Many of us know from experience that the most memorable and enjoyable parts of participating in a conference are the tea and coffee breaks, the conversations lunches and dinners, the informal chats outside of the conference room while the meeting is still happening, and the late-night hangouts with other participants. Genuinely good conversations take place and relationships are formed or renewed in those moments. So why don’t we recognise what is obvious, and create structures that bring out these experiences?

Social movements rely on purposeful gatherings to connect, share experiences, and strategise. We do this so often we should be really good at it. But more often than not, things do not seem to quite work. This has prompted me to reflect, and then test my impressions with other conference-goers who turn out to be feeling much the same ways. I need to first acknowledge how much unseen labour goes into any event planning; the event organisers are the most invisible if everything goes well. But it is necessary to recognise and name things that do not seem to work.

Here are the seven deadly sins of conference organising. I want to speak to my fellow conference organisers: of course, not all of us committed all of the sins, and some of you have done much better. But many of the sins would sound familiar to us, and we often let our guards down. By naming them, we may do a better job at avoiding them, and get to organise and experience more effective, creative and joyful gatherings.

Greed

The first sin is greed. We are often greedy about what can be accomplished with a gathering, especially with sizable conferences. We want to invite many people to be there to meet and connect, while also want them to have substantial discussions.

A medium to large conference of dozens to a few hundred people is amazing. But it is not primarily a place for deep learning or for substantial conversations despite our best efforts and most sincere wishes. There are simply too many sessions, too many speakers and too many people to learn and engage deeply. We listen to one panel after another and hardly remember anything from each speaker, while facilitators apologise for running out of time and no more time for questions. We then try to have conversations during breaks that on average last for 5 to 10 minutes before rushing back to the next session or talking or introducing ourselves to someone else. You should not feel alone in experiencing this.

We know deep learning and substantial conversation are most likely to take place in much smaller meetings. You may really have to keep it to a very small number of participants, arguably no more than 10 or 15 but maybe even fewer, to have sustained conversations that give everyone time to think, allow ideas to develop, and for them to build on each other’s ideas.

The medium and large conferences serve other important goals: it is good for building new relationships or renewing old ones, for feeling part of a larger movement with many others with shared values and goals, and for experiencing the optimism and joy of movement-building. It is good enough to take away with you the connections you have made, a sense of the movement’s diversity and creativity, and the fact that people are doing the best they can under enormous pressure and risk.

If these are the realistic goals, then our task is to structure the events in ways that let people and ideas to breath, to have both structured discussions and unstructured time for spontaneous conversations, and to make these events into festivals.

Busyness

The second sin is busyness. Far too often, I have been in conference planning where the logistics – the venue search and booking, the travel arrangement, the drinks, snacks and meals, and the interpretation – take up most of the planning time. We end up spending very little time discussing and experimenting with the actual program. In fact, the program design at times feels like an afterthought.

The logistics discussions and preparations are often not completely done until the very last minute. Time for a program discussion tends to be squeezed in between logistics discussions. When we are tight on time, we tend to revert to the familiar and the safest: let us get these speakers speakers for these panels, and each speaks for 15 minutes. It is the least that can go wrong. No one can claim they love this, but we keep doing it anyway.

It may be worth aiming to reserve a …