speaker Archives : Conferences That Work

The workshop that wasn’t

Monday, July 29th, 2019 by Adrian Segar

Last week, my friend Traci B wrote to me about a workshop that wasn’t.

“You’ll love this…I went to a 4 hour morning workshop at this digital conference. The speaker said, this will be interactive because no one wants to listen to me talk for four hours. He then proceeded to talk for 4 hours!

I did learn stuff and it prompted some ideas, but imagine how much better they might stick if it actually was a workshop. Also, he polled people in the audience and asked who was B2B [business-to-business] and who B2C [business-to-consumer]. 90 percent of the room was B2B…his presentation was almost all B2C.”

Sadly, experiences like this are far too common. Speakers (and the folks that concoct conference programs) decide to jazz up the description of a broadcast-style session by calling it a workshop.

The dictionary definition of a workshop is: “a seminar, discussion group, or the like, that emphasizes exchange of ideas and the demonstration and application of techniques, skills, etc.”.

Workshops that are

The lecture Traci had to endure wasn’t a workshop. Genuine workshops include significant, frequent, and appropriate work by participants, guided by leaders. The leaders typically have significant content-specific experience. However, they also need adequate facilitation skills to guide the group through the session’s activities.

Some workshops are better described as trainings, where the participants are novices and the leader supplies the vast majority of the content and learning environment. However, most workshops I’ve led included professionals with significant skills and experience.

Customizing a workshop

When running such sessions, it’s important to customize the workshop in real-time to meet the actual wants and needs of the participants, rather than plowing through a predetermined agenda that may be partially or largely irrelevant.

This did not happen at Traci’s event!

“Also, adapting your presentation isn’t tagging on “it’s the same for B2B” after every example…cause it’s not.”

Skilled leaders know to uncover the wants and needs of participants at the start of the session, and use the information to build an optimized workshop for attendees.

This sounds more difficult than it usually is. Preparation involves having a broad set of potential content, techniques, and skills to cover. Then, during the session, the leader concentrates on the wants and needs the attendees have initially shared, adjusting the time spent on each area to match the expressed interest.

One final suggestion

If a presenter (like me) is actually running a workshop, please don’t insist on calling them a speaker! In my experience, attendees prefer well-designed workshops to almost any other session format. Tell them the session is a workshop. They’ll appreciate the information (and likely the session too)!

Tags: custom, customizing, facilitated workshop, facilitation, lecture, presentation, speaker, workshop, workshops| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

Any questions? Rethinking traditional Q&A

Monday, April 22nd, 2019 by Adrian Segar

How often have you heard “Any questions?” at the end of a conference session?

Hands rise, and the presenter picks an audience member who asks a question. The presenter answers the question and picks another questioner. The process continues for a few minutes.

Simple enough. We’ve been using this Q&A format for centuries.

But can we improve it?

Yes!

Let’s explore, starting with…

Six criticisms of traditional Q&A

Traditional Q&A reinforces the engrained assumption that the presenter is the expert, and audience members are relative novices. This ignores today’s reality that the smartest person in the room is the room.
Traditional Q&A is a one-to-many process. These days, conference attendees come to learn and connect. But the only connection going on (if any) during traditional Q&A is between the presenter and individual audience members.
Have you ever thought, “I could answer that question better than [the person on stage]!”? Traditional Q&A provides no opportunity for obtaining answers from audience members.
Who gets to ask questions? The presenter decides, allowing any implicit (and explicit) bias full reign.
How much time is available for questions? Again, the presenter decides. Too little time scheduled frustrates audience members whose questions remain unanswered. Too much time leads to a premature session close.
During traditional Q&A, the questioner is in the audience while the presenter is up on stage. As a result, questioners remain largely anonymous; audience members can’t even see a questioner behind them without turning around.

Ways to improve Q&A

I can think of two fundamental ways to improve Q&A. Here are…

Five ways to refine the traditional Q&A format

Include multiple Q&A opportunities throughout the session. This helps audience members get answers to questions while they’re top-of-mind, rather than waiting until the end of the session. It also increases interaction with the presenter, which can help maintain attendee attention and improve learning.
Instead of the presenter picking the questioners, have an independent third party (a moderator) choose them.
Or you can have the audience submit questions via an app and then vote on the list. This helps uncover popular questions.
If you’re using a moderator, have the audience submit questions in writing or via an app. This allows the moderator to curate questions to be asked. When appropriate, the moderator can combine similar questions.
Instead of taking questions from the audience, have questioners line up at a front-of-room mike so everyone can see them.

Or, we can…

Further improve Q&A by integrating it into a discussion format

Traditional sessions have two parts, first a lecture, and then Q&A. As mentioned above, presenting multiple short pieces of content interspersed with Q&A increases interaction and consequent learning. But we can do better!

Combined with experiential exercises, here’s the approach I use in my Participate! Labs.

Using a facilitated discussion format like the fishbowl sandwich, I create a session that offers Q&A on an as-needed basis. As I share content, attendees can join me on stage at any time for questions or a discussion that I moderate. (Check the link to see how this works.) The session then becomes more like a live Ask Me Anything (AMA) around my content.

Creating a truly participative Q&A in this way lets the resulting questions and discussions reflect the audience’s just-in-time needs, optimizing the value of the session for participants.

Do you have additional suggestions for improving Q&A? Share them in the comments below!

Tags: conversation, discussion, fishbowl, fishbowl sandwich, improvement, lectures, participation, presentation, Q&A, questions, speaker| Posted in Event design | 2 Comments »

Please don’t call me a speaker

Monday, May 5th, 2014 by Adrian Segar

Please don’t call me a speaker. Yes, anyone who’s met me knows I like to talk. It’s true: I have been accused (justifiably at times) of talking too much. Yes, I get invited to “speak” at many events.

A typical conference speaker spends the vast majority of his or her time speaking, while an audience listens. These days, “speakers” often show pictures or videos too (but they’re still called speakers; interesting, yes?)

To be clear: there’s nothing wrong with the act of speaking itself; it’s the timeframe that’s invariably screwed up.

Most speakers speak uninterrupted far too long. How long is “too long”? Ten minutes is about the maximum for effective learning. Up to twenty minutes may be acceptable occasionally. More than twenty minutes—you’re doing your audience a disservice!

People cannot listen and simultaneously think effectively about what they’re hearing or seeing. We need quiet time to reflect on what we have just heard and seen; time to think about what it means, how we understand it, whether we agree with it, and so on. We also greatly benefit from doing this reflective work with other people as it exposes us to different interpretations, new points of view, additional relevant experiences, and so on.

None of this can happen with a speaker, no matter how engaging and entertaining, who speaks for fifty-five minutes non-stop, leaving five minutes for questions.

Even if you give me just twenty-five minutes, I will include time for people to interact with the content and ideas I’m sharing. People will learn more, retain it longer, retain it more accurately, and develop more ideas of their own when they participate actively during our time together.

So, Adrian, what would you like us to call you?

Well, please don’t call me a speaker. A presenter is a better descriptor for what I do. “Presenter” can, at least, imply that I present some content and then give the audience opportunities to work on that content alone / in small groups /collectively, rather than just listen.

Another word that is often appropriate is facilitator. As a facilitator, my job is to help participants engage in their learning and sharing. As a facilitator, when I’m working with a group of people who have experience and expertise in a common topic, I can help them learn in valuable ways from each other without possessing comparable knowledge myself. Because the combined expertise and experience available in a room full of peers is generally greater than that available from a single expert, effective facilitation is a powerful tool for providing great learning experiences, with the added benefit that participants become aware of other resources for their learning and development besides the folks at the front of the room.

A request

The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers
—William Shakespeare, Henry VI

I’m not suggesting that you banish all speakers from your events. (Though many meetings, in my experience, would be better if you did.) But I do want you to be aware of the consequences of blithely calling everyone who contributes a “speaker”.

So, please don’t call me a speaker. Whether you describe me as a speaker, presenter, or facilitator, I’m going to keep on doing what I’ve been doing. But language is important. I’m asking meeting planners and their clients to stop labeling people like me as “speakers”. And, if you want your attendees to receive optimal benefit from your events, I urge you to remember the reality that filling your program with speakers lecturing at an audience is a terrible modality to use if you claim that your conference is really about adult learning and connection, rather than promotion and status.

Photo attribution: Flickr user theenmoy

Tags: interaction, participation, presentations, speaker, speaking| Posted in Event design | 1 Comment »