Ken Jennings: “Welcome to America’s favorite answer and question game, Adrian! The answer is ‘The Fishbowl Sandwich’.”
<DING!>
Adrian: “If you had to pick one unique/creative/innovative session format or strategy you successfully implemented or you’ve witnessed that resulted in better interaction and engagement, what would that be and why?”
—Merijn van Buuren question via LinkedIn, July 17, 2024
Ken Jennings: Right!
And, just like that, I was on to the next round!
Here’s how I answered Merijn’s question:
“In 2015, I invented the fishbowl sandwich. It’s a session format where hundreds of people can profitably discuss and learn more about a “hot” topic—typically “hot” because it involves difficult challenges for the participants—and crowdsource creative, unexpected solutions by drawing from the ideas and experiences of the entire audience.
A well-designed and facilitated fishbowl sandwich is the best way I know to uncover, share, and develop solutions in a single session. People are often unaware that they know things that could be of immediate value to other group members. The fishbowl sandwich process finds these individuals and helps them share their knowledge and expertise. It encourages active participation and ensures that multiple perspectives are heard.
As a bonus, you can also use a fishbowl sandwich to offer structured consulting to group members grappling with a specific issue or problem.”
You can learn the what, why, and how to run a Fishbowl Sandwich from my book Event Crowdsourcing: Creating Meetings People Actually Want and Need.
Having only one tool in your tool chest of conference session designs and formats won’t get you far. No problem! I also wrote The Power of Participation: Creating Conferences That Deliver Learning, Connection, Engagement, and Action, which Julius Solaris called “a mandatory read for the modern event professional”.
The book comprehensively covers twenty-seven fundamental session formats that transform traditional conference sessions into a powerful learning and connection experience for your attendees. That’s why Jerry Weinberg described The Power of Participation as “a catalog of tools for designing meetings”.
For each format, the book includes:
Thousands of event professionals have purchased Event Crowdsourcing and The Power of Participation. They’ve beefed up their event design toolkits with the tools to tackle the hardest event design jobs.
When’s the right time to solve small problems? The right answer is almost always “as soon as practically possible!”
Why? Because small problems often become large problems if we don’t work on them in a timely fashion.
Unfortunately, people don’t appreciate the value of promptly solving small problems, because (see cartoon below) we love to acknowledge and reward heroes — people who solve big problems, aka emergencies — rather than the folks who proactively solve small problems and prevent emergencies in the first place.
“Prevention is better than Cure. But which one makes a better story?” by @workchronicles
Here are two examples of the value of solving small problems early, and the consequences when you don’t. The first is one where solving small problems in advance averted major world disruption. During the second, world leaders delayed solving small problems, resulting in millions of avoidable deaths.
In 1999, I reviewed the million lines of computer code I had written for clients over the previous two decades. I was checking for what is called the Year 2000 Problem (or Y2K). In the early days of writing computer software, many programs represented four-digit years with only the final two digits. This made the year 2000 indistinguishable from the year 1900! (There was also a concern that programs might not incorporate the 1-in-400-year calendar exception that makes the year 2000 a leap year.) As the millennium approached, programmers realized that when such programs ran on January 1, 2000, havoc might ensue.
Before January 1, 2000, these issues were small problems. On January 1, 2000, they could instantly become big problems.
Numerous fringe groups, as well as Christian fundamentalist and charismatic leaders, predicted the end of the world and other apocalyptic outcomes would occur because of Y2K. Interest in the survivalist movement peaked in 1999. People wrote many books on how to survive the “end times”.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of programmers worked diligently to review the millions of software programs currently running. When we found code that displayed the Y2K problem, we fixed it. I think I found four places in my old code that I needed to fix. Only one of these issues would have caused significant problems for a client.
We worked to solve small problems before they became big problems.
Thanks to the hard work of many programmers, on January 1, 2000, only minor problems arose.
Society didn’t call us heroes. I’m pretty sure there are no statues of Y2K mitigation programmers. No one gave us medals or publicly recognized our efforts. And that’s OK by me. We were just doing our jobs.
Surprisingly, to this day there remain opposing views on whether the software remediation I’ve just described was worthwhile. Some believe it would have been better to wait for problems to appear and then fix them, rather than solve small problems in advance.
I, and all the programmers I know who actually did the work and could see the consequences of inaction, are in the other camp.
Experts on pandemics have written about how the millions of worldwide deaths caused by COVID-19 could have been greatly reduced, especially the 500,000+ (1, 2) in the United States. We know that pandemics regularly wreak havoc on world populations. But we failed to work on the critical small problems of developing antiviral drugs or vaccines in advance.
In the United States, the consequences of the Trump administration’s consistent attempts to defund and disarm America’s preparedness against a mass outbreak of a viral respiratory illness, something that previous administrations had sought to prepare for, and Trump’s continual dismissal of the alarmed advice of his experts and intelligence services is well documented (1, 2). It’s estimated that if Trump had dealt promptly with solving the relatively small problems during the early stages of the pandemic, he could have prevented about 60% of U.S. COVID-19 deaths.
In recent weeks, we’ve been able to see the stark difference between Trump’s dereliction of duty and the leadership shown by the Biden administration on a coordinated response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The latter includes:
These actions create the conditions for solving problems that may occur in the future. You may not see such problems as “small”. But their size and difficulty to solve are small compared to the problems that can result when we ignore early warning signs and lessons from history.
Unfortunately, society tends to reward those “heroes” who rush in as saviors to solve big problems. The countless folks like you and me who work every day to solve small problems don’t get much credit.
Nevertheless, do the right thing. Invariably, prevention is better than the cure. We may get little or no glory from preventing big problems, or even catastrophes, but our world is a better place because of it.
Thank you, everyone, who works each day to minimize big problems for individuals, organizations, and societies by solving the small problems that, if unsolved lead to big ones! You are my heroes.
What makes attending conferences worthwhile? As I described in Conferences That Work, the two most common reasons for attending conferences are to learn useful things and make useful connections. But there are numerous other ways that conferences provide value to stakeholders. In this post I’ll focus on, arguably, the most useful conferences we can design: those that solve participants’ problems.
![solving participants problems: Cynefin illustration by Edwin Stoop (User:Marillion!!62) - [1], CC BY-SA 4.0](https://www.conferencesthatwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Cynefin_framework_by_Edwin_Stoop-640x249.jpg)
When thinking about solving problems, the Cynefin framework provides a helpful taxonomy of problem types. It’s useful because each Cynefin domain requires a different problem-solving approach. Cynefin describes five domains, usually named as: obvious, complicated, complex, chaotic, and disorder. Check out the above Wikipedia link to learn more about them.
As we’ll see:
Here’s a little more detail on the obvious, complicated, and complex problem domains. For each domain, I’ll include examples of meeting processes you can use to satisfy participants’ problem solving wants and needs.
Obvious problems (“known knowns”) have known solutions, often called “best practice”.
For example, how do I:
These examples might remind you of the kinds of topics that routinely appear as the titles of traditional conference sessions. That’s because these are problems to which experts know the answers, or, at least, have plenty of good advice to share. Their expertise can, therefore, be shared with participants via traditional presentations.
Sadly, traditional lecture-style sessions are only good for solving participants’ obvious problems. What’s more, the session will be of little use unless the session content happens to match a participant’s current problem.
Peer conferences reduce problem solving limitations in the obvious domain, by allowing participants to influence the content and scope of meeting sessions in real time during the event. So it’s much more likely that participants’ top-of-mind obvious problems will be effectively addressed at a peer conference.
Unfortunately, the majority of our day-to-day challenges are not obvious. (That’s why we spend much more time and energy working on them than obvious problems.) Complicated problems (“known unknowns”) succumb to expert analytical judgment.
For example, how can I:
Traditional conference lecture-format sessions provide almost no time for solving participants’ complicated problems. Typically, complicated problems can only be addressed up during a question and answer period at the end of the session, when there is little time to perform the kind of analysis a session expert might be able to supply.
Interactive conference sessions allow more opportunities for participants to share specific complicated problems and get targeted advice. However, few presenters incorporate significant interactivity into their sessions, and this format is more the exception than the rule.
Once again, peer conference sessions provide significantly more ways to solve participants’ complicated problems. There are two reasons for this. First, as above, peer sessions are far more likely to address the actual problems participants are currently facing. And second, peer session formats use the resources in the room — not just the session leadership — to uncover and resolve top-of-mind participant problems. (For more information on how to do this, see my book Event Crowdsourcing: Creating Meetings People Actually Want and Need.)
Complex problems (“unknown unknowns”) are even harder to resolve.
Here are some examples. How should we:
Such problems are complex because we:
Unlike the obvious and complicated domains, we have to approach complex problems by doing experiments. Cynefin describes this process using the word trio [probe–sense–respond], as opposed to the trios for the obvious [sense–categorize–respond], and complicated [sense–analyze–respond] problem domains.
Complex problems have to be tackled in the same way that scientists use experiments to probe the world around us and gradually build understanding of it.
Thus exploring complex problems requires a probing experiment, from which we observe outcomes, and then, with our understanding perhaps slightly improved, we probe in an appropriately different way again. With persistence and luck, over time we may be able to formulate some helpful responses to the problem.
It may seem strange to run experiments at conferences, but I’ve participated in (and designed) a few conference experiments over the years, and have invariably found them to be some of the most interesting and illuminating meeting experiences I’ve ever had.
Here are three session-based examples:
Finally, there are conferences that are entirely experiments!
In the meetings world, the most well known are the series of EventCamps that were held around the world between 2010 and 2014. These were volunteer-run, meeting experiments that explored a wide range of meeting and session formats and technologies. For example, we designed and held some of the earliest hybrid meetings, and introduced the meeting industry to peer conferences, gamification, improv, sustainability issues, and many other, now common, meeting components. These events made a profound impression on pretty much everyone who participated. Many of the people I met remain friends today.
Since 2016, I’ve been participating in the annual, invitation-only Meeting Design Practicum conferences that have been held all over Europe. A rotating crew of two or three volunteers organize these wonderful events. They plan an experimental program and ask participants to contribute in various ways, but are the only people who know the entire program in advance. Truly a unique and different experiment each year!
Conferences that are entire experiments are rare because they are risky. Experiments, by definition, have unpredictable results, which means they may “fail” to produce “desirable” outcomes. The understandable default assumption for most meeting industry clients is that their meetings are “successful”, and clients who are willing for “success” to include novel learning from innovative experiments are rare.
Nevertheless, whether held by the meeting industry for itself or for clients, meeting experiments provide the potential for the participants to work on some of their most difficult problems, those that are complex. Bear this in mind if you see an opportunity to create experimental sessions or events!
Whatever kind of conference you design, remember the value of incorporating sessions and formats that solve participants’ problems. It’s no accident that the experiment-rich Solution Room is the most popular and highly rated plenary I offer. Give your participants opportunities to solve their top-of-mind problems at your meetings and you’ll make them very happy!
Image attribution: Cynefin illustration by Edwin Stoop (User:Marillion!!62) – [1], CC BY-SA 4.0
Are you a specialist or a generalist?
“We used to be defined by what we knew. But today, knowing too much can be a liability.”
—Peter Evans-Greenwood, How much do we need to know?
Once upon a time, I enjoyed a lucrative career as an independent IT consultant. For 20+ years, I turned down more work than I accepted. And I never advertised; all business came via word-of-mouth, from CEO to CEO.
There was plenty of competition, and yet most of my competitors struggled for work.
Want to know one of my secrets?
My clients wanted their problems solved. There were three key reasons why they needed help:
When I started IT consulting, I thought companies would hire me because I had specialized technical skills they did not possess. Over time, I slowly realized that what made me valuable and useful to my clients were my abilities to:
Today’s hard problems straddle traditional specialties. Being a generalist in the realm of consulting means being willing and able to see and act on a bigger picture than clients typically initially present. For example, no one ever hired me to solve “people problems”, but I can’t recall a consulting assignment where human issues weren’t an important factor. Some examples:
My successful IT consulting career combined adequate technical knowledge, business managerial experience (from five years managing a solar manufacturing company), good problem-solving abilities, continuous acquisition of people skills, creativity, and a win-win mindset that focused on serving my clients rather than maximizing my income at their expense. During two decades of work, I saw many independent IT specialists who were, despite possessing technical knowledge superior to mine, unable to maintain a viable business.
I’m still a consultant today, but in a different field—meeting design. And I’m still a generalist, because good meeting design requires knowledge and skills in many different areas: production, andragogy (how adults learn), facilitation, and people skills, to name a few.
We are living in a world where the commodification of products and skills leads more and more quickly to a race to the bottom—” Who can make/do this for the least amount of money/time?” (For example, accountancy, once seen as a secure well-paying profession, is increasingly outsourced and automated.) As a result, the advantages of the generalist mount because relatively few people have the required skill set to solve problems that cross traditional specialties, and it’s easier to thrive in a field with, say, ten competitors as opposed to ten thousand.
To summarize, here’s an apt quote from Peter Evans-Greenwood’s excellent article:
We’re moving from working in the system that is a business, to working on the system. The consequence of this is that its becoming more important to have the general capabilities and breadth of experience that enable us to develop and improve the system in novel directions, than it is to have deep, highly entailed experience in working within the current system. There will always be a need for narrowly focused expertise in highly technical areas, but in the majority of cases the generalist now has an advantage over the specialist.
Are you a specialist or a generalist? How’s that working out for you?
Photo attribution: Flickr user environmental_illness_network
In Part 1, I introduced three distinct categories of learning: factual information acquisition, problem-solving, and building a process toolkit, and gave examples of how typical desired meeting outcomes involve different mixtures of each category. Here’s a final example of the complex ways that multiple factors can affect learning and learning approaches. Let’s explore the differences between how children and adults typically learn: aka pedagogy and andragogy.
In the 2014 post Meetings are a mess—and how they got that way I explained how we typically extend into adulthood the pedagogy we’re all exposed to as kids. The word pedagogy comes from the Greek paid, meaning “child” and ago meaning “lead”. So pedagogy literally means “to lead the child.”
The much less familiar term andragogy, first coined in the 1830s, has had multiple definitions over the years, but its modern meaning was shaped by Malcolm Knowles in his 1980 book The Modern Practice of Adult Education: From Pedagogy to Andragogy, based on the Greek word aner with the stem andra meaning “man, not boy” (i.e. adult), and agogus meaning “leader of.” Knowles defined the term as “the art and science of adult learning” and argued that we need to take into account differences between child and adult learners. Specifically, he posited the following changes as individuals mature:
My professional life journey illustrates all these transformations. School force-fed me a concentrated diet of science and mathematics. Besides making a broad decision to study the sciences rather than the arts, I had very little say in what classes I took. Since then:
Take a moment to review your own professional life. Do Knowles’s maturation concepts reflect differences in how you learned in school and now learn as an adult?
Of course, just as there isn’t a clear boundary between childlike and adult behaviors, there’s no clear-cut distinction between pedagogy and andragogy. Both terms encompass motivations and contexts for learning. It’s most accurate to view them as endpoints on a spectrum of learning behaviors. Nevertheless, Knowles’s five assertions, each positing progression from passivity to action, provide critical insight into why active learning becomes an increasingly important learning modality as we mature.
Too many events still use child-based pedagogical instead of adult-centered andragogical modalities. By concentrating on the latter, we can improve the effectiveness and relevance of the learning we desire and require from our face-to-face meetings.
Photo attribution: Flickr user agent_ladybug
When asked, just about everyone mentions learning as a key reason for conference attendance.
So, given the clear importance of learning at events, it’s surprising that we lump distinctly different activities into the single word “learning”. Perhaps this reflects the reality that learning acquisition is a largely unconscious process, in the same way our casual familiarity with snow leads us to possess far fewer words for it than the Inuit. Whatever the reasons, it’s useful to distinguish between three different categories of learning:
Factual knowledge acquisition involves what it sounds like — learning factual information.
Multiplication tables, names and typical dosages of medications, foreign language nouns, and the millions of facts that we don’t even know we know until someone asks us.
It also includes sensory knowledge.
The ability to recognize whether a skin lesion is benign, the sound of Mahler’s Second Symphony, the feel of satin, the smell of a skunk, or the taste of rhubarb.
Problem-solving calls for a different level of learning. In essence, it requires noticing or discovering relationships between pieces of information and using these associations to infer answers to relevant problems. Problem-solving provides useful process that operates on our knowledge.
Building a process toolkit is an even higher form of learning. After all, in many situations—for example, multiplying two 4-digit numbers using paper and pen—problem-solving is rote. But developing novel process frequently challenges our best minds. This can take a long time, as illustrated by the growth of scientific understanding over millennia. Whether we construct our own process or appropriate useful process developed by others, building a collection of processes that are relevant to our lives is perhaps the most powerful kind of learning we can perform.
I make these distinctions because any specific instance of learning incorporates a different mixture of each category. To complicate things further, the effectiveness of each kind of learning is influenced by disparate factors. As a result, books about learning tend to contain a bewildering variety and quantity of information about aspects of learning.
Consider training workers to determine whether an applicant is eligible for government benefits. This could involve many days of teaching a large number of complex requirements. Success might be defined as being able to consistently understand, remember, and apply the correct requirements for each applicant. Such learning will concentrate on acquiring relevant factual knowledge plus the capacity to follow a defined process determined by senior administrators. Some important factors are:
Compare this with the mysterious multiyear process by which some graduate students develop from novice researchers into leading practitioners in their field, which includes attending numerous conferences. This involves all three categories of learning:
While the government workers need to concentrate on retaining well-defined information, the researchers will likely acquire far more information than ultimately needed to make an advance or breakthrough. Consequently, graduate students need to learn how to refine—both narrow and broaden—their focus on a wide range of information. They constantly make decisions on what they will concentrate on and what they will, possibly temporarily, put aside. The capacity to do this well, combined with the ability to effectively problem-solve and develop novel processes defines successful learning in this situation.
So when we talk about learning at meetings, it can be very helpful to be specific about the kind(s) of learning that are desired. Trainings focus on the first two categories I’ve described. More powerful forms of learning—typically experiential process that introduces tools that can be applied in a variety of future situations—incorporates all three.
In Part 2 of this exploration of learning, I’ll share a final example of the complex ways that learning and learning approaches can be affected by multiple factors, specifically the differences between how children and adults typically learn.
Photo attribution: Flickr user jakerust
Though I’ve been a professional consultant of one kind or another for over forty years, I sometimes still fall victim to the Consultant’s Curse.