with her old connection and two new friends.
The conference closes with a keynote banquet. Linda sits next to a stimulating colleague but doesn’t get much time to talk to him because the keynote monopolizes most of their time together. They swap business cards and promise to stay in touch.
After TradConf
Afterward, Linda has mixed feelings about her TradConf experience. She met some interesting people and learned a few things. But it didn’t seem to be an especially productive use of her time, given that she has to get back to work and still grapple with the majority of her unanswered questions. She doesn’t feel like she’s built much of a professional network. Perhaps things will be better when she goes next year?
Linda goes to PartConf
Before PartConf
Linda is a first-time attendee at PartConf, a small annual association conference first held in 1993. It has a good reputation, but it’s hard to understand what the conference will be like, because, apart from an interesting-sounding keynote from someone really well known in the industry and a few other sessions on hot topics, the program doesn’t list any other session topics. Instead, the pre-conference materials claim that the participants themselves will create the conference sessions on the topics that they want to learn about. This sounds good in theory to Linda, but she is quite skeptical about how well this will actually work in practice.
A few weeks before the event, Linda gets a call from Maria, who identifies herself as a returning conference participant. Maria explains that all first-time PartConf attendees get paired with a buddy before the conference. Maria offers to answer any questions about the conference. She’ll also meet Linda at registration and introduce her to other attendees if desired. Linda asks how the participant-driven conference format works, and Maria is happy to share her own positive experience. They swap contact information and agree to meet at registration.
During PartConf
Linda calls Maria as she waits in line to register. As she picks up her large name badge, she notices it has some questions on it: “Talk to me about…” and “I’d like to know about…” with blank spaces for answers. Maria appears and explains that the questions allow people with matching interests or expertise to find each other. Linda fills out her badge.
Linda and Maria enter the conference venue and see a large number of people chatting with each other in small groups. There isn’t anyone there Linda knows, but Maria brings her over to one of the groups and introduces her to Yang and Tony. “Based on what you’ve told me about your interests,” Maria says, “I think you guys have a lot in common.” A glance at Yang’s and Tony’s badges confirms this. Linda is soon deep in conversation with her two new colleagues, who introduce her to other attendees.
By the time the opening session starts, Linda has met six people who are clearly going to be great resources for her. She’s also surprised to discover that a couple of other people are really interested in certain experiences and expertise she acquired at a previous job.
The opening session
The opening session is called The Three Questions. Linda has been preassigned to one of five simultaneous sessions. Two of her new friends join her in a large room with a circle of forty chairs. A facilitator explains how The Three Questions works and provides some ground rules for everyone to follow. Over the next 90 minutes, everyone gets a turn to share their answers to three questions. Linda learns much about the other participants. She gets a comprehensive overview of group members’ questions, issues, topics, experience, and expertise. Human spectrograms are held roughly every twenty minutes. They get people on their feet to show experience levels, geographical distribution, and other useful information about the group. Linda notes the names of four more people she wants to talk to during the conference. She discovers that her former job experience is of interest to other people in the room.
At the first evening social, Linda enjoys getting to know her new friends. Everyone spends some time proposing and signing up for “peer sessions”, using a simple process involving colored pens and sheets of paper. Peer sessions can be presentations, discussions, panels, workshops, or any format that seems appropriate for the participants’ learning and sharing. Linda suggests several issues she is grappling with and a couple of the sessions she wants to get scheduled. Although another topic doesn’t have sufficient interest to be formally scheduled, she notes the names of the people interested and decides to try to talk with them between sessions. She is surprised to find that quite a few people want to learn from her former job experience and ends up facilitating a discussion on the topic the next day.
Days 2 and 3
The next couple of days’ sessions are incredibly productive and useful for Linda. She meets other participants who answer all her questions, and several people who can advise her on potential future issues. Linda enjoys being an unexpected resource herself and has begun to build a great professional network by the time the conference draws to a close.
The last couple of sessions provide Linda an opportunity to think about what she has learned and what she wants to do professionally as a result. She now feels confident about beginning a major initiative at work, sketches out the initial steps, and gets helpful feedback from her colleagues. She even has some time to reconnect with now-familiar peers and make arrangements to stay in touch. The last session starts with a public evaluation of the entire conference: what worked well and potential improvements. Linda makes several contributions. She gets a clear idea of how the conference has been valuable to the many different constituencies present. Several great ideas emerge on how to make the event even better next year, together with the next steps for their development.
After PartConf
Afterward, Linda has very positive feelings about her conference experience. She got all her questions answered, learned much of value, and built the solid beginnings of a significant professional network. And she’s certain PartConf will be even better when she returns next year!
The impact of good process on the learning environment
Linda’s story illustrates the tremendous effect good process can have on the learning environment. The attendees at TradConf and PartConf are the same; only the processes used are different! PartConf’s participation-rich process gave Linda a learning experience that was much more tailored to her and the other attendees’ actual needs and wants than the predetermined program at TradConf. Linda also made useful connections with many more people at PartConf compared to TradConf.
The PartConf design also allows participants to make changes to the conference processes used. The learning environment at PartConf extends to the event design. The conference can “learn” itself through participant feedback and suggestions to become a more effective vehicle for participants’ needs and wants.
I have been running conferences like PartConf for over twenty years. Perhaps it’s not surprising that the vast majority of those who attend these events come to greatly prefer such designs over the TradConfs that have been the rule for hundreds of years.
We all like to feel important some of the time. Having status in some human relationships is important to our psychological well-being. As psychologist Matthew Lieberman explains:
“We desire status because it suggests that others value us, that we have a place of importance in the group and are therefore connected to the group.” —Matthew Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect
The problem with many conferences is that limited, unchangeable status is frozen into the event structure. The people with high status are those the organizers chose to be at the front of the room. Everyone else is just one of the lower-status crowd.
The beauty of a peer conference is that it provides many more opportunities for each participant to be high-status. The Conferences That Work opening Three Questions session guarantees that everyone gets a short time at the front of the room. During the event, you can be a learner (lower status) one moment and a teacher (higher status) the next. And it’s far more likely that others will recognize your expertise or experience.
Let’s be clear—peer conferences don’t impose similar status on everybody. An industry veteran will likely spend more time in higher-status situations than a novice first-time participant. But a peer conference makes no initial assumptions about who has something to offer. I’ve seen plenty of situations where an industry novice turns out to have valuable contributions to make from their prior experience in another field.
Isn’t a conference format where everyone gets to be appropriately high-status once in a while healthier than one where a tiny minority get it all? I think so, (and thousands of evaluations back me up!)
How do we build conference programs that attendees actually want and need? Since 1992 I’ve experimented with multiple methods to ensure that every session is relevant and valuable. Here’s what happened when I incorporated dot voting into a recent two-day association peer conference.
Here’s a 22-second video excerpt of the dot voting, which was open for 35 minutes during an evening reception.
I’ve been promoting the 
Staff picks
