Association Congress

Tuesday 5 July 2011

Conference innovators beware!

I’ve read a lot recently (especially from our American colleagues) that innovation in the world of conferences is the key, the secret, the future. From new session formats; to the fluid structure of a days programme; to the use of new event software and new media, we are in a world where everything on the registration desk and the cabaret table is up for grabs: but innovators beware. And here’s why.
You can ignore the basics
In too many event departments where I have done consultancy I see organisations not focusing on the basics; like good speakers; great content; keeping their database up to date or thinking about the price of competitor events. No, they are off chasing the ‘next big thing’. This could be their own TV station at their exhibition, or voting panels at the ‘great debate’, or wondering how to engage an audience with social media. I have seen ‘innovative’ events crumble and ‘cutting edge’ event businesses shrivel. We have to realize that innovation comes at a certain point of the life cycle of your event and your event organiser. Sometimes keeping up with the neighbours leads to two bankrupt, garish houses.     
Innovation that went wrong
Keeping with the housing metaphor, basically so I can draw on my experience within financial services, I saw ‘innovative’ products such as the 120% LTV mortgage (a product that allowed you to borrow 120% of the value of your house, secured against, believe it or not, the rising price of your home!) And the mortgage where £100,000s was lent to people who had been targeted as ‘likely to default’: people who were struggling to cope with the repayments for the kid’s hundred pound bike. This is what can happen with ‘innovation’ if you forget what it is the product or service is supposed to do. Mortgages were supposed to help people securely buy a home and a future in that home: they weren’t designed just to be sold to anyone wanting a home. And we all know that this unchecked innovation created a whole pile of poo for the rest of the economy.
So what can conference professionals learn from the ‘crash’?
It would be churlish to say that we should not embrace new ideas and of course it is totally incongruous to everything I’ve written in my blog but we have to understand that with innovation comes some risk, and a chance that we are taking our conferences off course. What conferences do and what we should focus on is helping people learn very useful stuff that will help them when they get back to their desks. And all this takes place is an environment where they can network and soak up learning. So here’s a few thoughts which counter some current ‘innovation’:
-          Letting delegates decide on what should be covered on the day. Structuring programmes to allow people to learn is hard. It’s a skill. So should we let delegates do this? Just imagine allowing the diners into to the kitchen, throwing the chefs to the wolfs, and expecting some fantastic food to come out the other end. If this happened it’s probably not a restaurant that you and I would eat in.
-          Asking delegates to speak on the day rather than have skilled, well briefed and prepared speakers, facilitators and chairs. In our metaphorical restaurant again, we can hear the call: “Who fancies making the beef Wellington for everyone tonight, it’s OK, you don’t need any experience we trust you”. Erm, check please! I am out of here!
-          Use of voting panels. Is this more worthwhile than asking delegates to raise their hands? Sometimes not. I hate seeing these tools used just for the sake of it.
-          Doing new things without taking the delegates along with you. Change can scare the begeebies out of people. Innovation scares some people to death!
Innovation? I’ll just see if your name is one the list
Innovation in our industry is no different from any other sector: it is the future and it is the key to adding value to our conferences. But before you let it in, ask innovation its’ name; check its’ ID and ask for references before you let it lose at your conference.
I hope this sets an interesting back drop to my chairing the session entitled ‘congress innovation’ on the events stream at the www.assocationcongress.com on the 18th July and I would love to hear your thoughts.  

Here's another great blog you should read: http://www.ideaarchitects.org/2011/07/be-careful-of-format-fetish.html

7 comments:

  1. William, as perhaps one of the American colleagues you are characterizing, I think you are providing a somewhat distorted account of what I, for one, have been trying to communicate.

    Having my "own TV station at [my] exhibition, or voting panels at the ‘great debate’, or wondering how to engage an audience with social media" are not on my agenda, though equating such "innovations" with rampantly dishonest marketing of fraudulent products seems disingenuous to me.

    However, what spurred me to respond to your post was your dismissal of asking delegates to decide what should be covered on the day.

    I can assure you that, when done correctly, this works exceedingly well, as the thousands of participants who have attended my participant-driven conferences over the last twenty years can attest. That experience is what led me to write my book about participant-driven events: "Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love". I use a more structured approach than Open Space, requiring more work by a small group of conference organizers and volunteers, but the resulting optimum program schedule is well worth the time and trouble taken.

    Obviously I don’t have the time to repeat here everything I wrote in my book, but here are a few points.

    Your analogy comparing effective learning with the way food is prepared in a restaurant is flawed. Yes, preparing Beef Wellington is a complex procedure that an experienced chef will do infinitely better than a novice. But, unlike the 1950's or the school education environment I, and perhaps you, grew up with, the majority of adult skilled learning today is not a production line formal process. These days it is predominantly a social process.

    Current research shows that about 70% of what we learn we learn from our peers. Another 20% is self-directed learning; we read a book or look things up on the internet. In fact, only about 10% of what professional adults learn comes from formal instruction, still the dominant mode at most conferences. Such an instructional mode is fine for novices—but novices are a minority at most conferences. What about everybody else?

    Another reason why predetermined conference programs with prepared speakers miss the mark, more often or not, is that conference organizers, well-meaning and careful as they may be, are, from my observations, quite poor at predicting the topics that delegates actually want. I know this, because I have been able to compare conference organizer predictions for session topics with what participants actually chose. The reality is that the best conference organizers I've worked with predict at most half the topics that participants wanted. In other words, at least half the sessions at a traditional conference are not what the people who came wanted!

    End of part 1! (Your comment box isn't big enough!)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Part 2!

    Of course, no one expects a polished presentation from a participant who has discovered the night before that her experience of or expertise on a topic is of interest and value to her peers. What occurs instead is an informal presentation/panel/facilitated discussion/workshop that allows plenty of opportunities for attendees to shape their time together into something that is maximally useful for everyone involved. Sure, many people are not good at leading or facilitating such a session, but over the years I’ve discovered that there are enough people present who are competent to do so.

    An aside on voting. I am also not a big fan of fancy voting devices, since all they are used for is to get passive counts which can be done, as you say, with shows of hands. But, if the room set allows it, you can use human spectrograms, aka body voting, to do much more than tallying votes, including introducing people with similar or different points of view to each other, and creating homogenous or heterogeneous small groups.

    I hope it’s clear that I am not blindly in favor of any kind of innovation in conference format, technology, or design. What I have found to work are the multiple conclusions of small conference design experiments carried out over thirty years.

    Let’s talk about fear. Fear is the reason why most innovation is resisted: fear of making mistakes when trying something new, fear of getting in trouble with your boss if something doesn’t quite work, and fear of losing control of your event. And, yes, “Innovation scares some people to death!” I agree that you need to bring attendees along with you when you introduce them to something different, and the first thing that I do at my conferences is to create a safe and open environment. But there are usually a minority of attendees who do not want anything different, and who are resistant. Though some of these people subsequently turn into big fans of participant-driven events, some do not. If we stay with event designs that scare no one because of the reactions of a few, we will never usefully innovate. From my conferences’ evaluations, the long-term value for the vast majority of attendees who experience a coherent participant-driven event design far outweighs the short-term fear some experience when doing things differently.

    Over and over again I have seen attendees discover the value of participant-driven conferences by experiencing one. Reading about how they work is not the same. In the events arena, the 2009 Event Camp East Coast in Philadelphia introduced this design to a conference for meeting professionals. If you or your readers would like to experience such an event I’d love to give you the opportunity at the 2010 conference this November.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Part 1!

    William, as perhaps one of the American colleagues you are characterizing, I think you are providing a somewhat distorted account of what I, for one, have been trying to communicate.

    Having my "own TV station at [my] exhibition, or voting panels at the ‘great debate’, or wondering how to engage an audience with social media" are not on my agenda, though equating such "innovations" with rampantly dishonest marketing of fraudulent products seems disingenuous to me.

    However, what spurred me to respond to your post was your dismissal of asking delegates to decide what should be covered on the day.

    I can assure you that, when done correctly, this works exceedingly well, as the thousands of participants who have attended my participant-driven conferences over the last twenty years can attest. That experience is what led me to write my book about participant-driven events: "Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love". I use a more structured approach than Open Space, requiring more work by a small group of conference organizers and volunteers, but the resulting optimum program schedule is well worth the time and trouble taken.

    Obviously I don’t have the time to repeat here everything I wrote in my book, but here are a few points.

    Your analogy comparing effective learning with the way food is prepared in a restaurant is flawed. Yes, preparing Beef Wellington is a complex procedure that an experienced chef will do infinitely better than a novice. But, unlike the 1950's or the school education environment I, and perhaps you, grew up with, the majority of adult skilled learning today is not a production line formal process. These days it is predominantly a social process.

    Current research shows that about 70% of what we learn we learn from our peers. Another 20% is self-directed learning; we read a book or look things up on the internet. In fact, only about 10% of what professional adults learn comes from formal instruction, still the dominant mode at most conferences. Such an instructional mode is fine for novices—but novices are a minority at most conferences. What about everybody else?

    Another reason why predetermined conference programs with prepared speakers miss the mark, more often or not, is that conference organizers, well-meaning and careful as they may be, are, from my observations, quite poor at predicting the topics that delegates actually want. I know this, because I have been able to compare conference organizer predictions for session topics with what participants actually chose. The reality is that the best conference organizers I've worked with predict at most half the topics that participants wanted. In other words, at least half the sessions at a traditional conference are not what the people who came wanted!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Part 3! Late night error. The Philadelphia EventCamp was in 2010; this year's is November 4-6, 2011 :-).

    ReplyDelete
  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Ok. Looks like I have worked out how to post a comment on my own posts. And I've been asked to respond. Firstly, educated in the 50s!!!! Come on 80s! But teachers were no better then.

    And secondly did youngest Jeff hurts last post comparing a conference to a fine dining or buffet? See what I have started. But on to the serious points.

    Adrian and I are now working together on th association programme at EIBTM in December so we actually agree on everything now.

    Well probably everything, I think I still want more structure at my events than he does and I think that I know the European audience better, body voting would bomb. But in a couple of years it's probably where we will end up.

    Delegate participation is key and peer learning is so important. But it needs structure and that's how I will structure EIBTM with Adrian's help I am sure.

    ReplyDelete
  7. You are right about the audience, William. There may be a risk of losing them by imposing too much "event innovation" on them ;-) Our customers (still) expect great content, inspiring speakers...

    That said, I think that innovative elements are needed to spice up the classic event formats - and we both have experienced how that can work.

    Looking forward to the fishbowl we'll organize a month from now in Vienna, with Press Freedeom activists from around the globe. Trying to implement what I've experienced at IMEX, Association Congress and others.

    And of course looking forward to EIBTM!

    http://michaelheipel.wordpress.com

    ReplyDelete