Written by, John Scarrott, Design Business Association, Sourced directly from LinkedIn Pulse

If you decide to attend a conference or send some of your team to an event, you probably think about the practical value of the time spent away from the office. But what percentage of what you learn at a conference impacts on your business? If your answer is “I don’t know” or “Not enough” what can you do about it?

The likely reality is that you’re not alone. It’s fair to say that not enough of the useful information that delegates pick up at conferences and events makes an impact on their business. But this is by no means inevitable.

By setting some clear goals before you go, applying an understanding of why it's tough to make new change stick and implementing one or two simple strategies post-event, you'll increase your chances of bringing more of what you learn back to your business. You’ll engage and energise your team and truly realise the impact that your investment of time and money deserves.

Set clear goals. Often, the reason people don’t make what they learn at a conference count, is that they forget to set themselves a powerful and clear goal at the start. They don’t know when and whether the goal has been met. This also makes it difficult for them to explain clearly the reason why they’re attending the event to their team.

To form a clear goal for attending a conference or event, there are a number of straightforward questions to ask yourself:

• Why are you attending the conference?
• What is the purpose of going to the sessions you're attending?
• Why is this purpose important to your business?
• What is the benefit to you?
• What is the benefit to your department?
• What is the benefit to your business?
• How will you know that the goal has been met?

If you’re not 100% sure of your answers, just make your best guess. Then write your answers down. Having something in print is important at this stage because later, you’ll be able to compare what you did learn with what you thought you’d learn. It gets your thinking out of your head and onto the page and it’s sharable information. You’ll also be able to explain to your team why you are going and why it might be useful to them.

Setting a clear goal is the first part of getting your ideas into play. You set the wheels in motion before you set foot inside the event. When you’re clear on your goals, the next step is to get your team involved with why you’re going.

Share with your team. Choose an opportunity to present your goals above in two minutes to your team. Send them the link to the event in advance so they can see where you’re going and what’s being discussed. Ask them for their input- what do they think of the theme? Ask if there are any sessions that they’d like you to go along to on their behalf.

Suggest to them that you'd like to feed back on the content of the event when you return. This builds trust and increased buy-in from your team as to why you are going. It starts to plug the themes into the business early and it opens up a discussion around the event. It helps to balance out any lingering cynicism that the time away from the office might be a ‘jolly’ by asking the team: ‘This is what I’m going to and why. What can I bring back that could be useful to you?’

Getting things set up before you go the event raises your chances of success. But even with this preparation, things can still conspire against you. With this in mind, it’s worth looking at what you’re up against.

A brief tour of the ‘change challenge’. A solid workplace is built upon a system designed to support itself. Everyone within the business has responsibilities and roles and knows what they should be doing each day and that’s how the business functions. Paradoxically, that can also make the business relatively inflexible when it comes to change. Any problems, challenges or opportunities that arise are all ‘managed’ by the system. A key benefit of the system is its ability to support itself by maintaining stability. And this often involves maintaining a holding pattern for the current situation. This is not anyone's fault and generally not the sole responsibility of any one person within a business.

An example of the magnetic pull of the ‘system’ can be how easy it is to get sucked back into the day job, when back in the office after a conference. It's the system saying ‘ this is what usually happens’ that drags us back in. The interactions we have on a day-to-day basis demand our attention and can overpower strategic thinking around the longer term.

This is the overall systemic context against which any new information you bring into your business plays, so it’s worth grasping and accepting that this exists before you start. However, you don’t have to like or agree with it. You just have to recognise it and then play the game to win.

In order to win, there are two further stages to go through. The first is about capturing your insights at the event. The second is what you do back at the office to get them into play.

Capture your insights at the event. When you’re at the event make notes andtake pictures of the slides or what’s happening on stage. It can take a while for organisers to get slides to delegates so this gives you a head start. Remember to tweet what strikes you in the session there and then.

Treat this process of noting and sharing as preparation for the session you're going to present to the team when you return. Make a note of every conversation you have and with whom. If it’s a multi-day event, look over your notes at the end of each day. Check that you can read them and understand them. Then add more notes to these as your thoughts occur to you. This process helps you to become ‘friendly’ with what you’re writing by engaging you with your own thoughts. This will create new thoughts and insights.

When you get back to the office, start to prepare your feedback session. Go back over your notes again and add in more thoughts as you have them. The acts of reading, thinking and writing work well together, because your unconscious mind will do some work behind the scenes while you’re doing other things. But you have to trigger this part of your brain to produce the goods when you want it to. And that’s what reading and writing do, they act together as a unified prompt to your brain.

Getting your ideas into play. So you're back in the office, you’ve done some processing of your notes and you have some ideas. Your next step is to arrange a 10-minute session to present and discuss what happened at the event. You could use a simple and well established coaching structure like GROW to present this. The GROW model was developed by Sir John Whitmore.

GROW stands for Goal, Reality, Options and What we will do. This is how it could be applied to the task of setting up a discussion around the conference you attended:

• Goal refers to the reasons why you attended the event.
• Reality is what you actually discovered.
• Options are your initial thoughts on the gap between the two and what that could mean in terms of opportunities for you, your team and your business. At this point you can open up the floor to discussion. Ask people what they think.
• What would be the action that you take next.

And that’s the three-step method for handling the information that you bring back from an event. It’s the start of a conversation rather than a cul-de-sac. It’s a question rather than an answer. And it’s an opportunity for you, your team and your business to explore how the information and ideas that you bring back from a conference could be used to transform your business or just make a small but important change. Imagine if handing in your badge at the end of the conference was the beginning of something exciting for you business.