(Summary, translation and conference perspective by Maarten Vanneste) 
Focussing is an obviously valuable skill for participants at conferences. Long days, many sessions, long session, variation in topics and difficult material, all make it hard to stay focussed. We may assume that focus is necessary for hearing and understanding and thus a crucial condition for Learning; the number one reason why we organise conferences.There are a number of tricks that we can use as participants for more focus. And some of them are of value when designing and executing meetings from the organiser’s perspective. There are things we can do to help our participants focus!Besides a healthy lifestyle (enough sleep, body movement, and healthy food), there are three factors influencing the ability to focus.

Enthusiasm

First one is enthusiasm (motivation). The things the meeting organiser and the speakers can do to get the participants enthused are crucial for the focus of participants. A boring long and monotone presentation may contain the most important information, but when participants are not enthused and therefore not focussing, the message doesn’t get trough, it’s lost…

skills

The second one is a little more challenging to influence: Skills. The more one is skilled in something, the easier it gets to focus on it. One thing meeting organisers can influance is the session description: the better you describe the session and the better the session connects to the participants, the easier it will be for theme to concentrate.  For example a group of hart surgeons will find it easy to focus on a presentation about hart surgery. The same group will find it more challenging to focus during a presentation on healthcare regulations for hospitals.

Distraction

Finally there is distraction: focussing or concentration is very difficult when sound or visual stimuli are distracting participants. If you realise that the sound of microphone feedback (the hi picht beeping tone) is the world’s second most irritating sound, it is clear that a good sound technician with professional equipment is a must. We can also neutralise the busy décor of a meeting (ball) room by installing a set or a wall of drapes. And obviously ask noisy backstage catering service to reduce noise or postpone activities.  Focussing is a skill that can be trained, or better, you can train yourself. For participants and focussing during conferences, here are a few other crucial tips.Distracted? Focus on the details.
Distracted during a presentation? Focus on the speaker. Not just to what the speaker says, but also to the clothes h/s wears, the shape of the face, hair, etc. If you keep doing this, you’ll find that it’s easier to concentrate. For larger conferences it is useful to install a camera and a second screen to   show face of the speaker. This is always helpful, but from 20 meter  or 70feet onwards, it becomes almost a necessity: from that distance onwards, seeing the expressions on the face of the speaker becomes difficult, so for rooms deeper than 20 meter (70ft), is gets really useful to project the speaker’s face on a second screen to help participants focus.

Lost connection? Activate the brain.

To focus is much easier when you are an active participant rather than a passive listener. For participants, writing, drawing, a mind map, etc are all helpful. Obviously it is the task of any speaker to offer as much interaction as possible and the conference organiser can certainly  support or even drive that by setting the standards and helping speakers to use a mix of listening, discussing, writing, typing,  speaking etc. Other ways to stimulate focusA simple tool to keep your audience focussed is the use of pictures in a presentation. Rather than text only slides, every few slides a picture or an illustration helps a lot. Some speakers even work with pictures only and the positive effect of images on memory is another good reason to apply more pictures in presentations. (Also see the five memories) The same for music, sound and video. The more variation in the presentation the better. Good speaker briefings, speaker training and the speaker support with for example a speaker office where someone helps with editing and adding illustrations can make a difference. Using a voting system with questions spread out over the duration of the presentation also activate the sleeping or distracted brains. Obviously co-creation and collaboration technologies are great tools to keep the participant’s attention. And even without that technology, asking the audience a question every five to ten minutes helps. In order to do that, a speaker can look at his ‘final’ slides and insert a question every now and than to introduce the next slide. And finally, tell your participants it is okay to do a powernap: after a 10 minute nap, concentration is optimal. (more in The power of nap)Read more?
book: Leer als een speer (Dutch), Jan-Willem van den Brandhof, Brainware
University of Cambridge Counselling Service, www.counselling.cam.ac.UK