Aside from my first book, I haven’t written much about the effects of attendee status — attendees’ “relative rank in a hierarchy of prestige” — at events. It’s time to revisit this important topic because you can improve your meetings by making attendee status a real-time construct.
Traditional event attendee status is pre-determined
Traditional, broadcast-style events assign attendee status in advance. A person’s status is determined before the event by whether they’re speaking and the context. For example, keynoting is of higher status than leading a breakout session. The program committee bestows status on certain attendees. Their status is publicly proclaimed on the pre-conference program, giving attendees no say in the decision.
Peer conference event attendee status is real-time
At peer conferences (and some traditional events), attendee status is dynamic, shifting from moment to moment. Here’s how pre-determined and real-time attendee status compare: Notice that events designed to support flexible, real-time attendee status:
Empower all attendees — not just a chosen few — to contribute and engage; and
Support inclusive, active learning by providing a participatory environment.
Minimizing assumptions about attendee status at traditional events
With careful design, even traditional events can minimize assumptions about attendee status.
Meeting professionals rarely talk about status and power issues. This is unfortunate because the ways that status and power manifest at meetings matter. Why? Because a majority of those who attend most meetings have little say over what happens at them. Typical meeting formats are rigid, and attendees play largely circumscribed roles.
So, let’s explore the roles of status and power at meetings.
Every meeting has a structure
As Jo Freeman wrote half a century ago, every meeting has a structure.
“Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved.”
—Jo Freeman aka Joreen, The Tyranny of Structurelessness, 1972
Meetings usually adopt traditional structures that attendees seldom question in public. Such structures contain status and power imbalances that can often reduce the effectiveness of the meeting. Meetings that are consciously designed to best fit the needs and wants of all the stakeholders are rare.
Hierarchy isn’t (necessarily) a problem
When we look at a meeting in progress, it’s usually easy to spot any hierarchy that’s present. For example:
The chairperson sits at the end of the table.
Speakers, board members, and panelists face everyone else.
Name badges signal high-status roles.
Only certain people get a microphone.
Hierarchy leads to overt or covert status differences. However, the existence of hierarchical or status differences isn’t necessarily a problem. A high-status, experienced chairperson, for example, may guide a board meeting through a complex agenda far more effectively than if the gathering is structured as a free-floating discussion. Similarly, a clear interactive presentation from an experienced expert to an audience of novices can be an effective way to share important information about a relevant topic.
However, hierarchy frequently impedes meeting effectiveness when high-status members use the power imbalance between them and other attendees to impose a meeting structure that suits their purposes.
Here’s a brief overview of each of these kinds of power dynamics from a meetings perspective.
Power-within
My work is about designing meetings that support power-within for every attendee. There are three overlapping sets of tools for this: agreements, facilitation that supports participants’ freedoms and agreements, and status-leveling processes like The Three Questions.
I go into a lot more detail in my books about why these tools are so important. Check out The Power of Participation for deeper explanations.
Power-with
Maximizing power-with is an obvious force for good for meeting participants (unless, perhaps, you are in a minority with power and want to maintain the status quo.) We are social creatures, and it feels good when we are listened to and experience being truly heard by others—even if they respectfully disagree with us. Consequential bonuses that provide additional joy include discovering agreement, making connections, and moving to action.
Power-over
Power-over is the most common power dynamic at work in meetings.
When power-over meeting dynamics are appropriate and relatively benign
Specifically, power-over dynamics can work reasonably well for meetings when a high-status leader:
Has significantly more expertise and experience than anyone else present;
Is good at communicating what’s necessary via broadcast; and
Is benevolent.
An example would be a high-level, experienced bureaucrat who has the job of teaching the implications of a complex set of new tax regulations to a group of customer service employees who answer tax questions.
Even in situations like this, reducing perceived status can improve the meeting. For example, creating a relaxed and supportive environment for questions and discussion plus breaking regularly into small groups to process learning will improve adult learning better than lecturing followed by testing.
Power-over meeting dynamics are often toxic
But if you’ve ever had low status at a meeting—and who hasn’t?—you’ve likely often experienced toxic power-over dynamics. For example:
Teachers publicly humiliate students in class.
Bosses pressure subordinates to make unwise or unfair decisions at meetings or avoid uncomfortable topics.
Arrogant people interrupt others and monopolize discussions at conference sessions.
What’s been fascinating to me during my decades of designing and facilitating meetings is how good meeting design can minimize power differentials between participants, and invariably just about everyone discovers that the meeting improves for them! (Even including the vast majority of the folks with more power!)
Conclusions about power dynamics at meetings
Two essential things meeting designers and facilitators should do to create effective meetings is to support power-within and maximize power-with for participants. Do these well and you will simultaneously reduce the deleterious effects of power-over at your events.
This post was inspired by Richard D. Bartlett‘s article Hierarchy Is Not the Problem…It’s the Power Dynamics. Richard covers work relationships while I have focused on applying his analysis to meetings. Richard also includes suggested steps towards healthy power dynamics at work—well worth reading!
I’ve consulted for more than a thousand organizations. My clients include branches of the U.S. Government, large international agencies, and for-profit and non-profit companies. Over the last four decades, I’ve found the size of a client’s organization affects many aspects of my work. Here are some of the pros and cons of consulting for large organizations.
Pros of consulting for large organizations
The pros of consulting for large organizations are pretty much what you’d expect.
Credibility
When choosing a consultant it’s smart to see whom they’ve worked for (and check references). Potential clients who check out my partial client list can see that I’ve worked for huge organizations like The World Bank, The Nature Conservancy, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Having had clients like these can reassure large organizations that I may be able to help them too. Smaller potential clients may also be impressed. (I also include plenty of smaller organizations on my client list, so people know I routinely work with large and small clients.)
Status
Consulting for large, well-known organizations obviously confers a certain amount of status. If you care about that kind of thing. Which some people do.
Access to resources
Large organization clients usually have more access to useful resources than smaller clients. For example, meeting rooms, specialized support staff, and travel budgets are often plentiful and generous. That can make my work easier and more pleasant. (Note: I’ve found for-profit clients have a harder time freeing up staff support for my work than the associations that make up a majority of my client mix.)
Larger fees? Perhaps…
You’d think that larger organizations would tend to pay more generous fees, and I’m sure sometimes you’d be right. However, I don’t set my fees based on the size of the client but on the scope of the work that’s needed. Though I don’t charge the stratospheric rates that some consultants quote, very small companies can have a hard time finding the money to pay me to do a good job. (And if I can’t do a good job for them, whatever the quantity of work, I won’t sign a contract.)
In general, only a few potential clients reject me because they decide they can’t afford me. My contracts with large clients may involve more time and money than similar work for a smaller client (see below). Otherwise, since I don’t set my fees on a “what the market can afford” basis, I don’t find a significant correlation between client size and fees. Other consultants’ experiences may be different.
Cons of consulting for large organizations
The cons of consulting for large organizations are less obvious than the pros. It took me a while to discover them.
More BS
In general, I don’t enjoy consulting for large clients as much as small ones. That’s because I’ve found working with large organizations involves…well, more bullshit. The BS manifests in many ways. It’s more likely, for example, that there will be conflicts between people and departments that I have to handle as part of my work. Decision-making processes are often convoluted. Administrative and contract issues take up more time.
There are exceptions. Typically they occur when I’m working for an autonomous subunit of the entire organization where the stakeholders have the decision-making authority needed for me to do my work. Under these circumstances, it’s like working for a small client, albeit one embedded in a large organization. Unfortunately, I don’t often come across this structure. Even when I do, the organization’s environment and structure sometimes warp the goals and objectives for our work in strange ways.
Harder to talk to decision-makers
One of the most frustrating issues when consulting for large organizations is that it can be impossible to talk directly with key decision-makers. In large organizations, I often work with middle managers who are enthusiastic about what we create. But then we have to sell our approach to upper management. Senior staff typically expect to hear from their middle managers rather than me. In practice, this is very inefficient. Any questions or objections that middle management can’t answer have to be passed back to me. This does not usually end well.
My rule of thumb is that if I can get ten minutes with a senior manager, we can get a go (usually) / no-go decision. For example, working with a hospital chain CEO recently, it took a few minutes to resolve an issue that no one else in the organization was able to handle. But this is frequently impossible!
I have seen more great consulting collaborations unnecessarily scuttled via the refusal of senior management to get even briefly directly involved than for any other reason.
I’m well aware that as a consultant I have no power, only influence. So I don’t take it personally when clients don’t follow my advice. But it’s still a frustrating and wasteful experience for everyone involved—and it’s a much more common outcome at large organizations.
It’s a wash
Creating long-lasting positive change in the organization
It seems plausible that a good consultant can create more long-lasting positive change in a large organization than in a small one. After all, the former has more people to influence, and any successfully introduced change will therefore affect a larger number of people.
Influence is like raspberry jam. The wider you spread it, the thinner it gets.
Large organizations dilute your influence for creating change because it’s spread over many people. In a small organization, I have more influence over fewer people and can help make a bigger change take place.
Here’s an example. A few years ago, I and a group of meeting designers spent a day looking into how we could improve the annual UN Climate Change Conference meeting process in order to better meet the challenges of the climate crisis. These meetings involve hundreds of countries and thousands of NGOs and people. A few hours spent reviewing the arcane procedures that have been historically used convinced me that the likelihood of a single consultant or organization affecting the outcome of these meetings was infinitesimal.
Conclusions
Personally, I prefer to consult with smaller organizations. Although the perks of working with a giant concern are rather nice, they don’t compensate for dealing with the higher level of BS that I often encounter or the increased likelihood of failing to make a positive change (despite getting paid).
I’m sure that some consultants prefer spending time in big and complex cultures. If you’re one of them and would like to share your viewpoint, please do so in the comments below. And if you agree with my preference, share that too!
“Those doing the work are often the only ones who really understand the context. Leadership is helping build the structure and then protecting the space to do meaningful work.“ —Harold Jarche, work in 2018
Build the structure to do meaningful work
Few traditional meetings are built to do meaningful work. Instead, they unconsciously adopt an ancient model: a rote diet of lectures. Conscious meeting design, on the other hand, builds an appropriate structure that supports and leads to defined and desired outcomes, aka meaningful work.
Protect the space to do meaningful work
The old-school status roles baked into traditional meetings minimize useful connection and learning by defining in advance those who have something important to say. This makes it difficult and risky for the audience to share their own expertise and experience for everyone’s benefit.
“Leadership is helping build the structure and then protecting the space to do meaningful work.” When seen through the lens of participant-driven and participation-rich meeting design, I view Harold’s two-part definition as a perfect description of leadership for meetings.
Do your meeting designs truly support participants doing meaningful work? Do you provide leadership for meetings?
You can improve meetings by de-emphasizing status.
Apart from my first book, I haven’t written much about status at events. It’s time to revisit this important topic.
I think about status at events as the relative levels of proclaimed or perceived social value assigned to or assumed by attendees.
There are two key kinds of event status — let’s call them old-school and real-time.
Old-school status
At traditional events, old-school status is implied in advance. Someone’s status is determined before the event by whether they’re speaking and the context. If you’re not speaking or leading a session you’re low status. In addition, keynoting is of higher status than leading a breakout session. Program committees bestow old-school status. It’s public, and attendees have no say in the decision.
Most traditional conferences desire a reputation as must-attend events if you want to rise to the top of the associated profession or business. Such events implicitly market themselves as vehicles for publicly proclaiming and gaining status. (Yes, you’ll never see in conference promotional materials the phrase: “Attending this conference is essential for establishing and increasing your professional status.”)
Presenters and panelists gain status simply from being presenters and panelists. But there are other ways that a traditional conference promotes and telegraphs old-school status. At academic conferences, for example, ambitious graduate students buttonhole speakers in the corridors and ask smart questions at the end of talks, hoping to increase their visibility and future employment prospects. Similar schmoozing occurs at professional conferences. There can be public battles during presentation question times. How I greet (or ignore) a colleague signifies volumes about professional pecking order, not only to the people involved but also to those who witness the encounter.
Traditional conferences, then, provide multiple opportunities for overtly and covertly promoting, adjusting, and reinforcing old-school status. But there’s another kind of status, one that leads to better conferences.
Real-time status
I design the participant-driven, participation-rich conferences I champion to provide maximal access to anyone who has something meaningful to offer. These events de-emphasize the importance of old-school status, replacing it with real-time appreciation of an individual’s skills, gifts, and learning. Unlike old-school status, real-time status is unique to and for each attendee, fluid, and context-sensitive.
Let’s elaborate. An attendee’s real-time status at a peer conference is:
Unique: It’s different for each person present. It might be low or high depending on their assessment of my potential value due to my experience or expertise, or neutral if we’ve had no interaction.
Fluid: It depends on whom I’m with moment to moment and what we’re doing. I could be learning from a conversation, giving me student-like status one moment, or sharing valuable information, giving me teacher-like status the next.
Context-sensitive: In one session I may have a lot to offer, in another I may be a novice.
Comparing old-school and real-time status
In environments that focus on real-time status, status is not a one-dimensional construct that an outside authority bestows. Instead, the interactions that occur generate meaningful real-time status. Consequently, it’s a much richer reflection of the value of attendees to each other. The environment and the structure provided by the event design allow attendees to discover other participants and the expertise and experience that are personally valuable.
Conferences that de-emphasize old-school status and support real-time status make it acceptable and encouraged for participants to define for themselves the issues, topics, connections, and interactions they want and need. As a result, they waste less valuable time listening to speakers talking about uninteresting topics. They make more useful connections than at an old-school status event. And they are more likely to be satisfied by their experience and, therefore, attend future events.
That’s why you can improve meetings by de-emphasizing (old-school) status.
I’ve been promoting the Conferences That Work meeting format for so long that some people assume I think it’s the right choice for every meeting. Well, it’s not. Here are (drum roll!) two meeting types and three situations when you should NOT use a Conferences That Work design:
Most corporate events
Many corporate events have a tight focus. Management has desired outcomes for the meeting, e.g., developing new products and services, communicating changes in company strategic goals, training and incentivizing sales teams, implementing successful product launches, etc. The function of such meetings is primarily top-down: effectively communicate management objectives, answer questions, and get employee buy-in. Fixed-agenda corporate meetings are not a good fit for peer conference designs. Why? Because they are predominantly about one-way broadcast-style communication. Participants are there to listen and learn rather than to determine what’s individually useful to them or to build intra-company connections.
Special events
Special events involve a mixture of entertainment, celebration, and raising money. While some may include impromptu participant involvement, they concentrate on creating a wonderful experience for attendees. Special events are carefully choreographed in advance and participant interaction is generally limited to the traditional social forms of meals and parties. So they are not a good fit for the spontaneous generation of topics, themes, and participant-determined process that peer conference designs generate.
When simultaneously scheduled alongside traditional meeting formats
Much as I would like to tell you that participant-driven and participation-rich event formats are common these days, it just ain’t so. As a result, many conference attendees have not encountered these designs before and have not experienced how effective they can be in creating valuable connections and learning with their peers. When meeting planners add participant-driven sessions as a track to an existing schedule of traditional presentations, few attendees will pick the unfamiliar. Unfortunately, this convinces the organizers that few people are interested in these formats, reinforcing a return to a familiar predetermined program.
If I had a nickel for every time I’ve seen this mistake made … well … that would pay the bill for a very nice dinner out.
When time is short
Participant-driven and participation-rich events are messy and, by the standards of a content-dump-into-listeners-ears event, relatively inefficient. You can share some good information in a ten-minute talk. (Even if most of the audience will have forgotten it a month later.) But try to build connections and learning in a group of a hundred people in ten minutes? Little of any significance is going to happen in such a short time.
I’ve run the core Conferences That Work design in a day numerous times, and it’s always a rush. A day and a half is the minimum for a group to really benefit. A peer conference design such as Open Space doesn’t need so much time—a few hours can be useful—though it omits some of the features that make Conferences That Work so effective.
Valuable peer learning and connection take time. It’s worth it. If you don’t have enough time, a peer conference isn’t like a podcast you can speed up and still understand. Schedule the time actually needed for the process to work and wonderful things will happen. Shortchanging the time guarantees frustrated and unhappy attendees.
When a meeting is significantly about status rather than learning and connection
Sadly, in my view, some meetings are primarily about asserting and demonstrating status. Government, political, and, to a lesser extent, academic conferences often fall into this category. If your conference attendees come from a culture where power and influence are firmly controlled by the people in charge, a Conferences That Work meeting design will be a poor fit. A format that does not reinforce their dominance threatens high-status individuals.
So when should you use the Conferences That Work design?
I thought you’d never ask. If you have all attendees’ attention and enough time for the process to work (see above), a Conferences That Work meeting design is a fantastic (I would argue, the best) approach for meetings of communities of practice (this link explains in detail what communities of practice are). That includes all conferences, colloquia, congresses, conventions, and symposia.
Association and client conferences are clear candidates for Conferences That Work. Traditional conference elements, such as keynotes, up-to-the-minute research findings, recognition ceremonies, social events, etc., can easily be integrated into the design.
By carefully incorporating the peer conference process into future events, you can make existing conferences more participant-driven and participation-rich. Over the years, I have helped many associations successfully make this transition.
But the best time to implement Conferences That Work is at a brand-new conference! (A good example is the edACCESS peer conference, now in its 26th year and still going strong.) Why? Because people typically create new conferences when they find the need to meet for a new purpose. At that moment in time, invariably, there are no obvious experts to invite. Opening with a peer conference design allows a group of relative strangers with a common interest to make fruitful connections and learn productively about and from the expertise and experience in their midst. The experience is so powerful that I don’t know of a group that has decided to stop using the format.
“Best” is context-specific, a matter of opinion, and transitory. So, there will always be a next best thing.
When we use “best” dishonestly, we ignore one or more of these realities. We appeal to status, implying that our “best” thing is absolutely best, transcending environment, viewpoint, and the passage of time.
Claiming the highest status for our “best” thing preys on our audience’s fears by offering a simplistic solution. “Believe us, buy this, and Bingo! You can stop worrying that you might have made a mistake!”
Sure, when aware of environmental and personal context, it’s fine to make an in-the-moment judgment that some course of action is the best of multiple alternatives (be sure there are at least three!) We do this all the time.
But when we simply slap on a “Best” label we are selling comforting feelings disguised as our product or service.
In addition, believing that we have or are the best does us a disservice. We will focus on “best” practices instead of next practices. Consequently, we may maintain the status quo, but with the danger that at any time a competitor could make our “best” second best.
Ultimately, what’s important is to continuously strive to be the best, not for the sake of being the best, but from a genuine desire to provide the best value/outcomes/opportunities for one’s organization or clients. Rather than feeling proud under the illusion that you are the “best”, work to be proud of your own efforts and achievements (including the learning that occurs when things don’t go according to plan or you take a risk that doesn’t pan out.)
Live with the knowledge that “best”, while well worth pursuing, is a moving fluid target. Remember, there will always be a next best thing.
I’ve returned from a wonderful 48-hour whirlwind of experiments and play with 30 meeting designers in Utrecht, The Netherlands. We came from Europe, South America, Slovakia, and the U.S. (me) to learn, share, and connect at the first Meeting Design Practicum, hosted by Eric de Groot and his merry gang. Here are nine learnings from the first Meeting Design Practicum.
Similar in spirit to the many EventCamps held around the world since 2010, the Practicum was a safe place for event professionals to experiment with techniques, approaches, ideas, and formats without the obligation and pressure of a “successful” outcome for a paying client. We met informally at an ancient Dutch fort, cooked meals together, did our own housekeeping, and quickly built an intimate community with connections that will continue to reverberate into the future.
I can’t give a complete survey of everything that happened at the Practicum. For one thing, I couldn’t attend every Practicum session because we often had to choose between simultaneous sessions. In addition, some of the important takeaways were already familiar to me, so I don’t include them here. Rather, I’ll share new insights that made an impression on me during our three days together. I apologize for not attributing them to specific people; suffice it to say that every single participant brought important insights and contributions to our gathering.
Elementary meetings
One of the great concepts Eric & Mike van der Vijver introduced in Into The Heart of Meetings was modeling portions or an entire event on the familiar format of what they call Elementary Meetings—such as weddings, legal trials, birth celebrations, etc. The Practicum provided several examples of this.
Our journey through the event was mapped onto a large wall “tree”, with our influences mapped onto the roots at the start. We added our learnings from the Meeting Design Practicum as leaves to the branches as the Practicum progressed.
Participants had the opportunity to share a single short meeting design tip/trick. This was mapped onto the magic competitions of Asterix and Obelix where druids demonstrated their magic to the tribes. On several occasions, those of us offering magic disappeared into a small room, only to reappear wearing impressive druid beards. One at a time, introduced by a flourish played on a trumpet we shared our tips. At the end of the Practicum, we chose the most useful tip. The winner, Victor Neyndorff, took home the golden snouieknife (sp?).
Gardening
Metaphors provide powerful ways to communicate, and I find them surprisingly difficult to discover. A delightful and effective metaphor for meeting design was shared early in the Practicum. Seeing the meeting designer as a gardener maps so many aspects of meeting design process onto the familiar act of gardening that enumerating the parallels is left as an exercise for the reader.
Objects
In 2007 – 8 I was a participant in a year-long leadership workshop held over a dozen weekends. For our last meeting, we were asked to bring a personal object and share its meaning and relevance to what we had learned and our experience. I found this a moving and bonding experience, as we told our stories, each linked to an object that we held in our hands or placed at the center of our group.
The Practicum reminded me of this format, thanks to a session on using objects at events. We concentrated on using individual objects with attributes that evoked a desired event theme, message, or mindset. One interesting aspect of this approach is that you could use it to replace the common practice of saturating the event environment with theme/message decor. Imagine—no more branded cocktail napkins needed! Another interesting suggestion was the use of two or more interacting objects. (For example, a mirror ball together with lights held by participants.)
Improving a traditional presentation with closing Q&A
Instead of moving straight into Q&A after a presentation, provide a short time for participants to share possible questions in small groups. This helps introverts get their just-as-good-as-anyone-else questions out. It also provides a check for those wondering whether their question is a good one, or optimally phrased.
“Never trust a leader who doesn’t dance at the event party”
I’ll let this stand without comment, except to say my experience bears this out.
A good question for pair-share
“What motivates you the most?” An excellent question for energizing participants by reconnecting them with their personal passion.
Working with status-conscious leaders at events
Some leaders are heavily invested in their personal status. At events, they may insist on speaking at length to everyone, even though the audience may widely consider their talk a waste of time. We discussed this issue at one of the four Practicum “challenge sessions”. One possible solution suggested was to elevate the leader’s status, for example, by adding a short well-produced video showing the leader to best advantage. Then the leader may accept more interactive and interesting formats, such as an interview by key participants with preplanned questions.
Relief from discomfort
My philosophy when facilitating is to bring participants as gently as possible into situations or experiences that may be uncomfortable but are needed to satisfy desired outcomes. During the Practicum we went through “a Maori discussion format”. We found an issue on which our group was roughly equally divided and, with the two groups standing facing each other, took turns arguing for our point of view using the format “YOU think that… WE think that…”
I found the format artificial and uncomfortable (not least because none of us had any idea of what the other members of our group actually thought). What was interesting to me was the next step. We all came together, sharing hugs and reconnecting across the groups, followed by a debrief where we all lay down and spoke about the experience when we felt we had something to say (rather like a Quaker Meeting). The relief felt after the “confrontation” was much stronger than if we had used a less aggressive discussion format. The experience made me think that there may be times when it’s worth increasing the discomfort at some points of event process to improve post-discomfort bonding.
Escape Rooms
On the last evening of the Practicum, we piled into cars for a mystery outing. Our destination was revealed to be an Escape Room or rather three Escape Rooms.
We had an opportunity to cooperatively solve (or watch others solve) a myriad of physical and mental problems in order to either escape from a room or, in my case, to compete against another team in an identical room. I had heard about these rooms but never experienced one before. For a group to solve the puzzles, members had to communicate effectively with each other. Our group worked fairly independently, calling out or showing findings to the other members as we found clues and objects needed to increase our score or unlock further puzzles. I heard afterward that our competitors were less effective at listening to each other, which is why we ended up “winning”. Video cameras watched us as we worked, though the staff told us that the video would stay private.
I had fun working with my six first-time teammates!
The Escape Room experience is an effective way to expose existing or potential communication problems in a group. It could be debriefed afterward using video of the session. However, it might be a rather negative experience, as there’s certainly potential for intra-team conflict. So I’m not sure if it’s an optimum environment for team building.
Learnings from the first Meeting Design Practicum
I’ve shared nine learnings from the first Meeting Design Practicum that this unique event uncovered. As always, reading about an experience is a pale ghost of the experience itself. Just as important was the opportunity to reconnect and deepen relationships with old friends, and make some wonderful new connections. I hope that Eric and Co will do this again; I will be among the first to sign up!
We all like to feel important some of the time. Having status in some human relationships is important to our psychological well-being. As psychologist Matthew Lieberman explains:
“We desire status because it suggests that others value us, that we have a place of importance in the group and are therefore connected to the group.” —Matthew Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect
The problem with many conferences is that limited, unchangeable status is frozen into the event structure. The people with high status are those the organizers chose to be at the front of the room. Everyone else is just one of the lower-status crowd.
The beauty of a peer conference is that it provides many more opportunities for each participant to be high-status. The Conferences That Work opening Three Questions session guarantees that everyone gets a short time at the front of the room. During the event, you can be a learner (lower status) one moment and a teacher (higher status) the next. And it’s far more likely that others will recognize your expertise or experience.
Let’s be clear—peer conferences don’t impose similar status on everybody. An industry veteran will likely spend more time in higher-status situations than a novice first-time participant. But a peer conference makes no initial assumptions about who has something to offer. I’ve seen plenty of situations where an industry novice turns out to have valuable contributions to make from their prior experience in another field.
Isn’t a conference format where everyone gets to be appropriately high-status once in a while healthier than one where a tiny minority get it all? I think so, (and thousands of evaluations back me up!)
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?
Notice that events designed to support flexible, real-time attendee status:
My work is about designing meetings that support power-within for every attendee. There are three overlapping sets of tools for this: 
Maximizing power-with is an obvious force for good for meeting participants (unless, perhaps, you are in a minority with power and want to maintain the status quo.) We are social creatures, and it feels good when we are listened to and experience being truly heard by others—even if they respectfully disagree with us. Consequential bonuses that provide additional joy include discovering agreement, making connections, and moving to action.
Power-over is the most common power dynamic at work in meetings.
I’ve consulted for more than a thousand organizations. My clients include branches of the U.S. Government, large international agencies, and for-profit and non-profit companies. Over the last four decades, I’ve found the size of a client’s organization affects many aspects of my work. Here are some of the pros and cons of consulting for large organizations.
What might leadership for meetings look like?
You can improve meetings by de-emphasizing status.
I’ve been promoting the 
I’ve returned from a wonderful 48-hour whirlwind of experiments and play with 30 meeting designers in Utrecht, The Netherlands. We came from Europe, South America, Slovakia, and the U.S. (me) to learn, share, and connect at the first Meeting Design Practicum, hosted by Eric de Groot and his merry gang. Here are nine learnings from the first Meeting Design Practicum.
I can’t give a complete survey of everything that happened at the Practicum. For one thing, I couldn’t attend every Practicum session because we often had to choose between simultaneous sessions. In addition, some of the important takeaways were already familiar to me, so I don’t include them here. Rather, I’ll share new insights that made an impression on me during our three days together. I apologize for not attributing them to specific people; suffice it to say that every single participant brought important insights and contributions to our gathering.
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