Why Big Industry Events are Not Going to Fix Your Company
How many times did you go to events that promise to solve all your business challenges but end up in a full day — or worse two full days — of general chit-chat? My guess is too many.
Events with a tag innovation or digital happen every two weeks in various European cities. They all work by the same scheme: invite executives from end-user companies to speak and facilitate for free, sell sponsorship to solution providers, and sell unreasonably expensive tickets to corporate middle managers and smaller technology businesses.
You know that you’ve been to one of those if you had to sit through — what was advertised as — an interactive workshop, where the person in charge just used the whole hour to share his life-long experience and never gave you a chance to speak. The reason is simple, as a practice event organizers don’t spend their budget on professional facilitators.
Case Study
My business partner and I just came back from what turned out to be one of those events. Our new company AlterContacts brings facilitation and expertise on-demand and enables leaders and visionaries to assess decisions and their consequences. To showcase what we can do, we agreed to facilitate a series of World Cafes on the topic of Innovation for free.
World Cafe is a good format for interaction that in an hour or two brings a group to a joint view on challenges and possible solutions. But in the case of that last event, we were given two and a half hours to facilitate five back-to-back World Cafes. Each one was only 30 minutes with 15 people, no round table or coffee — necessary for this format — and no time in between. So how can you run an engaging workshop with high quality for each and everyone in those circumstances?
Well, to make sure that every participant comes out with a benefit, we designed our own format of Silent Conversation where despite the tight timeline everyone could share their challenge and got input from the rest of the group. After each session we got excellent feedback from the participants who were impressed with the ideas they got, the efficiency and — guess what — interactivity of the method.
Before we could finish our last World Cafe, the organizers’ crew started to dismantle the room preparing it for the next part of the event. They were in such a rush to take everything down and literally kick us out of the room, we barely had time to pack the bags and take pictures of the board, while also answering the questions from our great participants.
A moment later we came to collect the post-its with insights from our groups in the back room. But it was too late. It turned out that the event photographer had already taken one general picture of the board for social media, and the organizers, having no further use for them, immediately threw everything away. So what we saw was the cleaning lady taking out the efforts of 70 people and three hours of work into the trash.
(Luckily we did take pictures and collected a lot of content during the day).
So what?
This behind-the-scenes story is just a good example of what happens at mass-produced events. They are designed to bring profit to the organizers not to bring benefit to participants as they advertise.
If you want to have a real dialogue, real knowledge sharing, real benefit — it cannot be shortcutted. It has to be designed for you, your peers, your team and your organization. The two-three days you take out of your busy schedule to attend these mass-produced events can be spent addressing your unique situation with your truly important stakeholders, specially invited external experts in a well-crafted workshop under the guidance of professional facilitators. Just try it and feel the difference for yourself.
Contact us and let’s design it together specially for you: info@altercontacts.com
