Use spectives to unlock the full potential of conferences

During a 1992 conference, I created the first of what I now call spectives. A spective is a plenary closing session that combines a retrospective (looking back at what just happened) with a prospective (looking forward into the future).

My visual metaphor for a spective is the two-faced Roman god Janus, who was “the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings”. [Fun fact: The month of January is named for Janus.]Over the last 32 years, I’ve led hundreds of spectives and introduced the format to many event professionals and facilitators. Spectives are popular and successful because, like peer conferences, they adapt beautifully to participants’ wants and needs. I’ve facilitated them for large (e.g. the 2015 PCMA Education Conference) and small (e.g. the 2023 BizBash Leadership Summit) conferences.

I repeat the details of leading a spective here because they are covered comprehensively in all of my books. (You can also learn a fair amount about spectives by searching the posts on this site.)

You’d think that spectives would take more time the larger the group, but it turns out they scale surprisingly well. Most spectives don’t include facilitated discussion of themes and issues that are uncovered, and they typically take between fifteen and forty-five minutes. [TIP: I usually schedule an hour. This means that the event usually ends a little early, which participants appreciate 😀.]

They are a perfect way to end a conference because:

Spectives rapidly and effectively provide a collective experience of what the conference has been like for everyone

I’ve found that spectives are a fantastic tool for participants to get a big-picture of what an event has been like for the group. This informs their own experience. A participant may learn that others shared their specific experience (e.g., I liked/didn’t like a session/format/topic, etc.) Or they may discover that aspects that were negative for them were positive for others, or vice versa. Learning how your experience reflects that of the group is valuable information that leads to the consequence that…

Spectives build community

I’m not sure there’s a faster way for a group’s members to learn about the commonalities that they share. Rapidly uncovering and expressing thoughts and feelings about what they’ve experienced together creates powerful bonds. The intense experience makes it likely (though not assured) that the event participants will want to meet again. And the spective provides valuable clues as to what forms such meetings might take.

Spectives are simple to lead, fun, informative, and bonding. They end your event on a high note. So make them the closing session of every conference you create!

A hat tip!

A hat tip to Nicole Osibodu and Kamryn Bryce for sparking me to write about the value of spectives, via their LinkedIn post (below) on how they use them at The Community Factory events!