I’m back from our AYE conference planning. I had a blast.
The best thing, aside from being able to publish our program, is that we discovered that when we are together, the creative juices fly. For example, instead of two people pairing to teach the warm-up tutorial, we decided we all teach the tutorial. Not all of us all the time. No, we’ll still pair-teach, but we’ll pair with different people over the course of the day. That way we all get to know the new participants. Since AYE is so participatory, we expect this will help us learn the new peoples’ names. And, it might help these people make decisions about which sessions to choose when.
I’ve updated all my sessions. This year, I’m offering
- You Are Here. You Want to Go There?
- The Budgeting Black Hole: Predicting the Unknowable
- Coaching is a Two-Way Relationship
- Agile Program Management: Another Approach to Large Projects
- A Fresh Catch, so I can have a little while to see what strikes my fancy as the conference gets closer. Or, if you decide to participate, you can request a session from me.
- Coping With Change in Your Life
The Coping with Change session is a brand new session that does not arise from my work, per se. My fellow hosts suggested I use some of the ideas from my previous Reinventing Yourself sessions and what I’ve done in the past four-plus months to manage my life and offer a session. Let me know if you think this is a good idea :-)
We discovered that when we meet in person, we are much more creative than we are on the phone in our biweekly phone calls. We might have developed some of the new ideas, such as the Fresh Catch idea on the phone. Maybe. But I don’t think so.
We have an innovative program this year, aside from it being experiential and interactive. Our tagline this year is “Exploring Human Systems in Action.” We will be designing the post conference tutorial to help people take advantage of what they learned during the conference and explore more, and we don’t quite know what that looks like yet, so it’s still a Fresh Catch.
As hosts, we’ve known each other for more than a decade. We’ve worked together on the conference for the last 10 years. We work on our relationships. We talk biweekly all year and meet once. But this year we realized that we were much more creative in person than we ever are on the phone. The ideas flowed–we had no problem generating ideas.
On our calls, we often have trouble generating ideas. I don’t know why. But we innovate in person. That’s why we’re going to work on getting together again later this year.
In the meantime, you can review the whole AYE program and register. Yes, registration is up and working, I believe. If not, let me know. That’s my job to resolve.
