In Praise of the Boring Conference

The good conference does not have a dance floor. The good conference has a working coffee corner, name badges that work, a programme that ends on time, and a sufficient number of chairs in the rooms where the actual conversations happen, which is to say the small breakout rooms rather than the main hall.

The regional conference circuit, for some years now, has been investing in everything except the things that make a conference actually useful for the people attending it. The investment has gone into production values, into spectacle, into the kind of opening ceremony that gets a clip in the highlight reel, into the dance floor that the highlight reel needs an excuse to film. The investment has not gone into the chairs in the breakout rooms.

What the boring conference understands

The boring conference understands that the people who travel to attend it are travelling for the conversations that happen in the half hour between sessions. The conversations require, structurally, that you can find the person you wanted to talk to in under five minutes, that you have somewhere quiet to talk to them once you find them, that you can both get a coffee while you are talking, and that you can get back to your next session without missing the introduction.

None of that requires production values. All of it requires careful logistics. The boring conference is, in operational terms, the conference where the logistics have been thought through by someone who has attended a lot of conferences and remembers being unable to find anyone in the lobby of the spectacular one.

Why the spectacle is winning anyway

Because the spectacle is what gets photographed. The photographer is at the spectacle. The clip from the spectacle is what circulates in the conference's post-event social media, and the post-event social media is what attracts next year's sponsors, and the sponsors fund the spectacle. The loop is self-reinforcing, and the loop excludes the boring conference, even though the boring conference is the one where the senior people who actually decide things are quietly going to do the deals.

The senior people who actually decide things are, in this point in the cycle, increasingly absent from the spectacular conferences. They are at the boring ones. They are at the small two-day events with a hundred and twenty attendees in a hotel that is not the most famous hotel in the city. They are at the working group meetings that are, in name, sub-events of the bigger conference but that, in practice, are the only part of the bigger conference any senior attendee is actually at.

What the press should do about it

Cover the boring conferences. Not on the day, which is when nothing has yet happened. Cover them a quarter later, when the deals that were quietly closed in the breakout rooms have started to appear in the company filings. Trace the deals back to the conference. Write about which boring conferences produced which closed deals. Build, over time, a reputation for being the press outlet that knows where the actual work happens.

Eventually, in a way that is not entirely good for the boring conferences themselves, the cycle will produce a recognition that the boring conferences are where the senior people go. The boring conferences will, in some cases, start investing in production values to live up to the new reputation, and will quietly become spectacular conferences, and the actual senior people will move on to whatever the next layer of even-more-boring conference turns out to be. That is, mostly, fine. The honest job is to follow them there.