Everything you did to make your conference better actually made it worse

Pleading for an end to negative-utility choices in conference design

Part of what I do for a living is help people make conferences better. I care enormously about connecting people to each other, and I think conferences are amazing tools for creating valuable community. 

Unfortunately, many conferences not only fail to take steps to help people connect, they actually make it harder for people to meet each other. Generally, they do this in the name of delivering information, but we have far better tools for that. We have had better, more-effective tools for that since the printing press. Delivering information is not what conferences are for. Conferences are for bringing people together.

Lots of the things conferences do are worse than doing nothing.  Imagine the baseline “not do anything” conference - this would consist of gathering all your attendees in a park or a bar, and just letting them hang out. This would be a pretty lazy way to run a conference. It would not be great. But it at least would do no harm. Many conferences are worse than that. They do things that make it harder for people to meet. 

Here are some of the ways that conferences get in the way of connection:

Conference speakers: the worst things about conferences

The worst thing about most conferences are the speakers. I’m not talking about speakers who are bad, or boring, or go on too long. I’m saying even good speakers are usually bad. Here’s why:

Say you had 200 people in a room and you wanted to stop them from talking to each other. A great way to do this would be to give one of them a microphone and put the other 199 in chairs facing forward. 

Most conferences are designed as if programmed talks are the most valuable activity at the conference. But every minute that attendees spend in a lecture is a minute they spend not meeting each other. Speakers can have value. They can give people something exciting to talk about; they can be a costly signal that the conference is a hot place to be; they can give introverts a chance to decompress. But speakers should be a means to an end of connection.

Fancy lunch is the enemy

I went to a conference recently that was not very fancy, but the organizers really splurged on a high-end four-course lunch. 

I’m sure they thought a “better” (ie: more expensive) meal would be a better experience for attendees. But a “worse” lunch would have provided a lot more opportunity to mingle, chances to talk – as people waited in line for a buffet meal, or had to get up to refill their coffee, or even find a spot to eat a quick box lunch at picnic tables. 

The “good” lunch meant being stuck in one place, for over an hour. We were at a big round table (standard at conferences) that made it more or less impossible to talk to anyone except the people immediately to your right and left. So you got to meet two people in an hour, which is a massively inefficient use of what, at some conferences, might be the most social time available.

I’ve also been to lots of conferences who do awards ceremonies during lunch. Or desperate conference programmers, trying to cram in one more speaker, will program them as a “lunch and learn” or something similar. 

At a conference filled with speakers, lunch is the rare moment when you might get to meet some people. Lots of conferences find ways to obstruct that. The consequence is that you can’t even meet people during your lunch break.

Destroy all the unprogrammed time and space

People need unstructured time and space in order to meet. I’m a huge fan of structured conversations and activities that allow people to meet each other. But there’s a kind of  valuable stuff that can only happen in the margins. 

Conference programmers, in their efforts to provide as much programming as possible, often end up crowding the margins out. I’ve been in more planning meetings than I can count where someone, trying to get one more talk into the schedule, decides that the best answer is to make the break (even) shorter. 

And, of course, once the conference gets going, things tend to run long. One of the most common mistakes I see is: having no mechanism to stop speakers from going over their time. So talks can go on forever. Even in a best case, organizers often allow things to run a little late, taking up more of the break time. 

When there are breaks, lots of conferences find ways to make them hostile to hanging out. I’ve been to conferences, where, at the end of the official break times, there are staff dedicated to corralling people back into the lecture hall, ensuring that no-one gets to continue their conversation.

At the event I went to with the fancy lunch - the organizers blew all their budget on the lunch. So there was no money left to have coffee or snacks outside of official break times. This meant that if you did have some down time, and wanted something, you had to leave the conference to get it. 

Remember that the breaks are not time away from the conference, they are part of the experience. They matter.

Work less, accomplish more

Are you a conference programmer reading this? Here is my note to you: I want to make your job easier. I want you to make conferences better not by working harder, not even by working smarter, but just by doing less. 

There’s a natural and positive human trait of wanting to do stuff. If you are a conference programmer, it’s natural to think that your job is to provide conference programming. So you work harder, trying to cram in one more talk, trying to finagle the best possible meal, trying to make sure everyone goes where they have to go when they have to be there. 

But as in many jobs (teacher, manager, facilitator) a huge amount of the value you provide comes from doing less. Like, literally, just create 75% less conference than you otherwise would. This might be initially hard but it will make your job easier and make the conference better. Don’t feel the need to make things happen – the best stuff happens when you are not in control.

(This the first in a series of rants on conferences. I’m interested in trying a few of these, with the aim of creating a free pamphlet or microbook for conference organizers, to help make conferences better.)