The Top 5 Reasons Why Events Fail
We’ve all experienced a poorly designed corporate event, where instead of feeling energized and motivated, you feel exhausted.
It can be anything from the colors used in the venue, the scent in the room, the lighting, the order and nature of content delivery, the pacing and spacing of moments of high excitement vs moments of calm and reflection. Or just the sheer cognitive backlog of content.
For the amount of effort it takes to stage an event, and the amount of disruption it creates for those who have to take time out of their daily schedules both at work and at home to attend it, an event needs to deliver a significant return on your investment.
To help you protect your investment, we’d like to share the top 5 reasons why events fall short – and what to do about it
01. TOO MUCH EMOTION
There’s a reason action films are only 90 minutes long. Aside from production costs and narrative integrity, there’s the simple fact that you can only watch superheroes fight so many battles before you become numb to the action and lose interest.
In event design, sustained emotional intensity is a deterrent to retention and interest (Cahill & McGaugh, 1998). The science of this is that stressful or exciting experiences increase the secretion of hormones such as epinephrine (i.e., adrenaline) and cortisol.
In small to moderate amounts, these hormones can be very effective aids in retention and engagement. But too much stress, excitement and hormonal activity has the opposite effect, resulting in burn-out, irritation and inattentiveness. Once attendees are burnt out it will take longer for them to recover – which means you may lose their attention for the back half of your event. Or they may forget what they saw in the front half. Or both.
Regulating the emotional intensity of the event is key to ensuring that attendees have time to recharge, remain engaged for the entire program and don’t burn out.
02. GREAT CONTENT. BAD DELIVERY.
Your content may be important. Your message may be relevant. But if it’s not structured in the right way or presented in the right order, it might as well be tears in the rain.
It’s important to consider both the order and volume of information within an individual presentation, and that of the entire event – especially weeklong events. The number and nature of sessions and the order in which they take place is key to avoiding fatigue and increasing retention (Ferreri & O’Connor, 2013; Boksem, Meijman, & Lorist, 2005). For instance, while interactive sessions tend to result in higher retention, they also take more out of your audience. Therefore interactive sessions need to be carefully balanced against presentation-style sessions, and neither should be too numerous that it deprives your audience of sufficient recovery time.
Attendee satisfaction not only depends on a carefully planned sequence and order of events, but also on ensuring that the content is compelling enough to inspire curiosity (Kalat, 2013). If people aren’t curious, they aren’t engaged.
Maintaining curiosity is therefore the foremost priority in both content development and program design.
03. MISSING THE HIDDEN SIGNS OF ATTENTION DEFICIT
Attendees don’t just walk through the front door, shed all the anxieties and priorities of home and office and enter your event 100% ready to hear what you have to say. They bring their baggage with them, and are very likely to spend a significant amount of their energy worrying about ignoring email, or about their kid with the flu, or the pile of work that is waiting for them after the conference is over.
No wonder studies have shown that our minds ‘wander’ about 20-50% of the time (Seli, Risko, Smilek, & Schacter, 2016). Attendees may be looking right at you when you are presenting, but you have no way of knowing what’s really on their minds. Best to assume there is at least a 20% chance that they are thinking about something else.
People do generally try to listen, but over the course of a multi-day event that effort is itself another energy drainer and retention inhibitor. Brain science has shown that as attendees spend more time listening, their attention decreases dramatically (Farley, Risko, & Kingstone, 2013). This is called a ‘vigilance decrement’, and the decline in attention associated with it persists no matter how much effort attendees exert.
Event designers must make an effort to understand the factors that make an attendee’s mind wander, recognize the subtle cues that his or her mind has left the room, and devise strategies to improve engagement and educational outcomes.
04. GIVE ME A BREAK
A growing body of research is proving true the saying “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”.
Sustained attention can cause stress, fatigue and mood swings. It can impede focus and drain physical and emotional energy. No one will disagree that energy must be replenished in order for people to remain attentive.
Research has debunked the myth that productivity requires prolonged hard work. Strong evidence suggests that it is in fact enhanced by taking breaks. A recent Baylor University study concluded that people who took short, frequent breaks ended the day with more stamina and fewer aches and pains. (Hunter & Wu, 2015). The same study found that if people spent their break time doing something they prefered to do, they came back from that break far more refreshed.
The timing, frequency, duration and nature of breaks is therefore of vital importance.
For instance, Hunter and Wu (2016) also found that morning breaks replenished more energy, concentration and motivation than breaks later in the day. Another study found that waiting until you’re exhausted to take a break makes it that much harder to recover (Sonnentag, Arbeus, Mahn, & Fritz, 2014).
Aside from timing and frequency, experience architects should also consider providing attendees with the kinds of spaces and places that encourage restorative behavior and cognitive recovery. Scent, color, lighting and other environmental features all play a significant role in facilitating these important moments of rejuvenation.
05. OVERLOOKING EMOTION
One of the key reasons for staging corporate events is to motivate your audience to achieve a certain goal, whether it’s a sales target or a service delivery benchmark. It is the recognition of how difficult these kinds of tasks are that drives companies to invest in events in the first place.
But how do you motivate? We know there is a strong link between emotion and motivation. Yet so many events are built around emotionless, lecture-style presentations on revenue targets and other organizational goals. Often, these routine presentations are followed by workshops discussing what was presented. Problem is, if there’s no motivation to act on that information, it doesn’t get acted on. And if there is no emotion, there’s no motivation.
Recent studies have demonstrated that emotion can both improve your memory of the content and motivate you to act on it (Makowski, Sperduti, Nicolas, & Piolino, 2017). In one, participants were shown a mix of emotionally charged imagery and neutral imagery. Their memory of central details was far stronger after viewing the emotionally charged images as opposed to the more neutral ones (Yegiyan & Yonelinas, 2011). Logic changes what people think. Emotion changes what people do. By using emotion wisely we can motivate attendees to turn information into action.
CONCLUSION
Staging a multi-day event is a daunting undertaking. There is so much to consider, so many ways it can succeed or fail. You may not get everything right, but if you can focus on the above 5 considerations, chances are good it won’t matter: you will have gotten the important things right.
