The Art of Conferencing.
Speaking for myself, conferences have lost the bulk of their joy.
I wouldn’t single out a single discipline for this. (Design, research, service, strategy, hackathon, agile, pure anthropology, applied anthropology, trans-disciplining, management-innovation… some examples I speak to from experience.) Regardless of intent, all gatherings appear to resemble one another. And the payoff is getting harder to come by.
For the price of admission, attendees get flooded with pithy answers to complex situations. That flood can rise up to our necks and at lightning speed. Dousing one’s mind in adrenaline. Gripping one’s spirit in a high energy coma. [1]
So, when the carnival leaves town, or more likely, when we head for the airport, little more than a foggy impression of the mindful adventure will take root in our skulls. Regardless of all the notes that piled up or the business cards, we remembered to gather. How can that even happen? [2]
Maybe the dominant format deserves a refresh. I would report that this feels true whether I am in the audience, speaking at a podium, or leading a workshop.
Last week, GOOD19_London pressed some joy buttons in me. And I wasn’t alone in experiencing a different type of gathering. There is something about the format of GOOD that brings back the joy and makes things better.
A Strange Attraction.
The half-life of knowledge seems unusually short in the career of the knowledge worker. This seems to be the case for the scientist, designer, or the engineer alike. Most chalk this up to the speed of technology. But we deserve a fuller explanation because when we look more closely at our surroundings the knowledge we pay for is not about how to make a tool work. We travel to conferences from great distances to understand how stranger things work. Phenomena: In our world. And in our careers.
Conferences are pretty expensive, right? The ticket + travel + lodging + entertainment + … it adds up to real money. So the urge to find a return on investment can draw our gaze on the top of a social ladder. Or to swoon at a beacon of power. [3] If you can, and if that works out, then fair play. Do that. Still, the powerful among us represent a scarce resource in smallish groups. We tend to learn more from small gestures, odd behaviors and promising experiments than we will from a quick brush with fame.
As a conference program unfolds, a social vacuum forms between the sage on the stage and the rest of the crowd, who arrived with their tangle of questions, doubts, uncertainties or… complaints, perhaps. [4] The question is, are there effective ways to bridge over the space which gets created?
Listening Relies on Work.
In fact, active-listening requires spooling content and replaying back to the sender. In an “I hear something like this, is that what you had in mind?” kind of way. [5]
Many of the people I was meeting for the first time marveled how GOOD19_London was a safe place to participate in questions and issues. I counted two reasons for it. First, kudos to the team at STBY for centering the program around discussions, and learning. Second kudos to all who made it is the safe place to ask, listen, explain, show or share.
The essential difference that I and others experienced was about leadership from the audience. Rather than the top-down leadership of experts. No disrespect to expertise from me. We live in a time that easily mocks expertise that was hard to earn. What a GOOD conference does that others may chose to copy is to value life experience–as expertise.
references
1. https://www.amazon.com/Overwhelmed-Work-Love-Play-When/dp/1250062381
3. https://medium.com/@HBCompass/so-this-one-time-at-a-journalism-conference-5d0662bb18b5
5. HARMON, MICHAEL M. “APPLIED PHENOMENOLOGY AND ORGANIZATION.” Public Administration Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 1, 1990, pp. 9–17. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40861462.
