We spent a lot of time this week putting together a report on our Bottlenecks events from the last three years. To do that we, Oliver designed a new report format (thanks Oliver!) and I wrote the report. We’ll be publishing it on Monday morning so definitely check it out.
“But,” you may think, “why should I read a report on Bottlenecks events?” We know that people are busy. But I wrote this report in particular with aspiring leaders in mind. What that means is that I wrote it while thinking about people who might themselves want to run events, or are wondering about whether running events are useful. The whole report is full of information about how to do things, and so we expect that it might be really interesting.
Will the report actually be interesting? We’re not sure, and we’d love feedback. (So please feel free to email us at contact@leverageresearch.org or DM on Twitter.) But we expect it will be. At least, while I was writing it, I kept thinking “Am I allowed to tell people this?” Not because anything is particularly surprising, but because there’s some sort of ingrained pattern where people don’t naturally tell people how things work.
Or something — we haven’t yet applied that to the Leverage Weeklies, and so it’s quite possible that this post isn’t that interesting. But we’ll get it there.
Some lessons from the report:
Events are worth running. They give tons of benefits, including things you wouldn’t think of, like giving you a way to motivate a lot of people to do something they otherwise don’t have an urgent reason to do.
Events have natural attractors, like just being about networking. If you want people to do something different, very careful event design can help. Having distinctive locations that relate to the theme help — like discussing bottlenecks to progress in a supersonic jet hangar, or carbon dioxide removal in the winter in Iceland, or the perception of risk from science and technology in Fukushima, Japan.
Events can help you accomplish things that are hard to accomplish otherwise. Our experience was that the events let us learn a lot that would have been hard to learn without interacting with people in person, in the context of the event. So from our perspective, the Bottlenecks events have been worthwhile and we expect to run more.
Those lessons can be extracted from the report, but the report itself is (we think) a lot more information-rich. So check it out on Monday, and again, very interested in feedback.
Best,
Geoff
p.s. If you want to receive our reports automatically, sign up to our mailing list!