Attendees are done with traditional, hour-long sessions and, even worse, three-hour general sessions — it’s time for session formatting to meet attendees where their attention spans are.
We’ve all heard that attendees want shorter, more interactive sessions and more breaks and downtime, but are we really breaking the traditional session formatting mold or just talking about it? Meeting industry events have been modeling different session formats, offering breakouts of differing lengths from short campfires to interactive brain dates, as well as longer breaks. If you’re not already hopping on this trend, it may be time to rethink the traditional way of chunking up your content.
Why? For one reason, people’s attention spans are shrinking, thanks at least in part to the rise of the cellphone and social media. From Instagram Reels to TikTok, we’ve all become accustomed to brief, entertaining bursts of content, interspersed with longer periods of skimming where we’re really engaged in scrolling but not so much challenged or entertained — or learning. According to Gloria Mark, a psychologist and chancellor’s professor of informatics at the University of California Irvine, in 2004 the average attention span was about 2.5 minutes. By 2012, it had shrunk to 75 seconds, and now it’s closer to an average of 47 seconds.
This doesn’t mean sessions should be less than a minute long, of course, but they do need to shrink from the typical hour to something less. And they should get the audience interacting and engaging with each other, the speaker or the content in some way several times over the course of the session to keep attendees focused and learning, rather than treating the session as a rote experience like scrolling, where you only tune in when something catches your attention.
There are a multitude of session formats you can use to shake things up and keep people engaged and paying attention, including lightning talks, Pecha Kucha and Ignite sessions where speakers have a limited time to deliver content — and slides that advance automatically to keep up the pace. Interactive activities, such as a human spectrogram, where attendees move to different areas of the room based on their answers to questions, and World Café, where small groups explore topics at tables for a set period of time, then rotate to new tables to change up the perspectives.
As with making any change, rebooting your session formats can be challenging. For one, it’s not easy to condense all the information into a shorter time slot without losing any vital parts of the messaging — and some speakers will try to jam too much into that shorter slot, much like the dreaded PowerPoint slide with so much crammed onto it that it’s borderline incomprehensible. That leads not to learning and engagement, but an audience that’s overwhelmed, exhausted and frustrated. But speakers who are accustomed to a longer session often find it difficult to pare down their content to fit the shorter time frame and may not like handing control of the content over to participants by using interactive elements.
From a purely logistical standpoint, shorter sessions also mean more transitions between speakers and activities, which can lead to delays and disruptions if they’re not timed precisely. And it’s more challenging to accommodate different learning styles when you have less time available.
The upshot is that, while it’s not always going to be easy to upend the traditional conference format, it will be well worth the time and effort when you see the results: Attendees having an engaged, active learning experience that will stay with them long after the conference is over.
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