Designing a memorable conference

By Jeffrey A. Govendo

Think about the last corporate conference you attended. What stands out the most? Was it the lavish surroundings; the food; the golf; or the stimulating sessions, insights gained and rewarding new relationships?

Or … are you having trouble remembering anything about it?

Putting on a large company meeting is no minor expense. Travel, hotels, food, speaker fees - these add up quickly to some enormous numbers. Not to mention the cost of having employees away from their jobs for days at a time. If a sizable portion of attendees at your conferences have trouble with the question I've posed, or in a moment of candor respond with a, b, or c, chances are you're not getting your money's worth. If, after a couple of weeks, they can barely recall the major themes of the meeting or what actually transpired, it's a good bet they were simply going through the motions of attendance, rather than really attending.

Unfortunately, this is a more common circumstance than most would like to admit. Conference attendees often complain of boredom, of topics that lack relevance to their jobs, and agendas that are either overplanned or underplanned. Above all, they feel passive and uninvolved, as they listen to speaker after speaker impart information while they sit, often for hours on end.

Just think back to your days in college or graduate school. What were your most memorable courses? Granted, some traditional lecture courses can be quite fascinating, depending on the subject matter and the instructor's style of delivery. Chances are, though, that the ones you remember best were those that had a high level of interactivity between the instructor and students, and among the students themselves. Classes in which the learning was in the doing. Where discovering things together was at least as important as being given the facts.

Recent research on adult brain-based learning confirms what common sense tells us to be true - that a high degree of interactivity and emotional involvement in the learning process not only increases the amount of information taken in, but also the retention of that material over time. Our minds perform optimally when learning is multi-sensory, offers variety and contrast, and alternates between periods of high mental activity and quiet reflection. In addition, we tend to make more sense of newly acquired material and remember it better if there is an opportunity to verbally share our understanding of it with other people immediately afterward; in effect, "sealing" it in our brains.

All of this should be taken into account when determining the design of a corporate conference. Too often, though, design is driven primarily by content - that is, the subject matter that needs to be covered - rather than by process, or how this material should be addressed. The result is that while the subject areas do get covered, the actual impact they have upon many attendees is questionable.

With this in mind, therefore, here are a few basic design principles and process suggestions which should go a long way toward helping you put together a conference people will remember for something other than the golf:

1. Start with a clearly-stated purpose for the conference - a unifying theme - and plan all activities with it in mind. This will serve as your guide in designing the various group exercises, and as a touchstone for attendees who tend to perform best when they know what is expected during their time together.

2. Plan a variety of group experiences, and alternate between them.
In addition to varying the size of the groups, think also about what people will be doing in them. Going from a large keynote in which people sit quietly and listen to smaller venues where they sit quietly and listen, isn't much of a change. Groups of any size can be highly interactive if they are skillfully facilitated. Even within a single session the group dynamic can be significantly altered by having people pair up or form triads to process a particular point or engage in generating new ideas.

3. Don't limit the group to Q&A after they've sat through a presentation.
It's not that asking questions and getting answers isn't valuable, but you can do much more here to get people involved. This is a time for capturing the audience's top-of-mind ideas, and the connections they're making between what they've just heard and their own jobs; their own lives. De-briefing a speech in this dynamic way actually encourages people to make it more relevant to themselves, increasing its perceived value and creating the emotional involvement that is key to good learning and retention.

4. Use this time to engage people in problem-solving real challenges faced by the company. Conference designers who look primarily at content tend to think about what attendees will get - the "takeaways." Those who look equally at process think about what attendees will do, and what they can give. This is an excellent time to involve people in working on some of the company's toughest issues. You have on hand your most diverse set of thinkers, they're away from their everyday routines at the office or laboratory, and they want the action - to actually create something. You also have the opportunity in a large meeting to put fresh, new combinations of employees together - people who may never have had any previous contact - and find out what these new "chemistries" might produce. It adds excitement to the conference and - who knows? - perhaps the next big breakthrough idea!

5. Make available to all attendees a record of the proceedings, recommendations and action items. The more people are involved in actually doing and creating things at the conference, the more they will want to see their recommendations captured and acted upon. Appropriate follow-up activities should be as much a part of the conference design as the on-site sessions themselves. In this way, your employees' emotional involvement continues long after the meeting is over, and the meeting itself assumes greater strategic importance than the more typical "one-shot" event that people may or may not remember several weeks later.

Copyright © 2001 The Innovative Edge™ Inc.

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