Everything you did to make your conference better actually made it worse

Claude

Summary. Misha Glouberman argues that most conferences actively work against their real purpose—bringing people together—by loading up on speakers, elaborate meals, and packed schedules that leave no room for unstructured mingling. He walks through concrete failure modes: lecture halls that silence 199 people so one can talk, fancy sit-down lunches that trap attendees at round tables with only two neighbors, awards ceremonies that eat into the rare social window of lunch, and shortened breaks sacrificed to cram in one more talk. His prescription for organizers is blunt: stop trying to do more and instead do about 75% less, because the real value of a conference emerges in the margins that programming keeps crowding out.

On the note. You could push this further into a design principle: the round-table lunch and the podium both fail for the same structural reason—they fix people in place facing a small, unchosen set of neighbors, whereas queues, buffets, and standing breaks let people self-select who to talk to and for how long. It's a neat mirror of Do Things that Don't Scale's advice to deliberately narrow scope rather than chase breadth—both are arguments that restraint, not more programming or more features, is what actually produces the outcome you want.

Related

• deliberately programming 75% less to create more value ↔ starting in a narrow market you can dominate before expanding (Do Things that Don't Scale) · Both pieces argue that deliberately shrinking scope—fewer sessions, a smaller market—produces more value than trying to serve everyone through broad, maximal effort.