Connect the dots, not collect the dots. How can we maximize the real value of a meeting? By maximizing how participants “connect the dots”—what they actually learn from their experiences at the meeting—rather than documenting what we or they think they should have learned.
Seth Godin makes the same point when talking about the future of education and what we can do about it in his 2012 TEDxYouth@BFS talk. Watch this 30-second clip.
Video clip transcript: “Are we asking our kids to collect dots or connect dots? Because we’re really good at measuring how many dots they collect, how many facts they have memorized, how many boxes they have filled in, but we teach nothing about how to connect those dots. You cannot teach connecting dots in a Dummies manual. You can only do it by putting kids into a situation where they can fail.”
—Seth Godin at TEDxYouth@BFS in the Youtube video STOP STEALING DREAMS
Stop collecting dots
Too many meetings continue to use short-term superficial evaluations as evidence for the efficacy of the event. We know that these kinds of meeting evaluations are unreliable (1, 2, 3). Luckily there are better ways to find out whether participants have learned to better connect the dots. Here are four of them:
“Hardy came home from school and proudly showed his mom the cheap plastic trinkets he had earned that day. ‘I stood quietly on the dot and so I got some tickets. And if I stand on the dot quietly tomorrow, I can get some more prizes!'”
… “Is standing on a dot the thing we need to train kids to do? Has each of us spent too much time standing on dots already?” —On the dot, Seth Godin
“…if you make a resolution, you should formulate it so that at every point in time it is absolutely clear whether you are sticking to it or not. The clear lines are arbitrary, but they help the truce between our competing interests hold.”
I explained how this shapes my design for a closing session that supports participants making changes in their lives, based on what they’ve learned and the connections they’ve made at an event.
In this post, I’ll share a couple of additional perspectives about making resolutions.
Seth Godin on resolutions
First, there’s the inimitable Seth Godin. In December 2020, Seth posted this:
Over the next few weeks, there may be fewer urgencies than usual. That’s the nature of coming back from a break.
What if we used the time to move system deficiencies from the “later” pile to the “it’s essential to do this right now” pile?…
…Resolutions don’t work. Habits and systems can. —Seth Godin, A different urgency
In his post, Seth suggests that one way to handle the “urgent” tasks that fill our lives is to create and fix systems that reduce our desire and need to make resolutions. We rarely do this because:
“Most of us are so stuck on the short-cycles of urgency that it’s difficult to even imagine changing our longer-term systems.”
But if we do…
“Amazingly, this simple non-hack (in which you spend the time to actually avoid the shortcuts that have been holding you back) might be the single most effective work you do all year.”
Deborah Elms on eliminating resolutions
My longtime friend Deborah Elms, has another take on resolutions—eliminate them altogether.
Thinking about resolutions for 2023?
Personally, I long ago replaced resolutions with intentions:
#Resolutions are based in our superego beating up on us for being “wrong” or deficient somehow. And we may try for a few days or weeks and then end up ignoring or fighting the resolutions.
#Intention, on the other hand, just recognizes and empowers a direction we’d like to take our life. No bullying!
“I resolve to never eat crap” (yeah right) vs “I intend to eat healthier” (ok, can do) —Deborah Elms, Mastodon post
I’ve written about my attempts to build good habits and described some of the ways I’ve been successful. But I haven’t said much about the frequently significant emotional cost of (sometimes years of) attempts to make such changes in one’s life.
Deborah’s suggestion probably won’t make it easier to create the change that a (rarely) successfully kept resolution might make. But it will reduce your beating up yourself emotionally during the struggle to make the change.
And improving your peace of mind in this way can be worth a lot.
For better meetings, we need to focus on learning, not education.
Yes, sometimes, cultural or professional “requirements” mean we have to provide education. That’s so we can “certify” that we’ve educated attendees to some prescribed standard. But is that all our meetings should be about?
Learning, not education
After all, it’s what we actually learn that’s important, rather than the “education” we receive. As Seth Godin says:
“Education is a model based on scarcity, compliance and accreditation. It trades time, attention and money for a piece of paper that promises value.
But we learn in ways that have little to do with how mass education is structured.
If you know how to walk, write, read, type, have a conversation, perform surgery or cook an egg, it’s probably because you practiced and explored and experienced, not because it was on a test.
Seth is talking about the potential failure of online education, but his point that we need to practice, explore, and experience to learn is true for any kind of meeting. Albert Einstein and Oscar Wilde pointed this out a hundred years ago:
What is humans’ true superpower? [Hint: We’re not more intelligent than other species.] We can make a strong case that humans’ true superpower is social learning. Why am I writing about social learning on a blog that’s (mainly) about meeting design? Because social (uncovered) learning is the best learning model for conference sessions. This means, to create the best meetings we need to maximize the social learning that takes place.
Humans’ true superpower
I’m reading Dutch historian and author Rutger Bregman‘s absorbing and optimistic Humankind. The book presents a ton of evidence that — despite the torrent of bad news that daily floods our media — “humans are hardwired for kindness, geared towards cooperation rather than competition, and more inclined to trust rather than distrust one another.”
Early in the book is this passage:
“What makes human beings unique? Why do we build museums, while the Neanderthals are stuck in the displays?”
“Chimpanzees and orangutans score on a par with human two-year-olds on almost every cognitive test. But when it comes to learning, the toddlers win hands down.”
“Human beings, it turns out, are ultra social learning machines.“
“…humans have another weird feature: we have whites in our eyes. This unique trait lets us follow the direction of other people’s gazes…Humans, in short, are anything but poker-faced. We constantly leak emotions and are hardwired to relate to the people around us. But far from being a handicap, this is our true superpower, because sociable people aren’t only more fun to be around, in the end they’re smarter too.” [emphasis added, illustration based on this research] —Humankind, Rutger Bregman
Illustration from Humankind by Rutger Bregman
Or, as Seth Godin puts it:
“If you know how to walk, write, read, type, have a conversation, perform surgery or cook an egg, it’s probably because you practiced and explored and experienced, not because it was on a test.” —The revolution in online learning, Seth Godin
We aren’t superior thinkers. Humans don’t remember stuff better or longer or more accurately than other species. We aren’t better at causal reasoning. The one characteristic — our superpower — that distinguishes us from the other life on our planet is how we learn from and with others. (And how they learn from and with us.)
Social learning is how humans learn. We’re great at it, compared with other life forms. (Yes, there’s always room for improvement.)
So, for pity’s sake, don’t lecture and test. Eliminate all the one-hour (or longer) lecture sessions. Instead, build social learning into your meetings as much as possible.
So, how can I incorporate the power of social learning into my events?
It’s not hard to unleash the power of social learning at your events! Simply implement the participant-driven and participation-rich processes I’ve described and taught in my books and workshops for over thirty years.
Are you stuck in a career or life that you are reluctant to leave because it would involve ignoring sunk costs? I frequently meet people who are, and I certainly understand the temptation. Here’s the story of how I liberated my life by ignoring sunk costs. Perhaps it will inspire you to do the same.
The first twenty-five years of my life
My early education environment fed me a fire hose of information that my schools decided I should learn. Somehow, I maintained an intense curiosity to understand the world. So it’s not surprising that I gravitated to studying physics. I ended up with a Ph.D. in experimental high-energy particle physics at the tender age of 25.
I could have stayed in the field, probably got tenure, and been a physicist the rest of my life.
Instead, having fallen in love with Vermont, I left the world of high-energy particle accelerators and multiyear Big Science experiments, never to return. Although some of my experience prepared me for subsequent careers in computer science and consulting, I spent perhaps five to ten years of my life studying and working in fields I have, by now, largely forgotten. Five to ten years of sunk costs.
But no regrets. Although nothing to do with my absence, the field of experimental high-energy physics yielded little interesting progress over the last forty years. I’m glad I left it.
A visit to Korea
In 1996, my family and I visited Korea. Everywhere we went, people asked about my profession. They were astounded when I told them I had recently given up being a college professor to concentrate on information technology consulting. In Korea, being a college professor was the highest status you could have. (The two college professors with whom we were staying had their graduate students pick us up at the airport and ferry us around.) The idea that I would give up college teaching to pursue a different career was incomprehensible.
Perhaps if I’d been born Korean and followed the same educational path, my high status would have seduced me, and I would never have left academia. Status is a big reason why people cling to jobs that they hate. Knowing more about myself now, I’m glad I escaped such a fate.
Solar, teaching, and consulting
New careers followed. Abandoning each one required ignoring my associated sunk costs. Yet, in retrospect, there was always learning that fed my future. Managing a solar manufacturing company taught me much about business, which proved vital to my later consulting career. And teaching computer science for ten years helped me slowly become a better teacher, eventually discarding the broadcast-style teaching modalities I had experienced and unconsciously assumed.
Meanwhile, in my spare time…
Ever since I was a graduate student, I’ve felt drawn to bring people together around topics and issues they had in common. I spent most of the next thirty years doing this as an unpaid volunteer in my spare time. My only reward was the mysterious pleasure of feeling good about what I was doing.
What I didn’t realize was that, during these decades I was learning a great deal about successful and unsuccessful ways to facilitate group connection and fruitful learning. Figuring out ways to make the fundamental human act of meeting better, motivated by nothing more than the pleasure it gave me, led me to write a book about what I had learned.
To my surprise, when I published Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love in 2009, I found myself professionally involved in the meeting industry.
It took me half a century, but I finally figured out (for now) what I love to do. And organizations pay me to do it!
Are you stuck?
Are you stuck in a career or life choice that you are reluctant to leave because you would have to ignore sunk costs? Ultimately it’s your choice, of course. For me, being able to walk away from the learning, experience, and status I’ve achieved in various realms has been worth it. If my story hasn’t convinced you, I’ll close with Seth Godin’s thoughts on the subject:
“‘Ignore sunk costs’ is the critical lesson of useful decision making…
…Creativity is the generous act of solving an interesting problem on behalf of someone else. It’s a chance to take emotional and intellectual risks with generosity.
Do that often enough and you can create a practice around it. It’s not about being gifted or touched by the muse. Instead, our creative practice (whether you’re a painter, a coach or a fundraiser) is a commitment to the problems in front of us and the people who will benefit from a useful solution to them.” —Seth Godin, Sunk costs, creativity and your Practice
Have you ignored your sunk costs, and walked away from a career or life choice? Share your story in the comments below!
Marvel spent $400,000,000 to make Avengers: Endgame. Because there was a business model in place that made it a reasonable investment choice.
What if we wanted to cure river blindness or address ineffective policing as much as we wanted to watch movies? The business model would shift and things would change–in a different direction.
I’m not sure there’s an intrinsic reason that watching a particular movie is more satisfying than solving an endemic problem. We’ve simply evolved our culture to be focused on the business of amusement instead of the journey toward better. [Emphasis added] —Seth Godin, In search of amusement
Seth points out that our business models have shifted away from those that satisfy needs, towards those that satisfy wants. These growing businesses make money by selling distraction from work, work that is needed to make things better.
Pandemic distractions
As I write this, the COVID pandemic has been raging for a year. We’ve had even more reasons to distract ourselves from the additional turmoil the pandemic has brought to our lives. Online streaming consumption has soared (while live event attendance has plummeted). The rise of online makes it possible to choose exactly the kind of distraction we want with a click or finger tap.
It’s hard to believe that in a (hopefully) post-pandemic future, we’ll spontaneously give up our newfound distractions. Especially since businesses are hard at work creating more distraction opportunities and temptations, making it even easier to avoid what matters.
After all, that’s where the money is.
Or is it?
A different choice
Each of us can make a different choice.
It’s going to need to be a conscious choice because businesses craft their distractions to be as addictive as possible. They will continue to do their best to make us want things that aren’t what we need.
There are so many unmet basic needs in this world. Here are some important ones:
Shelter
Food and water
Healthcare
Safety
Adequate income
Education
None of these needs are impossible to satisfy. The human race is capable of significantly improving access to all of them right now.
Working to meet these needs is a global effort. No one person can singlehandedly satisfy these needs. But each of us can do something.
You can make a difference
Individually, you can make a difference. Each of us has unique talents and energy to devote to issues that matter.
We can choose to distract ourselves a little less, and use our freed-up time to make the world a little better.
Because, for our world to become a better place, we can’t keep distracting ourselves from what matters.
You get to choose. Reduce weekly Netflix watching? Stop solving quite so many crossword puzzles? Don’t play Solitaire so often? (Those are some of my choices.)
Use your freed-up time to make the world a little better. (I choose to help run non-profits that provide support for healthcare and education, and to support other non-profits that work on improving the world.)
Make a conscious choice that works for you. One that supports a “journey towards better” for the world we live in.
However, meetings have tremendous potential to change lives. Attendees have something in common: a profession, a passion, a shared experience together. They are with people who, in some way, do what they do, speak the same language, and face the same challenges.
What an opportunity to connect with like-minded souls, learn from each other, and, consequently, change one’s life for the better!
Unfortunately, most conferences squander this opportunity. Learning is restricted to broadcast-style lectures, Q&A is often more about status than learning, and attendees have little if any input into the topics and issues discussed.
Peer conferences support change
The peer conferences I’ve been designing and facilitating for 33 years are different. Yes, you can’t make people change. But, as Seth Godin points out, you can create an environment where they choose to!
Peer conferences create an optimal environment for supporting attendees in the difficult work of making changes in their lives.
Peer conferences do this by providing a safe, supportive, and participation-rich environment that includes the freedom to choose what happens.
A safe environment supports attendees taking risks: the risks of thinking about challenges and issues in new ways.
The supportive environment of a peer conference provides process tools that allow attendees to freely explore new possibilities.
A participation-rich environment ensures that attendees are likely to connect with peers who can help them or whom they can help, thus building networks and new capabilities in the future.
The freedom to choose what happens at a peer conference allows attendees to collectively create the meeting that they want and need, rather than be tied to the limited vision of a program committee or the vested interests of conference stakeholders.
These are the core design elements of peer conferences that make them so successful in creating change. Their very design maximizes the likelihood that participants will choose to make useful and productive changes in their lives.
The first three of his revolutionary cycles are well established, the fourth is now arriving. Cycles one through three introduced calculation and data storage, connection, and shifting place and time.
Above all, Seth’s fourth cycle adds prediction.
“Call it AI if you want to, but to be specific, it’s a combination of analyzing information and then predicting what we would do if we knew what the computer knew.
…we’re giving those computers the ability to make predictions based on what thousands of people before us have done.
…If you’re a mediocre lawyer or doctor, your job is now in serious jeopardy. The combination of all four of these cycles means that the hive computer is going to do your job better than you can, soon.
With each cycle, the old cycles continue to increase. Better databases, better arithmetic. Better connectivity, more people submitting more data, less emphasis on where you are and more on what you’re connected to and what you’re doing.
…just as we made a massive leap in just fifteen years, the next leap will take less than ten. Because each cycle supports the next one.”
In an earlier post, I wrote about how neural networks can now quickly learn to do certain tasks better than humans with no external examples, only the rules that govern the task environment.
Seth points out that when we supply computers with the huge, rapidly growing databases of human behavior, the fourth cycle becomes even more capable.
In conclusion, Seth ends with:
“Welcome to the fourth cycle. The hive will see you now.“
When we enable people to meaningfully connect at a meeting, something extraordinary happens. We transform a conference from an impersonal forum for information exchange to a place where people feel they matter: their views, their experience, and their ability to contribute become seen.
Such a transformation is the essential work that we need in order to build a human community around the event. It becomes something special, standing out like a beacon from the humdrum conferences routinely inflicted on attendees.
The meeting feels different, is different, because it allows participants to be truly heard and seen. Because having people listen to us is a gift. And, as Seth Godin puts it:
“We like to see. But mostly, we’re worried about being seen…the culture of celebrity that came with TV has shifted. It’s no longer about hoping for a glimpse of a star. It’s back to the source–hoping for a glimpse of ourselves, ourselves being seen.” —Seth Godin, Mirror, mirror
It takes a few minutes at the start of a gathering to create agreements that help make it a safe place for participants to:
speak their minds;
ask appropriate questions; and
share possibly intimate yet important information about their work and lives that inform the entire event.
Immediately, the conference is subtly different, full of new possibilities, some of which might have been considered risky or even taboo. Everyone in the room begins to learn about each other in ways that matter. Everyone begins to discover how they can become a part of the gathering, how they can contribute, and how they can learn about issues and challenges that personally matter.
Make it easy for participants to be safely and truly heard and seen. Your conferences will be all the better for it.
The other day I attended my lovely nephew Julian’s high school graduation.
Ah, the joys of graduation! Where graduates:
wait in long lines;
sit for hours on uncomfortable chairs;
get sunburned; and
listen to (mostly) boring speakers someone else chose.
All to:
hear their name read amid hundreds of others;
walk across a stage; and
get a blank diploma (the real one is mailed later).
And there’s more! Your loved ones enjoy the same multi-hour experience, except they get to watch your fleeting stage walk from uncomfortable chairs a long way away!
Graduation is an Elementary Meeting: a social event that consists of an obligatory, tacitly agreed series of actions performed by those taking part. I’ve written about the power of Elementary Meetings to create original event designs — but some Elementary Meetings are poorly designed by today’s standards. Because they are a historic piece of our culture, we tend not to critically evaluate or rethink them. Instead, we take it for granted and put up with the ritual one more time.
When we ask those two questions, great opportunities arrive.
A prime audience for graduation is the graduates. And what do they want? A moment in the spotlight. Official recognition. Digital media to prove it. Speed. Humor. Connection.
At the same time, expanding the amount of time spent parading each student on the stage for a photo and a handshake undermines most of that, and it alienates or numbs everyone else.
Consider: we have screens now. Our graduates believe in speed, screens and being seen.
I’d do the following things, simultaneously:
1. Instead of one team of two doing the handshake and photo dance, have three teams. I don’t think a student cares if it’s a dean or an associate dean (or even a department chair) who shakes their hand. With three processions at a time instead of one, we go from six people a minute to 20. That means, even if you change nothing else, you’ve cut the time by two-thirds.
Reading the names more quickly is easy if you have three people doing the reading instead of one. Read them with care, and respect, and honor them, but that’s no reason to dillydally.
2. You could add extra cameras and have all the photos instantly posted to Flickr or Instagram. This means that the pictures would be shared immediately and with more power.
3. But the real win is in using the iMax video displays. In the month before graduation, each student comes to an office at the school (you can have multiple offices that do this) and records themselves saying their name. Now, we have a video of their face, with their name in bold type below, saying their name with pride. Edited tightly, this would permit a fun, energetic video with each student in it. You could cut in, every few minutes, some singing groups, a on-campus charity event, etc. While the videos are rolling, when a student’s name comes up, she marches across the stage.
…Graduation is a milestone. We should make it feel like one again.” —Seth Godin, Rethinking Graduation
To these excellent ideas, I’d add rethinking the interminable awards ceremony. I have no idea what most of the awards at Julian’s graduation were for or why they only announced some of them. (He won two that no one mentioned during the graduation.) Instead of watching a bunch of students stand up and sit down while listening to a list of awards, how about showing a tightly edited video explaining the awards and including names/pictures of the honorees right before the stage walks and adding the relevant awards to each student’s individual video? We’d get a complete picture of the student during their moment of glory.
Can you think of an Elementary Meeting (like lectures, weddings, galas, funerals, sports, baby showers) that could be fruitfully redesigned? Share your ideas in the comments below.