My name is Brandon. I have a big forehead. An even bigger heart. And only a small problem. That problem is so small and so simple… it drives me crazy every single day. The problem is so small in fact that all of us face it. What is it?
Luck. Accidental luck. I am one of a few million ‘facilitators’ in the world. I am one of a few billion people go to conferences ever year. We all have skills and networking plans and agendas, but let’s face it… most of it is luck. Yes, you. Me. We rely on luck that we might learn something or meet someone that will change our future.
So my problem became my passion. How could I increase my luck? I would go to some of the fanciest conferences in the world and it was luck if I succeeded. The conference organizers were curators of having famous people there and perfect logistics in tracks from end-to-end.
So to change luck, i needed to fix 3 things and two failure stories.
0. I joined a team of other kick-ass facilitators, and yes, together we won and will deliver the G20 this year!
1. personal objectives. what does each person want to achieve at an event? This is pretty personal. Some want to get away from the office. Some want the parties, some want ideas. So how do you find out. The first thing I did was try an app for that. Actually, an app for everything conference relations. Did you know every step and every thought can be measured? I could swipe left to meet people with the same skills. I could swipe down and miss the world as it went by because I was so focused on my phone.
Ok, if apps aren’t the answer. and we still need to figure out how to do it,
2. silos. every noticed how at conferences, most of the people hanging out together mostly look the same? And to be perfectly clear, i am super guilty of this. In fact, my two closest friends are named Brandon and Brendan. So the second thing I tried was data science. I discovered, that you can track the relationships and how information is being shared and then connect friends of friends so that everyone at the conference is just 1 person away from the answer they are looking for… well answer for at work at least.
but people even though they are perfect for each other don’t know how to talk to each other. You.. yeah you, you would rather tallk about how busy you are that about what you are busy about and the challenges you are facing. And if you are from 9/10th of america and 100% of the uk, you would rather talk about the weather than anything meaningful.
3. art and design: So we have the tech to personalize everything, but apps and more tech isn’t helping. And we have these silos of interaction amongst participants. how do we bring it all together?
Let’s look at this event, this TED conference for how simple it is to integrate technology and design to help you, your network, we call it your strategic network that can be improved 10x by
Let’s walk through today. 100 of you joined into 25 groups before this event to find ways that you could change a simple conference into an engine to improve the community of Lima.
So we took 450 of you. Looked at the network – my 2nd frustration and put people together in different parts of the community, but determined to improve different elements.
So in one step, we increase your odds of meting someone at this event by 45x. I am also happy to report that these 100 people have already identified 15 projects to help the community and identified $10M in potential funding. Let’s compare this to last year: 0. I think we are off to a good start.
Then, we asked each of you to sit in an assigned row. Yes. On the back of your name tag was a row and section to sit in. Did anyone figure out why we did this? We looked at your existing relationships. Everyone is sitting next to someone who they have in common. And in your row are people who can solve the challenge or issue or learning that you came here to solve. We worked with the organizers and have allowed a few more minutes to the agenda to help you carry on these conversations. This takes up 10 minutes throughout the day roughly This also increase your number of relevant connections 4 times.
