schedule Archives : Conferences That Work

Building the right conference

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 by Adrian Segar

How can we build the right conference?

In 2005, a quarter of the homes built in the United States were spec homes—homes that builders start, and sometimes finish, before selling them. Today (2010), in the aftermath of the bursting of the housing bubble, almost no one is building spec homes. From 25% market share to 1-2% in just four years.

A traditional conference is like a spec home. The program is designed and built for you based on what a program committee thought people like you would want.

I don’t think the traditional conference market is going to implode like the market for spec homes. On the other hand, I’ve found during my 33 years of experience running Conferences That Work that the best program committees predict only half the topics that participants at attendee-driven conferences actually request.

In contrast, participant-driven and participation-rich meetings reliably build the right conference for participants. How? By creating a meeting that satisfies their actual wants and needs.

If conference organizers continue to believe they can predict what their attendees want to share, learn, and do at their conferences they may, at some point, experience the bursting of a bubble of their own.

Housing data from http://www.census.gov/starts

Image attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thetruthabout/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Tags: bubble, program, schedule, spec| Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Unquestioned traditional conference assumption #2: Conference sessions should be used primarily to transmit pre-planned content.

Monday, December 14th, 2009 by Adrian Segar

Planners of traditional conferences assume that the primary purpose of conference sessions is to transmit pre-planned content.

The three communication modes used among a group of people are one-to-one (individual conversations), one-to-many or broadcast (presentations and panels), and many-to-many or conferring (discussions). Traditional conference sessions are predominantly one-to-many, with perhaps a dash of many-to-many at question time.

One-to-one conversations are infinitely flexible; both participants have the power to lead the conversation along desired paths. Many-to-many conversations are powerful in a different way—they expose the participating group to a wide range of experience and opinions.

In contrast, one-to-many communication is mostly pre-planned, and thus relatively inflexible if the presentation involves a passive audience. At best, a presenter may ask questions of her audience and vary her presentation appropriately, but she is unlikely to get accurate representative feedback when her audience is large. Some presenters can create interactive sessions with significant audience participation, but they are the exception rather than the rule.

Presentations and panels are appropriate when we are training, and have expert knowledge or information to impart to others. But today we have a rich variety of alternative methods to train adults. For example: reading books and articles, watching recordings of presentations, and searching for information and downloading answers on the Web.

What can you not replicate at a face-to-face conference? The spontaneous conversations and discussions! So why do we still cling to conference sessions that transmit pre-planned content, employing the one communication mode for which a variety of alternatives can substitute?

Image attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/plakboek/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Tags: Assumptions, event-planning, program, schedule| Posted in Event design, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Unquestioned traditional conference assumption #1: Conference session topics must be chosen and scheduled in advance.

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 by Adrian Segar

Most conference planners think that meeting organizers need to choose and schedule conference session topics in advance.

One of the questions I asked when interviewing conference attendees for my book was:

“Most conferences have a conference schedule and program decided in advance. How would you feel about a conference where, at the start, through a careful conference process, the attendees themselves determine what they want to discuss, based on what each person wants to learn and the experience each attendee has to share?”

Forty-five percent of my interviewees were unable to conceive of a conference that did not have a schedule of conference sessions decided on and circulated in advance.

The most common response? Interviewees weren’t sure they’d want to go to such a conference without knowing what was going to happen there.

The next most common response? The idea sounded great/interesting/intriguing. But interviewees had no idea of how one would create a relevant conference program at the start of the conference.

What if we could create conference session topics that actually reflect attendee wants and needs

Suspend disbelief for a moment, and assume that at the start of a conference it is somehow possible to use available resources to create conference session topics that actually reflect attendee wants and needs. Then imagine attending such a conference yourself, a conference tailored to your needs. (You might want to reflect on how often this has happened to you.) Wouldn’t it be great?

What is the origin of the assumption that one must pre-plan a conference program? Perhaps it arose from our experience of learning as children, from our teachers in school who knew or were told what we were supposed to learn following a pre-planned curriculum. Certainly, if one thinks of conferences as training by experts, a pre-planned schedule makes sense. But conferences are for adult learners, and adults with critical thinking skills and relevant experience can learn from each other. We’ll see that there are ways of putting conference attendees in charge of what they wish to learn and discuss. But this cannot be done effectively if a conference’s program is frozen before attendees arrive.

The peer conference model described in Conferences That Work does indeed build a conference program that automatically adjusts to the actual needs of the people present. Read the book to find out how.

Tags: Assumptions, conference session topics, event-planning, program, schedule, wants and needs| Posted in Event design, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »