Let’s take a trip back to your junior high days. If you’re like me, immediately your palms begin to sweat. Your throat tightens. Your heart starts racing and your mouth gets dry as you remember those trying teen years. Imagine that today is that day! It’s the big day when you have to deliver your first speech. Your mind is racing. “Will I remember everything to say? Did I wear the right clothes? Will they laugh at me? Will they boo me?” You say to yourself, “Remember what Ms. Smith said. View your audience in their underwear and you won’t be as nervous.”

10 Ways To Make Your Programs Effective, Engaging And Memorable In The Digital Age

Everything we experience changes our brain through the brain’s “neuroplasticity,” its lifelong ability to rewire itself. Each new technology we adopt changes not only our culture and lifestyle, but the brain itself. It’s not so much the content delivered — not the information or the entertainment. It’s the activities we’re involved in Andrea Sullivan, M.A. when using the technology.

10 Ways to make your Programs Effective, Engaging and Memorable in the Digital Age.

Everything we experience changes our brain through the brain’s “neuroplasticity,” its lifelong ability to rewire itself. Each new technology we adopt changes not only our culture and lifestyle, but the brain itself. It’s not so much the content delivered — not the information or the entertainment. It’s the activities we’re involved in Andrea Sullivan, M.A. when using the technology.

Ever been stuck and feel like you can’t get out of your box?

Maybe even backed into a corner? I have. And I suspect you have too.

Routine Thinking Leads To Being Stuck

I believe that often we do the same thing so much that we can’t see another way of proceeding.

Our minds really don’t like to think. It defaults to a mental path we’ve created over and over again. It takes less energy and mental work to follow the same path or process.

We know people get a lot more accomplished when they can collaborate and work together.

Yet most conferences make attendees sit passively in sessions. Or they are forced to connect in a speed networking session. Rarely do we tap into the brain wealth of attendees and allow them to collaborate.

Likewise, often conference attendees retreat into intolerant positions of non-listening. In today’s world of complex challenges, we long for over simplistic explanations that will solve our problems.

If you are a conference organizer, imagine your job as a museum curator.

Conference organizers must approach a conference’s content as a medium that needs to be strategically selected and placed to engage the audience, convey a message and inspire action.

Art gallery and museum curators use judgment and a distinguished sense of style to select and arrange art. They juxtapose art pieces against one another to create a narrative, evoke a response and communicate a message.