“This was without a doubt the most successful conference I have ever been involved with and this feedback was echoed by all of the participants. FAST Meeting Co. was instrumental in designing and facilitating this success. The conference design provided us an enormous step up, and overcome many of the challenges of alignment and buy-in that are so difficult to achieve with a change in structure. "
Michael Ehrentraut – Head of Transactional Business Group - Westpac Bank |
Conferences are a huge investment in the time and money of individual attendees, as well as your organisation. Both must get tangible outcomes.
But many conferences don't quite get the balance right to ensure that individuals take away a lot and that collective challenges are resolved and results actually happen.
In this article you will learn how to apply a simple but powerful process to guarantee personal take-home value for individual delegate
Individual Level Value: Converting Information into Action
Conferences often leave individuals to their own devices in applying what they learn because "it's their responsibility." Most organisations don't realise:
- If it's your conference, IMMEDIATE DELEGATE VALUE IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY.
- A few simple processes will help your delegates actually apply what they learn.
Most people return to work from a conference with a whole stack of presentations and sheets of notes filled with ideas and possibilities. But it usually takes at least a week to actually look at those notes again, if it ever happens at all!
The fact is that most people have way too much information to sort and sift through in their notes; you need to help them by simplifying and synthesising their knowledge, while they are still at the conference and their ideas are still fresh.
Facilitate a "Solution" and a "Traction" phase in your Conference
Every effective conference goes through four stages. Focus; on the relevant issues. Awareness; building up knowledge which supports a set of high quality Solutions: determine the most important ideas and Traction; make a plan and commitment to action.
Where do most conferences get stuck? In the Awareness phase. If your delegates are waiting until they get back to work until they are getting value from the conference, you've successfully helped them waste a valuable opportunity at the conference itself. Here's how to help them make the most of their ideas and knowledge while it's still fresh.
- Set aside a session of at least 20-30 minutes near the end of the conference (we call this a Solution or a Traction Session and often have separate sessions for these phases, to explore issues in depth)
- Facilitate conversations around the following key questions:
- What are the three most important ideas from this conference?
- If you could only apply one, what would create the biggest impact?
- What actions could you take, one week out, one month out, and further, to put this into action?
- What effects would this action have and what could you achieve as a result?
- How will you keep yourself honest to ensure you take action?
- Have people build these outcomes into their accountability structures; get a buddy to follow up with them, whatever they need to do to help them create action on the day AND on the week they get back.
If you can help your delegates take action as a result of your conference, they'll see the value and look forward to next year. If you fail, they may not be able to justify their future attendance; and would you blame them?
These simple methods, when implemented properly, achieve 80% of the outcome with only 20% of the effort. And that's what gets a Return on Investment.
More concerned about Collective Value?
For assistance with implementing this, or to find out more about how to achieve individual and collective value, you can contact us. We design and facilitate over 250 meetings every year, and our continuing work with clients illustrates the value we help them create.
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