Innovation - The Next Steps to Improve Your Conferences

My last Blog introduced you to the concept of holding an Innovation session for conference attendees focussed on creating the “ideal” conference format. I started the session by asking everyone to brainstorm everything that would happen, that they would be engaged in, that they would experience, etc. that would make it an amazing conference. Each idea was written on post-it notes. One idea per post-it note. No discussion, this is done individually. Then I had them break into teams of 8. Each team posted their notes onto flip chart paper and began the process of combining similar ideas into groups. This process, known as the development of an Affinity Diagram, generated many different groups of ideas in each team. They labelled each group. For example, “registration process”, “speakers”, “social”, “receptions”, etc. My next Blog will discuss the next steps.