Well it's got conference in the name!

Here's a bizarre idea, but it shows that there are VERY different ways of doing conferences! I could do without the headgear I think. Maybe there's a market for cool or funky headgear instead of this? You know, safe but not so uncool.

Better presentations

Here's another example of somone who has loads of excellent tips on improving presentations, Cathy Sierra, someone who's blog I read regularly.

A little taster ...

Nobody knows more about the importance of beginnings than novelists and screenwriters, but too often we think their advice doesn't apply to us. After all, we give technical presentations. Lectures. Sermons. We cover professional topics, not fiction. Not entertainment.

Oh really? Regardless of your topic, the only way they'll read or listen to it is if you get them hooked from the beginning. And like your mother always said, "You never get a second chance to make a first impression."

Followed by some excellent tips - have a look!

Democratisation of government: success and failure

I've been mulling over ideas as they have come to my attention over the past year roughly related to the question 'how can the public and third sectors and those they serve benefit from new web things, especially social networking developments?' Examples include blogs, wikis, search engines, podcasting, tagging and so on.

Thanks to a Demos post for this link to a recent (probably pretty miserable) Defra experience with a wiki to develop and environmental contract. David Milliband is also the first minister (Environment) to start a blog by the way.

I think it's a shame that this experiment failed. There are no doubt many ideas about why it did so, but I think the most important is that this kind of collaborative work is based on trust. This is an indication of the trust problem that government has, rather than proof that this approach will never work. The huge success of wikipedia and the tsunami blogs show the potential of this kind of tool. The third sector has significantly less of a trust problem than the public sector.

My view is that local government, and local partnerhsips can show the way for this kind of democratisation of government. Whether national governments will ever participate in the kind of trust that these forms of collaboration and communication need is another matter.

Attention span

"Formal speeches usually involve delivery of a written text to a passive audience. The speech is usually prepared ahead of time and focuses on what the speaker wants to say." Christine Loh 2003

That sounds familiar. So if we have to have formal speeches, what can we do about making them better?

Well one conference I attended on heritage interpretation in Aberdeen was notable for a few things, in particular that the papers to be presented were already collected and bound in book form and were handed out with the delegate packs. If that can be done, then how about making the speeches available on the conference website before it starts. And why not add a bit of competition too? Parallel speeches, where the audience can vote with their feet.

In the same paper Christine refers to research on attention spans, suggetsing that 15 minutes should be the maximum length of any speech. So let's aim for 10 minutes, and be strict with it. An assertive chair is useful in this respect.

Making those speeches better is also within the realms of possibility. Cliff Atkinson's book Beyond Bullets is but one example of ways to do it better.

And prizes for the best ones, with voting asking for reasons and those reasons made available to speakers past present and future.

And we don't have to have them all in one go do we? Speech, workshops, discussion groups, speech, workshops etc.

So that's on the assumption we have to have formal speeches of course. Can we deal with speeches or the status role that speeches play
in a different way?

Hierarchy of needs

One small observation on the last night of the conference led me to another whole line of thought. Not for the first time, but it seems relevant.

Loved the band, the caller did a fine job, and there was a good mix of experienced dancers, beginners, and what I call 'lumpy' dancers like myself. I've got a vague idea of what I'm doing, but lack any sense of refinement and grace in delivery. I dance like I'm wearing wellies. (My apologies to anyone who suffered from the experience.)

At the end, when virtually everyone had joined in the last dance, there was an immediate demand for water. But the caterers were very much packed up and unresponsive to demands. And then there was a fairly natural inclination for people to either have a 'wind-down' drink, or carry on dancing. But that proved difficult.

I think these two things reflect something of Maslow's hierarchy of needs describing human motivation. I think there's great merit in using a model like this to plan and review the conference experience from the delegate's point of view. I think most conferences do pretty well of taking care of biological needs, such as food, coffee and comfort breaks. But I haven't experienced many that go further up Maslow's pyramid ...

The Hotel Schindlerhof seems to have inlcuded at least some of these thoughts into its facilities.

Here's a quote from the link ...

At the creative centre, our conference world is yellow!

It takes more than just a conference room and lunch for meetings where spirits and feelings are in harmony.

Design, colours, scents and music create a unique experience at the Schindlerhof's creative centre.

This synergetic effect not only promotes your well-being: it boosts your motivation, too.

Our three profesionally equipped conference rooms give you the perfect conditions for body, mind and spirit to combine effectively, with enjoyment and efficiency.

Looking at Maslow again, I think there seesm to be something relevant to my earlier point about the status of keynote speakers. What do you think?

Learning from mistakes

I once heard a (probably famous) business expert saying that he had more faith in the business judgement of someone who has had a business failure or gone bankrupt at least once. Something like that anyway. The point being that you learn so much more when things go wrong.

If you have a healthy approach to 'failure'. There's a whole story in itself about how we, people and cultures, view, deal with and comment on 'failures'. But my point here is to see what this idea does for the now traditional 'best practice' approach to sharing learning.

What about sharing 'disaster learning'? Or 'cock-up creativity'? Or some other vulgar buzz-word. I roughly agree with the sentiment; I think disasters, crises, failures, cock-ups and so on are full of extremely rich learning. And they also offer the opportunity to have a laugh at what goes wrong. You know, 'you'll never believe what happened next...', while at the same time learning what came out of it. It's very hard not to become a bit patronising or pretensious, (well for me anyway), when trying to talk about 'best practice'. The implication is always, 'this what we did, and it's pretty damn good'.

So, in talking about part of a conference format, what about a light-hearted competition for the most productive disaster? People can present their stories and what they learned from it, and maybe bring out other similar experiences from those listening.

I can see some risky aspects to this, but hey, this is just thinking out loud ...

Making or doing?

I took this at a small gallery a couple of weeks ago. I agree as far as it goes, but it seems to exclude so much doing that I would happily call history and heritage too. Music, dance, stories and conversations - the ephemeral things that nontheless persist and live if we keep doing them. And then there's the stuff in between and including 'made' and 'ephemeral'. Which is where I think landscape lives. Some elements are made; some are done and we have to infer their existence ...

All those brilliant minds!

While I was out cutting the grass my mind was wandering over a few things as it does.

[In fact I often use my garden as a place to reflect, the hands are occupied, the mind thinks it's occupied, and so the amazing capacities of the human mind are freer to roam and explore.]

Anyway, I was thinking over the conference again, and I thought about the incredible range of experience and knowledge that 300 dedicated people like the Europarc delegates have. imaging if we could really enjoy that experience and even apply it to specific practical issues. I'm thinking of something a bit deeper than a case study, more a kind of problem-solving session. Bear with me as I make this up as I go along ...

I can imagine people offering their own real current challenges up to the delegates. Each challenger would try and make their case as interesting, difficult, attractive, fascinating, whatever. Their aim would be to attract the experience of people committed to helping them in their challenge. People would sign up to join the challenge at the conference during a focused session. The structure and ground rules would need thinking about, but even they could be flexible depending on the challenge and the number of people involved.

I can imagine some of the practical and strategic issues I've faced in my work benefiting. Some complete blockage could be broken up with a brainstorming session to generate other ways of looking at it, and alternative ways of tackling it. I'm sure you can think of examples yourself.

There's something practical and incredibly valuable about sessions like this it seems to me. Sitting listening to speakers is all very well, but even with the best will in the world the question and answer session at the end hardly makes it interactive. We might as well be watching the TV. It's the interaction that is the best thing about getting together at conferences, and being able to focus that on helping each other out with a specific challenge or problem, or even to generate a few dreams, (why not?), surely that would be better for everyone?

Just a few thoughts off the top of my head...

Now the show is over

Once the show is over, and the formal speakers have done their bit, we get workshops, field trips and side meetings. Mine were great. The Workshop B3 was broadly on maintaining skills. I enjoyed meeting Bernard from Briere and Didier from the Cevennes, we had good material to work on and had some excellent discussions. I learned a lot. That's what it's about isn't it?

Maybe all the workshops weren't as good?