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Is Attending Conferences an Unnecessary Expense?

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Keith Ferrazzi makes a good case that the answer is no, in Never Eat Alone.

The reason that conferences are not unnecessary expenses is because it is actually revenue generating to attend. But this is often overlooked because only the cost is tied to the conference in an organization’s budget, but the productive outcomes from the conference are not.

First, here’s how Ferrazzi decides whether to attend a conference:

“Conferences are good for mainly one thing. They provide a forum to meet the kind of like-minded people who can help you fulfill your mission and goals. Before deciding to attend a conference, I sometimes informally go so far as using a simple return-on-investment thought process. Is the likely return I’ll get from the relationships I establish and build equal to or greater than the price of the conference and the time I spend there? If so, I attend. If not, I don’t.”

Second, here is Ferrazzi’s very good case on why cutting out conferences is a bad way to cut costs:

“Right after we sold YaYa, the new owners instituted a set of cost-cutting policies relative to travel and conferences. I thought the policies were fundamentally off the mark. The owners saw conferences as boondoggles–pleasant affairs for indulgent executives rather than as revenue generators. To our new parent company, the costs of sending people to a few events each year seemed like an unnecessary expense on the start-up company’s balance sheet.

“I strongly disagreed and promised to convince them otherwise. I set about recording the actual number of revenue-generating projects that came directly from people I had met at conferences. The owners were stunned when I presented a spreadsheet showing successive deals and how a significant chunk of revenue could be traced back to one conference or another.”

Third, here’s a good summary from Fast Company on the value of conferences and conventions: They enable you to (1) make contacts and (2) share ideas.

The Four Categories of Information You Need to Pay Attention To

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There are four categories of information you need to pay attention to when embarking on any significant endeavor:

  1. Things you know and know that you know.
  2. Things you know but don’t know that you know.
  3. Things you don’t know and know that you don’t know.
  4. Things you don’t know and don’t know that you don’t know.

Category four is what can be the real curve ball. The early space program is often given as an example of this: before we went into space, there were certain things we knew and could plan for (radiation, re-entry, etc.). But what were the things that we didn’t know that we wouldn’t even know were factors until encountering them? That was the challenge.

Which is why experimentation and trying things, sometimes in small steps, is so crucial. Since you can’t discover the things you don’t know that you don’t know any other way than by experience, taking action and embarking on paths of experimentation are essential to learning, for individuals and organizations.

This means that, to a certain extent, we need to be willing to tolerate risk and we need to be willing to tolerate failure.

Remember: Ask Questions

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“Questions attract thoughts and new ideas. Asking questions creates a learning mindset.”

Plus, it’s the right thing to do. Being interested in others — reflected in asking questions — is part of treating people well.

The 3 Constraints on Every Project

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Every project — every endeavor in organizations, society, and life — operates within three constraints:

  1. Quality
  2. Schedule
  3. Resources

Quality means how well it is done. Schedule means time — how long it takes. And resources means people and financial cost.

Here’s the meaning of this: these constraints are interdependent. And so you can hit it out of the park on any two of these areas, but not all three.

For example, if you want the end result to be very high in quality and done very quickly, it’s going to cost you a lot. Or if you want to use as little resources as possible, it’s either going to take you a very long time or you are going to have to sacrifice on quality.

You have to choose your priorities.

Reasons Projects Fail

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Here are some main reasons projects fail, from To Do Doing Done:

  1. Unclear goals or objectives
  2. Changing scope
  3. Insufficient resources
  4. Conflicting priorities
  5. Lack of knowledge
  6. Poor communications
  7. Lack of leadership
  8. Lack of management support
  9. Lack of teamwork
  10. Poor planning
  11. Political issues

Turn it into a Question

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Here’s another approach to problem solving: When you have a problem, turn it into a question. Write it down on a document or sheet of paper, and then think through it on paper. Define the problem first, and probe it deeply. Ask “what is the problem?” and then “what else could be the problem?” Then do the same to identify causes, and then solutions.

The Concept of the Breakout

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When it comes to solving complex problems where we don’t seem to be making any headway, an approach called “the breakout” can be helpful. I came across this in a Harvard Business Review article a few years ago.

Here’s the summary of the concept: “By bringing the brain to the height of activity and then suddenly moving it into a passive, relaxed state, it’s possible to stimulate much higher neurological performance than would otherwise be the case. Over time, subjects who learn to do this as a matter of course perform at consistently higher levels.”

And here are the key steps:

  1. Struggle mightily with the thorny problem.
  2. Walk away from the problem at the top of the curve (when you stop feeling productive and start feeling stressed) and do something utterly different that produces the relaxation response.
  3. The actual breakout–sudden insight comes. A sense of well-being and relaxation brings an unexpected insight or higher level of performance.
  4. Return to the new normal state within which the sense of self-confidence continues.