• Don’t miss the 7th annual Loyalty World conference We’re very excited to announce that TomorrowToday has teamed up...
  • Conferences of the future – more online / more connecting New and ever improving telecommunication technologies have improved how we...
  • Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin." /> TomorrowToday's Blog » Blog Archive » Why your conference sucks

    Home » Innovation » Currently Reading:

    Why your conference sucks

    November 18, 2005 Barrie Bramley Innovation No Comments

    Ok. I should have said, “Why your (and sometimes our) conferences suck” – it would have been less direct, but also long and boring. Now I have your attention.

    Companies spend hovels of cash on conferneces, seminars, summits – call it what you like. You’ve been to hundreds, and it’s always the same…

    Tables lined up in parallel rows, chairs evenly spaced apart. Pencil, notebook, businesscard, empty glass tumbler (with mandatory jug of ice water), and the bowl of assorted mints / sweets. Endearmints if you’re lucky. Flipchart and markers in the corner. Some guys stands up, switches to his first PowerPoint slide, and almost simultaneously, you switch off. Finally, as Anne and Fiona so politely put it, you leave with nothing.

    sethSeth Godin
    , marketing guru and uber-blogger of note, recently published a post entitled “How to Run a Useless Conference“.

    In it, he laments the reality of an depressive, global corporate seminar dullness, and offers some insights as to how we can all improve the seminar experience for customers and staff alike. His message? Simple, be atypical.

    How to Run a Useless Conference

    I go to more conferences than you do.

    I’m frequently amazed, but not particularly surprised, at what a bad job conferences do at their stated objective. What’s the problem? After all, these are expensive, professionally-run events that work hard to satisfy the typical attendee.

    And that, of course, is the problem.

    Facts don’t change people’s behavior.

    Emotion changes people’s behavior.

    Stories and irrational impulses are what change behavior. Not facts or bullet points.

    If all we need is facts, then books alone would be sufficient.

    When the Surgeon General announced that smoking was fatal, how many smokers quit right away?

    Human beings are irrational. Change agents (like you) can fight that and obsess about presenting more and more facts, or we can embrace it and make change happen.

    bellcConferences are designed to get average people to change their behavior. By “average�, I mean typical—the masses, the center of the bell curve. That’s a sensible objective. By definition, most people (in any given population) are in the middle of that bell curve. Change them and you’re golden.
    Bellcurve
    If this group would learn, take action and make things happen with just a memo, you wouldn’t need to have a conference. But we end up being flown on average planes to average hotels to sit in average conference rooms and hear average speakers doing presentations filled with bullet points. And it’s all beyond reproach.

    But it doesn’t work.

    It doesn’t work when you’re on a sales call either. Your facts and your service and your prices can be the best, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get the sale. And it breaks down at an annual review and it even happens in a one-on-one encounter with a policeman or a teacher or a clerk.

    People are irrational and they usually make decisions that have nothing to do with facts. And yet we spend most of our time improving our facts and very little concerned with the rest.

    Think about the most powerful learning moments you’ve ever had. My guess is that they didn’t take place in a darkened meeting room.

    Conference organizers (and more important, their clients) spend virtually all of their time and money doing one of two things:
    1. Satisfying the center of the bell curve.
    2. Avoiding failure

    That’s why the typical conference is… typical.

    That’s why the food and the setting and the venue and the location and the chairs and the layout and the schedule and the refreshment breaks are… typical.

    If you want to run a meeting (a brainstorming meeting, a board meeting, a zoning commission meeting) that is likely to perform as well as your past meetings, then the best thing to do is to run it the way you’ve always been running it, right?

    Here’s the challenge, then: figure out how to do the atypical. How to change the interactions that people have with each other. How to change what they talk about in the elevator. How to create an environment where people walk in ready to learn and change and challenge, as opposed to getting that, “hey we’re in the Bahamas let’s get drunk and then sit through a session with the CEO� glazed look.

    Sure, it won’t work on everyone. But that’s better than working on no one.

    Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

    Related posts:

    1. Don’t miss the 7th annual Loyalty World conference We’re very excited to announce that TomorrowToday has teamed up...
    2. Conferences of the future – more online / more connecting New and ever improving telecommunication technologies have improved how we...

    Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

    Comment on this Article:







    Subscribe to this blog

    Subscribe

    Category Drop-Down

    Posts about Future Trends

    Forget creating customer loyalty and focus on building friendships with customers

    March 18, 2010 Dean van Leeuwen

    Forget creating customer loyalty and focus on building friendships with customers

    I’m not talking about the glib friendships companies try to encourage by inviting their customers to be friends or fans on Facebook, but rather intimate and deep relationships that come from having a vested interest in the people that make their business possible. I recently came across a study by Michael Argyle and Monika Henderson [...]

    You’re going to have to change your management style

    March 17, 2010 Barrie Bramley

    You’re going to have to change your management style

    I spend a large part of my year in conversation with managers working hard to try and understand today’s younger workforce. The pain they’re feeling is palpable. The evidence of change is overwhelming. Making the necessary changes, at times, seems impossible. The hope is that the challenges are being interrogated and slowly but surely acted [...]

    A Radical Proposal for Executive Pay

    March 15, 2010 Graeme Codrington

    A Radical Proposal for Executive Pay

    Everyone agrees that something must be done about executive pay. One of the major contentious issues emerging out of the financial crisis is the way that senior executives and manager, especially in the financial industries, are remunerated. These days, executive pay often seems to be unrelated to the company’s performance, and in many [...]

    The future of money

    March 12, 2010 Dean van Leeuwen

    The future of money

    For years banks and credit card companies have held a strangle hold over the movement of money and charged exorbitant rates for doing so. Now this is changing and fast.
    Michale Ivey the founder of Twitpay has devised a system, using code that PayPal made available to him, that allows people to make payments [...]

    Recent Comments

    • Graeme Codrington: Here is an example of how social media changes the power rel...
    • stace: lazy and sensationalist - I couldn't agree more...
    • Graeme Codrington: Here's another example - a company that developed software t...
    • Graeme Codrington: I agree with you on this point, Barrie. BUT... I just had a...
    • Graeme Codrington: I really wish I could use the main section of this blog site...

    Archives

    Tweet Blender

    codrington: RT @brainpicker: A Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention – insightful look at cognitive investment by Michael Erard http://is.gd/aNUOS
    2 hours ago
    DeanvanLeeuwen: RT @DeborahInComms: New blog post: iPOD at work http://www.theheromachine.com/ipod-at-work-2/
    3 hours ago
    DeanvanLeeuwen: RT @codrington: Gary Hamel, #management guru, turns his attention to the #future of #church - interesting long video: http://ow.ly/1o1Ej
    3 hours ago
    DeanvanLeeuwen: RT @towerswatson: Article discusses the critical link between employees level of #well-being and #engagement. Worth reading again....
    3 hours ago
    codrington: Gary Hamel, the #management guru, turns his attention to the #future of #church - interesting hour long video: http://ow.ly/1o1Ej
    3 hours ago
    codrington: RT @HarvardBiz: Real-time #Brand #Management — Lessons from #Virgin America's Hellish Flight http://bit.ly/99VSpj
    3 hours ago
    codrington: HBR: How BMW Is Defusing the Demographic Time Bomb: http://ow.ly/1o16H // managing an ageing & staying workforce
    4 hours ago
    DeanvanLeeuwen: Insights into the evolving world of work - TomorrowToday's Blog http://ow.ly/1nVhI
    4 hours ago