A Connection-Building Exercise That Draws Out Event Participants

Instant Picassos: Participants at The Conference for Conferences, with portraits they drew of one another — looking only at one another, and not at the page. Photo by Selina Pan.

There was an audible gasp in the room when, soon after The Conference for Conferences began, organizer Jenny Sauer-Klein told participants that the blank space on the cover of the 8X8-inch workbook they had been given was for a hand-drawn portrait — one that event participants would draw of one another.

It was an unusual way for a conference to get down to business. But then, the reason why Sauer-Klein convened the inaugural The Conference for Conferences on the campus of the Oakland Museum of California on Sept. 16 was to invite its 150 participants to experiment with session formats and reimagine ways to convene.

Jenny Sauer-Klein

For the exercise, which Sauer-Klein, founder of The Primary Shift, a San Francisco Bay Area–based workplace experience design studio, sometimes describes as “Instant Picasso,” participants were asked to write their names on their workbooks and exchange them with another participant. There were two rules, she added — not to look down at the drawing in progress and not to lift their pen from the page.

No one has to be an artist or be creative to do this, so it levels the playing field, Sauer-Klein said. And when participants “put their pens down and share their drawings, there’s always a moment of uproarious laughter.”

It’s fun, she said, but it also serves a critical function of helping people create strong connections at the beginning of events. “I’m not saying to people, ‘Gaze into your partner’s eyes deeply,’ but that’s kind of what’s happening, right? So, you get people looking at each other, strangers having this moment where they’re drawing, so they’re using a different part of their brain than normal.”

Sauer-Klein said that in her experience, “there’s an invisible wall between the speakers and the audience, and there’s an invisible wall between the attendees and each other. You’re sitting in a sea of people, but it’s often very awkward or uncomfortable to make those connections. So, as designers, how do we break the fourth wall between the speaker and the audience, and how do we break those invisible walls between attendees so that they feel safe and comfortable enough to make new connections?”

Barbara Palmer is Convene’s deputy editor.

Learn more about how the inaugural Conference for Conferences explored event engagement.