A couple of week’s ago, Martin Couzins made an interesting post about case studies at conferences and events. Since SMEs in the UK account for 61% of the workforce, Martin reasonably asked:

…how about more mixed conference programmes that represent organisations – and the work experience – of the majority of workers?

Martin Couzins – LinkedIn

There are a few issues with this. Firstly, he who pays the piper calls the tune. At many events it means those with larger budgets will want to showcase their customers and the larger organisations will get first dibs. I understand this but, as Martin says, the deployment to one hundred people will be different to one hundred thousand and, for the individual L&D professional in a small organisation, they need to know the detail to identify the devils.

We hear that real world application of theory and case studies is what people want at conferences. If people can’t relate to the world the speaker is coming from, it is as real as the world presented in an early VR headset.

If modern learning is learner centred, multi-modal, constructivist and connectivist, social and collaborative, are we running conferences in ‘old money’ by sticking with sages on stages, letting their words of wisdom drip from their lips?

So how do we change this? Here are a few ideas:

• Let’s create fail sessions at conferences. These are spaces where people have problems with their delivery and they can get support from peers
• Open sessions built on topics. E.g. a session on learning strategy which is facilitated rather than presented
• Output described sessions. Sessions which describe what need to happen but don’t describe how it’ll happen allowing freedom for people to choose how to engage.
• Flipped sessions. Content for sessions is sent to attendees beforehand and they get to discuss it when they come to the event.

These all favour SMEs as much as the bigger names. This diversity of thought creates diversity of conversation and a shift in the way people expect to learn at a conference.