Your Brain at Work

David, I so appreciate your attempts to redesign the conference experience. Too many conferences I have attended have been less that stellar learning events.

Your premise concerning the two primary reasons why people attend conferences (learning and connecting to people) is undoubtedly true for many - but not for all. Differences between people's personalities (among other factors) suggest that the format you have adopted would not work for everyone.

Indeed, even as a strongly extroverted individual, I don't attend conferences to connect with people. I go to learn from people who have a level of expertise and/or experience which I and my fellow attendees do not possess (I know I am making a rather large assumption here - perhaps a faulty one). In all candor, I don't come to listen to fellow attendees but to those whose expertise I value -- in other words, the speakers! That may sound harsh concerning my fellow learners, but it is the bias I bring to conferences.

Furthermore, when I am learning, I don't enjoy having to participate in activities with people I don't know. All too often, I have found these discussion times rather invaluable. Once again, this reflects my personal preference for learning, and I know that many others would differ.

Additionally, when I read your description of the "requirement" for people to spend time together over meals throughout the day, I had a mild averse physical reaction. This seems exhausting and triggered a threat response even thinking about it. Even if these events are not "mandatory," I fear that those who want more private time may feel an unwelcome degree of social pressure, and even disapproval, if they opt out of these structured events.

As I said at the start, I really appreciate your openness to redesigning conference formatting to make it a much more powerful event for attendees. And, as always, I appreciate your application of insights from brain science to the topic at hand (after all, I am a member of the NeuroLeadership Institute, and I will be attending this year's summit in San Francsisco!).

But I am concerned that once again, we fall into the trap of looking for a one-size-fits-all approach in our thinking. Differences between personalities also need to be factored in trying to make a conference work for all. No easy task to be sure.

David, I so appreciate your attempts to redesign the conference experience. Too many conferences I have attended have been less that stellar learning events.

Your premise concerning the two primary reasons why people attend conferences (learning and connecting to people) is undoubtedly true for many - but not for all. Differences between people's personalities (among other factors) suggest that the format you have adopted would not work for everyone.

Indeed, even as a strongly extroverted individual, I don't attend conferences to connect with people. I go to learn from people who have a level of expertise and/or experience which I and my fellow attendees do not possess (I know I am making a rather large assumption here - perhaps a faulty one). In all candor, I don't come to listen to fellow attendees but to those whose expertise I value -- in other words, the speakers! That may sound harsh concerning my fellow learners, but it is the bias I bring to conferences.

Furthermore, when I am learning, I don't enjoy having to participate in activities with people I don't know. All too often, I have found these discussion times rather invaluable. Once again, this reflects my personal preference for learning, and I know that many others would differ.

Additionally, when I read your description of the "requirement" for people to spend time together over meals throughout the day, I had a mild averse physical reaction. This seems exhausting and triggered a threat response even thinking about it. Even if these events are not "mandatory," I fear that those who want more private time may feel an unwelcome degree of social pressure, and even disapproval, if they opt out of these structured events.

As I said at the start, I really appreciate your openness to redesigning conference formatting to make it a much more powerful event for attendees. And, as always, I appreciate your application of insights from brain science to the topic at hand (after all, I am a member of the NeuroLeadership Institute, and I will be attending this year's summit in San Francsisco!).

But I am concerned that once again, we fall into the trap of looking for a one-size-fits-all approach in our thinking. Differences between personalities also need to be factored in trying to make a conference work for all. No easy task to be sure.

David, I've been designing and facilitating conferences for thirty years, the last twenty of which have been devoted to creating participant-driven conference designs that respond to many of the issues you outline.

I'll typically use an approach where the conference program is determined partially or completely by the participants at the event, rather than by a program committee in advance. The reason for this is simple (and depressing)—by comparing program committee choices with the topics participants actually schedule I've found that the best program committees predict barely half the sessions participants want.

Most people don't believe it's possible to build an optimum conference program on the fly at an event—until they attend one and experience how well the process works. I've been doing this for twenty years now, and thousands of conference participants have become believers.

I agree completely that sessions with regular (every 15-20 minutes) activities you describe as digestion, exercise, application, and questions provide far better learning environments and conduits for connections than traditional designs based on transfer theory (i.e. lectures).

In my experience, about 2% of attendees at my conferences display preferences like those described by Scott above, and about half of these people discover that they prefer a connection-rich design once they experience it. Yes, you won't satisfy everyone with a design like this, but delighting 90+% of your attendees (based on 20 years of my conference evaluations) is far better than the pitifully low expectations of attendees at traditional conferences.

For much more information about participant-driven conference design, you might want to check out my 2009 book Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love.

Hi David,

Great advice here for face-to-face conferences. (I have been designing and facilitating them for years, and never have I seen guidelines for developing engaging sessions spelled out so clearly!)

Much of my work today involves setting up and facilitating virtual meetings, where at least some or all participants attend remotely. (I also run workshops on planning and running engaging virtual meetings.) While I have some guidelines to offer my clients (e.g. plan for 80% active participation/20% passive; change activities every 7-9 minutes; engage people different ways to keep them guessing; etc.), I wonder what guidelines you might have, David, for virtual meetings/conferences.

Great post and so timely in this "spring" (Northern Hemisphere) conference season... especially the capitalist dilemma of butts in seats versus great conference experiences.

You are quite right about the "conference" format being about 20 years outdated - and it amazes me that "Death by PowerPoint" garners about 6 million hits on Google. (That should say something in and of itself.)

As conference planners and conference goers, we need to step back from the "model" in place and figure out what are the outcomes we want to achieve - and then work backwards from there. (Maybe the word "conference" is the wrong one to even be using at times!)

Speakers and track layout (if there are even going to be "tracks" should be closer to the end of the planning once the desired results and outcomes are decided.

I look forward to seeing more discussion and posts on this topic. Thanks for writing this blog!

Carol

This is a very interesting post, but I think it makes a distinction between learning and networking that is incorrect. To me, these are closely related, certainly in a conference setting but also for both activities in general.

Learning at a conference, including the grand speakers, is, in my experience a powerful facilitator of networking. It is much easier to begin a discussion with someone you don't know if you can reference a common experience. "What did you think of ...(fill in the name) session?" is an easy opener for starting a new networking relationship.

Also,once the networking discussion begins around a topic, both the learning and the networking get extended by the lively exchanges of interpretations and views. The social environment reinforcees both learning and networking. In the best conferences, these occur seamlessly.

Being avid supporters of the application of neuroscience to organizational performance improvement in general, we apply these same ideas to learning programs. We call the equivalent to a speaker an "enrichment experience" that people digest by talking about, applying it to real situations, and sharing the results with others. While a traditional training program typically has about a 10% content retention rate, our programs are closer to 90%. And because it is done in a team environment, group morale soars.

I am all for the new conference design and suggest we extend this to all learning experiences.