Re-envisage event technology to significantly improve your events

re-envisage event technology: photograph of a plastic sales blister-pack containing four AA batteries and a nail clipper. Photo attribution: Flickr user pierre-francois

We need to re-envisage event technology to significantly improve our events.

Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies—it happens when society adopts new behaviors.
—Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

I feel irritated when I see so many event professionals focusing on “new” event technology while ignoring existing technology that, in many cases, could greatly improve their events at a fraction of the cost.

There, I said it.

Every year there are plenty of conferences where you can go and see the latest and greatest mobile and gamification apps, attendee tracking systems, registrant analytics, mobile networking, video streaming platforms, etc. Vendors are happy to sponsor these events. They use them to showcase their wares and, hopefully, convince attendees that their new technology is worth buying.

Let me be clear—I have nothing against new technology per se. (If I was I’d be a hypocrite, given that I spent twenty-three profitable years as an information technology consultant.) What’s sad is that too much of event professionals’ limited continuing education time is spent investigating shiny new toys and apps while overlooking inexpensive and proven ways to provide effective learning, connection, engagement, and community building at their events.

Why does this happen? Here are two reasons:

We fixate on the new

“Technology is anything that was invented after you were born.”
Alan Kay, from a Hong Kong press conference in the late 1980s

We are enveloped by so much rapidly changing technology that we fixate on what is new.

What was new quickly becomes taken for granted and largely invisible. As David Weinberger remarks“Technology sinks below our consciousness like the eye blinks our brain filters out.”

Although technology in the form of human tools has existed for over three million years and we’ve had books for over half a millennium, the first history of technology wasn’t written until 1954. Flip charts, 5×8 cards, comfortable seating, room sets, healthy food and beverage, and hand voting have been around for a long time. They are old-fashioned technology to event professionals, so we don’t pay them much attention (unless they can be reframed in a sexy way, e.g. “brain food”). But that doesn’t mean they’re not important. Far from it.

Technology isn’t just manufactured goods and software

Our definition of what is and isn’t “technology” is far too narrow. We tend to think of technology in terms of products and embedded implementations (e.g. software). But this is an incredibly restrictive viewpoint. Kevin Kelly, in his thought-provoking book What Technology Wants, lists three of the most important human technologies:

  • Language: A technology that “shifted the burden of evolution in humans away from genetic inheritance…[allowing] our language and culture to carry our species’ aggregate learning as well.”
  • Writing: A technology that “changed the speed of learning in humans by easing the transmission of ideas across territories and across time.”
  • Science: “The invention that enables greater invention.”

Once we start thinking about technology with a wider lens like this, all kinds of possibilities arise.

Re-examine process—and re-envisage event technology

Language, writing, and science are outside our conventional, narrow-scope technology. The conventional technology we use to instantiate the sounds, symbols, etc. that they use is secondary. Language, writing, and science are primarily about human process.
When we expand our perspective on event technology to include process, many unexamined aspects of our events come into view. A few examples:

  • Why do we open conferences with a keynote?
  • Why do so few people speak during conference sessions?
  • How do we know if the sessions we’re providing are what attendees actually want?
  • Why do we provide entertainment during socials?
  • Are socials the best way to meet other attendees?
  • Why do we close conferences with a keynote or dinner?

When you start honestly investigating issues like these, instead of simply repeating things the same “safe” way you’ve previously experienced at conferences you’ll discover all kinds of human process technology that can fundamentally improve your event in ways that a new gizmo or app cannot.

So I urge every event professional to re-envisage event technology to include the process used during your events. Concentrate less on improving logistical processes: registration, decor, A/V, F&B, and so on. These are secondary processes, and we know how to do them well. Instead, focus on improving the human process you use throughout the event venue and duration. How you

  • structure and script its flow;
  • maximize useful connection between attendees; and
  • determine the content and form of sessions.

This is the event technology that counts.

Photo attribution: Flickr user pierre-francois

Don’t let the tech tail wag the event dog

Screenshot from the movie WALL•E showing two large future citizens living in their chairs. Photo attribution: Scientific AmericanWe often let the tech tail wag the event dog.

I’m steamed up after reading an article by the prolific and thoughtful journalist Jason Hensel (don’t worry, this is not about you, Jason). Here’s the relevant excerpt:

“I recently attended the second annual EventTech conference and expo in New York. It was a chance for me to learn more about “leveraging social media + technology to optimize live events,” as the event describes itself. There were several good sessions…however, there was one I think you’d find particularly interesting. It was called “FutureCast 2032: What Will Events Look Like in 20 Years?” Joe English, creative director-experiential marketing at Intel, led the discussion.

Joe started off by listing the value of live events, values that we’re all aware of: connecting people, serendipity, idea exchange and social exchange. What was most interesting, though, was his answers on how technology will be applied to live events in the future. There were six applications:

  1. We will know far more about the audience. Contextual tools and data management will be important. And we’ll move from a shotgun approach to more of a sniper rifle approach when marketing to potential delegates.
  2. We will gather much more about audience behavior. Once again, contextual tools will play a role in this, as well as relatedness engines and RFID/GPS.
  3. We will make more useful suggestions to our audience. Yep, you guessed it—contextual tools and relatedness engines will play a role in this.
  4. Our attendees’ roles as ambassadors will increase. This will be achieved via future social media technologies.
  5. Technology will be the delivery vehicle for information. Distance learning technologies will drive this.
  6. Technology will connect attendees with one another at events.”

—6 Ways Technology Will Be Applied to Events in the Future, Jason Hensel

A couple of these predictions tick me off.

Been there, done that

“3. We will make more useful suggestions to our audience.”

I hope this statement is true in the future. But the notion that you need new technology to make better suggestions to event audiences annoys me.

First, this formulation sides with the old worldview that treats event attendees not as adults but as children who need external authority to determine what they need to learn. That’s training, and most successful organizations abandoned years ago the concept that the majority of learning comes from training.

Second, we know now how to allow people to control their own learning at an event; i.e. via well-designed participant-driven process that uncovers needs and matches them to the considerable resources available from the people formerly known as the audience. Unfortunately, we rarely allow this to happen. I think we will find that future technology will not do as good a job at making better suggestions for our audiences, compared to what we can do now with well-tested, straightforward participative process.

Welcome to WALL•E

#3 started the pressure build-up, and #6 brings me closer to boiling point.

“6. Technology will connect attendees with one another at events.”

I guess this is what you might expect from a director of marketing at Intel. When you only have a hi-tech hammer, everything looks like a hi-tech nail. Joe’s pronouncement evokes the world of WALL•E—Disney’s 2008 movie about a future where obese humans live in outer space, barely able to move about, interacting with each other via advanced technology. Is this the vision of the future we want?

I’m a fan of virtual and hybrid events. I see them as providing important ways that technology can create new opportunities for us to be present at an event that we would not or could not attend physically. But in my opinion, baldly saying that in the future technology will connect attendees with one another at events goes too far. The human race has spent hundreds of thousands of years developing ways of connecting face-to-face. Unless we have holodeck-quality technology that creates a reality essentially indistinguishable from our face-to-face experience, I don’t believe that technology will replace the quality of connection and engagement that routinely occur at well-designed face-to-face events.

What to do?

Sadly these days, I routinely see queries on LinkedIn groups asking about the latest “hot” technology for events. This is sheer laziness that benefits no one except lucky tech suppliers. Instead of looking for new technology to make an event novel, spend your time incorporating processes and formats that will fundamentally improve the quality and value of learning and connection at your event. And if this leads you to incorporate appropriate technology to support these activities? Well, then your event dog will be wagging its tech tail, the way that nature intended, rather than the other way round.

Photo attribution: Scientific American

The effects of three centuries on our conferences

An (ironic) Powerpoint photo courtesy of Flickr user wmcap A classroom teacher shows a Powerpoint image titled "Rules for Better Presentations" The bullet points are: • Don't give powerpoint center stage • Create a logical flow • Make it readable • Remember that less is more • Distribute a handout

“Our organizations are built on 19th century learning styles coupled by 20th century leadership models fused with 21st century technologies.”
—Dan Pontefract, Future of Work

Replace “organizations” with “conferences” in Dan’s great quote, and you encapsulate much of what is wrong with conferences today.

What are you going to do about it?

(Ironic) Powerpoint photo courtesy of Flickr user wmcap

Torn About Technology

Torn About Technology: photograph of a Kodal Ektagraphic slide projector on top of a Kodak Carousel Transverse 80 slide tray boxHere’s a transcript of my four-minute Blink! talk Torn About Technology given on Monday, April 23, at the Green Meetings Industry Council 2012 Sustainable Meetings Conference:

“Let me make one thing clear.

I love technology!

I love my iPad and my iPhone! And I love my iPod touch! (Three computers in one man purse!)

And I’m a big fan of the appropriate use of technology at events.

That people anywhere with an internet connection can get a taste of what’s happening at this conference in Montreal, Canada, without having to use significant amounts of energy and resources to travel here is a GOOD THING!

But I’m Torn About Tech at face-to-face events.

I’m Torn About Tech because technology can distract us from what I believe is the core reason for having face-to-face events.

Because we don’t have to travel anymore to hear someone speak or to obtain up-to-the-minute content.

We can get all that online.

So what is the core reason for having face-to-face events these days?

It’s so we can meet, share, and learn through face-to-face personal connections and interactions.

And there’s a danger, a very seductive danger that I’m certainly not immune to, of focusing on new technology, new gadgets, new apps to mediate our face-to-face experience and, in the process, ignoring much simpler non-tech ways to increase learning, connecting, and sharing at events.

An example. Audience response systems: clickers, gadgets we can hand out to audience members to get responses to questions.

Great devices for anonymous polling, where no one in the room gets to find out how anyone else voted. Occasionally that’s appropriate and useful.

But, come on, is this really what we want at a face-to-face event? I’d like to know how you, you and you feel about an issue. There are a ton of low-tech/no-tech methods we can use to share that information.

We have:

  • hand voting
  • card voting
  • voice voting
  • dot voting
  • Roman voting
  • (one of my favorites) body voting aka human spectrograms

Body voting has audience members stand along a line in the room to show the agreement/disagreement gradient on an issue. You can use it to discover different viewpoints, create debates, and create homogeneous or heterogeneous small discussion groups on a topic—all things that gadgets can’t do.

These voting methods involve people moving about which improves learning, retention, and recall. They’re free or incredibly cheap and they’re a lot more fun.

Yes, there are some things that technology does better than the old ways. Having multiple session scribes live blog into a shared Google Doc projected on a big screen is much better than scribes taking notes on yellow pads or flip charts.

But let’s not fall into the trap of believing that new technology is the only way to improve events.

Very often we can simply use different human process to greatly improve learning, connection, and fun at our events.

That’s why I’m Torn About Technology.

Thank you very much.”

4 reasons why I pre-ordered an iPad

iPad presentation
I pre-ordered an iPad. No, I am not an early adopter of technology. My closest brush was to buy the original MacBook Pro three months after it was introduced in 2006. It’s still my current laptop.

So why, twenty-five years after I began work as an independent IT consultant who never subjected his clients to the bleeding edge, have I pre-ordered an iPad that won’t even ship until late April?

  1. Apple got the finger interface right. Yes, the finger interface. Other tablets required styluses in addition to the ten fingers we were born with. Apple built an interface for the iPhone from the ground up that worked better with our fingers than anything else anyone has ever made. The iPhone/Touch offers amazing usability on a 3” x 2” display—an incredible feat. I can’t wait to see what is going to be possible on a screen with over five times more pixels. It’s going to be fantastic, I can tell you that.
  2. I can write on the iPad. My right thumb doesn’t bend the way it should any more, and doctors have told me investigative/corrective surgery’s not worth the risk. And I never learned to touch type. (If I had, forty-five years ago, I’d have had severe carpal tunnel syndrome by now.) Anyway, I can’t thumb type on any small screen device. And even if I could, I wouldn’t enjoy writing long blog posts and emails on one. The iPad gives me the best of both worlds; a large virtual keyboard on which I can hunt and peck for quick text entry and a proper keyboard I can plug in when needed.
  3. I can stop lugging around my laptop for 99% of my trips away from the office. My MacBook Pro is a 7 lb. beast. Yes, I chose it four years ago and I’m glad I did. I wrote my book on it wherever I went, and its large screen upped my productivity significantly. But the book is published and I don’t need that big screen any more. An iPad and keyboard weighs a third as much. The case doubles as a wedge that props up the screen. Nice! Using iWork and the dock connector, I may even be able to run presentations from it (though the resolution may not be high enough for fancy speaking engagements).
  4. Application development heaven. If I still developed software, I would be dreaming up applications to run on the iPad. In fact, I don’t like to think about what could be done with this device, because if I did I’d be tempted to ditch my Conferences That Work evangelism and delve into building a killer app for this platform. (I’d probably make a lot more money too.) Well, I’m not going to develop apps for the iPad, but a lot of people are. And they’re going to create a second cycle of revolutionary applications that are an order of magnitude more impressive than the thousands of significant apps that exist now. Am I sticking my predictive neck out here? I don’t think so.

These four reasons, together with Apple’s track-record (yes, I know it’s not perfect) for quality products, are quite enough to convince me to pre-order an iPad, something I’ve never done before. By the end of this year, we’ll all know how this turns out.

There’s only one downside as far as I can see. My wife is under the impression that once I get my iPad I won’t need my iPod Touch any more. But honey, I will. We’ll work it out—her birthday is coming up. I’ll think of something…

What do you think about the iPad’s adoption? Do you agree with me that the future’s so bright I gotta wear shades? Or do you think I’m nuts?