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I have been meaning to blog more about conferences for the longest time (rant warning!) and the posts by Dave Winer and Alec Muffett finally kicked me into it. Having done more than my fair share of speaking at various events - conferences, round tables, workshops, panels etc, the whole set up is getting to me. And not in a good way. The frustration comes from knowing that it doesn’t have to be that way and that knowledge comes from participating at events such as unconferences and other geekfests without commercial contamination. Yes, dear reader, contamination for it is the commercial aspect of conferences that makes them boring and unproductive (and unnecessarily expensive). I hope to explain why.
- When you run an event to make money, you are selecting people on the basis of their ability and willingness to pay. In exchange, you need to offer them something that they consider worth the money. This completely rules out an informal gathering, without structured agenda, time slots, powerpoint presentation, projectors etc.
- Commercial events need to market themselves and the speakers are meant to be the draw. But you can’t afford to pay the speakers so you put all your money to one or two ’star’ speakers - the crowd-pleasers. Once you buy those, you approach others in the hope that their own ‘marketing needs’ or the desire to share the programme/stage with the big names will get them do it for free. So if you hear conference organisers use the phrase ‘marketing opportunities’, it means that they want you to speak at their event for free. And be grateful for it.
- This is a recipe for a dull agenda. After a handful of star speakers have done their spiel, the chances of hearing someone who doesn’t make your head hit the desk are pretty slim.
- So a big marketing gang-bang is going on - event organisers use the event and potential audience to attract the keynote speakers, occasionally topping it up with speakers’ fee. Then they use the keynote speakers and the potential audience to populate the rest of the agenda. And finally, sell the star speakers and the programme to the sponsors, exhibitors and the delegates.
- The result is formal, frustrating and mind-numbing with some transparent selling and bagfuls of swag. The highlights are the coffee breaks balancing a sour coffee with a biscuit or a unwholesome sandwich. Joy.
- I have been involved in organising events with VNU for the past 2-3 years, namely, social media tracks at Online Information and the two Blogs and Social Media Forums. Those I worked with tried to blow up the format as much as we could. We managed to smuggle in Johnnie Moore and Lloyd Davis to run Open Space sessions. These have always been a success, but my frustration remains - why can’t you have the whole damn event organised like that? I know the answer… impossible to sell to the usual list of names. The perceived ‘value’ rests in the session headings, the speakers or at least organisations they work for. In the end marketing wins. The more success we had with the ‘outlandish’ formats, the more interest the marketers paid to it and the more they took over. Thus killing the experiment and innovation.
Now I got that off my chest, I can try to be constructive. Dave Winer’s idea:
Imagine an evening event where, at random, groups of six were put together in a room with food and drink, perhaps an inspiring view, and a topic to discuss. As with our evening confab, it would be off the record, just a discussion that might or might not lead somewhere. You have to get beyond the usual surface-level stuff because you have three hours to fill. Who knows what might happen?
Good conversation, some thinking, some fun is what you’d get.
A couple of weeks ago I was at a VRM workshop organised by Doc Searls at the Oxford Internet Institute. It was interesting, productive and satisfyingly exhausting. The morning was slow, occasionally confused, with people saying what they had on mind first, talking cross-purposes and without any bigger picture. However, even this relatively chaotic approach has great merit. It means that everyone focused on VRM and by the afternoon, our thoughts were flowing in harmony. 
After lunch Doc decided we should get some fresh air and the best ideas were conceived out there, on the pavement.
I have seen this over and over again. Why not turn that into a legitimate part of a meeting or workshop? So here are my tips for organising an event that doesn’t bore people out of their skulls.
- Get as informal venue as you can. No stage - means no them and us i.e. no difference between speakers and the audience. Ideally, go out for a walk in between sitting indoors. Seriously.
- Don’t have an agenda, but know the purpose of the event. Don’t bother with time slots and programme, let people sort out the agenda on the day, even at the cost of chaos and cross-purpose talking (see the VRM workshop morning). Alternatively, discuss the agenda at the start of the event, making sure people can influence it.
- Have someone who ‘runs the show’ but does not control it. Someone with authority accepted by those present as he/she becomes the focal point and adjudicator in case of a heated debate.
- Get the right people to attend, chose them carefully. Don’t think of their place in hierarchy but of the input they can bring. Make sure that those invited want to be there and have their own reason to attend. This makes the commercial stuff harder, if not impossible, as it turns the event into a gathering of people with shared interests and goals rather than budgets for conferences.
- Avoid powerpoint like a plague. If people want to prepare something visual let them. But do make sure that they can’t monopolise everyone’s attention with their presentation. Better yet, don’t let people do ‘presentations’ but ‘talks’.
- Get some good coffee and tea, some healthy food and some higher quality yummy stuff. Nothing fancy but quality over quantity is the rule here.
As it happens, I am in the middle of getting together a network of people in a large corporation to discuss how to continue and amplify what social media are doing to the system and processes. (Actually, it is about how to continue what people using social media are doing to the system and processes - a crucial distinction in my view.) Offices have been ruled out and we have been looking for a place where we can plot the revolution, preferrably outdoors. We have had a rather tough time finding a place. In the end, it looks like we’ll gather in a farm barn with some tables and benches. Can’t wait.
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6 Responses to “Conferences are boring by default and design”
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Spot on. Especially the bits about sour coffee and stultifiying formality… Why on earth would I ask my boss to pay upwards of £100/hour for this?
I’ve recently helped set up and run a number of privacy workshops, and from the outset I wanted to do them as follows:
- some minimal ground-rules (Chatham House, that sort of thing) but no formal agenda;
- no presentations; this is many-to-many, not one-to-many. There’s no ‘us and them’, only ‘us’.
- no participation fee, but if you turn up, you have to contribute…
- no hierarchy: physically I try to make sure it is set up as a round table;
- not too many people - so far we have capped it at around 17;
- wide range of perspectives. I think I can state that technologists/vendors have been in the minority at every one so far - and that’s how I like it. It keeps the techno-babble in perspective.
I also wanted to organise them as early-evening events, with drinks and comfortable chairs, but that hasn’t always worked out.
So far we’ve been in Berlin, Brussels and Washington. Tokyo is next on the calendar, and there are serious plans to run one in the UK before the end of the year…
What would you say about “academic research conferences”? Those would be the kind that publish proceedings afterwards, speakers submit papers that will appear in those proceedings, the papers are reviewed by peers, etc?
And there are no vendor booths.
Do you think they would also benefit by moving toward the unconference format?
Eric, absolutely. Unconference is a format that benefits individuals who want to take the knowledge further rather than do a dog and pony show and I imagine that academic research conferences would fall in that category. I would publish the papers beforehand, and enable comments and commentary. Then the event itself would be a gathering with self-selecting discussions among those who have things to say about the papers.
From organisational point of view, such an event could be viewed as a social event first and foremost, with time and space to focus on the research papers. After all, it is about the people as without their minds, there would be no input. Make it easy for them, the rest will follow.
I have recently been introduced to the unconference and OST concepts. I am with the ISC, the trade association for corporate sponsors, and I believe these models can deliver more value than the traditional conference for corporate executives involved in sponsorship. These execs desire true open dialogue towards identifying and addressing common issues. You don’t get conversation at traditional conferences and it promotes a hierarchy that stifles the ability for most to add value. Sponsorship is about engagement and it has been interesting to follow the tech world and its leadership development of consumer engagement, content, emerging social media. Only makes sense they have created the conference industry’s next form of knowledge networking. Let’s see how it evolves and is embraced in other industries.
That’s why we enlightened marketing types ;O) held Interesting 2007
See here for review
http://noisydecentgraphics.typepad.com/design/2007/06/interesting_rev.html
I like your comments about conferences being boring by design. Absolutely right. I started speaking at conferences on themes of innovative thinking. It was easy to notice that many conferences were not particularly innovative in the way they were designed. In fact, there are not designed….they are organized…and here lies the problem.
There is an entire industry of professional organizers and event planners. They are experts at what they do: organize events. They are not experts in the learning or content development side of an event.
At the same time I also notice that a few conferences were excellent and these tended to be designed with people who have formal learning and development backgrounds. They design how they want to mix ideas, speakers and participants. Some government conferences are excellent as they use alternative formats and they do not buy into the model of hiring big dollar speakers to attract fee paying participants
The simple test that I use to evaluate a conference is to ask: does this conference have learning objectives? Only a few do.
All of this led me to apply the concepts from the innovation work to write a short book on the theme of “Seven Rules for Designing More Innovative Conferences”. My key message is that all events need a learning strategy to shape the content and its presentation. I based this on two strategies:
1. Design more engaging conferences.
2. Help your participants become more effective participants.
The second strategy may sound odd but remember that the majority of people I address freely admit that they take notes at conferences and never look at them again.
I now open conferences with a “how to navigate this conferences for more ideas” presentation.
I defined these rules to broaden the planning conversations that are used to design the event:
Rule 1 The experts at your conference are in the audience, not on the stage.
Rule 2 Think Return on Investment…even though it is hard to measure.
Rule 3 Design your conference with Logistics and Learning.
Rule 4 Learning objectives drive the design of your content.
Rule 5 Always use the brainpower of an audience to create something.
Rule 6 Put structure into your networking and mingling opportunities.
Rule 7 Assume that your conference participants have weak skills for participating in a conference.
www.InnovativeConferences.com