Conferences: ego trip or eco trip?

1 Sept

We’ve just run a conference. Seems an opportune moment to reflect on conferences…

Most conferences in Juba for the last 20 years involve people being invited to sit in rows and subject themselves to the pontification of others, with some tick-box group work, writing up conclusions on flipcharts (that many community leaders can’t read) and long-winded reporting back with no discernible purpose. It’s not only South Sudan. For example, just as Geneva is the headquarters of many international organisations, it’s also the global epicentre of performative pseudo-dialogue.

There was a time when panels, keynote speakers, conferences themselves, probably made sense. For some communities of practice (whether in a research domain, development, public policy, whatever…) it would have been a constructive way of connecting and exchanging directly with peers. Letters, later faxes, and later emails, could have flown back and forth, but the sense of more human interaction still relied heavily on physical meetings. In the time of snail mail, group conversations would have been virtually impossible remotely.

Part of the value of the in-person interactions in eras gone by included all the informal opportunities to follow up in depth over lunch or dinner, and the insight that could grow from full immersion over several days. And covid taught us that although virtual engagements present an opportunity, for now they are still limited.

For those who’ve been in a certain isolated ecosystem of traditional conferences, then you might say that it’s precisely the buzz of engagement in between the planned ‘sessions’ that makes it all worth it. Right then, so what purpose do the ‘sessions’ themselves serve?

It’s now more than 40 years since Harrison Owen articulated as a method what could otherwise be described as ‘natural ways of humans having conversations that matter’ – as opposed to ‘natural ways of humans reinforcing hierarchies of power and influence’. He mused on conference feedback that indicated the best part (for participants) of his meticulously organised conferences were the coffee breaks, and set out to design a method for running conferences as one long coffee break. Open Space Technology was born (or framed, given that its principles reflect natural ways of self-organising that have been practised for hundreds of years… over coffee… and in manifold ways besides, elsewhere and long before).

There are plenty of other methods and approaches that support conversations designed to benefit eco-systems, not ego-systems (nod to Theory U). And there are hybrid approaches that can blend some traditional formats (eg panels) with others so that the product is not something that an atomised panel could achieve, nor arbitrarily privileging perspectives of those who have certain types of power, nor inviting them simply to ‘download’ the same things they’ve already said elsewhere.

But instead, many conferences have become marketing products: substance less important than platforming people and organisations, enabling them to create marketing material (especially via social media posts) they can then use to build their brand credibility.

There is maybe nothing wrong with this, but we should be honest when that’s the case, not pretending that there’s any inherent comparative value we create by bringing people together. And this needs to be set against the costs, not least the travel and associated carbon cost.

This links to complexity theory [eg the Cynefin framework]. There are many aspects of a ‘well-run’ conference that exist in the complicated domain, and that’s as far as it often goes. Set up a framework of sessions, systematically fill them with panels, films, keynotes, and make sure people have accommodation and food. Done well, you have yourself a well-oiled conference machine. It needs an expert event manager, but it’s a relatively low energy cost.

Some of this complicated conference infrastructure is also needed with more innovative design (just a reminder, by innovative I mean ‘natural ways of humans having conversations that matter’). But it becomes supporting infrastructure to complexity-based frameworks, methods, and micro-methods, and that is itself a support structure to enabling effective participation and self-organisation.

There are some issues with more equalising, participatory approaches. One particularly thorny one is that it might be hard to attract the participation of people whose main preoccupation is having their knowledge and status acknowledged explicitly as speakers and presenters. And some of those people are exactly the people we want to attend, to give our conferences credibility…

That raises the question of whether I should really want those people. It also raises another question: are all these folks self-important types, or in some cases am I just projecting onto my idols my own insecurity and need for recognition? I was talking once with a friend whose (very) high flying, distinguished boss was lamenting how tired they were of being invited to speak at conferences, when they’d really be happier to go along for the ride, along with everyone else.

In some ways, this kind of participation is not a huge stretch. It just means showing up, taking ownership for my experience, being ready to learn from any direction, and ready to offer my own contribution – whether that opportunity comes in front of a plenary of 400 people or over lunch with one person. This qualitative rather than quantitative approach to social movement is a challenge to capitalist conferencing philosophy.

None of these approaches are silver bullets, and often they are facilitated poorly and given a bad name, and sometimes used in the wrong contexts. They involve skills, and often are picked up by people who have seen them done well, figure it can’t be that hard and try their hand. We draw on people with expertise - and only those people - in so many areas of life, but for some reason we think that anyone with a bit of gumption and common sense will have the skill to manage self-organising processes with groups of hundreds of people.

Another uncomfortable issue is control. We love to be in control. And because event management has become associated with complicated project management, it’s a space naturally occupied by those who are biased to control. This is great, when it comes to certain aspects: I don’t want a conference manager who is chilled out about whether the accommodation arrangements have been triple checked, because ‘everything will be fine in the end’. I want someone on top of their proverbial.

But when that mentality seeps into the structuring of the ‘conversations’, it can be the kiss of death. We speak of the ‘chilling effect’ of policy structure on the public space and there is an equivalent ‘chilling effect’ of conference structure on the conference space. It doesn’t mean no words are being spoken, it means the words lose vitality, in a morass of verbal diarrhea.

This goes beyond just conference managers; it goes to content holders who need to be sure of what people will say, need the conversation to stay within tight parameters, need that only certain people have certain platforms, that certain people aren’t put in the same conversation with certain other people. All this is fundamentally the need for control, hiding behind veils of ‘sensitivity’ and ‘relationship management’. These are the sorts of reputational risk elimination strategies that also eliminate creativity, spontaneity, healthy tension and suffocate collective intelligence.

And for some subjects, it’s also about the need to remain relevant and preserve value. Because as soon as knowledge and wisdom are recognised as distributed in a system, stocks in certain individuals automatically plummet. This doesn’t apply to all domains, but certainly to some.

So we tried to take a different approach to the women’s conference last week. I’m not saying it transformed anything fundamentally. It probably achieved very little. In fact I’m pretty sure it achieved very little. But the structure of it facilitated connection - combinations of open plenary sharing, always in an open circle, embodied representations of peace and conflict, dancing every morning and afternoon, mixed language groups to share directly across communal lines; and a focus on responsibility, not dependency. And it wasn’t just kumbaya holding hands. A significant portion, in a mix of formats, was devoted to addressing the cycles of abduction in the region.

Whatever else, it wasn’t boring.

Last Thursday evening, we were finalising the format of the final session of the conference. Having caved in to requests for a couple of speeches from government officials on Monday, the plan for the final session was a closing circle. It was for anyone who wished to share their brief reflection after the four and half days together, without carving out dedicated space for anyone. A few colleagues were concerned at this egregious, premeditated breach of protocol.

All 60 women, the three government officials, and a meagre presence of partner and donor representatives (none were invited to speak) sat in one circle that you see in the photo above. Women shared in three-minute bursts reflections of all sorts, from the banal to the profound – apologies for prejudice, practical commitments for follow-up, and much more. No-one stopped the donors or government present from speaking in this open flow, but they seemed content to listen, to share in a circle owned by the community of women across the three communities.

It underlined the tenor of the five days’ conversation: that what lies ahead for these women will be primarily determined by their own leadership and ownership at the community level.

I first stepped into this world of self-organising processes in 2008 in Indonesia when I saw Open Space Technology used for the first time. When the process was outlined to me the evening before, I was 100% skeptical. The next day, I was proven 100% wrong.

If this is new to you, you could start some exploring somewhere below: