Do Great Conferences Have a “Special Sauce”?

What makes for a transformational meeting?

I’m asking myself this question because I just attended the best conference of my life. I’m asking it because most conferences, well, suck. And I’m asking it because the people I just spent three days with were continually asking it of each other in order to identify the “special sauce” for themselves – and give us all a better chance of recreating it for more and more people.

The conference in question was WorldBlu live, an annual gathering that is “designed for individuals, for-profit and non-profit organizations who recognize the power of freedom and democracy as a tool for building thriving businesses, promoting innovation, attracting top talent and inspiring full engagement.”

I’ve already written about some of the specific highlights of the conference. Now I want to share the foundations of the WorldBlu “special sauce” that made it such a success – and that any conference planner can replicate, no matter what industry you represent.

1. The People (aka, Widen the Gene Pool) – WorldBlu Live is as heterogeneous a gathering of people as you’re likely to find.  It is, most broadly defined, a business conference, and, true to type, there were many CEOs in attendance, in industries ranging from telecommunications to healthcare to online retail. But there were also human resource professionals. And programmers. And higher education administrators. And musicians. And students. And the people themselves were coming from all across the United States. And Canada. And Denmark. And New Zealand.

This olio of professions, places and perspectives made for conference exchanges where no one could ever safely rely on their own linguistic industry shorthand, or even on an assumption about what one’s training did (or did not) include.  As a result, the conversations formed a powerful double helix of ideas and questions – quite the contrast from the more typical industry-specific meeting, in which the capacity to exchange new ideas – the genetic building blocks that lead to new ways of seeing both the world and our work – is so inward-focused it produces the equivalent of an inbreeding reproductive loop. In short, WorldBlu starts with the assumption that our capacity for innovation grows exponentially when we inquire into core questions with people inside and outside of our chosen fields. And any other conference would be wise to do the same.

2. The Purpose (aka, Start with the “Why”) – As Simon Sinek makes clear in his must-watch TED talk, successful businesses and individuals don’t get better solely by perfecting what they do and how they do it; they get better by understanding why they do what they do, and where that source of intrinsic motivation originates.

The same is true of WorldBlu live. Despite being such an eclectic group, each of us was clearly and powerfully united by the most unlikely of common denominators – a shared commitment to organizational democracy, and, by extension, to create spaces where people could bring their full selves to life and work. It was, put another way, a conference that was designed to reconnect the Me (individual capacity) with the We (collective capacity). And as a result, it was infused with great personal and professional relevance for every attendee.

By contrast, most conferences myopically focus not just on the professional, but also the “what” of what we do. This is what leaves us feeling half-filled, as, indeed, we are. It also prevents us from inquiring deeper into our own sources of passion, strength, and joy – a feeling anyone who attended WorldBlu live will tell you was at the heart of the experience.

3. The Pace (aka, Balance Passive & Active Learning) – Unlike many conferences, in which the majority of people have but one role to play – passive consumer of someone else’s learning experience – WorldBlu Live was designed to strike a dynamic balance between absorbing and co-creating solutions and ideas. Each morning, different people gave short, TED-talk style speeches to the entire conference – and each in response to one of WorldBlu’s ten design principles of an organizational democracy. Afterwards, someone else, from an entirely different organization or industry, spoke briefly about a tool they had used to apply that principle in their work. Then the group transitioned into long unstructured coffee breaks, then box lunches, and then short 45-minute breakout sessions.

I have never seen a shorter time for breakout sessions at a conference, and initially I assumed they would be too brief to yield anything meaningful. What I experienced was the opposite – the brevity encouraged folks to jump right in, and the design assumption was that breakouts were merely a way to help people identify affinity groups, and enable a more useful sorting of the participants so people could have the conversations they were most eager to have with the other people most eager to have them. Consequently, I witnessed something I rarely see in a conference: the complete absence of “drive-by speakers” – the folks who simply show up to dispense their wisdom and then leave as soon as they’re done. As one person put it, “At WorldBlu Live, the speakers were the conference, and the conference was the speakers.”

Imagine if more of our professional conference experiences were characterized by these design principles of people, purpose and pace? Imagine if we started to expect actual learning and fulfillment from these sorts of exchanges, instead of the reluctant knowledge that we will miss yet another opportunity to learn something valuable? And imagine if in the course of our own professional advancement, we made new connections that were equally valuable to our ongoing journeys of personal fulfillment?

It’s possible. I’ve seen it. So let’s stop accepting – and expecting – anything less.

Tribal Leadership, Chicago & Organizational Culture

I’m in Chicago this week attending the National Charter Schools Conference, and on the plane this morning I continued reading a book that was recommended to me last week by Zappos’ Tony Hsieh, called Tribal Leadership.

It’s a fascinating book to be reading as we prepare to start a completely new school. And as someone who has written previously about the prevalence of the wrong sort of business thinking in school reform, I’m struck by how poorly most of my field’s most visible leaders heed the authors’ advice.

To test this theory, check out the following quotations and post a comment to let me know if you think it sounds a lot like (or unlike) any of our current national figures in education:

  1. (Describing a hospital that had effectively remade itself) — “The leaders spent most of their efforts building strong relationships between the company’s employees, volunteers, and patients. Instead of telling people what to do, they engineered experiences in which staff members would look at the same issues they were dealing with, so that strategy became everyone’s problem. And they got out of the way and let people contribute in their own way to the emerging goals.”
  2. (Describing a dehumanizing organizational culture) — “Within this sort of culture, knowledge is power, so people hoard it. People at this stage have to win, and for them winning is personal. They’ll outwork and outthink their competitors on an individual basis. The mood that results is a collection of ‘lone warriors,’ wanting help and support and being continually disappointed that others don’t have their ambition or skill. Because they have to do the tough work (remembering that others just aren’t as savvy) , their complaint is that they don’t have enough time or competent support.”
  3. (Describing the late 19th/early 20th century origins of our public education system) — “The solution was to train a new generation of workers by teaching them inside a system that looked a lot like a factory. A star pupil is one who does the homework and has the right answers. This new system undid the classical liberal education, which said that the value was in the well-designed question, and this shift in focus made the worker exploitable. The system didn’t emphasize creative thinking, strategizing, leadership or innovation. Stars were smart conformists, and people who stuck to the pattern became model students . That approach also bred the “I’m great (and you’re not)” mentality, based on homework, grades, and knowing the right answer. It does not emphasize empowerment, creativity, or individual satisfaction.”

The main point of the authors — who, although they may sound like Linda Darling-Hammond or John Dewey, are actually career business consultants — is that the best leaders are those that “focus on two things, and only two things: the words people use and the types of relationships they form.” Words, because they shape how we view the world and our place in it; and relationships, because without a strong amount of trust, transparency, and mutual accountability, the best you can hope for is short-term (illusory) change.

I can understand why we must be mindful of tending to these insights as we grow our school from the ground up. What I can’t understand is why doing so puts us largely at odds with the most visible “reformers” of our day.

Is It Really All About the Benjamins?

As both a former teacher and a MBA, I’m struck these days by two things: first, the ubiquity of “business thinking” in today’s education reform strategies; and second, the complete absence of the sort of business thinking we actually need to be heeding.

Keep reading here . . .