It's the cracks between that matter
At Manifest earlier this year, I attended a session by Misha Glouberman and Austin Chen on how to host good events. The session used Manifest itself as a positive example, and one thing the speakers highlighted was the utility of conference talks as a sorting mechanism.
The claim is that when you attend a talk at an event, you get some value out of the contents of the talk itself, but the majority of the value is that attending that talk puts you in the same room with the rest of the people at the event who are interested in the same thing as you. First, you sit through the typically non-participatory (and often boring) talk. But afterward, you get to mingle with your intellectual kindred, forming all sorts of serendipitous connections.[1] This is good!
Someone then pointed out that Manifest itself had scheduled sessions back-to-back: once one block of talks ends at 12pm, the next set of talks being immediately 1:00pm. This forces a tradeoff between staying after a talk to mingle, or going to the next talk that interests you. Ideally, the schedule would build in some mingle time, e.g. with a 15-minute buffer between talks.
All of this feels very true to me. And it makes me wonder where else this pattern crops up, and how the structure of different events and activities can be honed to lean into their emergent secondary value propositions.
For instance, I went to Cannes this year, where I saw 11 films in three days. But the schedule of seeing back-to-back films was tight -- too tight. The festival generates a critical mass of film lovers and professionals, an unmatched opportunity to meet likeminded cinephiles. Young adults should come away from the event having met the entire cast, crew, and even critics of their future feature film! Yet if you're busy cramming in as many movies as you can, you have little time to chat with new people (I couldn't figure out why the person seated next to me never wanted to chat with me during a movie. I even did it during the boring parts!).
There of course were parties for those "In the know"[2], but the 3 Days in Cannes program should build socialization into the structure of the program. They could do this by explicitly hosting social events, or they could just loosen up the schedule a bit -- add some slack -- and see what wonderful things emerge naturally.
What other examples, and opportunities for improvement, come to mind?
You could argue that you don't need the talk at all; instead of using the talk as a sorting mechanism, just host a session called "[TOPIC] enthusiasts, show up and mingle!" The counter-argument given during the session was that being invested enough to sit through the talk is itself a filtering function to make sure that only true TOPIC enthusiasts are present -- posers go home. ↩︎
I was not "In the know". ↩︎