We expect a lot of speakers and presenters.  We want them to be witty, wise, and gnomic.  We want them to give us insights we’ve never had before.  We want them to change the world.  We expect a lot. 

But what about the audiences these speakers work so hard to please? Do we have the right to expect anything of them?

I think the answer is yes, and I think there are 3 ways in particular that audiences fall down.

“Just Give Me the Highlights.” 

I've all too often seen (especially) executives – but also conference organizers – ask hapless presenters, "We're running out of time; can you just give us the highlights?"  The busy executives use this as a deliberate technique to save them time and see how the presenters respond under pressure.  But this technique pushes the presenters into sloppy speaking as they rush to get as much as possible in the time left.  Besides that, it's rude.  The result is imprecision, confusion, omissions, bad feeling and more time wasted in the long run.  It will take 30 emails at least to straighten out the confusion created by one rushed presentation, you can be sure. 

“I'll Multitask While You Talk.” 

If we're going to go to all the trouble, expense, and time to get together, you should give the speakers your undivided attention.  Multitasking is for low-involvement, relatively unimportant tasks.  All the studies show that the more tasks you undertake simultaneously, the slower and more inattentively you do them.  Put away that iPhone or iPad or Android phone or Blackberry!  Pay attention if you've decided to be there in the first place. 

“I'll Come Early and Leave Late.” 

Both speakers and audiences owe each other the courtesy of showing up on time, starting on time, and ending on time.  Anything less is rude and disrespectful to those who do have watches.  That said, the speakers and conference designers must create moments, speeches, and conferences worth attending all the way through.  All too often, conference planners just fill in the time slots in the way they always have.  A conference should tell a coherent story, without filler, from start to finish.  It's not a series of time slots. You owe it to the audience to create something memorable.  And the audience owes it to you to show up on time and stay to the end. 

I think that audiences owe speakers the courtesy of paying attention politely for as long as the speakers hold their attention.  After that, audiences should still be polite.  What do you think? 

 

Conferences ask a lot of passivity from their audiences – audiences made up of people who are normally quite active.  The traditional model involves sitting in a seat for 2 or 3 days, occasionally allowed to ask questions, but basically only invited out of the seat for meal and bathroom breaks.  Any networking that’s done happens at the bar afterward, or perhaps at one of the lunches, if people are feeling communicative. 

By contrast, the first time I attended the Renaissance Weekend in Hilton Head I was astounded to learn the extent to which I would be involved in sitting on panels, running seminars, leading questions, and generally taking quite an active part.  It was a liberating, energizing experience, and I started to wonder, why aren’t all conferences like this? 

The Renaissance model requires a good deal of pre-conference planning on the part of the folks running the event, as well as input from the attendees.  That cooperation is not simple to get from busy folks, but it is well-rewarded in the richness of the offerings, the level of participation it encourages from participants, and the loyalty it generates from one year to the next. 

Another kind of conference model takes this even further:  the peer conference.  This model has been championed by Adrian Segar for over 20 years, and I chatted with him recently to find out how peer conferences work and what the benefits are to attendees.

Segar, who has a PhD in Physics, has run a solar manufacturing business, and consulted in IT for many years, pioneered the concept after observing that same kind of passivity in academic conferences he attended over the years.  He noted that typically he’d find one or two people that he’d really connect with, but was left with the nagging feeling that there were more interesting people at the conference than that, and he was missing out. 

How does a Segar peer conference work?  They involve 25 to 60 people, ideally, but can handle as many as 100.  They are open (unlike the Renaissance Weekend, which is invitation only) and private (meaning that, like the Renaissance Weekend, the proceedings are not published or open to the press).  They are convened by someone like Segar.  But after that, they’re up to the attendees.

A peer conference begins with a round table during which everyone involved answers 3 questions:

1.  How did I get here?

2.  What do I want to happen here?

3.  What expertise do I have to share on this subject?

Then a small group of conveners organizes the conference around the answers.  Everyone can sign up for the sessions offered, and the meeting is underway.  Segar reports that the networking is powerful and easy because everyone has been introduced to everyone else and know something about their interests.  And often peer conferences lead to action, because Segar closes by asking people, during a ‘groupspective,’ what they would like to see happen as a result of the meeting of minds.  The group commitment that results is usually very durable and leads to powerful initiatives. 

One of the longest-standing peer conferences that Segar started is known as edACCESS, a conference on IT for small colleges and schools, which has been running successfully for nearly 20 years.  Segar has just published a book on peer conferences, Conferences that Work, and I recommend his thinking highly as a necessary part of the future of conferences. 

Traditionally shaped conferences can encourage attendee participation in many ways before during and after the actual event, but even more participatory are audience-driven conferences like Renaissance Weekend and Segar’s peer conferences.  The collective power of a group of people with aligned interests can be amazing – why leave the audience passive in its chairs when you can draw upon their combined knowledge, experience and wisdom?

Think about all the people, products, and processes that have to work well in order for you to have a good experience at a conference.  From the flight (or drive) there, to the check-in at the hotel, to your first impression of the room, to the registration desk for the event, to the first meal, to your MC or initial speaker, to the whole roster of speakers, to the breakouts, to the guy sitting next to you – it all has to go smoothly so that you have a good time and don’t write a cranky note on the evaluation form. 

Meeting Planners don’t have it easy.  It’s a tough job.  They have to coordinate a myriad things over which they don’t have perfect control, everyone in their company or association feels entitled to offer unsolicited advice and feedback, and no one notices a job well done – only when something goes wrong. 

What follows is my list of 5 ways to make an ideal conference – and by the way make the meeting planners’ job easier. 

1.  The ideal conference should focus on the future, not the past.  It’s OK to have awards banquets; that’s how half the associations in the world persuade people to attend their meetings.  But if the conference isn’t mostly focused on the future, it’s wasting everyone’s time.  The point of a conference should be to let attendees have a glimpse of the future, in as many ways as possible.  That’s continuing education.  That’s why the Consumer Electronics Show makes news and so many others do not. 

2.  The ideal conference should involve the audience in creating it, running it, and making things happen afterwards.  The best conference I’ve ever attended is the Renaissance Weekend meeting over New Year’s (the one that the Clintons made famous).  Everyone there gets involved, taking turns chairing, speaking, asking questions, and generally taking charge of the content, which is based on questionnaires the participants submit in advance.  In a real sense, the participants own the event, though of course the RW folks remain very much in charge. 

3.  The ideal conference should tell a story, not offer a buffet.  Most conferences offer a theme, but it’s usually so vague as to be little more than a thematic suggestion.  As a result, attendees find meetings alternating confusing, overwhelming, and dull depending on their level of interest in a particular session.  Meeting planners need to do more than top and tail a conference with expensive outside speakers and offer breakouts in between.  That’s not planning, that’s scheduling.  I’ve blogged before on this tendency to create conferences for the convenience of the planners, not the edification of the attendees.  It’s time to raise the ante on the industry. 

4.  The ideal conference should be both green and community-oriented.  My conversation with Tim Sanders for part 3 of this series offered a number of ways that conferences can improve their green credentials.  They also should think hard about doing more than descending on a community, creating a lot of hot air and waste, and then departing in clouds of jet exhaust.  Every conference should build community service into its agenda – and specifically service to the community in which the meeting is held.  See Tim’s book, Saving the World at Work, for more stories and ideas on this subject. 

 

5.  The ideal conference should begin before the attendees gather and end (long) afterward.   Pre-work means that you can get more out of the day and a half or two days that people are together.  It needn’t be onerous; it can be as simple as finding out who the attendees are and what they’re interested in, like the Renaissance Weekend.  And every conference should aspire to publishing a useful record in some medium after the fact.  If you’re getting all those people together for several days, surely the collective genius can manage a set of predictions, a report on the state of the industry, or something that the larger world can care about.  TED produces extraordinary videos that are a wonderful resource for new ideas and interesting speeches.  Other conferences should take note. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I talked with author, speaker, and former Yahoo! executive Tim Sanders recently about the future and green conferences.  Tim is the author most recently of Saving the World at Work, as well as two highly regarded earlier books, Love is the Killer App and The Likeability Factor.  If you’ve never seen Tim speak, catch him live at your earliest opportunity.  He’s a dynamic speaker with a huge talent for connecting with an audience. 

Nick:  Tim, your recent book is all about doing well by doing good, and a part of doing good for any organization is hosting a green meeting.  Has the green revolution in meetings survived the economic downturn?

Tim:  Absolutely.  People still want to make a difference.  I always say that meetings are the movies of the business world.  They’re high profile, and people care about how they’re done and the image they create.  What we’re seeing now is a lot of ‘greenskating’ -- that is, people who are cheapskates for environmental reasons.  They’re saving money and going green. 

Nick:  What form is greenskating taking?  How are people doing both at the same time?

Tim:  Three ways.  First, they’re calculating ‘event miles’.  Those are like the food miles that Whole Foods started and Walmart has taken on in a big way, only for meetings.  In other words, so much of the carbon footprint of a meeting comes from the travel to the meeting and back home again that it makes sense to site the meeting in a place that involves the least travel for most attendees.  So a company in Dallas might pick Phoenix over Orlando, for example.  What companies are finding is that keeping your event miles low saves money – as well as the planet. 

Second, there’s a huge trend toward ‘digitization’ of all the paper and plastic that has been involved previously in putting on a meeting.  Instead of paper you have electronic registration.  Instead of the conference bag, you get a USB stick with everything on it.  Meeting planners are finding that this dramatically lowers costs, again.

And finally, I’m seeing a renewed emphasis on real recycling.  Making sure, in other words, that meetings add as little as possible to the garbage stream.  For example, rather than using cornstarch cups for drinking, which can’t be recycled, meetings are using recyclable plastic.  As you can imagine, recycling has a dramatic impact on the trash normally generated by a meeting. 

And I guess I’d add a fourth way:  green meetings are being talked about more, in breakouts, on the platform.  Being green is an integral part of the conversation now, in spite of the downturn.  It’s inevitable and it’s gathering momentum every day.

Nick:  Talk to me about the lifecycle of an event.  Where is the biggest impact in terms of the carbon footprint? 

Tim:  Beyond getting people to and from meetings, the next biggest area is what is thrown out after a conference or a meeting.  All that garbage, the food and drink, and the conference materials.  Especially the conference materials – all of that suddenly becomes waste.  How many people want to take a huge binder home in addition to the luggage they came with, and that present for the 8-year-old waiting back in Omaha?

Ray Anderson, the Chairman of Interface, the company that ‘greened’ the industrial carpet business, calls waste “stealing from our grandchildren.”  Increasingly, people at meetings are becoming conscious of the future of the planet and transforming meetings to be more green. 

Nick:  Why not just go virtual and have everybody stay home?

Tim:  Virtual meetings can’t substitute for in-person meetings.  Influence happens face-to-face, and it’s still the ultimate offset.  Like the quality revolution, like the focus on change and leadership in previous decades, the 2010s will be the decade of green, of sustainability.  Companies that get it will thrive; companies that don’t will look increasingly like dinosaurs. 

Nick:  Tim, thank you very much. 

PS:  download Tim's Dirty Dozen Rules of Green Meetings here: 
http://sanderssays.typepad.com/DDRGreenMeetings.pdf
 

 

 

 

 

 

It took a year for the conference world (and the traveling public) to recover from 9/11.  How long will it take for conferences and meetings to rebound from the financial meltdown of Fall 2008?

In a way, the comparison is misleading; what we’re in now is a recession much like, the experts say, the 1991-92 one in its sharpness.  9/11 was a discrete event.  Different things. 

And this recovery may be slow; it may well take longer than a year.  That seems to be the consensus in the conference world; from a low of 13% in June 2009, the number of meeting planners who think conditions ahead are favorable has only bounced back to 19% (in October, the latest figures available).  That’s according to Meeting Professionals International (MPI), one of the two big organizations of conference people.   

So there’s not much optimism out there yet, though anecdotally I see and hear that business for professional speakers is picking up already from 2009. 

What are the current trends beyond the difficult financial times?  Below I highlight four trends that I’m seeing from my window on the industry.

Not surprisingly, it’s a no-frills era.

After all the bad press that organizations like AIG received when they continued to send top executives to fancy spas for retreats at enormous expense, the whole focus now is on the low-key, the no-frill, and the minimal.  That’s not such a bad thing as long as companies don’t go crazy trying to save money.  Somewhere between designer sheets and a lumpy mattress at a truck stop there’s a good balance to be struck.  Business travel is stressful and difficult these days, so people shouldn’t wear the hair shirt just for appearance’s sake. 

The good news is that ‘green’ still is a ‘go’. 

Partly because environmental awareness has become – slowly, with a long way to go – a part of business consciousness, it has become a part of the meeting planners’ world, too.  Again, that’s a good thing.  Minimizing the enormous waste that’s generated by meetings, from the bottled water to the bags of loot to the paper trail, is relatively easy and a boon for the environment.  And it saves money, too.  I’ll have more to say about this in a blog later in this series when I interview Tim Sanders, speaker extraordinaire and author of Saving the World at Work.  

The bad news is that planning cycles are shorter. 

The days when you started planning the next annual meeting as soon as the last one ended are gone.  Some conference planners are now getting used to the idea of planning a small meeting in 30 days – an extraordinary shortening of the cycle.  Because businesses can’t predict a year out, they can’t plan a conference a year out.  This shift puts enormous stress on meeting planners, but in an era of instant thinking and goldfish-length attention spans, they’re just going to have to get used to it. 

We can expect more virtual meetings in lieu of face-to-face sessions.  

This is perhaps the worst news to come out of the conference recession.  While of course virtual meetings have the enormous advantage that you never have to leave your office, or your den, to take part, they have the enormous disadvantage that you simply cannot achieve the same things that you can in a face-to-face meeting.  Trust, understanding, commitment, bonding, group cohesion – all of these are huge aspects of meetings, and they simply don’t happen virtually.  Virtual meetings can work well where there is already a relationship established, but they are very poor ways to initiate human relationships.  Any regular reader of this blog will know why this must be so.  Certain things only happen between people in personal and intimate space.  Perhaps the most important of these is trust. 

Next time, I’ll talk in more depth about green meetings and the future.  

 

 

 

 

 

I’m starting a series of blogs on the future of conferences.  Last year was a difficult one for the meetings and conferences industry, and as we start another year, it’s good to take stock.  What is the state of conferences today?  What does the future hold?  What should the industry be doing in order to stay ahead of the game and continue to provide worthwhile activities for organizations thinking about sending their employees away from the office for a day or more?

I invite everyone to join in and share your ideas for what makes a worthwhile conference, what you wish conferences would do differently, and what you particularly like about them.  I’ll be talking to some knowledgeable industry watchers to bring in their perspectives, and I’d be delighted to include yours. 

I’m going to kick off the series with 5 reasons why we still need conferences.  Although the industry took a hit last year, and trends like virtual meetings and videoconferencing gathered momentum, it’s still important both to get people out of the office and get them together.  Why?

1.  Conferences offer work teams and individuals a change of perspective. 

Organizations that never get out of their usual ruts run the risk of missing the trend, the rival, the new market that could change their business or their mission forever.  If you don’t take active measures to continue to scan the horizon for what’s out there, it’s going to get you.  Conferences are a good way to get out of your rut.

2.  Conferences offer organizations and their employees the opportunity for powerful face-to-face encounters. 

Because of the way our brains are constructed, with mirror neurons that fire with the emotions of the people around us, we get important experiences from face-to-face meetings that we can’t get virtually.  Organizations that are experiencing change – or wanting to make change happen – simply can’t motivate their employees as strongly via webconferences and phone calls.  As I’ve said before in this space, the only significant things that happen between people happen in personal and intimate space.  If you’re an executive, you owe it to your people to give them an opportunity to have these experiences with others beyond the immediate office environment. 

3.  Conferences offer people a chance to focus in an information-saturated world. 

Many industries and professions use conferences for various forms of continuing education.  It’s a good use of everyone’s time.  In an information-saturated world, there’s no way that most busy employees can keep up with their industry and professional changes from year to year.  A conference allows you to ensure that your team or organization knows what’s current and what’s developing in their particular areas of expertise. 

4.  Conferences offer busy, stressed-out employees a chance to think about the office away from the office.

When you don’t see your way out of a particular issue with an employee, or you’re stuck in some unhelpful work pattern and can’t seem to break it – or if you’re just so busy you think you’re becoming immortal because the CEO will never let you die until you finish everything – then you desperately need a couple of days away to get some distance on your problem.  Paradoxically, the best way to solve an intractable business problem is often to put down your tools and go away.    

5.  Conferences allow you the chance to create new coalitions and alliances in a neutral setting. 

It can be hard to approach a potential partner, joint venture participant, or even a prospective employee if you have to do it formally, in a meeting set up solely for that purpose.  It’s often better to approach the person or group in the casual-but-focused context of a conference or meeting.  You’re already there, you’ve got a natural reason to talk about the industry, or the topic, or the trends in your field.  What better way to get to know someone, find out how much they know, and gage their interest? 

What reasons beyond these do you see for conferences?  Let me know.  Next time, I’ll talk about the current state of the industry. 

Thanks to all who participated in the “Worst Conference Experience Ever” contest.  We have a winner – a standout – and that could only be the entry from Mike, regarding the speaker who read from the tax code for “several hours with minimal commentary.”  I’m sure everyone will join in and offer their sympathy to the poor CFO who attended that presentation. 

Mike, you win an hour’s free (telephone) coaching for help in preparing any speech or presentation you have coming up.  Let me know via nick@publicwords.com how you’d like to schedule. 

Second place goes to Chris, who attended a Chamber of Commerce meeting (already, he’s got my sympathies) to hear from a judge who set an alarm clock up to keep himself to 20 minutes – only to hit the snooze button repeatedly, going on and on until the room was virtually deserted.  I wonder if the judge’s pronouncements from the bench are as long-winded!

Chris, you win a copy of my latest book, Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma.  Please send your snail mail address to nick@publicwords.com to receive your prize.

Third place goes to Piet, whose heart-rending description of the conference where the speaker was a no-show, but delivered the speech via texting to his assistant in real time does deserve mention for the most surreal and stupid solution to a vexing problem. 

Piet, send me your snail mail address and you also get a copy of the latest book.

Again, thanks to everyone who participated, and congratulations to the winners.

Recently, I called for an improvement in the way conferences are run and pointed out that the current downturn is an opportunity to make some long-overdue changes in conference behavior.  Conferences should involve their audiences more, and in more significant ways.  Conferences should tell coherent stories, not fill endless time slots. And conferences should use MCs as audience representatives.  Among other changes. 

To further promote these ends, I’m announcing a contest for the best story about the worst conference experience you’ve ever had.  First prize is an hour’s free telephone coaching either for a speech or a conference design.  Second and third prizes are copies of my new book, Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma. 

The contest begins with this posting and will run through the end of next week.  Entries must be 200 words or less, and my decision is final.

So bring it on.  Was it a memorably bad speaker?  A particularly stupid theme or breakout session?  A location?  An audience?  What made the experience awful?  Dish it out, and we’ll compare notes as they come in.  It’s time to raise the game by punishing the evil-doers.

The meetings and conference business has taken hits from the economy and Joe Biden telling everyone he wants his family to stay off airplanes.  But, much like the overall economy, the business is slowly turning around, or at least slowing its decline.  So this is a good time to take a moment to consider the conference business in general.  What could it do better when it comes roaring back in 2010?  Following are my three radical suggestions for improving meetings and conferences. 

1.  Conferences and meetings should tell unique stories.   Think about how conferences and meetings are typically planned.  A committee picks a theme.  Then someone finds a keynote speaker to open, and maybe one to close.  Then the committee divides the rest of the time up into 60-minute slots and fills them with ‘breakouts’, panels, workshop leaders, and so on.  The result?  From the conference-goer’s point of view, it’s like a regular workday, only worse.  You’ve got back-to-back meetings to attend, a day or days you don’t get to schedule, and uncomfortable seating.  The only choice you get to exercise is not to take part in some or all of the sessions.  Then you feel guilty for sneaking off to the gym, or your hotel room, or the bar. 

It’s a dreary prospect, because it could be so much better.  A conference should tell a story, one that unfolds and builds from the initial moments to the close.  Like any good story, there should be moments of high excitement, followed by moments of relative calm.  That’s different from panic and boredom in ceaseless alternation - a typical experience of a meeting now.  A good meeting should make linear sense from start to finish, in a way that allows attendees to retain what they see and hear rather than just feeling overwhelmed by the information. 

2.  Conferences should be for, by, and about the attendees.  A meeting or conference should feel participative, and you, the meeting attendee, should have some significant part in it beyond being a warm body.  Attendees should react, critique, judge, schedule, and vote for what they like and don’t like.  And that’s just for starters. There are many ways to give attendees a larger role in meetings and conferences, from making them part of panel discussions to creating discussion groups to having them manage Q and A. 

Every meeting should have an MC, or MCs, and they should do more than just point out the bathrooms and introduce the next speaker.  They should integrate, challenge, pull together, combine, disrupt, and generally function as the representative of the attendees, making sense of it all and demanding more from the speakers and other leaders.

3.  Conferences should be about more than just eating and sitting.   We live more and more of our lives in the splendid isolation of the Internet, with all the faux connectors like Facebook, Twitter, email, and the rest.  Getting together is an increasingly rare and important privilege.  Meetings and conferences should be constructed to take advantage of the gathered group.  Every meeting or conference should use the power of the group to give something back to the community in which the meeting is held.  Help a local charity, fix a local problem, champion a local hero, start a new movement.  There are many ways one could imagine making use of the combined energies of the people assembled.  It’s a crime to waste that gathered power. 

To be sure, some meetings and conferences do some of these things now, but not enough, and few, if any, get them all done.  Meetings take their toll on the environment, the workplace, and the families of the attendees.  It’s time to raise the conference stakes and make them serve us better. 

Following is a list of questions that speakers should ask meeting planners in getting ready to speak at an event.  You won't need to ask all of them all the time; the list is meant to give you a broad set of ideas. 

A.  The Venue

When is the speech taking place?
Where?
How many in the audience?
What time of day? How long should the speech be?
Will the audience be eating or have eaten?
What is the hall like?
Is there lighting?
What is the sound like?
The layout?
Are there backdrops, sets, stages, props, podia?
Are there barriers between speaker and audience?
How long is the audience’s day?
How many other speakers?
What is the nature and content of those speeches?
What kind of chair is the audience in?
How long have they sat there?
What is the event theme?
Slogan? 
What is the arrangement for slides and other visuals?
How quiet is the hall? 
Is there background noise?
When can we get in the hall for rehearsal?

B.  The Audience

Describe the audience
What is the age range?
Socio-economics?
Do they know each other?
Do they work for the same or difference orgs?
Describe the organization(s)?
What should my talk be about?
What is the point of the event for the audience?
How is the audience feeling?
What is the business climate?
What does the audience fear most?
What are their hopes and dreams?
What makes them laugh or cry?
What makes them worry?
What do they need to succeed?
What are their cultural references?
What is they worst speaker they’ve ever seen?
What would you like them to do differently as a result of the talk?
Who are their heroes and villains?
What are their recent successes and failures?
Why are they there?
Have you made any arrangements to get feedback? 
A DVD?

C.  The Speech

Why did you pick me?
Who or what determines the success or failure of this event?
How will that be measured?
How does the idea of my speech work for your event?
Give me some audience members that are great (or bad) examples of the points of my speech?
Can I interview them?
What is the problem the audience has for which my expertise is the solution?
Is the audience expecting interactivity?
Is the audience used to Power Point?
Can I ask for volunteers?
How many of them will have read my book?
Can we arrange for a signing/sales event?
What journey do you want the audience to go on?
Why should the audience pay attention to my speech?
How will you know if they have taken something important away from the speech?

Let’s imagine that you’ve been given the assignment of closing out a conference.  You’re the final speaker and you want to leave the audience happy, motivated, and ready to come back for more.  Assuming you’re not just going to give your usual speech and wish the audience bon voyage, you want to figure out some way to sum up the conference without just going over the main points of each of the preceding speakers.  That’s way too boring, so I'll suggest 5 ways to close out a conference with style, in order of ascending complexity.

1.  Give a brief, focused summary that talks about "Here are the 3 most important ideas I've learned.  Here's what I'm going to do differently when I get back to the office.  Here are the 3 ideas we should look for more information on going forward."

2.  Focus on the future:  give a short talk on the implications for the future of some of the key ideas you heard.  Use these to fit in some of your favorite ideas or issues that weren't addressed fully during the conference.

3.  Poll the audience for their ideas about aspects of #1  & 2.  In other words, quote people you've interviewed along the way for the 3 most important ideas, what they're going to do differently, further research, implications, etc.

4.  Take along a video camera, and interview audience members during the 3 days. Get their very quick reactions to selected talks, ideas for the future, etc.  Then show the video as the closer. (I've used this last idea at several conferences to huge enthusiasm, because people love to see themselves on camera, and the idea builds cohesion and excitement during the 3 days.  It works best if you have a camera AND a sound person; the quality is much better.  But it can be done with a simple hand-held video camera.)

5.  (Just for fun.)  Play a quick game of conference trivia.  Offer prizes (cash, easy things to carry, champagne, gift certificates) to all who can answer the questions (of what went on during the 3 days).  This means that you have to pay close attention during the entire conference, for good trivia. 

Have fun!

Sitting in the audience as a conference-goer, listening to a speech, or any kind of presentation, means working hard.  It’s difficult to retain information we’ve acquired through our ears.  Studies show that we only remember 10 – 30 percent of what we hear.  And judging those messages is a difficult task, too.  How do we decide on the fly what’s worthwhile and what’s junk?  We often are overly impressed with the sizzle of a fresh, well-presented idea, and don’t figure out until much later that the idea is actually a trivial one. 

So here are 4 questions to ask yourself as you listen, to test whether what you’re hearing is a good idea, or merely rhetoric.  Think of it as a conference survival guide.  

First, is it articulate? When you’re on the receiving end of rhetoric, listen closely for clarity. Articulateness is not only a virtue; it is also usually a sign of clarity of thought. The reverse is also true:  if the communication isn’t clear to you, it probably isn’t clear to the speaker.  If there’s a lot of jargon, that usually hides lazy thinking. 

Second, is there a real alternative? It’s always useful to ask yourself, when someone is putting forth an idea, whether there’s an alternative. If a politician says, for example, that he ‘supports our troops’, ask yourself, What’s the alternative? Could a politician say, “ I don’t support the troops ” ?  Obviously not.  If that’s the case, then there is no real idea behind the rhetoric. It’s only grandstanding. This is a good test to apply to your own communications as well.

Third, is the idea consequential? Check the importance of the idea. Does it amount to anything, or is it a tiny thought? Your time is valuable; don’t waste it listening to people rearranging the intellectual deck chairs on some virtual Titanic.

Fourth, does the idea shock but not surprise? A persuasive communication may shock us, but it shouldn’t surprise us. Indeed, good communication does need to shock, because otherwise it won’t get any attention in this information - saturated era.  Beyond that, we should be able to recognize the fundamental truth of it. Things that are both shocking and surprising are truly rare. When Luke learns that Darth Vader is his father, the audience is shocked but not surprised. Some part of us recognizes that it’s in some sense inevitable and logical.  Of course, Darth Vader is Luke’s father. That’s why the Force is so strong within him.  In your own communications, feel free to shock people, but try not to surprise them in this sense of the word.

Keep these four questions in mind as you listen to speech after speech at a conference this spring.  They will help you free your mind of clutter and stay focused on what’s important.