Imagine walking down the hall of a conference venue.

You stop and enter one of the rooms. A speaker is telling the audience the three steps that they must follow to be successful. The audience sits quietly. Some write or type notes.

Now imagine walking into another room at the same venue. The audience is talking to each other in pairs and triads about how to customize and apply one of the three steps needed for success. The speaker walks around the room listening and engaging in various conversations.

Evaluating Your Conference Model

Read the two examples listed above again.

Which example resembles the majority of your conference general sessions, plenaries, breakouts and workshops?

You’ve just identified your conference session mental model. And you’ve also just identified your cognitive bias.

Consider each example again. What are the underlying beliefs exhibited in each example regarding conference education?

Your Mental Model

Every person that comes to your conference has a set of beliefs about how the world works. What life is really about. And how they succeed in their job.

Similarly, everyone that helps plan and implement your conference has a specific set of underlying views about how your event should work. What defines success. And what your target market expects.

These views and beliefs are strong mental models that drive your actions.

Mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures of images that influence how we understand the world and how we take actions. Very often, we are not consciously aware of our mental models or the effects they have on our behavior.

Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline

Start With Your Mental Model... 

To view this full article please click here. This information was originally sourced from Velvet Chainsaw here and was written by Jeff Hunt.