The future of conferences isn’t bigger. It’s more meaningful. : Conferences That Work

Doug McLennan, the founder and editor of ArtsJournal, recently wrote an intriguing essay about the changing economics of theatre. His subject is the challenge performing arts organizations face in an increasingly fragmented world.

For generations, theatres operated on a simple assumption: success meant attracting the largest possible audience. Bigger audiences brought greater prestige, greater influence, and greater financial stability. Scale was the path to sustainability.

McLennan argues that this assumption is breaking down. Today’s audiences have an unprecedented number of choices competing for their attention, making it increasingly difficult for large institutions to be all things to all people. Rather than pursuing ever-larger audiences, he suggests that organizations may need to focus on serving smaller, more clearly defined communities exceptionally well. As he puts it, “smaller reads as losing.” But perhaps that’s because we’re still using yesterday’s definition of success.

Reading his essay, I kept thinking: this isn’t really just about theatre. It’s about conferences.

The meetings industry has spent decades measuring success in much the same way: more attendees, more exhibitors, more sponsors, more square footage. The assumption has been that larger events automatically create more value. (Even though most meetings are small meetings.)

Certainly, scale can bring advantages. Well-designed large events can expose participants to more people, more ideas, and more opportunities than smaller ones can. But they don’t necessarily create more value for the people who attend.

Have we confused scale with value?

I’ve spent much of my professional life designing conferences that maximize participant engagement. Along the way, I’ve become increasingly convinced that we’ve often confused bigger with better.

People don’t attend conferences just because thousands of other people will be there. As the 2026 Freeman Trends report concludes, they attend because they hope something will happen that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. They want to solve problems, discover new ideas, meet people they wouldn’t otherwise encounter, and return home with relationships, insights, and opportunities that make the investment worthwhile.

Those outcomes don’t automatically improve as attendance grows.

In fact, many become harder to achieve.

The paradox of large conferences

Almost everyone who attends large conferences has experienced the same paradox.

The event offers hundreds of sessions and thousands of participants, yet meaningful conversations can become surprisingly difficult to find. Sessions increasingly resemble performances delivered to passive audiences. Networking becomes a race from reception to reception and through exhibit halls. Participants may return home with pages of notes, stacks of business cards, and dozens of new LinkedIn connections, yet struggle to identify what actually changed because they were there.

By conventional measures, the conference has been a success.

From the participant’s perspective, the answer may be less clear.

Perhaps that’s because we’ve been measuring the wrong things.

Conferences create value differently

One reason McLennan’s essay resonated with me is that it highlights something conferences have always done unusually well.

Information has become increasingly abundant. Expertise is easier to access than ever. If information alone were enough, many conferences would already have disappeared.

But conferences have never been just information-delivery systems.

At their best, they create temporary and sometimes long-lasting communities.

They bring together people with different experiences, assumptions, expertise, and questions, then provide opportunities for those people to learn from one another, challenge one another, and occasionally build something together.

Most organizations create value for people. Universities educate students. Publishers distribute knowledge. Streaming services deliver entertainment. Conferences are different. Their greatest value emerges when participants create value with one another.

The organizer’s role is not simply to deliver excellent content. It’s to design the conditions under which productive interactions can occur.

That’s a very different design problem.

Measuring what matters

McLennan quotes the observation that “smaller reads as losing.”

That certainly feels familiar in the meetings industry, where organizers often feel pressure to report ever-increasing attendance numbers, even when growth may diminish the participant experience.

Perhaps the more useful questions are different ones:

• How many participants actively contributed rather than simply listened?
• How many conversations led to lasting professional relationships?
• How many collaborations began during the event?
• How many people left having changed their thinking because of someone they met?

Those metrics are harder to measure than registration numbers.

They are also much closer to the reason conferences exist.

A different definition of success

For years, I’ve argued that conferences should maximize meaningful participation rather than simply maximize content. That’s not because presentations are unimportant. Great speakers can inspire, educate, and provoke new thinking.

But presentations are only one ingredient in a successful conference.

The real value of a conference lies in what participants create together.

That’s something keynote speakers alone cannot deliver. It emerges from thoughtful meeting design, skilled facilitation, participant agency, and the countless interactions that occur when people are given meaningful opportunities to contribute.

If McLennan is right, organizations in many fields will have to rethink the assumption that bigger automatically means better.

The meetings industry should lead that conversation. The future of conferences depends on it.

Because conferences have always possessed a remarkable capability that few other institutions can match: they create environments where strangers intentionally create value with one another.

That has never depended on having the largest audience.

It has always depended on creating the right conditions for participation.