Some conference planning teams get their attendees wrong! So why do we get it so wrong? It has everything to do with the rapid pace of change—the age of discontinuity as Drucker called it—and our default thinking. The heart of our current organizational challenges is that we rarely diverge from our default thinking. We assume that all of our conference attendee challenges can be solved by analyzing our past. We embrace quantifiable metrics which is particularly ill suited for analyzing … [Read more...]
Using Human Sciences To Navigate Your Conference’s Future Through The Fog
Our linear and rational conference business models are our default thinking. Unfortunately, those traditional models cause us to navigate in a fog when the conference challenge is less straightforward. There are better ways to understand how to grow your conference than what you’ve done in the past. As conference professionals, we are inclined to continue to use models that have always worked enormously well for us. Yet our past has little relevance in the midst of an incredibly shifting … [Read more...]
An Anthropologist Walks Into A Conference
As your conference grows, it faces increased complexity. According to a recent IBM study of 1,600+ CEOs, the biggest challenge their companies face is the complexity gap. Eight out of ten of those CEOs expect their business environment to grow in complexity but less than half are prepared to face that change. Your conference’s growth faces similar complexity gaps. Forward-thinking conference professionals see gathering business intelligence about their target market as imperative. These … [Read more...]
Quantitative Or Qualitative Conference Measures. Which Matters Most?
Many conference organizers and their organizations tend to focus only on linear, incremental improvements. Most of those improvements are transactional in nature. Improving online registration, ecommerce, confirmations, lodging, CEU tracking, etc. Or they tend to copy what another conference is doing. Rarely do they explore the actual reasons behind number trends. Instead, they just twist metrics into their own exaggeration to serve their own needs. We have to remember that correlation of … [Read more...]
