Earlier this week I posted something on LinkedIn that I expected would ruffle a few feathers. The gist: stop cramming your conference agenda with more sessions. Remove one. Replace it with nothing. Let people talk to each other.
I’ve given over a thousand presentations. I’ve been the opening keynote, the closing keynote, the emcee, and the guy hanging around the coffee station the next morning because I actually stay for the whole event. And in all that time, across every industry I’ve worked in, no one has ever walked up to me and said, “I wish there had been more breakout sessions.”
What they say is, “I met someone at lunch who might change my business.”
So I said that out loud on LinkedIn. And something interesting happened… meeting planners started confirming it in the comments.
One planner told me her organization runs a 50/50 split between programmed content and open social time. Equal time. Most planners would sweat through their shirt at that ratio. But her attendees call it their favorite conference every year.
Another comment described a conference just attended. Four days. Back-to-back breakouts. Thirty minutes each. Barely any session longer than an hour. Every single attendee left exhausted. Not inspired. Not connected. Exhausted. That’s not a conference. That’s speed dating with PowerPoint.
A third point of view… someone who’s been doing this since before AI was part of the conversation, told me she noticed years ago that the real energy was in the hallways. People sitting on the floor with laptops. Side conversations full of laughter. The organic stuff that happens between sessions. So she started planning for it. Longer breaks. More seating in the corridors. Permission to skip a breakout if a conversation was going well.
She didn’t wait for a thought leader to tell her this. She watched her attendees and followed the signal.
And then there was the attendee who admitted that the best decision she ever made at a conference was skipping a session. She was in the middle of a great conversation, and instead of cutting it short to go watch someone’s slides, she stayed. She said it felt like she was breaking the rules.
That’s the problem right there. When your attendees feel like rebels for choosing a conversation over a presentation, your agenda is working against them.
One commenter nailed it when she said if your event could have been a Zoom call, you haven’t earned the plane ticket. That’s the test. Every planner should ask themselves that question before they finalize the schedule.
Look, I’m a keynote speaker. I make my living on stage. I’m not arguing against content… I’m arguing against the assumption that more content equals more value. It doesn’t. Content without space to process it, discuss it, and connect over it is just noise. INFObesity, as one commenter (Sam Horn) called it. A buffet nobody can digest.
The events people talk about for years aren’t the ones with the most sessions. They’re the ones that gave people room to breathe, to find each other, and to have the kind of conversations that only happen when you’re not rushing to the next room.
This is why I built my work around Human Interaction (H.I.). The moment that Human Interaction is about to have in society exists because too many people are getting this wrong. And we can no longer pretend that the connections are not the most important part of events.
Remove a session. Trust your attendees. The hallway is your best venue.
Stop competing with it.
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Thom Singer, CSP, is the opening keynote speaker you want for your next conference.