Version 2 Is Where the Event Gets Made

Every conference agenda I've ever built has a version 1, and no conference I've ever produced has run on it.

This used to bother me. Now I think it's the most important feature of the process.

Version 1 is a hypothesis. It's the producer's best answer to what this event should be — informed by the goals, the audience, last year's feedback, and a point of view about what the room needs. It should be a strong draft. But it's built on one perspective, and events don't belong to one perspective.

Then the planning committee reads it, and the real information arrives. Which sessions do people fight for? Which ones does nobody defend? What did the draft assume about the audience that the people closest to that audience know isn't true? What's missing that no amount of desk research would have surfaced? A committee review call is sometimes framed as the meeting where your work gets picked apart. I've come to see it as the meeting where the event actually gets made.

The discipline this requires from the producer is specific: don't be precious, and don't be vague. A fuzzy version 1 protects your ego — nothing concrete enough to be wrong — and wastes everyone's time, because there's nothing concrete enough to react to either. The job of the first draft isn't to survive. It's to be specific enough that smart people can disagree with it productively.

Version 2 carries the fingerprints of everyone who will have to stand behind the event. That's not a compromise of the vision. On a well-run project, it's the first version that has one.