3 reasons why in-person conferences are awesome
I was lucky enough to attend TuringFest in Edinburgh this past week — it was the first time I’d been to a multi-day in-person conference since 2019 and I’d forgotten how powerful they can be. Many of the speakers spoke about how important it was to “give back” to the community, so as I didn’t speak, this is my (small) contribution :)
3 things that attending an in-person conference taught (or at least reminded) me:
1. It gives you time to slow down and think more clearly.
Our office is a noisy buzz of collaboration. My day is often broken up into chunks of 30mins — I might be spending time with teams talking about their upcoming work, having 1:1s with my department, or running workshops to align colleagues around a strategy. Whatever I’m doing the time flies and it’s easy to get caught up actioning quick fixes for the fire of the day. Spending time out of the office, listening to others talk about their work and expertise, led me to pause and think more deeply about some of the issues my organisation is facing.
For example, we’ve been talking about the pace of work back at the office and how we can get to our goals faster. Pace which is a notoriously hard thing to measure and there is no magic fix if it’s not where you want it to be. Yet in simply listening to someone else speak about the power of kanban, I remembered some things I’d temporarily forgotten. I remembered that I used to be brought into organisations (as a consultant) to increase flow through a system; mostly by visualising work, decreasing cycle times for each state and reducing batch size. By the end of the talk I’d committed to upskilling my team on kanban by christmas and started to create a quick syllabus in my head.
2. It forces you to introspect about your own performance
You spend each day listening to others talking about their experiences — whether it be a psychologist talking about the difference between emotion and action, a head of UX talking about how culture can be defined by psychological safety, or the difference between leadership and management. These experiences, if you let them, will help your mind to wander and introspect about your own day-to-day performance. You get a chance to examine what’s working and what isn’t. Also if you’re lucky like me and you attended with a peer, then you can spend time in the evenings talking to them about your reflections — you can actually start to work out a plan for how to improve things.
You might be suffering unhealthy conflict at work, but have yet to have the time needed to reflect on your role in it. You may be an expert communicator, but somehow are talking at cross-purposes. You may consider yourself a leader, but you’re no longer leading by example. Whatever it might be, your mind will have the time needed to think about it deeply.
I have a coach, a therapist and a very patient partner — but sometimes you need something completely different to help you act. An in-person conference might be exactly that, as it was for me this time round.
3. They are inspiring
Cheesy as it sounds, I was really inspired watching people share their experiences. You could tell how nervous some of them were; you could tell how much they cared about what they were saying (or not). It takes bravery to get up on stage and talk to strangers, no matter how many times you’ve done it before, and that bravery is incredibly inspiring.
I watched my colleague get up in front of a packed room to deliver an exceptional talk and I honestly cried a little. She had worked really hard on it, taking on numerous rounds of feedback and she got up on stage, fought off the nerves and crushed it.
It was so inspiring to watch and reminded me I can do more to give back to the community. It made me think “Why am I not doing a talk” — which considering 24 hours earlier I was thinking how glad I am not to be doing one, that’s quite an impact.
In Summary
Conferences are great. They are fun, a great bonding moment and also a chance to take the time to think differently about yourself (and the work you do).
I’ve listed just three of my many revelations that I had this week. They may seem obvious, but that’s because in many ways they are. However I’d certainly forgotten, so I wanted to share them with you :)
Thanks to Turingfest for helping me on my journey of re-discovery!
