Who Will Rule Our Conferences? Truth or Bad-Faith Vendors?

You won’t believe what a vendor said about a speaker at a conference—when that speaker spoke the truth.

Conferences are big business in the workplace learning field.

Conferences make organizers a ton of money. That’s great because pulling off a good conference is not as easy as it looks. In addition to finding a venue and attracting people to come to your event, you also have to find speakers. Some speakers are well-known quantities, but others are unknown.

In the learning field, where we are inundated with fads, myths, and misconceptions; finding speakers who will convey the most helpful messages, and avoid harmful messages, is particularly difficult. Ideally, as attendees, we’d like to hear truth from our speakers rather than fluff and falsehoods.

On the other hand, vendors pay big money to exhibit their products and services at a conference. Their goal is connecting with attendees who are buyers or who can influence buyers. Even conferences that don’t have exhibit halls usually get money from vendors in one way or another.

So, conference owners have two groups of customers to keep happy: attendees and vendors. In an ideal world, both groups would want the most helpful messages to be conveyed. Truth would be a common goal. So for example, let’s say new research is done that shows that freep learning is better than traditional elearning. A speaker at a conference shares the news that freep learning is great. Vendors in the audience hear the news. What will they do?

Vendor A hires a handsome and brilliant research practitioner to verify the power of freep learning with the idea of moving forward quickly and providing this powerful new tool to their customers.
Vendor B jumps right in and starts building freep learning to ensure their customers get the benefits of this powerful new learning method.
Vendor C pulls the conference organizers aside and tells them, “If you ever use that speaker again, we will not be back; you will not get our money any more.”

Impossible you say!

Would never happen you think!

You’re right. Not enough vendors are hiring fadingly-good-lookingly brilliant research-to-practice experts!

Here’s a true story from a conference that took place within the last year or so.

Clark Quinn spoke about learning myths and misconceptions during his session, describing the findings from his wonderful book. Later when he read his conference evaluations he found the following comment among the more admiring testimonials:

“Not cool to debunk some tools that exhibitors pay a lot of money to sell at [this conference] only to hear from a presenter at the conference that in his opinion should be debunked. Why would I want to be an exhibitor at a conference that debunks my products? I will not exhibit again if this speaker speaks at [conference name]” (emphasis added).

This story was recounted by Clark and captured by Jane Bozarth in an article on the myth of learning styles she wrote as the head of research for the eLearning Guild. Note that the conference in question was NOT an eLearning Guild conference.

What can we do?

Corruption is everywhere. Buyer beware! As adults, we know this! We know politicians lie (some more than others!!). We know that we have to take steps not to be ripped off. We get three estimates when we need a new roof. We ask for personal references. We look at the video replay. We read TripAdvisor reviews. We look for iron-clad guarantees that we can return products we purchased.

We don’t get flustered or worried, we take precautions. In the learning field, you can do the following:

Look for conference organizers who regularly include research-based sessions (scientific research NOT opinion research).
Look for the conferences that host the great research-to-practice gurus. People like Patti Shank, Julie Dirksen, Clark Quinn, Mirjam Neelen, Ruth Clark, Karl Kapp, Jane Bozarth, Dick Clark, Paul Kirschner, and others.
Look for conferences that do NOT have sessions—or have fewer sessions—that propagate common myths and misinformation (learning styles, the learning pyramid, MBTI, DISC, millennials learn differently, people only use 10% of their brains, only 10% of learning transfers, neuroscience as a panacea, people have the attention span of a goldfish, etc.).
If you want to look into Will’s Forbidden Future, you might look for the following:
- conferences and/or trade organizations that have hired a content trustee, someone with a research background to promote valid information and cull bad information.
- conferences that point speakers to a list of learning myths to avoid.
- conferences that evaluate sessions based on the quality of the content.

Being exposed to false information isn’t just bad for us as professionals. It’s also bad for our organizations. Think of all the wasted effort—the toil, the time, the money—that was flushed down the toilet trying to redesign all our learning to meet the so-called learning-styles approach. Egads! If you need to persuade your management about the danger of learning myths you might try this.

In a previous blog post, I talked about what we can do as attendees of conferences to avoid learning bad information. That’s good reading as well. Check it out here.