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The Future of Conferences
Where does the industry stand today, and where is it headed?
By Nick Morgan
Even through a very tough recession, conferences remain an important part of the business landscape. Why is that? Why hasn’t the recession, coupled with the growing use of webinars and virtual meetings, done away with the business of getting people together in far-flung locations for a few days every year? Following is an examination of the state of meetings and conferences today — and a look into the future.
Incentive trips, meetings and events account for 15% of all travel spending, which creates 2.4 million jobs, $240 billion in spending and $39 billion in tax revenue, according to the U.S. Travel Association. Incentive trips — generally, upscale vacations given to high achievers who met certain goals — alone generate about $13 billion a year, according to the Incentive Research Foundation. Motivational meetings and special events generate $64 billion a year.
- Conferences still 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. - Conferences still 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. 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. - Conferences still 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. - Conferences still 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. - Conferences still 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?
It’s a no-frills era.
OK, so we still need conferences. How about the state of the business in 2010 and beyond? How long will it take for conferences and meetings to rebound from the financial meltdown of Fall 2008?
The recovery will 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?
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.
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.
Yes, 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. Certain things only happen between people in personal and intimate space. Perhaps the most important of these is trust.
What would the ideal conference look like?
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.
Here’s how to make everything go right.
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.
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.
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. It’s time to raise the ante on the industry.
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. Find the interview with Tim here.
The ideal conference should be both green and community-oriented.
It’s time for conferences to 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.
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.
Conferences should involve their audiences.
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.
The ultimate expression of audience involvement is the peer conference.
Another kind of conference model takes this even further: the peer conference. This model has been championed by Adrian Segar for over 20 years.
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? As long as the future of conferences and meetings continue to draw upon human creativity and ingenuity, it is bright indeed.
About the Author
Dr. Nick Morgan is one of America’s top communication theorists and coaches. In his blog he covers modern communications from a variety of angles, including the latest developments in communication research, the basic principles and rules of good communication, and the good and bad speakers of the day. His passion is to connect the latest brain research with timeless insights into persuasive speaking and writing in order to further our understanding of how people connect with one another. He has an international following among professional speakers, students of communication, and executives interested in persuasive communication in cultures worldwide.
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