By Marc Steinlin
When designing events, have you ever wondered “what makes a good agenda?”, or “how can we balance the level of participant satisfaction and dissatisfaction”?
At IPK, when we design and evaluate an event our maxim is, that since people are diverse, there is no programme that is a 100% fit for everyone in any particular group. And because people have different preferences and styles, what is desirable and agreeable to one person, isn’t to someone else. Hence, we must design in a way that there is enough for everybody, and that we “distribute dissatisfaction” equally across all programme parts. In other words, what we want to avoid is that one person is unhappy throughout and someone else is happy 100% – lest we lose someone completely.
Let’s look at some figures:
If every participant in an event rates let’s say 70% of all sessions as good or satisfactory, then that’s probably as good as it gets. This indicates that what worked for some participants didn’t work for others, but everybody found at least a critical portion of the programme to be interesting. It’s just very unlikely that everybody finds everything 100% relevant and satisfactory. Were that to occur, it would be a reason for concern: where have individuality and diversity gone?
Let’s look at a specific example of a recent workshop evaluation. Among others, we asked the following two questions:
- “Which of the sessions did you appreciate most?” – and people could (but didn’t have to) distribute 100 points across 10 sessions;
- “Which session would you eliminate?” and again, people could (but didn’t have to) distribute 100 points across the same 10 session.
Firstly we see that while most respondents distributed most of their “appreciation points”, they were a bit more sparing with their “elimination points”; quite a few chose to not “outvote” anything at all.
What’s more is that while some sessions found more consent than others, there is not a single session which amassed significant amount of disapproval to a point where it would need to be removed altogether. On the opposite, every single session did rank in the top of at least some persons, and hence found particular appreciation of at least a part of the participants.
Let’s take an example: the OpenSpace session ranked second in the appreciative ranking – but it also ranked second on the list of sessions to eliminate! While many people really appreciated it, some did really not like it. At the same time, while the Model Building Studio ranked highest on the list of sessions to eliminate, it also ranked among the favourites of other participants.
This speaks to the imperative that every person should find a critical number of activities that meet their needs and preferences. Due to differences in functionality (and content) across different facilitation formats and methodologies, only a diversity of sessions can achieve this.
Overall the example workshop seems to be quite balanced. The evaluation results suggest that any major change of the agenda structure would probably make at least a few persons unhappier, because it would remove their “favourite”. And as we’ve seen it’s less likely that it would eliminate their least favourite. Of course there is always finetuning to be done to nudge towards shaping individual sessions better, but that’s a different issue.