Peer Conferences Deep Dive—Meeting Doctors transcript and video

Image illustrating "Peer Conferences Unveiled: A Conversation with Adrian Segar", a LinkedIn Live session scheduled on Tuesday, March 26, 2024 at 10:00 AM EDT. The image includes photographs of Adrian, Martin Duffy, and Paul Nunesdea, together with the cover of Adrian's first book "Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love".On Tuesday, March 26, 2024, I sat down with Martin Duffy and Paul Nunesdea on LinkedIn Live for an hour’s deep dive conversation about peer conferences: the participant-driven, participation-rich events I’ve designed and facilitated for over thirty years.

You can click on the graphic above to watch the video of our engaging conversation. but I admit that I generally prefer to read transcripts of talking heads videos. So I took the time to create one for what I think was an incredibly informative conversation. Here it is—enjoy!

Peer Conferences Unveiled—The Transcript!

I’ve lightly edited this transcript for clarity and added some relevant links.

Paul Nunesdea: Hello, dear viewers, this is a soft start of our third episode in 2024 of Talk to Your Meeting Doctors. As you probably know by now, we are pleased to entertain today our guest speaker Adrian Segar. He will be talking about his work in a few minutes, but it’s great to be here with you again. Martin, welcome!

Martin Duffy: Well, good afternoon. Lovely to meet you, Adrian. Perhaps people didn’t catch it at the very start, but Adrian, you were just explaining that you’re about 50 years in the States.

Adrian Segar: Yes, I spent the first 25 years in England and began my first career there, fell in love with Vermont to my complete surprise on only the second time I ever came to the United States, and then tried to figure out how to make a living in this beautiful place, which is, as many of your viewers will know, a rural U.S. state. I don’t regret moving here at all. It’s just stunning.

Paul Nunesdea: It’s so beautiful. Indeed. And, Martin, we normally start our conversations with a question. I’m not sure if Adrian already watched past episodes. Maybe it’s kind of prepared, maybe not, but would you like to fire it?

Martin Duffy: Yeah. Extending from where we just started there, Adrian, we normally invite our guests if there’s something about yourself, any little trade secret, or any little personal secret that might intrigue our listeners.

Adrian Segar: Okay. I’ve been writing a weekly blog for 15 years now. And it’s mostly about meeting design and facilitation, but I write about all kinds of things. My bio is there, so I’m fairly transparent about my life, but there’s something I did when I was living in England—my first career. I have, believe it or not, a Ph.D. in high-energy particle physics. I used to do research in neutrino physics at CERN and was lucky enough to work on an incredible experiment there, maybe one of the most important high-energy physics experiments in the second half of the last century. And there are so many stories. I have one on my blog about being trapped in an elevator with a Nobel Prize physicist. That’s a long story, but it’s on my blog and you can read that!

Adrian Segar: If you had told me at that time that what I would love to do is work with people and facilitate connection between groups of people coming together, I wouldn’t have believed you. I’ve had this long, weird arc of professions, careers, and life experiences that have brought me to this place, which I really love, and I’m very happy. I love doing what I do.

Martin Duffy: Fantastic. Well, that neatly segues us into the theme that we set for today, which is unveiling peer conferences. And the concepts behind peer conferences. Can you elaborate Adrian and we’ll let the conversation take us wherever that conversation might go?

Adrian Segar: I’ll try to make this brief. I’d love to talk in a historical context. When I was an academic —my bio says “recovering academic”— I went to academic conferences as a grad student with all these physicists, and I hated [these conferences] because you’re in a room with a hundred physicists. These are interesting people. The format was some famous physicist that had a lot of status being in the front of the room and giving a speech for an hour. And maybe there’d be five minutes for questions at the end. And the questions were more about showing what a smart person who was asking the question was, than about actually learning.

Adrian Segar: I’m in the audience. I’m thinking, people are sitting here and I don’t know; maybe that’s someone I’d really like to meet, maybe we could work together, maybe we could collaborate, or maybe I have stuff to offer them. And there was no opportunity. We’ve spent all this time and money bringing all these people together and nothing is going on except us listening to lectures. Of course, this was nearly 50 years ago. And the other piece of this strange obsession of mine is that I’ve always liked to facilitate connection between groups of people who have something in common.

Adrian Segar: So, even when I was doing particle physics, I started organizing conferences. When I came to the States and started manufacturing solar hot water systems—this was long before electric solar electricity was viable—I organized probably the earliest solar energy conferences in the United States back in the late seventies and early eighties. But they were all traditional conferences because that’s all I knew.

Adrian Segar: And then in 1992, I wanted to do a conference in a new area: The rise of personal computers, using them in educational administration. And I thought, well, who are the experts, because when you do a traditional conference who do you invite to speak? But there weren’t any experts to invite to speak because it was a whole new field!

Adrian Segar: So it was all new. I thought, how do we do this? And so three of us invited a group together and I invented an approach on the spot. This is in 1992 for a conference. Here we are, we’re all doing the same thing. We mostly don’t know each other. So we have to have some way of finding out about each other, what we do, where we live, anything important, what we’re working on, what our problems are, what cool things we’ve done that other people might want to hear about.

Adrian Segar: So we did that. And it became pretty clear; there’s three or four things here we really need to talk about, and there are a couple of people here who have actually done [each of] these things. So let’s have them [lead sessions]. So we created sessions, we created a conference on the fly. We had no alternative because we didn’t know what else to do. And then at the end of it, we said, well, this has been fantastic. You know, we created this conference, and everyone loved it because it was what the group clearly discovered it wanted to talk about, so what should we do now?

Adrian Segar: That conference has now been going for over 30 years as an annual event. It’s a four-day event, and it’s still designed the same way. It’s a very clearly defined group of people who have something in common, and they go, and you never know what the conference program is going to be.

Adrian Segar: I developed this process. This is how I got into this work. That group spends half a day learning about each other. Who’s there, what they want to talk about, what the resources are, generating a conference program from that. And then the rest of the conference, you run that program. It’s a very informal program. It could be lectures, but that’s rare. It’s usually discussions or small group sessions with a lot of participation. There might be two or three people running a session because it turns out they know something about the topic. It’s very informal.

Adrian Segar: I also, over time, developed processes for figuring out what have we done here. What I call a spective which looks back on what’s just happened, sharing group and personal experiences of what that was like and then a prospective of the future. What should we do now?

Adrian Segar: That group, for example, over 30 years has come up with several initiatives outside the conference. “We need to do this, let’s set up a task group,” et cetera, and has created whole new projects as a result. But the conference itself is different every year. It adapts to what the people who come to it want and need, and they love it!

Martin Duffy: So who drives it? What’s the underlying driver? Are there multiple different groups with different agendas or different topics of interest? How does that work?

Adrian Segar: So, again, maybe the historical perspective is a good way to go. I loved doing this event. People loved it. It was clearly going to continue. Other people found out about these formats and asked me to do these conferences on topics that I knew nothing about.

Adrian Segar: So I thought, well, this is great, but will it work if a group of people who own garden centers get together and want to talk about stuff? Or people who own sports venues in the United States.

Adrian Segar: I eventually discovered over the next 10 years that it seemed to work for everybody. Everybody loved this format that I’ve just outlined to you. And that’s when I decided I would write my first book, Conferences That Work, Creating Events that People Love, to talk about the format, and make it available to anyone who wanted to use it. That book came out in 2009, and suddenly I was in the meeting industry. This was my fifth career. Though I’d been convening events for much longer than that; well over 40 years.

Adrian Segar: So the answer to your question is, I wrote a book, and then, with a website and a blog, people started finding me and asking me to [design and facilitate] events. Once I started doing this in the meeting industry, I was doing a huge number of events. Over time, I experimented, tried new things and new approaches, and eventually wrote a couple more books on different aspects of how to do this work.

Martin Duffy: Super! So is there a framework or a process that you adopt generically that you can tailor per the different particular groups that you end up working with? Is that how it operates?

Adrian Segar: Yes, there’s so much detail! What I like to do to describe the general process is something called the conference arc.

Adrian Segar: You’re creating an event that becomes the best possible event for each person who comes. That’s my goal. That [simple goal] implies so many things.

Adrian Segar: It implies that you can’t have a predetermined agenda because you don’t know what the people at your event are actually going to want to do. You don’t know what resources they have that might be amazing for other people who are there and so on. So the framework is very simple. I think of these events as having three pieces. A beginning, a middle, and an end!

Adrian Segar: At the beginning, I use a number of processes where we learn about each other. The core one, which I use a lot, is called The Three Questions where everybody at the event—and you divide into smaller groups if it’s a really large event to do this—answers three questions to everybody in their group. Maybe as many as 40 or 50 people in each opening session.

Adrian Segar: There are no wrong answers to these questions. You can’t answer these questions incorrectly. There’s a fixed amount of time for each person. So we level status differences. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the head of a 50,000-person association or someone who just started working there last week, they get the same amount of time.

Adrian Segar: And the three questions are:

1) “How did I get here?” Which might be answered, “I drove down the street”, or “I’ve been coming to this conference for years and I love it” or whatever it is.

2) “What do I want to have happen?” In other words, if this conference was amazing for me, what would I want it to look like? What would I want to be talking about? What problems do I have that I’d love to find someone to help me work on together? What things do I want to do and I want to find other people who want to do them?

Adrian Segar: And the third question is:

3) “What experiences or expertise do I have that others here might find useful?” There you get to say perhaps “I did this cool thing last year”. And at almost every event where someone says something like that, there are maybe 20 people in the room who are “Oh, we’re just about to do that! Can you talk about it?” and bingo, you have a session that no one even knew was needed.

Adrian Segar: That’s the beginning of a peer conference. The middle is the conference’s bread and butter. You run those sessions. I have a whole set of fairly simple instructions for people who haven’t been to these conferences before so that they get the best out of those sessions. They’re very participatory. I have a double-sided piece of paper with tips for anyone who’s facilitating or leading those sessions, and I find that most people with these instructions can do very well.

Adrian Segar: And then the third part, the end of the Conference Arc, is typically two sessions. [The first is] a personal introspective, a time for people to think in the moment: what has happened for me, what do I want to change in my (usually) professional life as a result of being here? [We do this] while the experiences are fresh. Because how often do we go to a conference and go away with our heads full of ideas and then you’ve got to go back to work and you’ve got a million things to do? And those notes you wrote and those ideas never come to anything.

Adrian Segar: So the personal introspective is an opportunity to [evaluate your conference experience] and make it more likely that the changes you experience at the conference that you decide to make for yourself will actually happen.

Adrian Segar: The end of the arc is the spective. I just wrote a blog post about the spective, which is where the entire group talks individually about their experience of the conference. They start with the stuff that they like, and then they continue with stuff—not that they didn’t like, but—they think can be improved or changed in some way. Two separate pieces.

Adrian Segar: The spective does two things. It gives the whole group a collective experience of what the event was like, We all have our own experience, and you might say, I really didn’t like that session. And then you hear three other people say “That session was fantastic for me”. And that doesn’t change it for you, but it gives you a feeling of why the whole community did that.

Adrian Segar: The second thing is that the spective creates tremendous community bonding. You’re saying, we just had this experience together. And out of that often comes things that the group wants to do in the future. For example, at a first-time conference, people might say, “We have to do this again! Let’s meet next year”

Adrian Segar: So that’s the big picture. And then there’s tons of stuff that I’ve developed to deal with special cases—there are all kinds of processes. Those are in my second book, which is like a tool kit for process design for participant-driven and participation-rich meetings.

Martin Duffy: Let me step back a little bit. Adrian, you said something about halfway through your comments. You said: “There is no agenda”. So the conference starts off with no agenda. So if there’s no preordained agenda, what’s the hook? What’s the reason that people show up in the first place?

Adrian Segar: Why are they coming? There’s a Japanese word Ikigai that means my reason for getting out of bed in the morning. My Ikigai is facilitating connection between groups of people who have something in common, which is basically every association that exists on this planet. And things that we don’t even call associations because associations are actually incarnations of what one would generally call communities of practice.

Adrian Segar: You have groups of people who have something in common. Every single association started with a group of people who said, we’re all cardiac surgeons, or we’re all folks concerned about climate change or whatever it is, and we want to meet and talk about that, and then the group gets formalized.

Adrian Segar: So, the reality is there are hundreds of thousands of these groups all over the world. In the United States, there are I don’t know, probably over a million associations alone. And there are plenty in Europe. They tend to be larger in Europe and less of them because a lot of the things that people build associations for in the United States are handled at a governmental level in Europe and in other countries.

Adrian Segar: So the answer to your question is, you define a community. There’s a community of practice. There are always some vague edges. But you have a group of people…for example, I did a conference for anyone who owned an independent garden center in the United States. All those people know each other.

Adrian Segar: And there’s an association for them, so they have a lot in common to talk about, and so do cardiac surgeons. That’s how you define a group. [Ultimately,] the group is self-defined. Then when you frame the invitation to the conference, you have to make it clear who you’re inviting.

Adrian Segar: Maybe it’s a certain kind of cardiac surgeon or people who own independent garden centers rather than large chains, for example. So it’s clear when the invites go out. “I’m in that group. This is interesting. I will be meeting with other thoracic cardiac surgeons” or, whoever the group is that’s of interest to me.

Adrian Segar: You tell them that it’s a format where they will actually get to ask questions and get problems solved that they personally have, that the conference is designed to work that way, and the conference may well tap their valuable knowledge and experience and expertise that they don’t even necessarily know is valuable until 20 other people say, “Wow, that’s really a cool thing you’ve done. We want to hear about it. We want to learn from you.” All those things become possible.

Martin Duffy: So we haven’t set an agenda, but we’ve set a thematic area. We’ve identified a target audience. We’ve pushed out the invites, we’ve set the date, we’ve got the venue, people turn up, and now what happens, and let me be a bit more specific. So very often there’s going to be somebody who’s going to cheerlead from their perspective and they’re not always necessarily the best people to hold a group together. But they’ll almost always want to take the lead. Is that what happens or is it more structured and more managed?

Adrian Segar: The subtlety of designing meetings is that you need people who I would call facilitators. I define myself as a meeting designer and facilitator. So clients will often ask me to facilitate.

Adrian Segar: The meeting is usually about something I know nothing about. I’m very curious and I’m always interested and I learn a lot. [But there are different approaches.] For example, Eric de Groot, who you mentioned earlier, he’ll do corporate events. You’ve got situations where two companies are merging or something like that. How do we make that happen successfully and so forth. And he’s brilliant at that. My focus is much more on [creating a] good experience for each person who’s there.

Paul Nunesdea: It’s interesting. It’s fascinating. The world of meetings is fascinating because now we see a kind of specialization. Eric is more focused on corporate meetings, and Adrian is more on association meetings.

Martin Duffy: What Adrian said: his focus is on personal experience, as opposed to, let’s say, corporate experience. You know, that’s an area that I’m kind of intrigued to understand in a little bit more detail as well.

Paul Nunesdea: Absolutely. Absolutely. But what crossed my mind, Martin, is that in the world of corporate meetings, every one of us is also likely a professional from an association. So, if we are not in a corporate meeting, we will probably end up in an association meeting.

[Short tech change break]

Paul Nunesdea: Thank you so much for watching us. Dear viewers, we are on episode three of Talk to Your Doctors. This is a LinkedIn live event series. Co-hosted by me and my dear colleague, Martin Duffy. Today, we have a special guest, Adrian Segar from the United States, and we are having a wonderful conversation. Martin, can you just bring us back to the thread?

Martin Duffy: I’ll do a really quick synopsis. Adrian, you started off by telling us about how your first career in particle physics brought you along to academic conferences, which you found a little bit stifling of participation. You found a way for new people to come together in groups to engage hearts and minds in a way that was based on a design with a beginning, middle, and end to the conference.

Martin Duffy: Your beginning has three key questions that enable people to engage and interact with each other at the interpersonal level. And out of that flow the common interests that they have in whatever the thematic area of the conference is. The middle part of your session is then to run the discussion using facilitators within the groups themselves, and you’ve got guidelines and so on for that.

Martin Duffy: And then at the end of the conference, you said to us that there are two different endings that you try to focus on. One is the personal kind of introspective. What did people introspectively take or get from the conference? They do that at the very end rather than three days later when a lot of it might have gone out of their minds.

Martin Duffy: And the second [ending] is to look at the collective perspective, so it’s a kind of feedback within the group about the conference itself. What was good and what we might improve the next time. Interestingly then, you took us to framing the invitation to the event, which now takes us into particular groups with particular individuals in the group, where there’s a thematic area.

Martin Duffy: And then your focus is typically on the personal experience that people get from the conference that they’re attending. And that’s where unfortunately the technology let us down. We had to pause and we’re back. So looking at it from the personal experience point of view, as opposed to your colleague Eric de Groot, where you suggested Eric will be more focused on the corporate perspective, while your perspective is at the personal experience level. Could you expand that idea just a little bit for us, Adrian, to give us a flavor of what you’re doing?

Adrian Segar: Yes, it goes back to my joy in bringing people together to connect at an individual level in ways that work for them.

Adrian Segar: I give them the support and structure for them to create, the connections and the sessions that they need and give them good process to allow them to run those. I [should] add in the beginning piece, after the uncovering of who’s there, what they want to talk about. and what the resources are in the room (remember the saying “the smartest person in the room is the room”).

Adrian Segar: There’s an art in doing this. I use all kinds of techniques, to create an event that’s maximal for the participants. Eric will get a client who says, this is what we want to achieve for this organization or association. He will come up with some very creative ways, [e.g.] using elementary meeting techniques, which are really great.

Adrian Segar: He’s coming up with ways to create a meeting that serves the needs primarily of people at a higher level in a way that works for the whole organization. Whereas my focus is from underneath. My focus is I’m interested in every single person who comes.

Adrian Segar: How can I make their experience maximally useful for them? And what I’ve found for decades is that when you do that, the event also benefits the stakeholders, the sponsors, the folks who brought the event together. The leaders of the association are happy because the event is very energetic. Participants are very happy. The closing session often comes up with whole new directions for the group to go that are often bottom-up. They’re not imposed by leadership at the top, but by people in the group, the people who form it. That community of practice is saying, “Hey, this is what we want to explore. This is where we want to go.”

Adrian Segar: And the resulting initiatives are very likely to be successful, much more successful in general than top-down directives of [leadership] saying, “We think we should go here”. Their intentions may be great. But in fact, as we all know, [top-down] initiatives don’t always pan out.

Martin Duffy: So what kind of timescale for this type of conference?

Adrian Segar: That is a wonderful question. And again, that’s part of the art of designing a meeting. For example, that [original] conference has been going on for 32 years. It’s a four-day conference. So you have plenty of time to do all kinds of stuff. It starts up with a half day and then there are three full days. But sometimes people don’t have that much time, that’s actually a rarity these days. I can do something useful in any amount of time. For example, the probably most well-known format in this genre is Open Space, Open Space Technology. You can run an Open Space event in two hours. And I’ve written some critiques of Open Space and some people think that what I do: “Oh, it’s got to be Open Space!”

Adrian Segar: Open Space is only one of many formats. It has one advantage in that it’s fairly well known. It has some disadvantages too, in that it tends to, in my experience, cater to extroverts who are happy to come up at the start of the event and say, “I’m going to do a session on this in room so and so”. And it’s true that people don’t have to go to [that session], but there’s some time wasted there; it’s inefficient because you go and, “This isn’t really what I wanted”.

Adrian Segar: I believe if you’ve got the time, if you have half a day, or a day or a day and a half, or two days, it’s worth doing what I described to you in general terms at the beginning of the conference. Where you take some time to hear from everybody, not just the people who say “I want to do a session on this”. There’s nothing wrong with that, but the introvert who actually is a fount of knowledge on a topic isn’t likely to stick their hand up and say, I want to run a session. You don’t hear from those people. I’ve talked to people who have said “I know there was a world expert on this topic in the room, and they never offered a session because that’s the kind of person they are.” That person would be far more likely via the processes that I use to be seen and acknowledged, and people would say, “We really want to hear from you, on X that you know a lot about.”

Martin Duffy: And that person is much more to talk in the event. Yeah, I was going to specifically ask you about Open Space because I’ve run a number of Open Space events myself. Some of the things you were describing are very similar to Open Space, but actually, some of the things you’re describing are quite different from Open Space.

Martin Duffy: So how would you characterize Open Space? As a variation of peer conferences, or would you describe it more as a separate type of format on its own?

Adrian Segar: No, it’s definitely a participant-driven participation-rich format. And that’s how I describe the peer conferences that I run.

Adrian Segar: I’ve run Open Space when time is really limited. If you’ve got two hours and you’ve got a group together, Open Space is probably about the only reasonable format you can use. But I believe from my long experience, if you have more time, it’s well worth spending some time learning about the folks in the room.

Adrian Segar: The amount of time it takes? You don’t have to take half a day. Half a day is plenty of time for everybody in a group to get a really good picture of who’s there and the resources in the room, but you can do that in a much shorter period of time at a shorter event.

Adrian Segar: So part of the art of doing this is, clients say, “I have a day and a half. What should I do with it?” And I can say. “We should spend this much time on this, this much time on that, this much time on this.” For example, maybe there’s not enough time for a personal introspective because it’s a short event.

Adrian Segar: We’ll just have a spective at the end. That’s the benefit of using an experienced meeting designer because I’ve done so many of these and know how to best use the available time. And there are certain situations where you do something different [because your client has a specific need]. For example, I did a conference in Philadelphia last summer where the U.S. association client was designing the 50-year anniversary of the association, and they wanted to talk about the future. It was the first time they’d ever had a conference, and when they brought me in they had already invited an expert on forecasting the future. And then they scheduled a panel with their experts and that person.

Adrian Segar: They bought me in at that point to open up the event and say, “Well, what do we want to talk about? Having heard all these really good ideas and thoughts about the future? What do people now actually want to talk about?” I used a very different technique from The Three Questions at that point, because a lot of information had already been uncovered.

Adrian Segar: The other thing I’ll mention that I really love to do and specialize in is taking a large group of people with a significant problem that’s group-wide and facilitating a large group discussion on solutions to that problem.

Adrian Segar: I have a technique called the fishbowl sandwich which I developed out of need. It works incredibly well. It taps the wisdom of the group for ideas. It uncovers people who don’t even know they have a fantastic solution that many people in the room love, want, and need.

Adrian Segar: I’ve experienced this numerous times. Someone comes up on stage and says, “Well, I don’t really have this problem because I do X” and half the room goes, “Oh, that’s brilliant!” And the association magazine editor comes up and says, can I interview you about that. It’s just incredible. The person was just someone sitting in the audience thinking, well, I don’t have this problem. And the process brings them out on stage. And they share and it transforms the group and you find three other people who have fantastic ideas. It’s a very effective session for dealing with large group problems.

Martin Duffy: When you say large group, Adrian, what scale are we talking about?

Adrian Segar: Good question! You can do what I just described with hundreds of people. There’s an issue about how some of the things I do scale, because, as you know, a meeting with 50 people when facilitated right is very different from [what you can do] in the same amount of time [facilitating] a thousand.

Adrian Segar: You have to do different things. Typically though, the best events are relatively small, up to a hundred people, because there’s no way you can facilitate really effective connection between, say, 500 people in a day. I can do that better than a traditional conference can, but you’re not going to meet all the other 499 people and get to know them in a day. It’s impossible. Human beings don’t work that way.

Martin Duffy: Yeah. Really interesting. The fishbowl sandwich, just the name is intriguing. What is, or is there a trade secret behind that?

Adrian Segar: No! I write about these things! One of my mentors, Jerry Weinberg, a long time ago said “Give away your best ideas”, don’t have any secrets, share. With my clients, I find this works very well. [They appreciate learning how to solve their problems themselves.]

Adrian Segar: So the fishbowl sandwich, it’s described in my second book in detail. It’s a very simple technique. It starts off with a pair share in the audience. When I use it for problem-solving in large groups what you do is this. You state the problem. You might have three people who have some ideas on how to solve the problem come up before the group and give an—absolute max 5-minute—description of how they are approaching this problem.

Adrian Segar: So that primes the audience to think about the problem in a creative way. Then you do a pair share. You get everyone in the audience in pairs and each person talks [with their partner] about their personal experience of that problem. How they’re dealing with it, if they have some way of dealing with it.  Then they switch. So that’s a standard pair share. This gets everyone in the room to say something to someone else in the room and that opens up the session.

Adrian Segar: And if someone says, “I did this” and the other person says, “Wow, that’s really cool. Maybe you should say something in the main part of the session because I think other people would be interested.” So you’ve primed everyone.

Adrian Segar: Then I run a fishbowl. You know what a fishbowl is—well, there are several kinds—but I have a stage, at the front of the room. I’m in a chair, there are perhaps four other chairs, and the fishbowl, for those of you who don’t know what that is, is a wonderful technique for working with large groups of people and controlling conversations.

Adrian Segar: The rules are very simple. You can only speak if you’re sitting in one of the chairs in the front. And you invite people up to speak. So you say, “Okay, we’ve heard some things. You’ve had some discussions. I’d like to hear people who have, who want to talk about their particular problem, or maybe you’ve got a great way of solving it”.

Adrian Segar: “If you want to say something, come and sit in a chair.” People sit in the chairs. I have the mic, maybe a few mics. I facilitate a conversation between those people. Another rule of fishbowl is when you finish what you have to say, you leave your chair. And another rule is if all the chairs are full and people are sitting up there and someone else comes up then someone in one of the chairs has to leave.

Adrian Segar: So, you have a conversation facilitator and a maximum of four other people at any one time. Sometimes two people are talking with each other, sometimes individual statements, and so on. And it’s very dynamic.

Adrian Segar: Then the last part of the sandwich. It’s called a fishbowl sandwich because it’s a fishbowl sandwiched between a pair share at the beginning and a pair share at the end. The final pair share is “lessons learned”. What did I learn today? You do that with someone else in the audience and you say, “Wow, that idea was really a great idea. I’m going to do that with my business group when I get home” and so on. That’s a cementing technique like the personal introspective. Pair shares are very good at reinforcing [potential] change.

Adrian Segar: The other fundamental thing about the conferences I do is that I’m always interested in creating change in people’s lives. If you go to a conference and you have a good time, but nothing ever changes, there isn’t any point in going apart from having a nice time. I want to learn stuff. I want to get new ideas. I want to maybe change my life. I find someone who can offer me a new job or a new position or a new way of thinking about a problem.

Martin Duffy: The really interesting thing that I’m picking up thematically, that I’m picking up from each of the points that you’re elaborating for us is this idea of personal experience. So, you know, the idea of using the pair share, pairing discussion, where that’s opening up, creating the kind of the unbounded part of the conversation. But even still, with the fishbowl part, we still have four people having a conversation at an intimate level. And then the pair share at the end is consolidating the takeaways, and it’s people personalizing.

Martin Duffy: So that seems to be a fundamental theme that I can feel threading through everything that you’re describing there, which is really fantastic.

Martin Duffy: In terms of scale. You know, where you run an event that, say, between 50 and 100 people, can you give us a sense of how you manage to bring that personal into that scale of collective? How does that mechanically work in your events?

Adrian Segar: Well, the whole event design is designed to model and support. personal interaction, fruitful interaction, not pointless stuff like icebreakers which I think are terrible. You know, a lot of people think, “Oh, we’re going to do that.”

Adrian Segar: No, the crucial thing is—and that’s why the three questions that I’ve talked about are so important—to get to the heart of what it is people want to know about each other at the event. When I was that grad student sitting in an academic conference, I wanted to know about that person three chairs away from me. I wanted to know what they did, and why they were at this conference. I wanted to know what they were working on. I wanted to know what they knew about. That’s all the information you need to have a conversation. So when you design these formats, the wonderful thing I’ve learned, because I’ve done a huge amount of group work, is that you can gently and hopefully ethically take people to places they would never go by themselves.

Adrian Segar: We [facilitators] all know this. That’s one of the things I love about group work. I love taking people into these processes, and they suddenly discover that they’re talking with their peers in a way that they love. “Wow, I went to the session. I saw that there are three people here I really want to talk to, and then I can get to go and talk to them.” Maybe in a session, maybe out in the hallway. “And I found that out on the first half-day or the first few hours of the event. And even if nothing else happens at the event, the fact that that session introduced me to those people is incalculable.” Maybe it changed my life or their life.

Adrian Segar: So you build support for all these interpersonal stuff. And the norm that it’s okay to communicate and talk to you gives them a framework to do it in a way that’s not threatening. Then you sit back and let them do it. You watch it and you make sure it’s going according to plan, but they do all the work.

Adrian Segar: That’s what facilitation really for me is about; if your design is good you don’t need to intervene much.

Martin Duffy: And I think when you bracket it at the back end…very early in our conversation you mentioned the idea of closing out and you have the two steps to closing out, which is the personal introspective. And then there’s the [spective] piece.

Adrian Segar: Yeah. The spective is a combination of a retrospective, looking back, and a prospective, which is looking forward, and I call [the format] a spective because it’s both.

Martin Duffy: Okay. So the future looking spective that you offer, how does that work in practice? What’s what does that sound like or feel like in the group?

Adrian Segar: [For] the process I usually use for that, I start with a pair share or trio share. To get people thinking what they might say, they talk to each other and say, yeah, this is what I really liked.

Adrian Segar: So everybody in the room is already thinking about what they liked. And then I use a very simple technique called plus delta, which works really well. You do it with a flip chart or you can do it with a Google doc. I have two mics, a plus mic and a delta mic, and I have people come up and I say, “Okay if there’s something you liked about this event that you want to share, come up to the plus mic. Form a line, be brief, tell us this is what I liked: a session, the food, meeting this person, whatever it is.” You get a stream of [positive feedback]. And I keep inviting the audience up. You can do this with hundreds of people. And in half an hour, sometimes less, you can get very good information about what was great about the event.

Adrian Segar: Sometimes I have clients video the respective because what people can turn into amazing testimonials. So there’s the plus mic and then eventually the pluses peter out and then I open up the delta mic and I explain “This is not about ‘bad’ stuff!”. This is about what would you change to make this event even better. And people come up. “I think we should do more of this”, “that session could be improved by…”, etc. I have two mics because someone may come up to the delta mic and say, “I think we shouldn’t do X anymore”. And then someone else in the audience will come up to the plus mic and say, “Actually, I thought that was really good.”

That’s plus delta. It’s a very good technique. I usually have the client recording what people say, because that’s incredibly valuable to the stakeholders [as feedback] for improving the event for next time.

Adrian Segar: And sometimes the plus delta includes a piece that’s client-specific. Occasionally, clients will ask me to address an issue that has been troubling the association or one that comes up during the plus delta. It’s often pretty obvious. So after the plus delta, I may facilitate a discussion, which might be a fishbowl sandwich on a specific issue. Or we might hear an overwhelming desire during the plus delta, and I’ll feel compelled to say, “Okay, folks I think we should spend a few minutes figuring this out because it’s very clear that this group wants to do X. Let’s have a discussion on how that’s going to happen right now while it’s really fresh.” For the group spective, that last session, I usually budget it for maybe an hour. And it’s often less than that, but that hour allows us time in case some issue comes up that needs individual attention.

Martin Duffy: Yeah, I’ve used a technique called, I call it PMI: plus minus interesting. It was developed by Edward De Bono. Very similar principles. It’s a plus and a minus and whatever people found interesting. But it’s the same concept of delta, where we find the difference in perspectives. And then we can actually lever off that to say, well, where, where would you take this conference next or the next conference? Where would you take it differently? Which is really cool.

Martin Duffy: Paul, I’m watching the time, are we at our limit at this point?

Paul Nunesdea: We are at our limit, but still, I have one last question to ask Adrian, if I may, Martin, and then over to you to the wrap-up because it’s a privilege to have Adrian Segar here.

Paul Nunesdea: The mind beyond the peer conference model, it’s even more than a method model to design and create your own conference. Adrian, I’ve learned so much from the few comparisons you made with Open Space Technology. It’s really interesting because it never struck me how important it is for a group to meld before they actually [start to work together]. Precisely what you accomplish is that melding at the start that [allows] people to join a safety zone where they then will be able to learn from each other. That’s amazing.

Paul Nunesdea: A question to you. You rightly said that you’re positioning yourself in the meeting industry [where] there’s still these traditional conferences that attract people by the thousands and are extremely expensive. I normally compare them to people in a library buying a book, right? Because this is content that you want to acquire when you buy those books; you can go to that conference, and you pay for a ticket for content, right?

Paul Nunesdea: But in the end, it’s always back to the principle of you leaving that conference maybe with some wonderful experience, but with little change on yourself. So how do you convince meeting owners, the people who organize these large events that a peer conference model is more sustainable, more effective? How do you convince them?

Adrian Segar: Well, there’s no one answer. My rule of thumb, and I think Eric’s too; my rule of thumb is if I can actually get to the decision maker at the organization for ten minutes, the CEO, I can convince pretty much anyone. And the tragedy is that very often middle management or upper management contact me and say “Hey, I love what I read about your stuff” or “I heard about it.” Or “a colleague of mine experienced it and we want to do this.” And then it’s not unusual for the CEO to be inaccessible. I say, “Well, can I talk to your decision-maker? Because I can convince most people if I talk to them directly.”

Adrian Segar: And sometimes that’s impossible. Sometimes at these larger organizations, this person, you can never speak to them. And I have to say that when I don’t, it’s rare for my approach to be adopted. So many associations are still stuck in these hierarchical cultures that don’t really reflect an effective environment for creating change and, fulfilling the needs for which the organization is created. We still have a lot of top-down culture. So the answer to your question is, I get frustrated with it too! It’s not [as simple as] a client approaches me and then hires me, As a consultant you need to be prepared for people to reject your advice. You have only influence, no authority.

Adrian Segar: The plus side of this is that I love the clients that I get to work with because they get or at least partially get enough to trust what I do to actually experience it. And when they do typically they will adopt how I have designed their meetings. I influence them, and their future meetings, even if they don’t use me again, are different.

Adrian Segar: So, I love running in-person meetings. I [design and facilitate them] online as well. and spent a lot of time, since COVID, figuring out how to create online what I do in person.

Adrian Segar: But, it’s a perpetual struggle to change [traditional meeting formats]. And I’ve written extensively about this in my books and on my blog. Why? I think Eric talked about it too. We’re all indoctrinated in school to sit there. It’s the model every single one of us still gets. There’s a person in [the classroom] who talks to you for fifteen years who knows more than you do. And that is how you get taught. That’s how I was taught for years. When I was a college teacher, I taught the same way too. I didn’t know any better.

Adrian Segar: [I have a] vocation and desire to spread the way I describe to create meetings. Participants’ most common response is, “I don’t want to go to traditional meetings anymore”. And that’s growing, and we do see that, luckily, in the meeting industry, and now people in meeting magazines talk about creating connections at conferences, not just content, and how we create connections. [Many] still don’t know how to do it, but at least we’re moving in the right direction.

Paul Nunesdea: And for you, dear viewers watching us, if you want to plan a meeting, please contact Adrian Segar. There’s a wealth of [free] resources on his website, conferencesthatwork.com.

Paul Nunesdea: Myself, I also use Adrian’s stuff when I prepare some of my meetings. And it’s definitely well worth it to read and access those materials. Martin, this reminds me that the more association meetings we have that are peer-based peer-model conferences, maybe that’s the kind of energy that you get in association meetings. Once you get back in your corporate environment in your organization, then you say, “Oh my God, this meeting sucks.” Right? And I think this is probably going to force corporate meetings to be more effective as well. Martin, I think we are close to the time for the wrap-up.

Martin Duffy: Yeah, I did a small summary because of our technical glitch in the middle there.

Martin Duffy: But actually, just in the last 15 minutes, Adrian, there’s one really significant takeaway that I’m getting from what you’ve said. It was a throwaway comment you made, but you talked about bottom-up versus top-down. And when we compare and contrast what Eric talked to us about on our last episode, that would be more reflective of a top-down corporate-type approach which is fine.

Martin Duffy: No judgment made on that. But, how you describe your approach is very much bottom-up. From my own experience, what I might suggest is that the fear of the peer conference approach might just be a fear that the bottom-up is going to send us in a different direction from where the top-down thinks we should be going. Are we afraid that we won’t be able to handle the shift required? Or, do we embrace the possibility that by adopting a bottom-up shift, we can all actually head in a much more unified, harmonious, and productive direction?

Martin Duffy: So I think that’s fascinating. The concept of peer conference, as you’ve so generously shared with us, Adrian, I think it really does open the possibility of that bottom-up input to the overall future direction that our group or our collective or our association, or our organizations, whatever they make; that that bottom-up input, there’s a ready-made way in which we can get that.

Martin Duffy: The question is, Are we brave enough to try?

Adrian Segar: I think that’s an excellent point. And, I agree that a lot of the difficulty in introducing these kinds of meetings to replace or improve on existing meetings is the fear of something unknown, of something one doesn’t have control over. In a hierarchical organization, people like to know we’re going [somewhere specific]. [It’s comfortable that] people are leading us and so forth.

Adrian Segar: What actually happens—and I don’t think this has ever not happened—is that the folks at the top discover that these events are incredibly useful for everybody, including them and the participants. And the folks who are not at the top really appreciate the leadership for giving them these opportunities and are grateful.

Adrian Segar: In my experience, this creates a stronger organization. So it’s a win-win for everybody. The leaders get really good feedback from these events, and also really appreciate them. And the people in the organization or association are grateful to them. It’s like, “Thank you, thank you, thank you for making this event much better than the traditional event we used to have or I’ve gone to online”.

Adrian Segar: So there is no downside. But you’re right. There’s fear. Change is scary. I’ve written a lot on my blog about facilitating change, the difficulties of doing that, how to facilitate change, and leadership models. There are all kinds of resources there!

Adrian Segar: So it’s a pretty popular website. I would like to mention that [conferencesthatwork.com] is the most popular website about meeting design in the world. And there are over 800 blog posts there. It’s a great resource, that includes free chapters from my three books.

Paul Nunesdea: We are on a mission here, Adrian, and thanks for joining our list of guests here and talking to Your Meeting Doctors. We’re on a mission here to convert the meetings of the world to meet in better ways.  

Adrian Segar: I agree with you. I’m with you. 100%. Thank you very much for inviting me here today! I love talking about this and I appreciate you. And it’s great to meet you and find some more allies in this journey.

Martin Duffy: A real pleasure meeting you, Adrian. Thank you very much indeed for your time. Bye now.

Adrian Segar: Okay. Take care everyone.

Martin Duffy: Bye. Bye. Hey, what a fantastic conversation with Adrian!

Martin Duffy: And on his final point, Paul. He raised an interesting challenge and a challenge that Eric de Groot raised with us actually in our first episode. And that’s the challenge of convincing the powers that be within organizations that there may be a different way and a better way to manage their resource of meetings in totality.

Martin Duffy: So not just the special meetings or the special conferences, but equally their day-to-day meetings. So perhaps we could line something up for a future episode on that.

Exploring the Second Question

A photograph of a room with a woman holding a sign that says “What do I want to have happen?”Back in 1992, I developed The Three Questions as a fundamental opening process for participant-driven meetings and conferences. I’ve used it myself at hundreds of events, and many facilitators and meeting designers have also adopted it as an effective way for attendees to get to learn about each other and uncover what they would like to discuss while they are together. I’ve written about The Three Questions in all my books, and the links above and this video provide introductions so I won’t describe it further here. Instead, I’ll share how I encourage deeper responses to the Second Question:

“What do I want to have happen?”

How people respond to the Second Question

The Second Question goes to the heart of the peer conference (aka unconference) process. Answering it gives every person present, in turn, an opportunity to share what they would like the ensuing meeting to be about.

Over the years, I’ve noticed a subtle difference between first-time peer conferences and subsequent gatherings of the same community. At first-time gatherings, it’s more likely that some people (typically ~10%) will respond with an answer that comes down to:

“I’m here because I want to learn from others.”

These people are hesitant to share specific top-of-mind issues or questions they have. Of course, that’s OK because there are no wrong answers to The Three Questions. On the other hand, I suspect that many of those who respond this way do have topics or questions, but for a multitude of reasons don’t share them when it’s their turn.

At subsequent community conferences, my experience is that such a response is less likely. Those who offer it are usually first-time attendees. I think participants are more likely to be specific at repeated events because they have experienced the flowering of discussion and sessions based on what is shared during The Three Questions. They have seen that they have the potential to personally shape the peer conference toward their wants and needs.

The limitations of “I want to learn from others”

Again, there’s nothing wrong with an attendee’s answer: “I want to learn from others.” From a group perspective, however, this response doesn’t enrich the set of ideas, topics, and questions that the ensuing meeting could address. (If everyone answered this way, the group would know no more about its collective wants and needs than before The Three Questions started!)

So, a few years ago I added an extra prompt to my original introduction to The Three Questions.

How I encourage deeper responses to the Second Question

I simply add this refinement:

“Some people say ‘I want to learn’. That’s fine, but try to go deeper if you can. See if you can come up with three specific things you’d love to get out of this conference.

Depending on the conference, I then sometimes supply an example of ideas, topics, and questions that my client thinks might be top-of-mind. For example, writing this in 2023, I might mention artificial intelligence. Then I’ll add that anything of interest can be shared, at any level of detail. For example:

  • They are using artificial intelligence and want to talk to others who are exploring the same approach; or
  • They are wondering how AI will affect their profession; or
  • They simply want to learn more about AI.

How well does this refinement work?

I know that this simple addition has encouraged some people to share more deeply because I now routinely hear attendees say something like, “The N things I want to learn/understand/have questions about are…”. And I suspect that others have been nudged to be more specific too.

Do I still hear “I want to learn from others”? Yes, I do! But not as often as before. And that’s fine!

Using pair share for group work practice

Group work practice. An image of two people who are seated in adjacent chairs looking at each other. They are part of a circle of chairs filled with other people.I’m a big fan of the core facilitation technique pair share. After pairing up participants and providing a short time for thinking about a topic or question, each pair member takes a minute or so, in turn, to share their thoughts with their partner. I use pair share regularly to move participants’ brains into active learning, introduce them to someone new, and share relevant ideas and information about what we’re currently exploring together. But there’s always more for me to learn. Last week, a client pointed out that we can use pair share for group work practice too!

Rachel and I were preparing for another core facilitation technique I use at the start of meetings: The Three Questions. Participants think about their answers to the questions and then share their answers, in turn, with the group. We were reviewing Rachel’s outline and I came across an addition to the process.

“Practice Round (3 minutes). Now, turn to the person next to you and in 60 seconds or less, share your answers. Ask for feedback.”

Rachel had added a pair share to allow all participants to practice their answers before sharing with the entire group.

I immediately loved and saw the value of her idea!

I devised The Three Questions thirty years ago and have run it hundreds of times, but I’d never considered this improvement. Though I mention common slip-ups to participants, such as spending too long on the first question, they sometimes still occur. Allowing everyone to practice their answers with one other person before group sharing is a simple and effective way to help each participant:

  • Feel more confident about their answers;
  • Get personal feedback; and
  • Provide better answers to the group.

Conclusion

I will be adding Rachel’s small but valuable improvement to my future sessions of The Three Questions. As a proponent of lifelong learning, I’m happy to use observations, feedback, and trying new things to continually refine what I do. A generous hat tip to Rachel LaForgia, Senior Program Director of the Peace and Security Funders Group, for sharing this simple application of pair share for group work practice with me!

Can Broadcast be Personal? Exploring New Ways to Connect with Others

Can broadcast be personal? An image of a happy woman looking at something we cannot see. In the blurred background is a screen with another woman's face on it.We prize personal moments of connection, moments when we are moved. But today, broadcast messages bombard us. This leads to the question: Can broadcast be personal?

Occasionally, the answer is “yes”.

  • A paragraph in a novel unexpectedly hooks your heart.
  • An inspirational speaker says something that totally resonates with an audience member.
  • The meditation teacher on Zoom looks right at you as they deliver a perfect piece of wisdom.
  • A political slogan captures your imagination at the right moment.

And yet, broadcast being personal happens relatively rarely.

  • As George Orwell remarked, “In much more than nine cases out of ten the only objectively truthful criticism would be ‘This book is worthless …'”.
  • I once heard a motivational speaker whom I found inspirational at the time. Three months later, I couldn’t remember a thing he said.
  • The meditation teacher was looking at their camera, not you—and there were 500 other people listening too.
  • Millions of people heard the slogan that high-priced consultants crafted to appeal to them.

When people come together at a meeting, an event, or a social, we usually default to broadcast-style experiences. We listen to speakers. We’re assigned to large tables where we can’t quite hear the individuals three chairs away from us. We use formats like theater seating that minimize interpersonal contact. Broadcast modalities like these breed a passive experience. And they are so engrained that we default to them unconsciously.

Which leads to a better question.

Are there better ways of creating personal moments of connection?

Yes, there are. We can gently steer people into opportunities to connect one-to-one, or in small groups. And it’s easy to do. Here are three examples:

David Adler’s Jeffersonian dinner

David Adler, the founder of BizBash, loves to connect people. One of his favorite approaches is to host a Jeffersonian dinner, where guests take turns sharing their answers to a question the host offers.

David often uses the question: What was your first job, and what did you learn from it? Each participant broadcasts their answer to everyone, but only for a few minutes, and the sharing moves around the group. Each story provides opportunities for personal connection, as many of the stories involve common threads and learnings.

Pair share

Pair share (or trio share) is such a simple and effective way to create personal moments of connection I don’t understand why it’s not more widely used. Announce a topic or question to a group, ask people to find a partner, provide a little time for everyone to think of their response, and then give each pair member a minute or so to broadcast/share their thoughts with their partner. Maybe add another minute for the pairs to talk to each other about what they just shared.

Voila! You’ve created an opportunity for everyone in the room to have a short, focused conversation, and maybe a moment of connection with another person (whom they may have never met before). Pair share is quick, so you can run it multiple times while people are together, each time with different partners to create new connections.

The Three Questions

I often use The Three Questions to open a peer conference. (See Chapter 18 of my Event Crowdsourcing book for a full description of this core meeting format.) Like the Jeffersonian dinner, each participant has a short-broadcast time to share their answer to a question—in this case three questions—with an entire group.

There are three things meeting participants really want to know about each other. These three questions allow each person to share their past, present, and future in a way that is appropriate and safe for them with everyone in the group. This sharing provides the foundation for connections to deepen during the conference that follows.

Can broadcast be personal?

Traditional broadcast formats are rarely personal because one person dominates the time. But by breaking broadcast into small segments where many people get to talk, broadcast can become personal, while also fostering multiple moments of new connection.

Try it, you—and the people in the room—will like it!

Six fundamental ways to make a better conference

The other day, a client booked an hour with me to discuss how to make their conference better. Not much time, but enough for us to uncover and for me to suggest plenty of significant improvements.

Thinking about our conversation afterward, I realized that all my recommendations involved six fundamental processes that, when implemented well and appropriately, will make any conference better.

  • Using participant agreements.
  • The Three Questions.
  • Pair/trio share.
  • Fishbowl.
  • A personal introspective.
  • A group spective.

So here’s a brief introduction to each of these core processes. Each section includes suggested links and resources to learn more.

Using participant agreements

better conference

Meeting ground rules, covenants, or agreements. Whatever you call them (I’ve used all three terms), explicitly naming and asking participants to commit to appropriate agreements at the start of a meeting fundamentally improves conference environments.

Participant agreements help to create an intimate and safe conference environment. They set the stage for collaboration and participation because they give people permission and support for sharing with and learning from each other

I’ve used the six pictured above for many years. You can read more about ways to create attendee safety and intimacy via agreements—and the benefits for your meetings—in Chapter 17 of The Power of Participation.

Creating agreements at the start of a meeting takes five minutes!

The Three QuestionsA process for creating a better conference. Whiteboard illustration of The Three Questions: 1. How did I get here? 2. What do I want to have happen? 3. What experience/expertise do I have that others might find helpful?Ultimately, there are three key things that conference attendees want to know about each other. As this post explains, they want to know about:

  • Attendees’ relevant pasts that bring them to the meeting;
  • What people personally want to learn and happen at the meeting; and
  • The valuable experience and expertise that’s available from others in the room.

I’ve covered the value and how to run The Three Questions in all three of my books, but the latest and most up-to-date description is in Chapter 18 of Event Crowdsourcing.

And check out this video (transcript included) where I explain The Three Questions with the help of my friends at Endless Events.

The Three Questions typically takes 60 – 90 minutes. When you add it to a one-day or longer conference it will significantly deepen participant connections made and strengthened during the event that follows.

Pair/trio share

Any conference session that doesn’t regularly use pair share (or trio share) is missing out on the simplest and easiest tool I know to improve learning and connection during the session. (Okay, if you’re running lightning talks, Pecha Kucha, or Ignite, you get a pass.)

The technique is simple: after pairing up participants and providing a short period for individual thinking about an appropriate topic, each pair member takes a minute in turn to share their thoughts with their partner. Read this post to learn why you should use pair share liberally throughout an event. More details can be found in Chapter 38 of The Power of Participation.

Fishbowl

Every good conference includes participant discussions (aka breakouts). The single best way to create a productive discussion that prevents anyone from monopolizing the conversation is the fishbowl format. (Which you can also use online.)

[TIP: You can use fishbowls to great effect in panel discussions too! Here’s how I do it.]

[BONUS TIP: There’s a fishbowl variant, the two sides fishbowl, which is great for exploring opposing viewpoints in a group.]

See this post’s conclusion for one more variant!

Fishbowls are flexible formats that you can adapt to the time available and the number of participants. Learn more about them in Chapter 42 of The Power of Participation.

A personal introspective

better conferenceMuch of the learning that occurs during a traditional conference is wasted because participants don’t have the time or opportunity to consolidate and integrate personal learning into their future life and work. Though a personal introspective takes about an hour to run, it’s the single best way I know to maximize the learning and future outcomes of an event. I recommend you use one at the end of any multi-day conference.

Check out this introduction, or Chapter 57 of The Power of Participation for full details.

A group spective

Every conference I design and facilitate has a final session that I call a group spective. The personal introspective described above allows participants to review what they have personally learned and to determine what they consequently want to change in their lives. A group spective provides a time and a place to make this assessment of the past, present, and potential future collectively.

The design of a group spective depends on the goals and objectives of the preceding event. These days, I invariably start with a beautifully simple technique, Plus/Delta, (see Chapter 56 of The Power of Participation) in which participants first publicly share their positive experiences of the conference. When that’s done, they share any changes they think would improve the event if it were held again.

Plus/Delta is an elegant tool for quickly uncovering a group’s experience of a conference. I’ve run them for hundreds of people in thirty minutes. (Some groups take longer; your experience may vary!) A Plus/Delta usually has an immediate emotional impact, drawing the group together right at the end of the event.

Check out this introduction, or Chapter 58 of The Power of Participation for more details.

[TIP: A variant, action Plus/Delta, is a great tool for a group to determine and commit to group action outcomes uncovered at a conference.]

Conclusion

It’s best to think of these six core processes as building blocks that can be used in multiple ways. Combining them appropriately allows you to create customized optimum process to meet different goals. A great example is using two pair shares around a fishbowl to create what I call a fishbowl sandwich: an incredibly effective way to create very large group discussions around a meaty topic.

It’s also helpful to see these processes as parts of the conference arc, which is how I envision the overall flow of a participant-driven and participation-rich meeting.

One final point. When appropriately incorporated into a good meeting design, these six core fundamental processes will make any conference better. But for maximum effectiveness, it’s important to use them in a congruent way.

For example, participant agreements are useless, even counterproductive, if conference and session facilitators don’t support them. Similarly, telling attendees they’ll have the opportunity to participate in their learning and then feeding them a diet of broadcast-style lectures will not be well received. In fact, competent facilitation is a prerequisite for these processes to be successful. (Yes, I’m here to help 😀.)

How to entwine content and connection during an online conference

content and connection during an online conference: an illustration consisting of the two words "Content" and "Connection" displayed in a closed circleHow can we entwine content and connection during an online conference?

During a MeetingsCommunity (MeCo) discussion thread “Networking at conferences” last week, Sharon Fisher posted this.

Sharon’s post

Hi all,

I am coming in very late to this conversation, but figured it’s never too late to share. For the last two years, I have been pondering “why is there such a big separation between content and networking?” Why do we look at those things as two distinctly different offerings? Why are we not blending the two together and looking at holistic ways to accomplish both goals with the same solutions?

And at the same time we being tasked with making our meetings more engaging, so why are so few of us asking ‘how do we make content/learning more engaging’ – as opposed to looking at those two concepts as different things. We seem to look at engagement as entertainment, décor, seating, venues, etc. (ie: more environmental) but rarely consider other alternatives to making our learning engaging.

Now that we are in the virtual world, I think it’s even more critical to stop looking at networking & engagement as something that happens outside of the sessions, and more as participation and conversation within the sessions. And exploring ways to blend education/learning/content with participation/networking/idea sharing/games so as to make our online learning more engaging.

Would love to hear from planners about how we might better integrate the ‘content designers/speakers’ into the engagement conversation. And to hear what you are doing in this online world to make your meetings more engaging.

Playing on…

Sharon Fisher

As it happened, I’d just completed facilitating an online conference that I think did entwine content and connection. This was my reply to Sharon:

My response

“Hey Sharon,

As you may know, you broach a topic dear to my heart. Why so many continue to relegate content and networking (though I prefer the term connection) to separate activities is related to the human inclination to do things the way we’ve always done them at meetings. Since I just finished running and facilitating a three-day European/Asian online finance conference for senior executives that I designed (and I didn’t have to travel further than the green screen studio in my attic!) I thought it might be helpful to share an outline of how we blended content and connection throughout the event.

Day 1

We ran the event mainly in Zoom, with a couple of other tools that I’ll mention. On the first day, we used a process I call The Three Questions, which I’ve used at in-person events for many years. It allows the participants to learn about each other, current content interests, and expertise and experience in the group. The session provides a mix of content and networking, simultaneously uncovering the content people want to cover and the people in the room who are resources for doing so. We split the participants into three breakout rooms for a more intimate session. We scribed the content choices publicly in a single Google doc, viewable by all three groups. Each session also had a scribe to record the expertise and experience of individual participants. From this data, we built an inventory of the learning resources at the event.

When this session was over, we immediately introduced the attendees to another tool, Gatherly, which simulates an in-person social online in a simple but effective way.

When you enter the Gatherly “room” you see yourself as a named dot on a room map. Other participants appear as named dots. Click on the map to move next to someone and you join each other in video chat. Your dots become a circle on the map, with the number in the circle showing how many people are in the video chat group. Placing your cursor over the circle shows who’s in the chat. Move next to the circle to join the group chat. (You can temporarily “lock” the chat to have a private conversation.)

Gatherly allowed people to meet people they’d heard share in the previous sessions and deepen their connection. We made it available at every break in the conference program.

We took the information gleaned from the opening session and a small group of us used an online whiteboard tool, Miro, to build a conference program for the following day, matching the content wants and needs with the appropriate expert leadership available.

Here’s the initial Miro board containing the topics uncovered by The Three Questions and imported into Miro.
content and connection during an online conference
And here’s the “working” Miro board after the small group had determined the peer sessions to hold.
Day 2

The second day’s sessions were not lectures but interactive discussions and explorations, focused on the actual needs of the participants. At the start of each session, we used a simple design to discover what people wanted to learn. The results shaped the session in the ways participants requested. During the sessions, people discovered peers who had relevant knowledge to share, further increasing relevant connection. Gatherly was again available during the breaks and after the day’s last session.

Day 3

On the final day, I facilitated a session that started with a trio-share.

People were moved into breakout rooms in three’s, where they briefly shared:

  • their takeaways;
  • the aspects of the conference they liked; and
  • those aspects they would change to make it better.

Then I brought them back into the main Zoom room. There they first shared their positive responses to the event, and then their suggestions for improvements. The latter gave us some great ideas for future meetings. The overall sharing during this session creates a public evaluation of the event and increases group social bonding. This makes future meetings more “can’t miss”.

After the usual closing remarks and thanks, we ended with a Gatherly social.

Post-event, the main conference sponsor wrote. “Better than ordinary conferences – we have made more connections with senior people in the industry. When is the next one?”

I hope this example gives a taste of how content and networking can be organically combined throughout an event in ways that improve the meeting for all: participants and sponsors alike.

—Adrian Segar—”


Entwining content and connection during an online conference isn’t hard, and the results are well worth the effort. If you have other suggestions for integrating these two core components of a successful event, please share them in the comment below!

How to implement participant-driven breakouts in Zoom — Part 5

run your peer conference using Zoom: a screenshot of conference session topics chosen in Miro

Run your peer conference using Zoom

Part 1 of this series of posts gave an overview of what’s involved in implementing participant-driven breakouts in Zoom, and Part 2 explained how to prepare for The Three Questions. Part 3 describes how to run them using Zoom breakout rooms, and Part 4 covers how to create an optimum conference program. Read them before diving into this post! This post, Part 5, the last in this series, explains how to run your peer conference using Zoom breakout rooms.

Overview

Once you have developed and distributed your conference program, as described in Parts 1 – 4 of this series, it’s time to run it!

You’ll use the same procedure for every conference time slot. First, create breakout rooms for the peer sessions scheduled in the time slot, and then name each room with a number and session topic.

Currently, Zoom has no easy mechanism for participants to move from one session to another. So it’s best to share the conference program with participants in advance, and, for each time slot, ask them to pick the session they want to attend. I’ll describe the simplest (and most common) way to do this below.

Right before each session time slot, participants are assigned to the Zoom breakout room associated with their chosen session. Once this is done, the breakout rooms are opened and the sessions commence.

At the end of each session, participants return to the main Zoom meeting and indicate their choice for the next set of sessions. After renaming breakout rooms with the next set of session topics, the cycle repeats.

Moving between breakout rooms

At in-person conferences, participants are normally free to leave a breakout session and move to another one.

At an online conference using the Zoom platform, once participants are in a specific breakout room/session, they can only leave the room and return to the main Zoom meeting. They cannot move themselves to another breakout room unless they have been given co-host status in Zoom.

[UPDATE. Since September 2020, Zoom allows participants to move themselves to another breakout room. Nevertheless, I still strongly recommend having a staff member stationed in the main Zoom room (see below), as some participants may not know how to change their breakout room or have some other concerns that this staff member can address.]

Although one could give all participants co-host status so they could move themselves to different sessions, I don’t recommend it. Co-hosts have a lot of power in a Zoom meeting, and one malicious or careless participant could really mess up your meeting.

One big advantage of peer conferences is that opening with The Three Questions leads to conference programs that are much more likely to reflect participants’ genuine wants and needs. As a result, moving between simultaneous breakouts is relatively rare at in-person events.

Nevertheless, people will occasionally want to move to a different session during a time slot. (The most common reason, in my experience, is that they chose or were assigned to the wrong breakout room by mistake.) As a result, while you’re running sets of peer sessions, you’ll need to keep a staff member stationed in the main Zoom room. This person should have co-host status, so they can reassign participants who return to the main meeting from a breakout room and ask to join a different session.

Preparing participants to choose their desired session

Before each set of sessions begins, one of your staff (a Zoom host or co-host) creates a set of breakout rooms that match the peer sessions about to be held. Since you’re going to assign participants to specific rooms, pick the Manual option when creating the rooms.

run your peer conference using Zoom

While creating breakout rooms, provide participants with a numbered list of the breakout sessions for the time slot (see below). If you’re using Miro, add session room numbers and export or screenshot the relevant portion of the conference program.

run your peer conference using Zoom

To keep everyone in Zoom, I suggest having a host or co-host display the list, using screen sharing in the main Zoom meeting.

Now it’s time for participants to pick the peer session they want to attend. While they’re all present, display the current session choices and explain that to assign them to the correct session they’ll edit their display name to add the breakout room number in front of their name. Give them an example: e.g., “If I want to attend the Data Security session next, I need to change my name from Adrian Segar to 2 Adrian Segar.”

This is a common technique these days, and many people who are familiar with Zoom know how to change their Zoom meeting name while in the meeting. However, since some participants won’t know how to do this, provide instructions like these:

How to change your screen name on a PC during a Zoom meeting

1: Click on Participants in the Zoom toolbar at the bottom of your screen.

2: Hover the mouse pointer above your name until you see the option to select More.

3: Once you see it, click on it and select Rename.

4: Enter your desired name in the text field and click Rename to confirm your selection.

How to change your screen name on a mobile device during a Zoom meeting

1: If the toolbar isn’t visible, tap on the screen to display it. Tap Participants to bring up the list of meeting participants.

2: Find your name on the list and tap on it.

3: Tap Rename, enter your desired new name, and tap Done.

Have participants choose their peer session breakout rooms

Once participants understand how to change their Zoom name to indicate the breakout session they want, have a staff member monitor the name changes on the Zoom Participants list, and assign them to the correct room. Make sure that session leaders are present and assigned to the correct room before proceeding. Sometimes there are a few people who don’t add their room number to their name. Have another staffer contact them by text chat or directly in the Zoom meeting, to check whether they need help. If there’s anyone who can’t figure out how to change their name, ask them which session they want to join. Pass the participant’s name and desired session to the breakout room assigner.

Explain to participants that if they wish to leave the session they’re in, they should click Leave Room. This will bring them back to the main room meeting, where a staffer can move them into another peer session.

Start a set of peer sessions

Before opening the Zoom breakout rooms, check the Breakout Room Options, which should look like this. (You can change the countdown timer setting if desired.)

You’re ready to start the set of peer sessions! Tell participants they are about to be moved to their desired session and click Open All Rooms.

Ending a set of peer sessions

Five or ten minutes before the sessions are scheduled to end, let everyone know how much time is left in the session. Do this by clicking Breakout Rooms in the Zoom toolbar. Then click Broadcast a message to all, enter your message, and click Broadcast.

A minute before the sessions are over, click Breakout Rooms and then click Close All Rooms. In a minute or less, everyone will be back in the main Zoom meeting.

Do it again!

Repeat the above process for each set of peer sessions until all sessions have been run.

To create a fresh set of breakout rooms, click Recreate and then Recreate All Rooms in the Breakout Rooms window.

That’s how you run your peer conference using Zoom!

Conclusion

In the five posts of this series, I’ve:

A final point. As you know, peer conferences use the conference arc design, which includes a closing process that’s tailored to the wants and needs of the meeting stakeholders (here’s an example). I haven’t covered this important conference phase in this series, but you should spend time thinking about and designing appropriate closings for your online event. Perhaps I’ll write more about what this might look like, and how it can be implemented online in a future post.

If you’ve been planning to implement participant-driven breakouts in Zoom, I hope this series has been helpful. As always, I welcome your thoughts, questions, and suggestions in the comments below.

How to implement participant-driven breakouts in Zoom — Part 4

process participant information
Part 1 of this series of posts gave an overview of what’s involved in implementing participant-driven breakouts in Zoom. Part 2 explains how to prepare for The Three Questions, and Part 3 explains how to run them using Zoom breakout rooms. Please read them before diving into this post! In this post (Part 4) I’ll cover Step #2 — how to process the participant information uncovered in Step #1 to create an optimum conference program. Part 5, the last in this series explains how to run your peer conference using Zoom breakout rooms.

Creating and convening your conference program group

By the end of The Three Questions (see Part 3), your scribed Google document contains a rich list of your participants’ desired and needed topics, issues, and current challenges. Now it’s time for a small conference program group of conference leaders and subject matter experts to use participants’ answers to the Second Question to create an optimum conference program. (Part 1 lays out options for your participants while this is going on.)

Make sure your small group contains someone from each Three Questions breakout group. These people can identify participants in their group who have the expertise, experience, or interest in leading or facilitating the sessions you choose.

The conference program group can meet in a variety of ways. Perhaps participants are listening to a presentation while your small group meets in a Zoom breakout room. If attendees are taking a meal break, you can use the current Zoom meeting, and restrict attendance to the conference program group. Or you can simply set up a separate Zoom meeting for the small group to hash out the upcoming conference program.

Building your optimum conference program

The small conference program group needs a tool to review and organize the topics that participants have requested and suggested.

Tools for in-person meetings

At in-person meetings, I use the process Post It! for Programs, described in Chapter 22 of my book Event Crowdsourcing. Read Chapter 22 to understand the detailed process I summarize in this post. (You may find Chapter 21, Peer Session Selection and Sign-up useful too.)

The small group starts with a wall of participants’ topics, written on large sticky notes. We clean up, cluster, and consolidate the topics, moving notes around and rewriting them as needed. The small group reviews and rates the results, and chooses the most relevant topics. Finally, we find leaders and/or facilitators for these peer sessions and schedule them into an optimum conference program.

Tools for online meetings

Two tools that provide the above functions for online meetings are Miro and Mural. You can read a useful comparison of their features and user interface here. Miro has a free limited version, and Mural offers a free limited-time introductory plan. It’s worth upgrading to a paid plan for either of these products if you expect to use them regularly.

In this post, I’ll outline how to use Miro to collaborate remotely with your small group. I don’t know Mural as well, but you should be able to use it in a similar fashion. Even though the basic concepts can be quickly grasped, both Miro and Mural provide a rich variety of functionality. So you and your small group members should practice using them. Before the conference, give small group members a link to a “playground” Miro board where they can freely explore Miro’s frames, sticky notes, and tools.

Importing participant topics into Miro

Miro has a simple, though slightly obscure, way to import the topics from your Google doc into separate sticky notes. If you try the obvious approach —bulk copy all the topics and paste them directly into Miro — they’ll end up in a single block of text. Instead, open any spreadsheet program (e.g. Excel, Numbers, or Google Sheets) and paste the topics into the top left-hand cell. They will fill the leftmost column, with one topic per row. Now copy all these cells and paste them into Miro. Each topic will be added to a new sticky note, nicely laid out in a grid.

Here’s an example: the topic list shown in Part 3…

…turned into a set of Miro sticky notes via the above copy-paste-copy-paste process.

process participant information: a screenshot of Miro sticky notes, each containing a participant's idea for a breakout session topic

Process participant information: cleaning up and clustering topics

Once you’ve created a board of imported topics, copy it to a new board for the small group to work on. (In Miro, click on the name of the board in the top left-hand corner and click “Duplicate”.) This keeps the original topics available for reference if needed.

The next task is to review the topics and check that they’re clearly expressed. If a topic is unclear, rewrite the note or discard it. As you review the notes, notice themes and create a Miro frame for each one, plus a Miscellaneous frame for isolated ideas. Cluster topics by dragging sticky notes out of the original grid into the appropriate frames, as shown below.

process participant information

The small group should have agreed on conventions for working on the topic board and identifying and collecting sticky notes that eventually become peer session topics.  There are many ways to do this. For example, you can:

  • Use a specific sticky note color to indicate a potential or definite peer session topic. (You can change the color of an existing note from its context menu.)
  • Create a separate frame for topics that will become peer sessions.
  • Create frames or a space on the board for topics and frames that have been reviewed and are not going to be incorporated into the conference program.

Process participant information to determine the peer conference program

Use the process described in Chapter 22 of my book Event Crowdsourcing to determine the peer sessions you will offer, pick leaders and/or facilitators for each session, and schedule sessions into your conference program time slots. As you decide on each session, drag its sticky note into a “Peer Sessions” frame, as shown below.

process participant information


In Miro, you can switch the type of a sticky note to a card. I recommend doing this for your chosen peer session sticky notes, since Miro cards provide you with a structured way to add data, like the names of session leaders, a long description, etc.

Distributing your peer conference schedule

As soon as you’ve created your peer conference schedule, distribute it appropriately to all participants. You could publish the schedule on your conference website, email it as a Google Doc, or supply it as a link in Zoom chat.  Remember to also inform session leaders when their sessions will be held, and be available to answer any questions they might have. I also recommend distributing a version of the introductory handouts for peer sessions that are included in two of my books (Appendices 4 & 5 in Conferences That Work, or Appendix 6 in Event Crowdsourcing).

All that remains is to prepare for and run your online peer conference, which I’ll cover in the final post of this series.

Conclusion

First, a big thank you to the super-creative Liz Lathan of Haute Dokimazo for sharing with me how she collects and begins to process participant information online. Liz figured out how to use Mural to do this — the Miro process I’ve described above mirrors hers.

So far, in the first four posts of this series, I’ve:

The last post (Part 5) describes how to run your peer conference program using Zoom breakout rooms.

Check this blog for future posts on implementing participant-driven breakouts in Zoom. To ensure you don’t miss the rest of the series, subscribe.

How to implement participant-driven breakouts in Zoom — Part 3

participant-driven breakouts in Zoom: a screenshot of a group on Zoom answering The Three QuestionsPart 1 of this series of posts gave an overview of what’s involved in implementing participant-driven breakouts in Zoom. Part 2 explains how to prepare for The Three Questions using Zoom breakout rooms. Read them before diving into this post!

In this post (Part 3) I’ll cover how to run The Three Questions using Zoom breakout rooms.

Preparing staff to run The Three Questions in Zoom

As described in Part 2, each breakout room must be staffed by a facilitator and one or preferably two scribes. Before the breakout sessions of The Three Questions start, the facilitator and scribes need to know what they need to do, and have the necessary tools to do it.

Staff tools

I recommend that facilitators and scribes run Zoom on a personal computer, rather than a mobile device. This will allow them better simultaneous access to both Zoom and additional shared docs — typically a set of directions and a place for scribed participant responses, as described below. (Although less critical, I’d encourage participants to join the meeting on a PC too, if possible.) At the start of the meeting, make the facilitators Zoom co-hosts, so they can manage participants (mainly mute/unmute) in their Three Questions breakout room.

Each facilitator needs a countdown timer with a visual display: usually, a phone timer app — for example, Apple’s Clock. Displaying remaining time on the facilitator’s webcam is a simple way to keep sharing on schedule. (Hopefully, one day, Zoom will provide this functionality in their software.) For participants who join by telephone, the facilitator should give them a verbal “half-time” and “times up” message when needed.

Facilitators also need a way to track the time remaining in their breakout room, so they can ensure their room will finish as close as possible to the agreed upon time for all rooms.

Each scribe needs access to a place to scribe the responses to the second of The Three Questions: (the topics, issues, and challenges that participants want and need). Any online shared document can be used for this.

A shared Google Doc is an obvious choice. Here’s a template you can download and adapt for your event. Be sure to make the document sharable and editable! Create a short URL link, using a service like bit.ly, to make it easy for scribes to copy, and distribute the link to the scribes before The Three Questions starts.

Here’s an example of a topic list created at a technical conference.

Three Questions facilitator training

Ask your facilitators to read Chapter 18 of Event Crowdsourcing or Chapters 31 & 32 of The Power of Participation so they are familiar with running The Three Questions. Decide on the sharing time, typically around 2 minutes, for each participant. Communicate it to the facilitators, so they will all be able to end their session at approximately the same time. Because all Zoom breakout rooms close at the same time, emphasize that time keeping is important, so that all participants get to share and everyone has the same time.

Three Questions scribe training

Explain to the scribes that their job is to record concisely the topics, issues, and challenges that participants share in response to the Second Question only. Introduce each scribe to their session scribing partner, and have them decide who scribes for the first sharer. Give your scribes the link to the shared online document in advance. Ask them to practice entering a few topics before their session starts.

When using a shared Google Doc, editors are assigned arbitrary names, shown in color during editing. It can be helpful for two scribes in the same session to learn each other’s assigned name before the session starts, so they can check on what their partner is writing.

Scribes can be participants too — when there are two scribes per session, one can scribe topics for the other’s sharing. Suggest that scribes alternate scribing for participants: one for the first participant, the other for the second, and so on.

If a topic is mentioned for which one or more participants have expertise and/or experience (the answer to the Third Question) it can be helpful to make a note of their names so they can potentially tapped as leaders or facilitators for the main conference breakout sessions.

It’s likely that some topics will be suggested in more than one of the separate Three Questions breakouts, or by several people in the same session. Since all scribes will be using the same Google Doc, it’s helpful for scribes to keep an eye on all the topics that are appearing during the breakouts. For a repeated topic, scribes can add an “x” at the end of the original topic line each time. Sometimes the topic will be similar but not the same as another topic. In this case it should be entered as a new item.

Running The Three Questions in Zoom Breakout Rooms

Before running The Three Questions, assign facilitators and scribes to specific numbered breakout rooms. Remember that breakout room assignments will be random. The main group facilitator or another designated staffer should, therefore, promptly move facilitators and scribes to the correct number room as soon as the rooms open. (See the section “Preparing breakout rooms” here to learn how to do this.)

At this point you’ll have a set of Zoom Breakout Rooms, each populated by an equal number of participants and a trained facilitator and scribe(s). Have everyone mute their audio except the facilitator and scribes.

Determining who shares next

During seated face-to-face meetings, it’s easy to keep track of who has or hasn’t yet shared by their location in the room. Online, it’s harder to track who hasn’t yet shared without a little help. (Don’t assume that a gallery view of participants will remain unchanged throughout the session; the display changes unpredictably if participants arrive or depart.)

Consequently, the facilitator should choose who shares next. (See this post for more information on “who goes next?” process.) To do this, each Three Questions facilitator must have their participants list visible. They then call on participants in turn, maintaining a written list of those who have shared. If the facilitator has a printer, track people who have shared on a printed screen shot of the attendee list.

Because people may join a session late, the facilitator should always check that everyone has shared.

Individual sharing

As each person shares, the Three Questions facilitator monitors their progress. If they are spending too much time on the First Question, let them know. It’s helpful to let sharers know when half their time is up, at which point they should be well into their answer to the Second Question.

If many people aren’t using their full time, point this out and encourage participants to say a little more. (But don’t insist that anyone share more than they originally offer.)

It’s a facilitator’s job to prevent people sharing too long, ensuring that everyone gets an equal amount of time to contribute.

When sharing in a Three Questions breakout is complete

When everyone in a Three Questions breakout has shared, there should be some free time left in the session. If desired, the session facilitator can solicit additional short expressions of interest in the uncovered topics, and perhaps suggestions of additional topics sparked by what has been heard in the group.

Each Three Questions facilitator should let the meeting facilitator know (typically by private message in Zoom’s text chat) when their session is over. The meeting facilitator can then close the breakout rooms once all breakouts are complete.

That concludes step #1, as outlined in the first post of this series on participant-driven breakouts in Zoom.

At this point:

  • Participants will have met a useful number of other participants and learned useful information about each other, namely, details of their association with the meeting topic, their wants and needs for the meeting, and their relevant expertise and experience.
  • Conference organizers will have a comprehensive list of topics, issues, and challenges that are top-of-mind for attendees, plus identified participants who can facilitate/lead/present on them.

Conclusion

So far, in the first three posts of this series on participant-driven breakouts in Zoom, I’ve:

  • provided a brief recap of the benefits of peer conferences;
  • given a big picture overview of how you can hold one online;
  • explained how to prepare to run The Three Questions online in Zoom; and
  • covered how to run The Three Questions online in Zoom.

The next post (Part 4) will describe in detail how to carry out step #2 — creating an optimum conference program from the information uncovered in step #1— using Zoom.

Part 1 (an overview of what’s involved in implementing participant-driven breakouts in Zoom) is available here.
Part 2 (preparing for The Three Questions) is available here.
Parts 4 and 5 are now available.

Check back on this blog for future posts on implementing participant-driven breakouts in Zoom. To ensure you don’t miss the rest of the series, subscribe.

How to implement participant-driven breakouts in Zoom — Part 2

Part 1 of this series of posts gave an overview of what’s involved in implementing participant-driven breakouts in Zoom. Read it before diving into this post!participant-driven breakouts in Zoom: a screenshot of the well-known Zoom dialog box that's used to determine how many breakout rooms to assign and how participants will be assigned to them
In this post (Part 2) I’ll cover most of Step #1 of the previous post: preparing for The Three Questions using Zoom breakout rooms.

If necessary, get familiar with Zoom, including breakout room functions, before proceeding. I’ve included links to the relevant Zoom tutorials and reference articles, when appropriate, in the following instructions. Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to start creating participant-driven breakouts in Zoom.

What is The Three Questions, and why use it?

I developed The Three Questions in 1995 as a fundamental opening process for peer conferences. It’s described and explained in all three of my books. You can find the most detailed implementation in Chapter 18 of my 2019 book, Event Crowdsourcing.

The Three Questions is the most effective way I know to assist a group of people to get to know each other usefully, safely, and authentically. It’s quite different from the common but often artificial and awkward icebreaker approaches used in “team-building” and “getting-to-know-you” activities because it focuses on core information we want to know about the people we’re currently with: why they’re present, what they want to do/learn about/discuss, and what useful resources they possess.

Besides connecting people around their fundamental interests, The Three Questions is one of the best formats for discovering important topics, issues, and questions that were previously unknown to event organizers and a majority of the participants, as well as associated levels of interest.

Zoom’s key tool for effective active learning and connection — Breakout Rooms

Frequent and well-designed small group work is the key to creating active learning and connection at any meeting. Zoom’s tool for small group work is Breakout Rooms.

Zoom allows facilitators to speedily split a meeting into up to 50 separate sessions. Participants can be allocated to these separate sessions automatically or manually.

If you’re not familiar with breakout rooms, take time to review Zoom’s tutorials. Practice using them at small group meetings before employing them for a significant event!

Preparing for The Three Questions in Zoom

Learn about The Three Questions

First, read the detailed instructions on how to run The Three Questions which you’ll find in my books:

  • Event Crowdsourcing [2019] (Chapter 18) [recommended: most comprehensive and recent information]
  • The Power of Participation [2015] (Chapters 31 & 32)
  • Conferences That Work [2009] (Chapter 25, pages 260-265)

If you don’t possess one of these, you can buy an ebook for $19.99US.

Decide on the number and size of your Three Questions breakout groups

Next, decide the number and size of your breakout groups. This will depend on:

  • the number of attendees;
  • the duration and scheduling of your conference; and
  • the time you plan to devote to The Three Questions.

As I’ve written elsewhere, these days, most meetings are small meetings (less than 100 attendees) and that’s a good thing! So the following barebones examples offer suggestions for online conferences with up to 100 attendees. They don’t include a closing session, which I recommend — I’ll make suggestions for appropriate formats in a later post.

With care, more staffing, and a beefier Zoom license, The Three Questions can definitely be run successfully at larger online events.

Example 1: 60 attendees, ~4½ hour event (includes ~75 minutes of breaks), two one-hour breakouts with three simultaneous sessions per slot (six peer sessions)

Suggested schedule:

  1. Five minutes for the welcome.
  2. Fifteen minutes to explain The Three Questions, for attendees to write their answers, and divide attendees into three breakout rooms with 20 people in each.
  3. One hour for each (simultaneous) Breakout Room for The Three Questions; two minutes sharing per person, with a five-minute break after 30 minutes.
  4. Fifty minutes for conference organizers to build the nine-session conference program and set up Breakout Rooms for the resulting sessions. See the Part 1 post for attendee options during this time.
  5. Ten minutes for attendees to review the program and decide which session to attend.
  6. One hour for the first set of peer sessions.
  7. Ten-minute break.
  8. One hour for the second set of peer sessions.
  9. (Optional, but recommended) Closing session; for example some form of Plus/Delta.
Example 2: 100 attendees, ~6½ hour event (includes ~140 minutes of breaks), three one-hour breakouts with four simultaneous sessions per slot (twelve peer sessions)

Suggested schedule:

  1. Five minutes for the welcome.
  2. Fifteen minutes to explain The Three Questions, for attendees to write their answers, and divide attendees into five breakout rooms with 20 people in each.
  3. One hour for each (simultaneous) Breakout Room for The Three Questions; two minutes sharing per person, with a five-minute break after 30 minutes.
  4. Ninety minutes for conference organizers to build the twelve-session conference program and set up Breakout Rooms for the resulting sessions. See the Part 1 post for attendee options during this time.
  5. Fifteen minutes for attendees to review the program and decide which session to attend.
  6. One hour for the first set of peer sessions.
  7. Fifteen-minute break.
  8. One hour for the second set of peer sessions.
  9. Fifteen-minute break.
  10. One hour for the second set of peer sessions.
  11. (Optional, but recommended) Closing session; for example some form of Plus/Delta.

Both of the above examples allow each participant ~2 – 2½ minutes to share their answers to The Three Questions with their groups. As described in my books, when calculating sharing duration add at least ten seconds per participant for the inevitable pauses between shares.

If you want to adjust the time allocated to The Three Questions, you can adjust the size of the breakout groups and/or the sharing time for each participant. But don’t stray too far from the suggested parameters of the above examples. And don’t forget to include breaks!

If at the start of the event, the number of participants turns out to be significantly different from what was expected, facilitators should be ready to collectively adjust sharing time so that the total sharing still fits comfortably into the scheduled Three Questions session length. Each Three Questions breakout should use the same sharing time per participant, so all breakouts can close at the same time.

Staffing an online Zoom peer conference

An experienced practitioner who’s familiar with Zoom can often handle the facilitation and technical support for very small meetings. Online Zoom peer conferences, however, require multiple staffers, who need to be identified and prepared in advance. Typically they will be set up as Zoom co-hosts. I recommend the following staffing:

  • At least one staffer handling technical issues: user support, muting/unmuting participants appropriately, assigning facilitators to their Three Questions rooms, and pre-assigning attendees to breakouts in Step #2.
  • A meeting facilitator, who introduces  The Three Questions to the entire group. (This person can also be a facilitator for one of the Three Questions Breakout Rooms.)
  • A facilitator for each Three Questions Breakout Room, who keeps track of sharing time, and ensures the sharing runs smoothly.
  • One or two scribes for each Three Questions Breakout Room. (Two scribes will have a much easier task than one.) Ideally, scribes should have some conference topic experience so they can summarize attendee responses accurately and concisely. During each Three Questions session, scribes summarize answers to the second question, usually in a shared Google Doc.
  • A small group of subject matter experts who will review the topics, issues, and challenges uncovered in Step #1, build a responsive peer session program, find leaders for each peer session breakout, and publish the resulting program.
  • Each peer session will need one or more participants who lead and/or share useful experience or expertise and/or facilitate the session.

As for any conference, adequate preparation and, if needed, training, for meeting staffers is crucial for a smoothly run event. Until everyone involved is experienced in supporting online meetings, a pre-meeting mock run-through on Zoom is strongly recommended!

Preparing attendees for a peer conference

At in-person meetings, facilitation via verbal directions works well. Because online participants can be more easily distracted or late, I recommend distributing a short preparatory online document for participants to read before the meeting.

Be sure to communicate in advance the importance of being present at the start of The Three Questions. The document should contain a short explanation of the value and format of a peer conference and a schedule. You don’t need to provide detailed information about The Three Questions. You can see some examples here and here.

The facilitator can share this document on-screen while introducing The Three Questions.

Introducing attendees to The Three Questions

One of the advantages of creating a peer conference online with Zoom is that participants don’t need to physically move to separate breakout rooms. At in-person events this takes time. Consequently, it’s simplest to introduce The Three Questions to attendees when they are all together in the main Zoom meeting room. Once the explanations are over, and participants have been given a few minutes to answer The Three Questions in writing, it’s easy to allocate them to their separate breakouts.

At the start of the peer conference, welcome attendees and then cover any housekeeping issues. Ask all attendees to turn on Zoom text chat, which supplies a useful way for facilitators, scribes, and participants to ask questions, and assist with format and technical issues.  Also share links via screen share and/or text chat to the conference introductory document, and the online document that will contain participants’ responses to the second of The Three Questions: (the topics, issues, and challenges that participants want and need), as described in Part 3 of this series of posts.

The facilitator who introduces The Three Questions can use the same guidelines and scripts provided in my books, with the following minor variation. At the start of the introduction, ask attendees to have paper and pen available. Instead of passing out printed cards, the facilitator shares their screen, displaying a copy of The Three Questions card, and then introduces the exercise.

Allocating attendees to Zoom Breakout Rooms for The Three Questions

Once The Three Questions has been introduced, give attendees a few minutes of silent time to write down their answers. (As always, emphasize the importance of writing their answers.)

Once you’ve checked that attendees are ready to continue, it’s time to assign them to breakout rooms.

When running an online session of The Three Questions in Zoom, it’s easiest to assign people to Breakout Rooms automatically, i.e. at random. Pre-assigning people to specific rooms is possible in Zoom, but somewhat clunky — as you’ll see when implementing Step #2!

After creating the breakout rooms, click Options and make sure the following (and only the following) options are checked:

  • Move all participants into breakout rooms automatically.
  • Allow participants to return to the main session at any time.
  • Countdown after closing breakout rooms.

As soon as people are randomly allocated to their rooms, find your individual room facilitators and scribes on Zoom’s participant list and move them as needed to their correct room. (See the section “Preparing breakout rooms” here to learn how to do this.)

Congratulations! You’ve completed the major portion of Step #1. You’re well on your way to creating successful participant-driven breakouts in Zoom. Part 3 of this series covers how the breakout room facilitators run their Three Questions session.

Conclusion

So far, in the first two posts of this series, I’ve:

  • provided a brief recap of the benefits of peer conferences;
  • given a big-picture overview of how you can hold one online; and
  • explained how to prepare to run The Three Questions online using Zoom.

The next two posts will describe in detail how to:

  • run The Three Questions online (Part 3); and
  • carry out step #2 — creating an optimum conference program from the information uncovered in step #1— using Zoom (Part 4).

Part 1 (an overview of what’s involved in implementing participant-driven breakouts in Zoom) is available here, and Part 3 (how to run The Three Questions) is now available here.
Part 4 (how to process participants’ sharing to create an optimum conference program) is now available here, and Part 5 (how to run participant-driven breakouts in Zoom breakout rooms) is now available here.

Check back on this blog for these posts on implementing participant-driven breakouts in Zoom. To ensure you don’t miss them, subscribe to this blog.