When like-minded people gather together, a powerful energy and enthusiasm often results. People are excited about what they have learned, the profession or organization of which they are part, and the possibilities the future holds. And then we send them on their way, without asking for a pledge or commitment, without harnessing the collective energy to achieve some specific common goal, without asking people to volunteer their time and talents to help create the future they want to see realized. Too often the momentum is left in the ballroom.

In the seminal book The Leadership Challenge, authors James Kouzes and Barry Posner found that recognizing individual contributions and celebrating shared community values and successes are two of the 10 traits associated with extraordinary leadership. Sometimes in our haste to move quickly, we turn the doling out of awards into an assembly-line experience. While it is admirable to avoid wasting participants' energy, simply going faster does a disservice to the individuals being honored … and our own creativity. What we should instead be thinking about is how we can create celebrations that our community can share in even if they do not know all of the individuals being honored, and how we can build pride and reconnect individuals to their profession, their organization, and recent accomplishments.

Wasting the Opportunity to Gather Feedback

Even if your individual session evaluations are impeccably designed, how else are you tapping into the opportunity a meeting represents to gather perceptions and insights? For example, I recently attended a conference where the free e-mail stations required you to answer one simple question prior to checking your account. The question changed each day. If you are using electronic polling in a general session are you also asking a few questions to inform your organization's future efforts?

Wasting Knowledge

The value many associate with P2P (peer-to-peer) learning seems to be increasing dramatically, yet so many of our conference formats still turn participants into passive receptacles of wisdom from the stage. What if keynotes were shorter but they were followed by small discussion break- outs of peers sharing common demographic characteristics or interests? What if instead of one 60-minute speaker on a topic, you had three 20-minute speakers on a theme? What if you did something crazy like what I experienced at the 2006 TED Conference (ted.com), which gave attendees an opportunity to submit proposals to do a three-minute presentation during general sessions? A few of those snippets offered the most provocative learning I took from the conference.

Wasting Local Intellectual Capital

My CVB friends tell me that planners often ask them to recommend local suppliers or interesting meeting spaces, but they are almost never asked about local artists, business leaders, or teachers, who could be valuable contributors to their program. In every city, incredible talent, insight, and enthusiasm go unutilized when out-of-town planners don't think to consider how local resources might support the learning objectives of their event.

So much of a meeting's design gets relegated to individual functions: logistics, communication, catering, sales, education. Being better stewards of the vast resources involved in any event is an area where true collaboration can occur. Together, we can craft events that provide the greatest value to participants while leaving the smallest footprint behind.

Jeffrey Cufaude is a former higher education administrator, meeting planner, and association executive. He currently writes, speaks, and facilitates on a variety of individual and organizational leadership issues. Learn more about his work at www.ideaarchitects.org. To submit topic ideas and feedback on the Leading Learning column, e-mail jeffrey@ideaarchitects.org. Convene's Leading Learning series is sponsored by AVW TELAV. Visit its Web site at www.avwtelav.com.