EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)29 Jul 2025

“Please, no more group brainstorming” by OllieRodriguez

And other ways to make event content more valuable.

I organise and attend a lot of conferences, so the below is correct and need not be caveated based on my experience, but I could be missing some angles here. Also on my substack.

When you imagine a session at an event going wrong, you’re probably thinking of the hapless, unlucky speaker. Maybe their slides broke, they forgot their lines, or they tripped on a cable and took the whole stage backdrop down.

This happens sometimes, but event organizers usually remember to invest the effort required to prevent this from happening (e.g., checking that the slides work, not leaving cables lying on the stage).

But there's another big way that sessions go wrong that is sorely neglected: wasting everyone's time, often without people noticing.

Let's give talks a break. They often suck, but event organizers are mostly doing the right things to make them not suck. I’m going to pick on two event formats that (often) suck, why they suck, and how to run more useful content instead.

Panels

Panels. (very often). suck.

Reid Hoffman (and others) have already explained why, but this message has not yet reached a [...]

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Outline:

(01:14) Panels

(03:43) The group brainstorm

(04:30) Your session attendees do not have the answers.

(05:29) Ideas are easy. Bandwidth is low.

(06:31) The ideas are not worth the time cost.

(07:53) Choosing more valuable content: fidelity per person-minute

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First published:
July 28th, 2025

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LaMDxRqEo8sZnoBXf/please-no-more-group-brainstorming

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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