The Survivor's Guide to Corporate Conferences

In times of financial restraint, conferences are a good way to rack up some frequent flyer miles, get out of the office, perhaps see a new city and get some free food and drink. Unfortunately, there is a heavy price to pay for this. You may be forced to sit in a darkened room while some important people tell you how important they are and how important their important ideas are.

They will then send you into smaller rooms to discuss their important ideas. Back in the plenary session, you will be obliged to feedback the answers you were meant to give: all your flipchart notes will then be gathered in, summarised and completely ignored.

By the end of this exercise the important people will be satisfied that you have now been fully consulted and mobilised. But just to make sure of it, you will hear a motivational speaker telling you that climbing Everest is just like managing well: this normally serves to show why people who climb Everest should never be allowed near managing a business.

There has to be a better way of making use of conferences.

In truth, the plenary and break-out sessions are largely a waste of time. Most plenary sessions can be missed and no-one will notice you are missing. Catch up on emails, sleep or gossip instead. Break-out sessions are smaller, so you will be missed. Endure them positively.

The real action happens in the unscheduled time. This is when all the delegates are mingling around looking and feeling vaguely lost while at the same time desperately trying to exude an air of importance and urgency.

Most people miss this opportunity completely. They mix mainly with people they already know. In a global conference you will find New York office people speaking to New York people and Paris people speaking to Paris people.
In practice, the conference survivalist knows that this is the opportunity to meet people who would normally be very hard to meet. They will have a mental note of half a dozen important or distant people to meet, and agendas to start or to progress with each of them. They will happen to bump into each of their marks during the conference.

This is not the time to make the full pitch. It is the time to put down a quick marker and agree a follow up meeting if necessary. Doing this well will accelerate some agendas by months, as well as creating new ones.

So if you are ever in charge of a conference, be brave. Slash the amount of plenary and break-out time. Create plenty of time where people from different regions, functions and geographies get to meet each other. Then let good things happen. There's every chance people will enjoy it and it will be productive. You will not even have to hire someone who has just climbed Everest to speak for you.