{"id":23773,"date":"2012-05-01T02:27:43","date_gmt":"2012-05-01T02:27:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/how-to-make-panels-not-suck\/"},"modified":"2012-05-01T02:27:43","modified_gmt":"2012-05-01T02:27:43","slug":"how-to-make-panels-not-suck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/how-to-make-panels-not-suck\/","title":{"rendered":"How To Make Panels Not Suck"},"content":{"rendered":"

stoweboyd<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Panel session at conferences are very uneven, and often they suck. Why? The primary blame can be laid at the feet of the moderators, who often don\u2019t do enough to make the panels great. Charlie O\u2019Donnell offers details in a great post:<\/p>\n

\n

Charlie O\u2019Donnell,\u00a0 Why do panels suck and how can we make them\u00a0better?<\/a><\/p>\n

I spoke on a SXSW panel in 2011 that didn\u2019t suck.\u00a0 I know it didn\u2019t suck because the first person to ask a question told us that our panel was worth the whole price of admission to the conference and we got the same sentiment echoed on Twitter.\u00a0 The panel included myself, Emily Hickey<\/a>, Ben Lerer<\/a>, and Christine Herron<\/a> and we spoke about startup mistakes.<\/p>\n

The panel didn\u2019t suck because it was engineered not to suck.\u00a0 Here are a few things we did:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. First and foremost, the panelists were carefully chosen.<\/strong>\u00a0 They aren\u2019t the biggest VCs and entrepreneurs, but they\u2019re some of the most thoughtful ones.\u00a0 Some of the most successful people simply haven\u2019t tought much about why they got where they are\u2014and even if they have, they\u2019re just wrong about it because they\u2019ve only scratched the surface.\u00a0 These panelists have seen both success and failure, and they\u2019ve seen it from multiple perspectives\u2014and on top of that, because I knew them well, I knew they\u2019d be able to share those stories.\u00a0 Not everyone is a good storyteller, so choose carefully.<\/li>\n
  2. The moderator had a sense of the story that should come out of the panel.\u00a0<\/strong> I knew what I wanted to cover and what I wanted the audience to leave with.\u00a0 Panels are, or at least should be, stories, and a story is supposed to leave you with something.\u00a0 You should remember them because they make sense in a structure.\u00a0 Too many moderators pick something broad like \u201cThe Future of the Present\u201d and ask vague questions like, \u201cSo what happens after now?\u201d\u00a0 You\u2019ll never get a tight story that people can leave with if that\u2019s what you do.\u00a0 People either need to leave with a specific story or a sense of \u201cIf I believe x, this will happen, if I believe y, this will happen.\u201d\u00a0 Moderating is hard and not everyone can do it.\u00a0 Respect the craft.<\/a><\/li>\n
  3. The questions were discussed among the panel ahead of time.\u00a0<\/strong> We vetted a bunch of topics and decided on the questions that would output the best answers.\u00a0 That also gave the panelists time to think about their answers.\u00a0 In fact, they were given a specific format by which they should structure their responses\u2014to think about the tweets that we wanted to see before further explaining.\u00a0 So, when the question was \u201cHow can you tell what makes a good hire?\u201d\u00a0 Someone would say a one line, tweetable, comment-worthy sentence as an answer before diving in further.<\/li>\n
  4. Not everyone answered every question.<\/strong>\u00a0 Don\u2019t you hate when they go through everyone in order and the last two panelsts basically say, \u201cYeah, what she said\u2026\u201d but they still take 5 minutes to say that.\u00a0 Some of the questions simply aren\u2019t relevent to everyone.\u00a0 With our panel, each person was asked to answer only 2-3 of the questions, so the answers bounced around the four of us and no more than two people addressed any given question\u2014unless they really had something ridiculously awesome to say.<\/li>\n
  5. The panel talked amongst themselves.<\/strong>\u00a0 We disagreed on a few things, asked questions of each other.\u00a0 It was like we were real humans sitting next to each other discussing a topic.\u00a0 Amazing.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    I think Charlie\u2019s hit it on the head, but let me add a few thoughts.<\/p>\n

    Interviews are underutilized at conferences. In many cases, people who really don\u2019t present well \u2014 despite having great ideas or being quite accomplished \u2014 are great when interviewed. Small panels \u2014 a moderator and two panelists, for example \u2014 can be great, especially when handled like a parallel interview by the moderator.<\/p>\n

    And panels should have no more than one person for every ten minutes: 50 minutes = four panelists max and one moderator, for example. That means in today\u2019s fast twitch conferences, a 30 minute panel would\/should\/could have only two panelists and one moderator.<\/p>\n

    Last summer, I led a Future Of Work seminar series in five cities, and although we were allotting 45 minutes, I held the panelists to two in all cases but one, and that worked well. The time I had three panelists was a bit cramped, in comparison.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    stoweboyd: Panel session at conferences are very uneven, and often they suck. Why? The primary blame can be laid at the feet of the moderators, who often don\u2019t do enough to make the panels great. Charlie O\u2019Donnell offers details in a great post: Charlie O\u2019Donnell,\u00a0 Why do panels suck and how can we make them\u00a0better? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[722],"class_list":["post-23773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words","tag-this-is-experience-design"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-6br","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23773"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23773\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}