Notes from a room where nobody was allowed to network

The format has three rules and all of them are subtractive.

No panel. A panel decides in advance whose opinion the room is for, and once that decision is visible everybody arranges themselves around it. Six people listen to four people and then queue to speak to one of them.

No badges. A badge is an instruction to sort. Give a room badges and within ten minutes it has quietly re-formed into the shape of a conference, with the same people at the centre of it as last time.

No pitching. This is the rule people find hardest to give up, and the one that makes the evening work. The moment a conversation can end in a transaction, it is being managed rather than had.

What is left

A table, a reason to be at it, and a seating plan.

The seating plan is the whole craft, and it takes longer than the venue, the catering and the invitations put together. You are not seating people by industry — industry is what they would sort themselves by, and it produces rooms where everybody already agrees. You seat by the shape of the problem somebody is currently stuck on, which means you have to have asked, which means the four days of work happen before anybody arrives.

A good evening looks like it organised itself. That is the sign somebody spent four days on it.

The measurement problem

There is no metric here and attempts to invent one have all been embarrassing. Follow-up meetings can be counted, and counting them changes the evening for the worse, because a host who is counting starts introducing people who will produce a countable outcome.

The only test that has held up is negative: if two people who should obviously have met leave without having met, the evening failed, however good it felt at the time.

Why it is on the register at all

Because it produces things, unpredictably, at a rate that would be embarrassing to defend and impossible to deny. The best thing that ever came out of one of these was a conversation I was not part of, between two people I seated next to each other for a reason I no longer remember, which turned into something neither of them has ever mentioned the evening in connection with.

That is the correct outcome. An evening that gets credited is an evening that has started managing its reputation.