Convening architecture
Most conferences are designed for the people who organize them, not the people who attend them. The result is a room full of people being talked at, in formats that made sense in 1995, producing outcomes that nobody can name. This page describes a different way to think about bringing people together — one I've developed and tested across a decade of events, from Splice Beta to international media convenings across the Asia-Pacific.
I work with organizations to redesign how they bring people together.
[email protected] →The problem with how we gather
Most conferences are built around a content model that assumes people want to consume information from a stage. But the feedback from every post-event survey I've seen says the same thing: the highest-rated part of the conference is the networking. The content is the draw, but the connections are what people remember.
The gap between those two things — what gets people in the room and what actually serves them once they're there — is where most conference design breaks down. Organizers keep asking what sessions people want to see. What they should be asking is what outcomes people need to take home.
The shape of that problem varies by organization, but the pattern is consistent: academic-style plenaries, fireside chats that make everyone uncomfortable, breakout sessions that are either a roundtable or a workshop, and a format that was designed for passive consumption in an age when people have already voted with their feet. The audience skews senior because the format rewards familiarity. New voices don't show up because the space isn't designed for them. And the conference gets smaller each year not because interest is declining, but because the experience isn't changing.
The Fractals approach to convening
There is no standard engagement. Every organization has a different set of constraints — funding, legacy, mandate, internal appetite for change. But the principles underneath are stable across contexts.
Start with outcomes, not formats
Before anyone names a session, we ask: what do people need to leave with? A playbook they can implement. A policy statement their organization can adopt. A standard operating procedure written with five peers in the same position. Five connections with people they've never met before who work on the same problem. Once you know the outcome, you design the space around it — not the other way around.
The session is the appetizer
The real value of any gathering is the people in the room. Sessions exist to get them approved by their bosses, to give shy people a way in, and to provide shared context for the conversations that happen outside them. If the connections are working, the sessions can be almost incidental. This is hard to sell to sponsors but it's what attendees actually want.
Design the before and after, not just the during
The most important interactions at a conference happen before anyone arrives. At Splice Beta, we scanned every new attendee's LinkedIn profile upon signup and pre-paired them with relevant contacts. By the time they stepped into the room, they already had meetings scheduled. No one was a stranger. The same thinking applies to the after — the outcomes people commit to producing together, the follow-through structure, the tools that sustain relationships beyond the event.
Language is infrastructure
What you call a gathering determines who shows up. "Festival" instead of "conference" changes attendee mindset — people arrive expecting participation, not consumption. "Media" instead of "journalism" opens the room to creators, activists, and technologists who would never identify as journalists. These are not branding decisions. They are architectural decisions about who gets to be in the room and how they behave once they're there.
Smaller is a feature, not a compromise
The right KPI is not bodies in seats. It's whether people want to fly themselves in because the outcomes are valuable enough. A focused gathering of 200 people who self-select and self-fund is harder to organize but produces better results than 400 flown-in participants who were never going to come back. The degrowth conversation is happening in newsrooms and in conference planning rooms at the same time, for the same reasons.
Don't crowdsource the format
Asking attendees what sessions they want to see produces more of what already exists. People replicate familiar formats because they can picture themselves in them. Instead, ask what they need to accomplish — what would make the trip worth it for them. Then invent the format that delivers that outcome. The organizer's job is to create conditions people haven't experienced before, not to poll them into more of the same.
What this looks like in practice
These are not theoretical positions. Each principle was developed through iteration, tested against real attendees, and refined across multiple events.
Splice Beta — a festival, not a conference
Over seven editions, Splice Beta deliberately refused the conference label. It called itself a festival. Sessions were framed as appetizers — the reason to show up — but the real work was the pre-arranged meetings, the curated pairings of new attendees with veterans, and the deliberate design of a space where no one was a stranger.
This model produced a self-funding audience that returned year after year. The tradeoff: sponsors struggled with the language because "festival" didn't match their ROI frameworks. That tension is real, and it's worth naming rather than pretending it doesn't exist.
of post-conference feedback across multiple events rated networking and peer connection as the most valuable outcome — higher than any content session.
When this applies
This kind of work fits organizations that are at a specific inflection point — where a conference that has worked for years starts to feel stale, and the person running it knows they need to change but doesn't have the vocabulary or the permission to do it alone. That's usually the moment when the head of events, the incoming director, or the team lead has privately concluded that another year of the same format will lose their audience, but doesn't know what to replace it with.
The engagement can take different forms: a strategic audit of an existing conference's architecture, a redesign for an upcoming edition, or a longer-term thinking partnership that evolves as the organization's needs shift. In some cases, it's a matter of making the internal case — giving someone the ammunition they need to advocate for a different approach with their own leadership and funders.
I've done this work with media conferences and journalism organizations because that's where my experience sits. But the principles apply anywhere people are brought together for a common purpose — policy convenings, industry summits, internal offsites, partner gatherings. The mechanics change. The psychology doesn't.
The most common question I get after these conversations is: "What would you do first?" The answer is almost never about format. It's about starting with a clear, honest picture of what people actually need from the room — and then trusting that the format will reveal itself.
If your organization is bringing people together and you're not sure the current format serves them, let's talk. I work as a thinking partner, an auditor, or a redesign lead — whatever shape the need takes.
[email protected]