Conversations, Collaboration and Chemistry

Judith E. Glaser, an author, business executive, and self-described “organizational anthropologist,” says science has now proven that the chemical nature of relationships, conversations and collaboration is more than an attraction metaphor: it’s a reality.

So the quality of our conversations — especially those participants have with others at conferences and meetings — has a direct chemical impact on them, those around them, and therefore on the organizations they belong to.

Glaser, who writes about the topic in her book Conversational Intelligence: How Leaders Build Trust and Get Extraordinary Results, has done research that identifies three levels of conversations. You want to strive for Level 3 at your conferences:

• Level 1 conversations are transactional in nature. It’s sharing of information. These tell and ask experiences create closed spaces.
• Level 2 conversations are positional and defend a specific belief. The goal is to influence someone to do something specific. Level 2 conversations limit space and usually result in the release of negative brain chemicals.
• Level 3 conversations are transformational and collaborative. They involve sharing and discovering together. They create the space for trust, progress, and positive brain chemistry.

Quality Conversations Matter

Your conference success depends upon the quality of your conference culture, which depends on the quality of your participants’ relationships, which depends on the quality of their conversations. Those conversations release specific chemicals in your participants’ brains. Your conference success does not depend upon the quality of the content delivered to your participants, according to current neurological and cognitive research, as much as it depends upon the quality of your participants’ conversations.

This is important, considering that the large majority of our conference schedule is dedicated to pushing content to our audiences. We want to exert control over their learning, so we focus on providing one-way didactic expert speakers who dispense information. We schedule limited opportunities for our participants to converse about that critical content.

We need to flip that, and develop conference experiences that nurture collaboration and conversations. Dedicating conference time and creating the space for open and non-judgmental conversions is a critical skill we must master. To best accomplish this:

1. Adopt and model conversations with regular attendees at the highest level of your organization. A high-sharing culture needs to be part of your meeting purpose.
2. Coach presenters on how to chunk session content into 10-minute segments, interspersed with thought-provoking audience-discussion prompts in pairs or groups of three.
3. Design a human library or mentor zone where participants can “check out” an industry thought leader for 10–15 minutes.

Enable True Conversations

Conversations are not what we think they are, Glaser says. We’ve grown up thinking they are about talking, sharing, information, telling people what to do or telling others what’s on our minds. A true conversation goes deeper and is stronger than sharing information. A transformative level-three conversation actually releases chemicals that cause us to bond with one another.

To build trust and empower others, we need to understand the three levels of conversations. We have to develop conference experiences that move from power over others to power with others. It is only then that we can truly help make our participants’ experience at our events transformational.

How can you plan for deep conversations at your conferences? How can you better engender trust among your attendees?

Adapted from Dave’s Forward Thinking column in PCMA’s Convene. Reprinted with permission of Convene, the magazine of the Professional Convention Management Association. ©2017