Is your mission impossible? If you know your mission — you do have a mission, right? — then your long-term strategy becomes much clearer. You know where you want to go; now, all that remains is how to get there.
Of course, life is rarely that simple.
There’s always that must-do-now stuff that gets in the way. As Seth Godin puts it:
“This interim strategy, the notion that ideals and principles are for later, but right now, all the focus and resources have to be put into the emergency of getting successful—it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because it’s always the interim. It never seems like the right time to stop doing what worked and start doing what we said was important.”
—Seth Godin, The interim strategy
How can we stay focused on our mission when there’s always something demanding our attention right now? There are four core steps:
Notice what’s going on. (“A week has gone by, and I’ve spent fifteen minutes, tops, working on my mission.”) Sometimes this is the hardest step. We can’t change when we are unaware or avoid the changes we really need/want to make.
Make a plan. End/delegate/deprioritize the short-term stuff that’s getting in the way. Set goals for your mission-related work.
Carry out your plan. Sometimes this is the hardest step.
Steps 1-3 aren’t a one-time process. Loop ’em. Keep noticing, making new plans, and acting on them. That’s how you’ll grow and, potentially, succeed in your mission.
As Seth concludes his aforementioned post: “The interim is forever, so perhaps it makes sense to make act in the interim as we expect to act in the long haul.”
And remember this.
If you remain continually immersed in interim work, executing your Mission becomes Impossible.
Less perfection, more risky learning — an experiment
Right after the 2015 PCMA Education Conference Tuesday breakfast, I facilitated an experiment that allowed 675 meeting planners to choose sessions they would like to hold. In 45 minutes, hundreds of suggestions were offered on sticky notes. A small team of volunteers then quickly clustered the topics on a wall, picked a dozen, found leaders, and scheduled them in various locations around the Broward County Convention Center during a 90-minute time slot after lunch the same day. The experiment was a great success; all the sessions were well attended, and, from the feedback I heard, greatly enjoyed and appreciated. Many people approached me afterward and told me how surprised they were that such a simple process could speedily add 50% more excellent sessions to the 21 pre-scheduled sessions.
Our desire for perfection
All of us who plan meetings have an understandable desire for everything to be perfect. We strive mightily to not run out of coffee, comprehensively rehearse the show flow, allow for rush hour traffic between the day and evening venues, devise in advance alternative plans B -> Z, and anticipate a thousand other logistical concerns. And every planner knows that, during every event, some things will not go according to plan. So we pride ourselves on dealing with the unexpected and coming up with creative solutions on the fly. That’s our job, and we (mostly) love doing it—otherwise we’d probably be doing something less stressful, e.g., open-heart surgery.
Aiming for perfection is totally appropriate for the logistical aspects of our meetings. But when applied to other aspects of our meeting designs—little things like, oh, satisfying meeting objectives—we end up with meetings that are invariably safe at the expense of effectiveness.
Perfect is the ideal defense mechanism, the work of Pressfield’s Resistance, the lizard brain giving you an out. Perfect lets you stall, ask more questions, do more reviews, dumb it down, safe it up and generally avoid doing anything that might fail (or anything important). —Seth Godin, Abandoning perfection
We took a risk on a less-than-perfect outcome at our PCMA Education Conference crowdsourcing experiment. “What if hardly anyone suggests a topic?” “What if one or more of the participant-chosen sessions turns out to be a dud, or nobody shows up?” “Suppose we underestimate the popularity of a session, and the scheduled space is too small to hold it?” (In fact, due to the limited locations available, we had to hold several sessions in one large room, and there was some auditory overlap that had to be minimized by a quick seating rearrangement. Lesson learned for next time!)
Risky learning
This is a superior kind of learning—risky learning. We try new things with the certainty that we will learn something different. Perhaps we’ll learn something important that we would not have learned via a “safe” process. And we are prepared for the possibility of “failing” in ways that teach us something new and fresh about our process.
I’ve been running crowdsourcing of conference sessions for over twenty years. So I was confident that there would not be a shortage of session topic suggestions. But I had never before run crowdsourcing with 600+ participants. Could I get their input in 45 minutes? Would a small group be able to cluster all the suggestions in another 30 minutes, pick out juicy, popular topics, and then be able to find session leaders & facilitators and schedule all sessions before lunch?
We took a risk trying new things, and I appreciate the conference committee’s support in letting me do so. The end result was a great learning experience for the participants, both in the individual sessions offered and the experience of the process used to create them. And we learned a few things about how to make the process better next time.
How much risk?
So we need less perfection, more risky learning at our meetings. But how much risky learning should we incorporate into our events? There’s no one right answer to this question. Ultimately, you have to decide what level of risk you, your clients, and your participants are willing to accept. A healthy discussion with all stakeholders will help ensure that everyone’s on board with what you decide. But, whatever your situation, don’t aim for perfection, or play it safe.
Build as much risky learning as you can into your events. I think you’ll find the resulting outcomes will surprise and satisfy you.
What’s more important at a meeting: engagement or perfection?
“To dance with customers in an act of co-creation: This is part of 37Signals’ secret. From their book to their blog to their clearly stated point of view about platforms and the way they do business, they invite customers to debug with them in an ongoing dialogue about finding a platonic ideal of utility software. They don’t promise perfect, they promise engagement.” —Seth Godin, What is customer service for?
Sometimes you go to a meeting where not screwing anything up seems to be more important than anything else. Such meetings often execute impeccably—and yet something is missing.
Engagement is the heart and soul of a meeting. Cold perfection is admirable but inhuman. When you are open to the unexpected, and dance with it rather than fight or deny it, you open your event to the possibility of participant engagement around human imperfections and marvelous opportunities that are always present when people meet.
Engagement or perfection? Don’t promise perfect, promise engagement.
Today, you need to produce for a micro conference market.
Fifty years ago, producers and marketers got smart. They saw the miracle of mass marketing and they adopted it as their own. They amped up mass production and bet on the masses. The smart creators today are seeing the shift and doing precisely the opposite: Produce for a micro market. Market to a micro market. —Seth Godin, Mass production and mass media
Despite the status associated with big conferences, most meetings are small meetings. Whether by accident or design, in today’s world this is a good thing. The heyday of the large amorphous conference—where plenaries consist of well-known people trying to entertain or inspire you, meeting important people by chance is unlikely, and you’re uninterested in most of the sessions—is past.
Today, the most successful conferences are micro conferences. No time wasted navigating through sprawling venues passing hundreds of people you’ll never meet. No more inspirational lectures that you don’t remember three weeks later. Minimal obligatory glad-handing. Instead, you’re meeting less than a hundred people with a lot in common and a lot to gain by connecting effectively, appropriately, and, ultimately, profitably.
So, produce for a micro conference market. As Seth puts it: “When someone wants to know how big you can make (your audience, your market share, your volume), it might be worth pointing out that it’s better to be important, to be in sync, to be the one that’s hard to be replaced. And the only way to be important is to be relevant, focused and specific.”
“If you can’t sell it, you can’t build it.” When you’re trying to sell services in a capitalist society, this makes sense. (Yes, people often build material things before they try to sell them, but it’s often not a great idea. Conducting a little market research first is smart.)
Here’s Seth Godin’s explanation:
Architecture students bristle when Joshua Prince-Ramus tells them that they are entering a rhetorical profession. A great architect isn’t one who draws good plans. A great architect gets great buildings built. Now, of course, the same thing is true for just about any professional. A doctor has to persuade the patient to live well and take the right actions. A scientist must not only get funded but she also has to persuade her public that her work is well structured and useful. It’s not enough that you’re right. It matters if it gets built. —Seth Godin, If you can’t sell it, you can’t build it
But.
As a consultant, you have no authority, only influence. And sometimes you will fail.
Even if you’re right and do an amazing selling job, sometimes you will fail.
Because sometimes it’s not about you, it’s about them.
If you can’t handle failure—having your great advice ignored—you won’t be consulting for long.
What’s the relationship between conference size and “success”?
Here’s the beginning of a blog post by Seth Godin with every occurrence of the word “organization” replaced by the word “conference” and the word “traditional” added to the first sentence.
As a [traditional] conference succeeds, it gets bigger.
As it gets bigger, the average amount of passion and initiative of the conference goes down (more people gets you closer to average, which is another word for mediocre).
More people requires more formal communication, simple instructions to ensure consistent execution. It gets more and more difficult to say, “use your best judgment” and be able to count on the outcome.
Larger still means more bureaucracy, more people who manage and push for conformity, as opposed to do something new.
Success brings with it the fear of blowing it. With more to lose, there’s more pressure not to lose it.
Mix all these things together and you discover that going forward, each decision pushes the conference toward do-ability, reliability, risk-proofing and safety. —Seth Godin, Entropy, bureaucracy and the fight for great
I think it still works, don’t you?
Small is beautiful
Judging by their favorable evaluations, conferences that use the Conferences That Work format are highly successful. Yet they don’t grow significantly bigger, even though some of them have been held for years. Participants discover that effective intimate learning and connection that occurs requires a small event. The maximum number of attendees is capped. This ensures that the attractive conference environment isn’t lost by the consequences Seth describes.
I once spoke to a veteran of large medical conferences who bemoaned the time she had wasted attending such events. She told me that the talks were invariably on already-published work, with people presenting for status or tenure reasons. In addition, apart from the schwag and meeting a few old friends, she did not enjoy or find her attendance productive. She was looking forward to a much more rewarding experience from the small conference I was planning for her group.
Her comments are typical, in my experience. Unfortunately, people usually assume that the size of a conference is a metric of its “success”. From the point of view of organizers and presenters this is true: the bigger the conference, the more status you receive. But from the point of view of the customers of the conference—the attendees—after 40+ years of attending and organizing conferences it’s clear to me, both from my own experience and from that of hundreds of attendees I’ve spoken to, that, all other things being equal, smaller well-designed conferences beat the pants off huge events in terms of usefulness and relevance.
What do you think? What redeeming factors make larger conferences better? Are these factors more important than the learning and connection successes that smaller conferences provide?
“My philosophy is that it doesn’t pay to go to a conference unless you’re prepared to be vulnerable and meet people, and it doesn’t pay to go to a Q&A session unless you’re willing to sit in the front row…
There are more chances than ever to attend, but all of them require participation if you expect them to work.“
—Seth Godin, On doing the work
Attendance versus participation. Attendance is easy. But to do the work, you need to participate.
As a meeting designer, one of my most important jobs is to create meeting designs that encourage and support meaningful participation for every attendee. I try to make this as easy as possible for everyone: from the grizzled veteran who’s seen it all to the newbie who’s just entered the profession.
But ultimately, I can’t make anyone participate if they arrive with an attending-only mindset.
Ultimately, the attendee chooses, either consciously or unconsciously, whether they will do the work.
Like books, conferences are changing inexorably as new formats and technologies transform and replace the broadcast framework we’ve used for hundreds of years.
But one thing won’t change. Our conferences will still be containers for ideas. Especially as our conferences become places where participants will share and co-create ideas, rather than simply listen.
As our events increasingly embrace today’s reality that knowledge is social, the ideas they contain will be those of the many, not just of the few.
Opportunities that can change our lives in amazing ways surround us. These opportunities come in the form of a choice between continuing with what we are already doing and doing something different. Think of them as forks in the road.
The fork in the road offers only two difficulties…
Seeing it.
and
Taking it
Most organizations that stumble fail to do either one. The good news is that there are far more people than ever pointing out the forks that are open to us. The “this” or “that” alternatives that each lead to success if we’re gutsy enough to take one or the other.
Taking the fork is hard because we fear change. Venturing into the unknown scares us. Perhaps we are scared of what might happen if we fail, or of feeling embarrassed. We may even be scared of what might happen if we succeed!
Change potentially threatens the way we see the world and when we confront circumstances that are inconsistent with our worldview, we’re likely to feel stress. How many people do you know who enjoy extra stress in their life?
Change is also potentially associated with loss. Loss, for example, of all the time and effort we’ve expended learning how to do something a particular way. How many people do you know who enjoy loss?
The reality of this extra stress and loss is a hard obstacle to overcome—and it must be dealt with in order for you to take the fork.
So how can we do better at choosing a new path?
Here are three steps.
First, notice how you’re feeling about taking the fork. If you’re oblivious to how you feel about a change, your emotions will likely determine your actions. When fear is the dominant emotion, you are unlikely to take the fork. If you do take the fork without awareness of the associated stress and loss, they will ambush you later, usually when their effects have built to dangerous levels.
Second, express how you’re feeling about taking the fork. I find that sharing my feelings with someone I trust is the best way to do this, though some people prefer to journal privately about the emotions that taking the fork brings up. Processing how you are feeling helps you work through your emotions and integrate the new path into a feasible personal future.
Third, take the fork! Like most things in life, practice makes taking the fork easier. When you feel those butterflies in your stomach it’s easier to make the scary choice when you’ve felt them a hundred times before and, most of those times, things turned out alright. There will always be more forks, and the more frequently you take them, the easier it’ll be to take the next one. Robert Frost “took the one less traveled by/And that has made all the difference.” Follow his footsteps!
Photo attribution: Flickr user raptortheangel
How do you facilitate change? In this occasional series, we explore various aspects of facilitating individual and group change.
My daughter Cara and her kids joined us last week at our home in Vermont. We ended up spending most of our time goofing around:
July 4 fireworksBellows Falls station
How we decide is important because it greatly determines what we decide. Last week, we made superficial decisions. That’s a recipe for relaxation and fun—and who doesn’t need some of that?
However, when it comes to making decisions about meetings, many meeting professionals stick with old familiar formats. Keynote, plenary, panel, breakout, social; rinse and repeat. That decided, they concentrate on the logistics: F&B, decor, etc.
Here’s Seth Godin’s take on this approach:
Sometimes, it seems like all we do is make decisions.
Most of those decisions, though, are merely window dressing. This color couch vs. that one? Ketchup or Mayo? This famous college vs. that one? This nice restaurant vs. that one? This logo vs. that one?
Genuine choice involves whole new categories, or “none of the above.” Genuine choice is difficult to embrace, because it puts so many options and so many assumptions on the table with it.
There’s nothing wrong with avoiding significant choices most of the time. Life (and an organization) is difficult to manage if everything is at stake, all the time.
The trap is believing that the superficial choices are the essential part of our work. They’re not. They’re mostly an easy way to avoid the much more frightening job of changing everything when it matters. —Seth Godin, The Illusion of Choice
We have known for a while now that traditional formats are not the best ways for attendees to engage, learn, and connect. Social production’s increasing popularity and success (e.g., Wikipedia, Linux, Kickstarter, etc.) parallels the growing adoption of innovative participant-driven and participation-rich meeting formats. Meeting planners now need to take on the “frightening job” of changing conference models to those that give participants real choices about what, how, and with whom they engage, learn, and connect.
There’s a time and place for making superficial decisions. (Like last week!) But when we concentrate on the superficial at the expense of the important when planning our meetings we are doing a disservice to those who spend significant resources of time and money to attend.
We can do better. Meeting participants deserve real choices. Yes, it’s scary. But we owe it to our clients.
Shop window photo attribution: Flickr user orinrobertjohn
Is your mission impossible? If you know your mission — you do have a mission, right? — then your long-term strategy becomes much clearer. You know where you want to go; now, all that remains is how to get there.
“My philosophy is that it doesn’t pay to go to a conference unless you’re prepared to be vulnerable and meet people, and it doesn’t pay to go to a Q&A session unless you’re willing to sit in the front row…
Meeting participants deserve real choices.
