Creating A People-To-People Conference

One of the greatest challenges we face is delivering on our ideas. The resounding answer when I asked Twitter “what’s most important when it comes to ideas?” was: “making ideas happen.”

The challenge for Like Minds this year was to make the idea of ‘people-to-people’ happen – rather than letting those ideas become ideals that are never actualised.

People-to-people is a world where action is more important than accolades. It means teams working on projects consist of individuals from different companies and across the divides of supplier, consumer, customer, B2B and B2C.

To create a conference like this, we needed to remove the barriers that exist in the 1950s conferencing model of ‘I talk, you listen.’ So we created three levels:

1. Person-to-People

Keynotes: one person talking, inspiring, and helping lots of people, for 20 minutes. Similar to TED. Necessary when the room has varying levels of expertise and needs a common baseline.

2. Persons-to-People

Panels and Q&A: a few people speaking to the many. Provides greater variance of experience and opens up the ideas from the keynote.

3. People-to-People

Like Minds Lunches: speakers sit down with 10 strangers in a local restaurant. Anyone can book a seat. This is where genuine depth is built – regardless of being a speaker or attendee, you bring your ideas to the discussion and engage the others there. You’re part of the team at that lunch table.

Our primary goal is accessibility – to people, to ideas, to resources. But this accessibility is not so people can go and create more content. It is in order to create actions.