Failing to treat our customers as partners in achieving our purpose is unconscionable if we have any interest in creating a more just, equitable and loving world.

Back in 2020, when I was designing the core system that sat at the heart of the “market network” framework we proposed in From Billions to Trillions - https://trillions.global - I spoke to the individual as a ‘citizen’. While this is a word that is now heavily contextualised to politics, it was originally used to refer to an inhabitant of a place, acknowledging the rights to place inferred upon all people.

So as citizens of earth, the one place we all inhabit, it certainly seemed fitting to place us at the centre of the system I designed.

But too often, we treat our stakeholders as recipients, rather than as participants, leading to suboptimal results not only for our organisations, but more significantly, for the change we seek to make happen.

The idea that everyone is a participant is applicable across all areas of ethical enterprise - from product and service design through incorporating customer feedback, to humanitarian aid and international development, by providing a level playing field in which the explicit recognition of the agency of focus communities ensures they are incorporated into designing, building and implementing solutions. The important point is that if we're going to make change at the speed and scale we all believe is necessary, we need to find a way to do that together, regardless of where in a value-flow diagram we believe that people sit!

Let me illustrate this in a context we’re all familiar with - conferences and events where agents of change gather to seek ways to be of greater service. The holders of these spaces (and also ourselves, by giving permission to this dynamic) generally treat us as customers, or worse, as beneficiaries (a colonial notion we urgently need to be rid of), rather than as participants in the experience we’re having together.

The people who gather in these rooms are smart, compassionate, and well-informed. And we’re eager to do more with our time than sit in amphitheatres and listen to those with the profile, or the wealth, or the brand recognition, tell us what we already know, or our experience leads us to have a radical divergence of opinion on.

So for the love of all things sacred, make better use of us!

Here’s some simple (and conservative!) math that oughta make our heads reel, based upon a 2 1/2 day ‘conference’ which is pretty standard these days:

1000 = number of participants

500 = cost of entry

500 = flights

500 = accomodation

24 = travel hours

24 = in-conference hours

150 = billable rate

• 1000 = number of participants

• 500 = cost of entry

• 500 = flights

• 500 = accomodation

• 24 = travel hours

• 24 = in-conference hours

• 150 = billable rate

1000 x (500+500+500) + 1000 x 150 x (24+24) = 8,700,000

And that doesn’t include venue hire, catering, staffing, marketing, transport & logistics, or the sundry other costs that go with paying speakers’ transport, accommodation and speaking fees (when they’re being paid).

So let’s conservatively round it up to 10 million, and ask ourselves - what good did we achieve with that investment? And by extension, if we multiply that number by say 1,000 for all of the other impact conferences that run worldwide over the course of a year, what could we do with that $10 BILLION?

“Don’t just sit there, do something!”

What we seem to have largely forgotten is that conference is a verb, not a noun. Its root is the latin “conferens” meaning “to bring together”. The great Bretton Woods Conference was not just a bunch of smart, experienced people coming together to get talked at. It was 730 delegates, from 44 allied nations, gathering for THREE WEEKS to hammer out a way to rebuild the international economic system while the second world war was still being fought!

While it would certainly be unreasonable to expect delegates at a three day conference to achieve something as sweeping in impact as the Bretton Woods Agreement, I’m confident that we can do better than have them spend thousands of dollars on flights, accomodation, and event tickets, to build value for a conference brand, and then sit in a room and basically watch YouTube and Ted videos all day.

After all, ask any participant at any conference for change makers what the best part of the event was, and they rarely say “the keynotes, the plenaries, the panels (oh my!)”. What they speak to is the quality of the conversations they had, the connections they formed, and the opportunities they discovered to scale their impact. So when an event fails to engineer for serendipity and incorporate these spaces, seasoned and experienced professionals often come away feeling cheated.

Whenever I’ve been engaged to support program design, I start with the core principal "everyone is a participant". And. Participatory programming isn't easy. There are a variety of reasons for this, but the one that seems to gain the least attention (which is ironic amongst those dedicated to building more inclusive economic systems), is that it has the potential to be tokenistic at best, and extractive at worst (and the legal form the event host maintains has nothing to do with this).

Frankly, as much as I enjoy delivering heartfelt keynotes or inciting riots on panels by quoting Machiavelli, I often find considerably more value in designing and facilitating participatory programming - finding ways for people to work together, to unite around a meta-challenge that encapsulates all of their work, and throw out the playbook of business-as-usual to explore how their unique combination of people, knowledge and capital (of all types!) can be best coordinated towards maximum impact.

I’ve co-created these experiences at conferences in the USA, Mexico, Switzerland, Germany, Poland, Copenhagen, and Australia, and each time, the results have been extraordinary. In one I co-facilitated, we worked with participants to codesign a solution that combined multiple projects such that they could deliver power, telecommunications, low-cost dwellings, water, sanitation, and education to over 1000 remote communities in a West African nation of 22 million people (where each of the participants had projects already active), with less money, and in less time, than each individual project was investing separately.

In short, in only a matter of hours, they all figured out how to move beyond collaboration to effective coordination, and more importantly from the perspective of mitigating human suffering to:

Do more.

With less.

Faster.

Now imagine if we could find a way to do that at every conference, or event, or design process we participate in from now on.

I invite you to share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below. What is your experience of conferences and events? How would you like to be spending your time in community with other agents of change? Let's start a conversation and learn from each other.