The real value of an “internal conference”

This is a story about an “internal conference” we organized.

It’s not about the conference itself, but more about what we learned from it thru the organization of it. So, I won’t write about the contents of the conference, but about why this was important for us as an organization.

Our department is responsible for the production of digital products, a broad palette of websites, apps for the general media users. We are organized around product teams that have an end-to-end product focus, most of the time they operate autonomous (within boundaries of companywide infrastructure, principles and practices).

A challenge for this approach, is providing every team member the broader encompassing perspective.

And that was the main driver for our first “internal conference”: Make some time to escape the silo of your daily development routines and/or expert in-depth perspective.

Personally, I also hoped that it would create an effect that makes room for some better understanding between team members and between teams. What is the daily struggle for other teams and roles? And how, from what angle, are colleagues looking at challenges and problems?

Whilst organizing this event, we kept a few principles in mind:

• It’s an event from and for the team members: Talks and presentations must be prepared and presented by team members. We deliberately did not invite an external speaker or expert. (We did invite some speakers from other relavant departments)
• The idea is to get people out of their comfort zone: We tried to set-up an agenda that covered a broad spectrum.
• Organize it with an “intrapreneurial” mindset: those who want to contribute in any (practical) way can participate and even shape the event.
• “Eat your own dogfood”: In our broadcast organization we already have a lot of assets that we can use to our own benefit, studio space, lightning and sound equipment, a video-capturing solution, an event app that we can reuse etc. …

And so it went, we created an agenda, team members prepared their presentations, we created an introductory keynote, a lot of practicalities were taken care of and of course we didn’t forget about the catering… :-)

We had that conference and everything went quite well.

In this article I want to share you some insights I gathered out of this event:

• The quality of the presentations was very good. Although many of the speakers didn’t have experience as public speakers, they all did a great job. They can speak with confidence on subjects they work on everyday and that really is a great asset.
• Presentations are best prepared in solitude, when teams tried to prepare a talk in pair or as a group effort, it took more time and created some unnecessary tension between people.
• Doing it “in-house” has disadvantages: some people keep thinking that they can combine the conference with other meetings or operational tasks. They tend to “cherry pick” presentations, this way, they don’t take the chance to step out of their comfort zone.
• A lot of communication is needed. In the weeks before the event, this is a full-time job. Most of the remarks and suggestions we received afterwards were about more and better communication.
• Topical expectations differ: One half of the audience expected “in depth topics”, the other half expected a “broad perspective and overview”. Keep that in mind for the structure of the presentations, always start with the broader context and go a few times “up and down the ladder” with some details.
• Plan for the “aftermath”. When the event is over, it is hard to find the energy to do some retrospective work (create a small after-movie, photo-story or this Medium post :-) )

But the most important learning is the following:

While your team members prepare their presentations, they are actually forced to take some time to organize their thoughts and expertise on the topic they work on for themselves. In a way, they are documenting things and that is often re-used in other discussions, even months after the conference.

The same goes for us, the staff members that presented an introductory key-note, it was a moment to document the overall broader view instead of working towards the next deadline or biggest operational issue.

The value of that can’t be underestimated.