Getting Serious About Forecasting Future Conference Topics

Savvy 21st Century conference organizers can effectively demonstrate strategic learning alignment of their conference networking and education programming. (Can you?)

Smart conference professionals are skilled at articulating the value of their event’s networking and learning opportunities. They can discuss how their programming helps their target market achieve their business goals. (Can you?)

These effective meeting professionals are laser-focused on securing topics that meet’s their customers’ current and future needs. They realize that looking backwards does not help their customers meet tomorrow’s needs. They aim for future-focused, cutting edge learning experiences. (Do you?)

Wearing Your Future Focused Glasses

We have to put on our future glasses.

We have to start conference customer conversations about where their business is headed. We have to foster thoughtful, open dialogues on the new challenges we face.

And we need to collaborate on what our customers’ workforce needs are. What types of leaders they need to be successful. And where they’ll need those leaders

We can’t live in the past of others’ successful stories. Those are now history. They worked well for yesterday. And they are now out of context in our ever changing world.

And when you copy another person’s success, innovation gets lost. We all know our conferences need more innovation!

We must become more interested in how to forecast how current decisions produce the greatest opportunities for the future.

First Step Is Business Strategy

The first step to conference success is having focus and clarity on your business strategy. You need to pinpoint that strategic thinking for the next couple of years and for the long term. And you can’t do that looking backwards at others’ success.

Identifying your strategy for the next few years will be difficult. Change and uncertainty constantly confront us and our conference stakeholders.

It’s so much easier to live in someone else’s shadow of success. It takes less effort to copy someone else’s tips to their achievement.

But don’t be fooled! This mockery will mislead you. This mimicry will cause you to miss the mark. You should never try to apply someone else’s accomplishment to your conference without first ensuring that it fits your customers’ needs. And you need to understand the issue that someone else was trying to solve before you consider following in their footsteps.

Making Their Strategy Your Strategy

It is essential that you get crystal-clear regarding your conference’s stakeholders priorities. You need to understand what your customers’ business goals are before planning your conference. You’ve got to make their strategy as part of your strategy.

And it is vital that you wear your future glasses.
You’ve got to take the time to picture what your target market’s profession and operating environment will be like in one, three and even five or more years. And you’ve got to ask those customers where they want to be in one, three or five years.

21st Century conference organizers must stop just scheduling speakers and assigning room sets. To be successful in the future, we’ve got to speak the business language of our target market customers.

Forward oriented forecasters spend their strategic thinking living mentally in the future. Do you?

How does your organization currently pick conference topics? What do you need to know to forecast future focused conference topics?