Meeting planners typically default to squaring the circle when specifying room sets. They persist in seating attendees in long straight lines whenever possible, ignoring the benefits of curved and circular seating at their events. (See Paul Radde’s Seating Matters: State of the Art Seating Arrangements for more information.)
I’ve explained the importance of curved seating and large circle sets in detail in my book The Power of Participation (Chapter 13), so I won’t reiterate its value here. Instead, I’m going to answer a common dilemma faced by my clients: what to do when there isn’t enough room for large circle sets at a venue.
Circle sets are especially important for opening sessions such as The Three Questions. Circles allow everyone to see each other and minimize status differences due to seating position. Unfortunately, circle sets take up a lot of space compared to theatre seating. Though I don’t recommend it if you’re expecting any kind of meaningful activity, you can squeeze a few hundred people into a room that is large enough to hold a perfect circle of fifty chairs.
Because clients typically contract with a venue before engaging my services (don’t do that!), they frequently belatedly discover that they haven’t reserved enough space for maximally participative sessions.
Set in ovals
Sometimes there are enough rooms to run multiple simultaneous opening Three Questions sessions, but some of them aren’t large enough to set as circles. When this happens, we can often set the smaller rooms in ovals rather than circles. Oval sets have the disadvantage that they imply greater status to the people at the narrow ends and centers of the long edges. This can be minimized by placing session staff, such as the facilitator, scribes, and timekeeper in these positions.
A common mistake is to set the long edges of such oval chair layouts as straight lines. Instead, maintain a gentle curve between all chairs to maximize the visibility of every participant.
Run The Three Questions using a theatre set!
If space is tight, it’s possible to run The Three Questions in a curved theatre set. The details are in my book Event Crowdsourcing: Creating Meetings People Actually Want and Need. Briefly, you use staff ushers to bring individual participants to the front of the set where they share their answers facing the entire group.
This set does not provide the same level of intimacy and connection as circle sharing. But it is a usable alternative when space is limited.
Set breakout rooms in circles
There’s no single room set that’s optimum for peer sessions breakout rooms. Any kind of participatory group work, such as facilitated discussions, works best in circle seating. However, some peer sessions may be led by one or more people with expert knowledge or experience who do most of the talking.
My recommendation is to set up all breakout rooms with circle seating before the first set of peer sessions. This ensures that discussion formats won’t be hampered by a broadcast-style set. If participants in a broadcast-style session feel the need, they will rearrange the chairs themselves to face the session leaders.
Avoid squaring the circle
Although circle room sets are the best choice for many group activities, you’ll sometimes need to find alternatives. I hope these suggestions help!
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?
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.
There are three things conference attendees really want to know about each other.
Connections with people are formed by our experience with them over time. (Yes, Buddhists and Taoists, the present moment is our only reality, but we still experience it through the filters of the history and desires in our brains.) Besides learning about people we’re with through our direct experience, we discover more by listening to their descriptions of their past and present experiences and their hopes for the future.
That’s why the first thing that happens at Conferences That Work is a roundtable, where each attendee answers the following three questions (there are no wrong answers!) to the group:
How did I get here? (past)
What do I want to have happen? (present & future)
What experience or expertise do I have that might be of interest to others? (past & future)
As people, one by one, share these three things to know, they share their past, present, and future with everyone in attendance. Each person opens a window for others to see the timeline of their life more clearly. This sharing provides the foundation for connections to deepen during the conference that follows.
When I was an IT consultant I used to build custom database management systems—complicated, company-specific software that handled the unique way an organization did things. The normal way to do this is the Microsoft Word or kitchen-sink approach. Add every feature and ability you can think of (or that any important customer asks for) into the application. Then, let the user work with the entire glory of what you’ve created.
Over the years I found I could make a good living creating integrated systems that did things a little differently. Instead of company staff facing a complete set of menus, choices, and features, most of which they never used, I built interfaces where users only saw the functionality they required. Once logged on to the system, it appeared to contain only the functions and information needed to do their work. Yet, because the software spanned the entire company, any departmental changes were immediately available elsewhere in the organization.
Employees loved these systems because they gave them just what they wanted and no more. Without unneeded menus, options, and reports, employees worked with minimal distraction, leading to less stress and higher productivity.
Large traditional conferences exemplify the kitchen-sink approach I described above. The thinking goes: “If we have a program that includes sessions on anything that attendees might want, then they’ll come and be happy”. And perhaps this seems like the only answer, given that traditional conferences, at best, do a poor job of predicting and then offering what attendees really want.
Give attendees just what they want
Well, we can do better. When we ask attendees what they want to have happen, it turns out they are remarkably good at telling us. Especially if you’ve just presented them with a smorgasbord of possible topics gleaned from the entire group. That’s what the Conferences That Work roundtable and peer session sign-up sessions do. First, they uncover participants’ needs, experience, and expertise. Next, within a couple of hours, they turn these discoveries into a conference program that optimally matches just what attendees want, and no more.
Attendees love these conference programs because they contain just what they want and no more. Wouldn’t you?
What do you think about the feasibility of determining your conference program at the start of the event?
How can we help conference attendees satisfy their curiosity?
“Satisfaction of one’s curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life.” —Linus Pauling
When I was a graduate student I used to dislike going to academic conferences. Despite having won a senior scholarship to Oxford University I was scared of walking into a room of people I didn’t know and trying to start up conversations. When I sat next to random folks at lunch and we talked, I always had the sneaking suspicion that there were probably other people present at the conference whose company I’d enjoy even more—but I had no way to figure out who they might be.
We are curious about other people, especially if we share a common interest. And every culture has its conventions for meeting and learning about strangers. Unfortunately, in a conference setting these conventions limit the number of people we can meet. For example, in my experience, even an extreme extrovert will find it challenging to meet a majority of the people at a 100-attendee two-day conference.
So in the 80’s, when I began to have opportunities to design my conference formats, I knew that I wanted to include the opportunity for participants to learn about each other, right at the beginning of the event.
Over the years, this desire shaped the first Conferences That Work session: The Three Questions. Each attendee in turn answers the following three questions to a group.
The Three Questions
“How did I get here?”
“What do I want to have happen?”
“What experience do I have that others might find useful?”
I describe in detail how to explain these questions to attendees in my book Conferences That Work. There are no wrong answers to the three questions. Participants can answer them by publicly sharing as little or as much as they wish. What I find wonderful about the sharing is how the atmosphere invariably changes as people speak; from a subdued nervousness about talking in front of strangers to an intimacy that grows as people start to hear about topics that engage them, discover kindred spirits, and learn of unique experiences and expertise available from their peers. When sharing is over, both a sense of comfort and excitement prevail. Comfort arising from the knowledge attendees have of their commonalities with others. Excitement at the thought that they now have the rest of the conference to explore the uncovered connections and possibilities.
Switching the responsibility for initial introductions from attendees to the conference model bypasses normal social conventions – replacing them with a safe place for people to share about themselves with others. This simple conference process gives attendees the openings they need to further satisfy their curiosity about their peers. It works amazingly well.
“Patiently Smiley waited for the speck of gold, for Connie was of an age where the only thing a man could give her was time.” from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John Le Carré
I was facilitating a peer conference roundtable recently when a young man began to speak. He was obviously nervous: his voice a monotone, when it wasn’t quavering. I was peripherally aware that some people didn’t seem to be listening. He paused for a moment and his eyes swept around the circle, searching for a sign that anyone cared about what he had to say. He found me.
I was leaning forward, looking directly at him, giving him my full attention. Our eyes locked and I nodded slightly. He took a breath and continued. His voice became stronger. I saw people turn back to him and he finished well.
I had just given the gift of listening, and this young man had been nourished by it.
Active listening
When I am facilitating it’s my responsibility to actively listen to what is going on, focussing my full attention on what others say and do. When I’m successful, those who are present know that there is at least one other person who is listening to them and who takes seriously what they have to say.
Listening like this is hard work. To conscientiously listen to participants for over two hours at a large roundtable is extremely challenging for me. But it’s very important. People need to be heard, and if they believe they will not be heard, why should they bother to speak? By offering good listening at the start of a peer conference, I model and encourage a conference environment where openness twinned with receptiveness becomes a safe option for participants.
There’s a wider benefit from the cultivation of this skill. Practicing listening when required by my role has helped me to be a better listener during all the times when I’m not facilitating—when I’m a participant, or with my family, or as a customer. You, too, may find that developing your ability to fully listen pays rich dividends.
Meeting planners typically default to squaring the circle when specifying room sets. They persist in seating attendees in long straight lines whenever possible, ignoring the benefits of curved and circular seating at their events. (See Paul Radde’s Seating Matters: State of the Art Seating Arrangements for more information.)
![The best way to fundamentally improve your dull conference: Photograph of Adrian Segar [back to the camera, purple shirt] facilitating at a Conference That Work. Participants are sitting in a single large circle in a large wood-paneled hall.](https://www.conferencesthatwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/VT-Vision-2012-Roundtable-640x370.jpg)
