I just wrapped Pinnacle, Hightower’s annual conference for field professionals. I sent the first draft of the agenda in July. The version that ran in the room was number eleven.
The first draft of a conference agenda is a guess. Not a bad guess — an informed one, built from what the client has told you they want and what you know about how people actually sit through three days of content. But a guess.
Here is what moved.
Sessions got cut. Some of them were good ideas that didn’t survive contact with the schedule. There was no room for everything, and something has to lose. The hardest part of programming is not filling the time. It’s deciding what doesn’t get any.
A general session became a breakout. It turned out the content was for some of the room, not all of it. Putting it on the main stage would have meant a large share of the audience sitting through something that wasn’t for them — and once that happens on day one, you’ve taught people that the main stage is optional.
A keynote absorbed a session. We had planned a general session on AI. Then we booked Zack Kass, and his keynote covered the ground better than our session would have. So we cut ours. That isn’t a loss. That’s the keynote doing its job.
Roles shifted, and the agenda shifted with them. Over four months, people move. Responsibilities change hands. Every time that happened, it rippled through the document — a speaker here, a session owner there, a panel that needed rebuilding. Some versions existed for no other reason.
Names changed. More than once. A session called one thing in July means something different to the people in the room in October, and if the title doesn’t tell someone whether the next fifty minutes are for them, the title has failed.
The hardest part wasn’t what to cut
Cutting is relatively straightforward once you accept that something has to go. The genuinely difficult work is everything after: covering what needs covering without wrecking the rhythm of the days.
Every topic on a conference agenda has someone behind it who needs it there. A leader with a message. A team with something to launch. A partner who was promised a slot. All of those are legitimate. And the agenda has a fixed number of minutes.
But it isn’t arithmetic. Fitting everything in is not the same as building something people can sit through. Put three dense sessions back to back and you’ve lost the room by the second one, no matter how good the content is. Front-load the day and the afternoon dies. Save the most important thing for last and half the audience is already thinking about their flight.
So you end up solving two problems at once — what goes in, and where it sits — and every time you solve one, you’ve broken the other. That is what eleven versions actually looks like.
None of this means the first draft was wrong. The first draft’s job is to give everyone something concrete to react to. You cannot get useful feedback on a blank page. You can get a great deal of it on a rough agenda.
What I’d tell anyone taking on a conference for the first time: build the thing early, send it before it’s finished, and expect it to be unrecognizable by the time it runs.
Eleven versions isn’t a failure of planning. Eleven versions is the planning.
I’ll let you know what twelve looks like.
Photos: Donna Alberico Photography