Please, no more group brainstorming

And other ways to make event content more valuable

I organise and attend a lot of conferences, so the below is correct and need not be caveated based on my experience, but I could be missing some angles here.

When you imagine a session at an event going wrong, you’re probably thinking of the hapless, unlucky speaker. Maybe their slides broke, they forgot their lines, or they tripped on a cable and took the whole stage backdrop down.

This happens sometimes, but event organizers usually remember to invest the effort required to prevent this from happening (e.g., checking that the slides work, not leaving cables lying on the stage).

But there’s another big way that sessions go wrong that is sorely neglected: wasting everyone’s time, often without people noticing.

Let’s give talks a break. They often suck, but event organizers are mostly doing the right things to make them not suck. I’m going to pick on two event formats that (often) suck, why they suck, and how to run more useful content instead.

Panels

Panels. (very often). suck.

Reid Hoffman (and others) have already explained why, but this message has not yet reached a wide enough audience:

Because panelists know they'll only have limited time to speak, they tend to focus on clear and simple messages that will resonate with the broadest number of people. The result is that you get one person giving you an overly simplistic take on the subject at hand. And then the process repeats itself multiple times! Instead of going deeper or providing more nuance, the panel format ensures shallowness.

Even worse, this shallow discourse manifests as polite groupthink. After all, panelists attend conferences for the same reasons that attendees do – they want to make connections and build relationships. So panels end up heavy on positivity and agreement, and light on the sort of discourse which, through contrasting opinions and debate, could potentially be more illuminating.

The worst form of shallow discourse is the rampant and endless nodding along that often happens on panels. It goes like this:

• Panelist A: [makes a point].

• Panelist B: “Panelist A is right. [rephrases Panelist A’s point]”

• Panelist C: “I think Panelist B makes a great point, though I’d just want to add that [basically Panelist A’s point again with a caveat everyone already thought of]”

• Moderator: “It sounds like [panelist A’s point]”.

The greatest gift you can give to your audience as a panelist is the following phrase: “Nothing to add”.

There are versions of panels—or rather, getting multiple important people on stage and using time well—that do work.

• Starting with short talks: Let each panel member speak briefly (!) about the topic. This could then be followed by:

• Group Q&A: Let the audience direct questions to one panel member at a time or ask the moderator to pick one (avoid an endless meandering answer where everyone wants to chip in).

• Active, moderated disagreement. If you prepare your panelists and moderators accordingly, and pick people who are good at debating with good faith, you can set them up to disagree well and educate your audience about the topic in the process. Understanding disagreements between people can be very interesting and useful, especially if you find double-cruxes among people with fundamentally different perspectives.

How can all of these people say something interesting or have a useful conversation? They can’t even see each other.

The “group brainstorm”

A session format that’s increasingly common and which has received insufficient criticism is the “group brainstorm”:

• The session lead gives a short introduction about a topic, and then divides the room into groups.

• Each group is then given a question, often about a sub-field of the broader topic, and maybe some instructions.

• Group members then discuss the question among themselves or quietly brainstorm ideas.

• One person from each group reports back what they discussed to the wider group.

• The session lead then gathers these ideas.

I’ve led sessions like this, and I will get to how I think they can be useful, but group brainstorming is often a poor use of everyone’s time.

Your session attendees do not have the answers.

Your session attendees are probably quite smart, but they’re usually missing a lot of context (unless you’ve carefully selected your attendees) and context is extremely important for coming up with good ideas. They also usually don’t feel invested; yes, they want to be a helpful and willing participant, but they probably didn’t attend this event to help you solve your problem. Unless session attendees directly work on the problem and are grouped together, your attendees are unlikely to generate something novel or actionable in 30 minutes. In fact, the first few ideas you get probably won’t be much better than if the session lead thought a bit harder themselves.

If it’s ideas you want, use AI. LLMs can generate lots of ideas much faster than a room full of people politely talking to each other. Give the LLM some context on your problem, maybe some other documents, and ask it for 100 ideas.

Ideas are easy. Bandwidth is low.

Often, solutions that are easy to generate are very ambitious or just downright unrealistic. “What if someone simply started an organization focused on this problem?”, “What if some smart and capable people spent a week working on this?”, “What if we just found someone extremely talented at solving this particular problem, and they solved it?”.

A common experience at the end of a brainstorming session is someone asking, “okay, who has capacity to do this?” The answer, dear reader, is absolutely nobody at any point in time. Solutions are hard to implement and require dedicated attention. Unless session participants have good context on things like the capacity available, the priorities of those involved, the steps it would take to reach the solution, and the appetite for the solution in the first place, their ideas are likely to be much too ambitious. This makes it all the more likely that the session lead dismisses these ideas outright, and time is wasted.

The ideas are not worth the time cost.

Unless there’s a clear plan for tracking and using the group’s ideas, a lot of brainstorming notes languish in long Google docs or are collected up in the form of colourful sticky notes and chucked into a bin.¹ Even when a few ideas are used, session leads are probably not tracking the person-hours it took to generate those ideas. If you had 20 people in a 30-minute session, and you got a few good ideas for your project, that’s 10 hours or over a day’s work just for a few ideas. Imagine asking a colleague with the average intelligence and context of your session attendees to spend a day trying to make progress on a problem, and then they delivered 5 hastily written sticky notes onto your desk. That sounds like extremely poor returns to me!

Group brainstorming can sometimes go well. In particular, if the session lead genuinely wants a long list of ideas or to get a temperature check on several ideas at once and carefully notes down the suggestions generated, this session format can work. Another benefit is that participants are forced to reflect on an issue; a useful prompt for brainstroming, therefore, is a prompt where everyone has high context and is actually looking to take actions (e.g., “what’s your experience of this problem? what can you personally do about this issue? Tell your group what actions you plan to take”).

Choosing more valuable content: fidelity per person-minute

A useful heuristic for valuable content is to consider the person-minutes (length of session * attendees) going into each session and the fidelity of information each person is receiving in that time. You should look for high-fidelity information flow relative to each person-minute.² Consider:

• Are the people who know what they’re talking about doing the talking? If not, are participants able to steer things until this is the case?

• What proportion of your participants are active in each minute? How many are listening and learning or contributing something useful?

• Is it easy to leave if returns are poor?

1:1s are particularly good. The person-minute cost is low (2 people * length of meeting), and the information flow is very easy to control and manage. You can ask your partner the exact thing you need from them, they can try and give you that information, and if you aren’t finding that useful, you can then talk about something else. An old EA forum post on why 1:1s are great that I strongly agree with:

• 1-on-1s offer a unique opportunity to get personalized feedback and information that is helpful for your top priority questions, uncertainties, career plans, and more, unlike talks and workshops that aren’t specifically catered to you.

• People often think better when talking to others.

  • Perhaps most importantly, you get very quick feedback loops on your thinking, which are harder to get in other formats - mistakes, alternatives, and potential improvements to your ideas and their communication can be pointed out quickly

  • They offer a uniquely good setting for asking and being asked/answering really good questions.

  • It can be easier to stay focused when talking to someone else and being regularly required to actively contribute

  • Conversations can force you to refine your thinking and communication of ideas, since your conversation partner needs to understand what you’re saying.

  • You can incorporate new perspectives/information from your conversation partner quickly

  • Easy accountability for ideas that come up - ideas can turn into concrete plans, which your conversation partner can provide accountability for.

• 1-on-1s can turn into long-lasting friendships, professional connections, references/referrals for job/project/internship opportunities

Talks also look pretty good on this. Well-attended talks are a lot of person-minutes, but every person in that audience except the speaker is getting information from someone who the organisers have hopefully chosen because of their ability to share useful information. On top of this, it’s easy to leave if you aren’t finding it useful. A tangential take is that more people should probably be walking out of talks they aren’t finding useful. If you’re one of three attendees, consider staying for the speaker’s wellbeing, but if you aren’t confident you’ll enjoy the talk, sit near the back and then leave when you want to.

Panels and group brainstorming are not strong on this metric.

• As covered above, panels often lead to low fidelity information being shared: panelists aren’t delivered prepared notes, they’re often riffing on a point that they just heard. On the plus side, panels are easy to leave if you aren’t finding it useful (I strongly encourage more people to leave panel sessions, maybe even the panelists themselves).

• Group brainstorming is weak on both. It involves a lot of person-minutes to brainstorm together, and participants are sharing information with each other on a topic they aren’t familiar with, with people they don’t need to talk to, and without the remit to steer the conversation to whatever would be more useful to talk about. Brainstorming groups often consist of one person with limited context on the topic sharing their poorly-informed takes with several people at once, all of whom would probably benefit more from talking one-on-one with each other or hearing more from the session lead or whoever has more context.

Events, among many other things, are about getting as much value from other people as you can, while you’re in the room with them sharing air and takes and time together. Make it useful!

Thanks to my colleagues on the CEA Events Team for comments and suggestions

1. If you’re looking for even more pointless ways to spend your time, you could take a picture of these sticky notes, transcribe them and then let them languish in a Google Doc.

2. You could also replace “high-fideily information flow” with “high-quality cognition on a useful topic”.