It’s time to disrupt the conference model
Enough of the conference pablum. Where’s the real meal?
Conference season is well upon us, and my advice is always this; choose wisely.
Seems that every industry, and every vertical is awash in the great calling of its pundits and practitioners to gather and….? Well, that’s just it. Do what, exactly? What is the intent of all of these conferences?
Wikipedia’s definition is that a “conference is a meeting of people who “confer” about a topic” and a business conference is “organized to discuss business-related matters”. Seem too ambiguous to you? Me too.
I’ve had it with conferences that have no real purpose or intent. There’s just too much talk, and truly, not enough action, especially for this action oriented culture. It’s time to put our collective feet down until conference organizers show us that there is going to be some tangible outcome from attending their thousand dollar shindig, rather than just:
- hanging around with industry people that we mostly know already
- hearing from speakers that are often irrelevant, we often know more than, or whose video we could view at our leisure because their exact same speech has been delivered umpteen times so far, and
- being loaded down with a…
