Looking back at Like Minds 2011

I used to run team-building programmes. At the end I always reminded participants of something I had learned from attending workshops that had been rich in emotion. It was always wise to think ahead to what was going to happen when you got back to the real world and encountered the important people in your life. I rather wish I had taken that advice more seriously when coming back from the Like Minds conference in Exeter on Friday evening.

To be fair I had tried to. Taking advantage of advance booking and a Railcard, I had decided to upgrade to First Class for the journey to and from Paddington. The country that invented railways considers it an appropriate mode of travel for the majority of its citizens to spend a couple of hours auditioning for the role of a battery hen. But I didn’t want to round off three highly-charged days that way. I thought a bit more physical space would buy me the mental space I needed.

In stark contrast to the rest of the train, the First Class compartments on the journey back were sparsely populated and quiet. There was none of the loud business conversation that had characterised the journey down. Suddenly hungry, I ordered a burger with outrageously rich toppings. Eating this, drinking a paper cup of undistinguished coffee, and scanning a crumpled copy of The Times, started the process of coming down from the previous three days.

Each day of the conference had followed a similar routine. In the morning, a plenary session lasting a couple of hours featured short inspirational presentations. These were followed by a variety of informal lunchtime talks held in various nearby restaurants. From two in the afternoon, there were three or four breakout sessions to choose from.

Called immersives and held in the function rooms of Exeter hotels, the breakout sessions featured opportunities to learn practical stuff that could be applied on Monday morning. These were followed by yet more inspirational presentations, before the conference broke up for the day and those who had the energy and inclination went on to eat, drink and socialise.

I experienced the plenary sessions and the vibrancy and warmth of the company in the evenings, but I didn’t get the opportunity to do much more because I had volunteered myself to run a series of three linked immersives.

Earlier in the year, I was encouraged to think about contributing to the LikeMinds conference by Will Rowan, Joanne Jacobs and Andrew Gerrard, who had participated in the 2010 12boxes beta group. I began to sketch out some ideas for a condensed version of our 12boxes in 12-hours programme that could be stripped across the conference in three linked immersive sessions. Participants would have to commit to all three – a big commitment when there was so much else of interest on offer.

The process would be intensive, with just over five hours contact time, but I hoped that the forty-eight hours between the beginning of the first and the end of the last sessions would allow people to subconsciously internalise the 12boxes process. By the time Drew Ellis asked if I would like to contribute to the conference, I was in a position to offer him something to which he was able to say yes straight away.

The title was to be Creative Business Development. Partly this was because business development really is a creative process, and partly because it was aimed at people for whom creativity was an important part of their offering. In particular, there were three issues it was intended to address. The first was that creative people often do far too much work for clients before they get paid.

The second is that they often pitch for work on the strength of their ideas, giving away their intellectual property for nothing so that the client tends to take it for granted, and focuses on issues such as daily rates, which have nothing to do with real value.

Finally, creative work is often an expression of an individual’s personality. When it comes to negotiating fees, few people like the idea of ‘selling themselves’. They need to put some psychological distance between themselves and the value they are delivering. The question should not be, “What am I worth?” but “What is the value to the client of what I can achieve for them?”

When I came to sit through the first morning of the conference, it was clear that the plenary presentations were expertly curated and of a very high standard. Our immersive session had not only to match this, but by the end of the week we needed our participants to have a new perspective and skills that could be applied to good effect. In the short time available we had to enable them to engage with and absorb some challenging material.

To make this happen I needed to be mentally prepared. As soon as the morning plenary ended, I went straight to the venue, skipping the lunchtime talks to give me time to get myself into the zone.  The staff at the St Olaves Hotel could not have been more friendly, helpful and welcoming. While I went through my notes and got the room ready before the participants arrived, they provided me with an oasis of calm and a delicious light lunch.

After the first session, I knew that we had a hit on our hands. Tweets about our immersive were very positive. Conference word of mouth reflected this. Our strategy of giving a questionnaire to the participants near the start had achieved the engagement we wanted.

But it got better. On the second evening at dinner someone turned to one of our participants, Jay Blake of Ichthus Video and asked, “What is 12boxes?” Without missing a beat, he immediately replied, “12boxes is a framework for conversations that generate profits.” My jaw dropped. I’d been trying to think of a concise way of saying that for over two years. Out of the mouths of customers comes your elevator pitch!

Our third afternoon found little groups of participants scattered through the hotel, trying out their technique. Sometimes it can be difficult to get role-plays going, but Bracken Vernon-Jelier of Crossways Communications helped to cut through that by telling how the evening before she had already enlisted the help of a relative who had role-played a customer. She had been pleasantly surprised by how much she knew how to do.

At the end of the final session, people said they had learned a great deal and they were very satisfied with the outcome. The only negative seemed to be that they would have liked to spend longer. From our point of view, the limited time frame had forced us into trying out some new approaches, and it was clear that these had worked. The Like Minds conference had enabled us to hot-house the development of our offering with some terrific people and see just how much could be achieved in a limited timescale.

But there was more. The Like Minds conference is of the right scale to generate a real sense of community. On a personal level it was wonderful to spend time with the funny, inspirational, well-informed, highly-professional and totally unpretentious people that Scott Gould and Drew Ellis had attracted to Exeter. More than once I found myself helpless with laughter in the company of people I had only just met. And it couldn’t all have been down to the Martinis they bought me.

Which brings me back to the re-entry problem. My intention had been to use the train journey to bring myself gently back down. But you can’t sit through an afternoon of successive presentations from Chris Moss, James Whatley, Rupert Turnbull and Luke Johnson and then contemplate dozing.  I had to leave my seat and walk back down the train for a few words with fellow Like Minds participants with whom I’d been spending such convivial evenings.

Sitting among the huddled masses in coach E were a couple of guys with whom I had been having a rolling conversation for the past 24 hours which badly needed to reach an ‘agreed next action’. Just when I had thought we had reached a point in the 12boxes story where we could freeze our development and focus on scaling up, something in the way I had described 12boxes to them over a drink in the bar had convinced them we should seriously consider working together to embed 12boxes in…  Well, perhaps we’d best leave talking about that for another time.

I stood in the aisle of coach E, getting in people’s way. No doubt we were having the kind of business conversation that I had been overhearing on the way down, which was probably the last thing our travelling companions wanted to be exposed to on a Friday night. The conversation continued way past Reading. When the train finally reached Paddington, and I went through the barrier to meet the loved one who had stayed late at the office and crossed town just to make me feel welcome on my return, I was not really the person I should have been.

So next year at Like Minds, and I am sure there will be a next year, I will take more care to manage my return journey so that when I get back I can give the same quality of attention to the person I love, that I had given to the people I had met in Exeter.

Perhaps I could pack a DVD of the Wizard of Oz, and start watching the final reel as the train leaves Reading.