Live events should change lives : Conferences That Work
When people attend a live event, they give us something we can never give back: their time.
They may travel across a city, a state, or the world. They rearrange their work and personal lives, and spend money on transportation, accommodation, and registration. And then they give us hours—sometimes days—of their lives.
What do we give them in return?
Too often, we give them a succession of presentations, panels, and other activities that could have happened without bringing them together at all.
Live events can do something extraordinary. They can create relationships, conversations, decisions, learning, and experiences that couldn’t happen nearly as well any other way. They can sometimes change people’s lives.
Two comments about meetings have stuck with me recently. The first is from Seth Godin:
—Seth Godin interview by Magdalina Atanassova, reported by Barbara Palmer, Convene, November 2025
Godin’s point is simple: when people travel to spend time together, a live event should offer more than they can get from YouTube or email.
My friend Martin Sirk made a similar observation at IMEX Frankfurt this year:
“I believed when I first saw really, really cool meetings happening about 20 years ago, people like George P. Johnson were creating wonderful multifaceted meetings that were very outcome-focused and very driven by delegate demand. And I thought, well, once a delegate’s been to one of those meetings, they’ve experienced the empowerment that comes from such a well-designed event. How could they possibly accept going to one of these top-down things, with the CEO boring on for half an hour, everybody sitting in theater rows, no idea who else is in the room, and no moderation?…But…we still make crap meetings. …And you see people in the bar going, why did we come? Why did we come to this thing? …Let’s not build volume. Let’s have meetings where the people who go are the right people. The topics are the right topics and the outcomes are structured.
…I remember talking to a number of experiential agency guys, and of course, that’s when the erosion starts. Every cool idea gets whittled down and edged out and, oh, but the CEO needs 20 minutes. And so the event owner kind of takes this very cool, quite experimental and adventurous concept, and it somehow ends up being a wee bit boring.
So I think meeting owners are the toughest. They will spend tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands on a well-known TED Talk keynote speaker who will excite people for 20 minutes and leave them like a Chinese meal, hungry for more after they walk out the door. But they won’t spend 10 grand on good facilitators and good moderators.
They will spend money on some upmarket gala, flashy location, but they won’t spend any money on designing the networking of the event.”
—I love the human side of meetings – Martin Sirk | LJ TALKS at IMEX Frankfurt, May 2026
Twenty years ago, Martin experienced some exceptionally well-designed, outcome-focused, participant-driven meetings and assumed that once people experienced them, they would never again tolerate conventional, top-down events.
He was wrong.
Both comments point to the same extraordinary mismatch: we bring people together at enormous cost, then routinely waste the opportunity that their presence creates.
What are we doing with people’s time?
If I ask you to travel to my event, rearrange your work and personal life, pay for transportation and accommodation, and spend one or more days with me, I’ve acquired something extremely valuable from you:
Your time.
That time should be treated as the event’s most important resource.
Consider a conference with 500 attendees spending 16 hours at the event. That’s 8,000 person-hours.
Eight thousand hours of human life.
What are we doing with them?
If the primary purpose is delivering information, a video may do the job more efficiently. If the primary purpose is networking, spending most of the day putting people in rows facing a stage is a strange way to accomplish it.
There are perfectly good reasons to do these things. A great presentation can be valuable. A great speaker can change someone’s thinking. But those activities don’t automatically make a good live event.
The extraordinary opportunity of a live event is that the people in the room can interact with one another.
They can build relationships, solve problems together, make decisions, learn from one another, discover unexpected connections, and sometimes change one another’s lives.
That’s what we’re wasting when we design events primarily around what happens on stage.
Participation isn’t enough
Once meeting designers recognize the limitations of passive conferences, they add participation: polls, sticky notes, breakout groups, interactive apps, fishbowls, and other techniques.
These can be excellent tools. But participation isn’t the goal.
Start with the desired outcome:
“What needs to happen because these people are together, and what is the best way to make that happen?”
So why don’t we do this?
Martin and I share decades of experience working with meeting owners, and we have both, reluctantly, concluded that many meeting owners are remarkably conservative. As Martin put it: “Every cool idea gets whittled down and edged out.”
Compelling meeting designs are weakened, distorted, and finally buried under accumulating requirements.
The CEO has to give a speech; sponsors want visibility; “we have to have a big-name keynote, like last year”; the venue is already contracted with a ballroom designed for theater seating.
None of these decisions is necessarily unreasonable. But together they can destroy the original design.
Conventional choices have another advantage: they’re easy to justify.
Everyone understands what you’re buying when you spend $100,000 on a celebrity keynote. It is much harder to explain the value of spending $10,000 on exceptional facilitation that produces better conversations, better connections, or a decision that might not otherwise have happened.
The downside of experimenting is visible. The upside is often harder to measure and seems riskier. Even though there are proven strategies that help attendees take risks and try something new.
So we keep doing what we’ve always done.
I don’t think every meeting needs to be radically experimental, and I don’t take “changing people’s lives” literally for every event.
But every live event should create attendee value that justifies the cost of being there.
Sometimes that value will be transformational. Sometimes it will be a new relationship, an important decision, a difficult conversation, a useful skill, or simply the experience of belonging to a community.
The essential question is:
What can happen because these people are together that couldn’t happen nearly as well any other way?
If we can’t answer that, we should rethink holding the meeting. If we can, the answer should drive everything else about the event.
Live events are an extraordinary opportunity. But bringing people together isn’t inherently valuable.
What we do with their time determines whether bringing them together was worth it.
