Ideas for Meaningful Conferences

Possible talks, organised by the question you are asking yourself, as a starting point for building the one your audience actually needs.

The pages in this section do not describe off-the-shelf lectures. Each one starts from a question as it is really asked by the people who contact us, and opens up several possible directions, grounded in the texts published in our resources. They are starting points: something to recognise yourself in, an angle to choose, and then a conversation with us to build the singular talk that will truly serve your audience.

Why don’t young people come to us, how do you stand up for culture when the money runs out, should we confiscate the phone, is artificial intelligence going to replace us: requests for talks come to us as questions, rarely as themes. So we have organised this section by questions. Under each one, several approaches are possible, and the preparatory conversation is precisely where we choose the one that fits your situation, your teams, and what the day should leave you with.

All these talks share one way of working, described on the page Giving talks and lectures: short inputs alternate with moments when the room gets to work, everyone contributes in writing through a digital tool developed by the agency and hosted on our own servers, and what has been produced stays online after the day is over, for those who were there and those who were not. The methods experienced during the session are named at the end, because they can be reused as they are; they are documented in Collective intelligence facilitation methods.

These talks are given by Benoît Labourdette or, depending on the subject, by another member of the agency. And when the right person to speak is on your own team, we can support them in building and delivering the talk themselves [see the page “What if someone from your team did the talking?”, to be linked once published].

The simplest way to start is to write to us describing your situation: the organisation, the event, the expected audience, the question at hand. The first step is always a conversation.