I’ve been to more HR-related conferences than I care to remember.
The problem when you go to a lot of conferences is that you end up listening to a lot of speakers, and that means you get a close-up view of the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to presenters.
Overall, both the very good and the not-so-good speakers stick out (think Malcolm Gladwell and Sir Richard Branson; you figure out which one is which). The rest just sort of descend into a mass of words and images that may have been mildly entertaining at one point, but now, fail to register much of naything in my brain.
That’s one of the reasons why I am a big fan of the Ignite HR format that I saw at the annual HR Reinvention conference in Omaha last November. I attend this event largely because TLNT is the media sponsor, but what I always find there (besides an active, engaged local HR community), is that the Ignite HR format means that you will probably never get bored or complacent about the conference presentations.
The format is the thing
Yesterday, we kicked off a series of Ignite HR videos from the Omaha conference (you can see the first one, I’m Sorry You’re So Ugly, here) from the Reinvention conference, and although they are not quite as good as experiencing them in person, they give you a good sense of howe this all works.
Ignite HR is a format that gives presenters a tight structure of 5 minutes, 20 slides and exactly 15 seconds per slide. This makes it hard for presenters or conference attendees to linger on any one slide, any one point, and any single issue.
It also makes it impossible, as an attendee and consumer of the conference content, to get complacent or bored or to mentally drift away.
Is there a downside to the Ignite HR format? If there is, it pales in comparison to the upside, and that is how this unique speaker structure keeps everything moving ahead rapidly, really pulling the audience along at a pretty quick clip. For me, I’d rather have this and be left wanting more then to nod off bored and frustrated as I have at way too many other events.
I hope you’ll watch these video and decide for yourself. The Ignite HR experience in Omaha included presentations that were each in someway related to the theme of “putting the human back in human resources,” so if you are interested in that — and that’s why you’re here at TLNT, isn’t it? — then these video are probably for you.
Yesterday’s video, if you missed it,was titled I’m Sorry You’re So Ugly.
Today’s video is from Todd Conkright, the owner at Cornerstone Global Training & Performance Solutions in Omaha, who presented on Positively Deviant Performance Improvement. If that title doesn’t make you want to watch, then probably nothing will.