Improving conferences

Prompted by posts by Johnnie Moore Ton Zylstra and David Wilcox, I’ve been thinking about how we might improve conferences.

As a facilitator of Open Space Technology and other large group processes, I offer clients ways of radically transforming conferences to make them highly productive. But these meetings require changes in expectations and frames of reference that are sometimes too much for a client to go on. When you are convening an international conference on business and the environment, putting everyone in a circle and placing paper and markers at the centre of the room can sometimes seem too much of a change.

Of course, I would argue that this degree of change is EXACTLY what is required to move to another level of think about complex situations. But I don’t “sell” clients on stuff that they aren’t comfortable with. I’ll discuss with them how to get the most out of what they are willing to do and sometimes those conversations open up new possibilities. In most cases though, with respect to conferences, I’m generally asked to come into a room of a few hundred people sitting at round tables and make something happen.

Traditional conferences with plenary sessions, speakers and power points are a huge missed opportunity in most cases. Conferences are not everyday affairs. In general people convene them because they want something special to happen: sharing information, learning, taking things to a new level. Occasionally a conference is convened with an expressed intent to develop a consensus or make a decision. In almost every case, attention to logistical detail generally ignores attention to process. How do we make the most of the opportunities that any given conference provides us?

For me the answer lies in three things. First it’s important to contextualize each person’s reason for being at a conference. If you can take time to come to a conference prepared with questions and invitations and learning objectives for yourself, you will bring built-in filters to the hoards of information and options provided by most conferences. You will also maximize your learning.

Second, good conferences have easy ways of connecting people. Think about it in terms of a marketplace. If you are in a conference on local economies, and you want to develop a local clothing line, you need to find the local designers, manufacturers distributors and buyers. Without a marketplace (something as simple as a bulletin board, or as complex as an Open Space agenda wall, which structures the entire conference around invitations) you have no way of connecting to others.

Finally, conferences find their power when we can provide opportunities for real and intentional dialogue and conversation. It is a cop-out when conference designers place this critical function at the mercy of coffee breaks, question and answer sessions and “networking events.” For the most part there is very little thought given to connecting passion and responsibility at these events. If you get into a good conversation, it’s more about luck than anything else, and if you are paying $800 to attend a conference, you don’t want your learning based on luck. Serendipity has its place and these unstructured processes are powerful opportunities, but they are made more powerful by being offered with intention.

I stand by Open Space Technology as a conference format in and of itself and I have had amazing experiences seeing that process facilitating change, learning and emergence. Short of that though, and responding to Ton’s idea that maybe we can import Open Space elements into conference setting, I have been toying with the idea of what I am calling “keynote facilitation.”

The keynote facilitator combines the attention and energy of a keynote address with the process care of a facilitator. Instead of giving you great ideas from MY head and experience, as a keynote facilitator I help to set the context for your own learning, and guide process that invites you to turn to those in the room and begin to craft innovation together in collaborative conversation. I have been using World Cafe as a process for doing this recently at a national conference on Aboriginal forestry and a regional gathering on Aboriginal economic development and I believe that it does provide added value for participants who are able to get quickly deeply into the issues and questions they face. The process also helps to develop an emergent sense of what the conference as a whole is thinking about and it provides individuals with an opportunity to reflect on their reasons for attending and to become more intentional about that. With the hour or so assigned to traditional plenary keynote speakers, I can have a conference of people talking to one another, creating connections and seeking out partners.

Supporting that conversation during and after the conference is the challenge, and that is one that my friend Susan Neden in Saskatchewan has taken up with her Conference Quest software which supports conference attendees as learners on a journey, or a quest for a nugget or two of knowledge and innovation that might change everything about how they do business.

And if we offer anything less to people, I think we are wasting the great potential of the conference setting. I’ll be talking with Johnnie and Ton and Susan over the next week or so and I’ll report here what we discover in conversation about what the role of the keynote facilitator could really be. If you have thoughts leave a comment and maybe we can have a quick Skype call about it as well.

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