What can I expect if I lead a discussion at the JSL Unsession hosted at Discovery Summit Americas?
Advice about leading a session...
If you call together a session, it is your responsibility to “hold the space” for your session. You hold the space by leading a discussion, by posting a “first question,” or by sharing information about your program. Be the shepherd – stay visible, be as involved as necessary, be a beacon of sanity that guides the group.
- Ask for help holding the space if you need it. You might, for example, put a session on the board and know that you are so passionate about the topic that it would be better if someone else, someone more objective, facilitates the discussion. Choose someone from your team, or another participant who is interested in the topic.
- Don’t assume people in the room know more, or less, than you do. You never know who is going to be interested in your session. You might want to start by asking people to hold up their hands if they’ve been involved with the topic for more than five years, for one to five years, or for one year or less.
- Don’t be upset if only two people show up to your session. Those two people are the ones who share your interest.
- Don’t feel that you have to “fill” up an hour of time. If what you have to say only takes 15 min and the group has finished interacting–then the session can end. At the start of the conference, we will discuss guidelines for how this can happen.
- Don’t feel pressure to have everything take place in “only” 45 minutes . If you start with a short presentation, and then a group conversation gets going, and your discussion needs to continue past the time allotted – find a way to make this happen. You might be able to keep talking for awhile in the room you are in, or move to another part of the conference area. At the start of the conference, we will discuss guidelines for how this can happen.
- Be Brave! Others are interested in making your session work!
- Do think about the ideas that you want to cover in your session, and how you want to cover them. But don’t feel as though you need to prepare a great deal. (If you’re over- prepared, your session might lose energy.)
Experiment with the kind of sessions you lead. There is no such thing as “failure” in an Unconference Unsession.
