How a Conference Should Begin

The first minutes in a plenary decide how the audience listens for the rest of the day, yet openings are often left to a walk-in loop and a housekeeping slide.

The first minutes in a plenary decide how the audience listens for the rest of the day, yet openings are often left to a walk-in loop and a housekeeping slide. This essay draws on Solomon Asch, Erving Goffman, Richard Wagner and Priya Parker to show why. It treats the opening as a sequence of five moments, each one designed.

Most conferences begin twice. First comes the official start, with a walk-in loop and a housekeeping slide. Later, if the room is lucky, comes the moment people start to listen. Knowing how to open a conference means closing that gap. The first minutes do more than fill time before the keynote. They teach the audience how to listen for the rest of the day.

Still arriving

When the keynote starts, many people in the room have not yet arrived in their heads. The first few minutes of a conference are when that arrival happens, so they shape everything that follows. That makes an opening act more than entertainment. It sets the mood in which the rest of the day will be heard.

Arriving mentally is the right phrase. Bodies are in seats, but minds are still on the train, the inbox and the breakfast meeting. The opening is how a room catches up with itself.

What the peak-end rule leaves out

Event design has learned a lot from the peak-end rule. It says people remember an experience mostly by its best moment and its end. The cost of eyeballs applies it to events. By that rule alone, the start barely matters.

But the start does a different job. It does not decide what people remember. It decides how they pay attention.

In 1946 the psychologist Solomon Asch read people a list of traits about a stranger. "Intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn, envious." Another group heard the same six words in reverse order. The first group formed a far kinder picture. The early words set the frame, and every later word was read through it.

A conference works the same way. The first minutes tell people what kind of day this is. They say whether it is serious or loose, and whether it is worth putting the phone away. Everything after is read through that frame.

Brackets

The sociologist Erving Goffman called these signals brackets. In Frame Analysis, in 1974, he showed how an activity is marked off from ordinary life by signs that it has begun and that it has ended. The theater's brackets are the clearest we have. The house lights go down. The curtain goes up.

Even that was designed once. When Richard Wagner opened his festival theater at Bayreuth in 1876, the lights in the hall went off during the performance. The orchestra sat hidden in a sunken pit. Nothing was left to look at but the stage. In time, the dark hall became normal in theaters everywhere.

Many conferences have no bracket at all. The lights stay up. The loop keeps playing. Someone taps a microphone and asks if the back can hear. The audience never gets the signal to start, so it starts slowly, one person at a time.

Never start with logistics

Priya Parker makes the case in The Art of Gathering, from 2018. One chapter is called "Never Start a Funeral with Logistics." At a friend's funeral, she writes, the room leaned in for words of comfort. The minister began with the reception and the parking.

Her point is that the opening is when guests pay the most attention. Spend it on parking, and you have spent the best minute you had.

The housekeeping slide is the conference version. Wi-Fi codes, the app and lunch times are useful. They are not a beginning. Some notices, like the fire exits, may have to come before anything else. Give those clearly and calmly. Then let the real opening start.

Five moments that open a conference

An opening is a sequence, not a slide. Each part sets something up.

• The doors. The default: Opened when the room is ready, with nobody at them. Designed: Opened on time, with hosts, and a first view of the room that says what the day is.
• Walk-in sound and light. The default: One loop at one level, house lights up. Designed: Music and light that settle the room, then change to say "now".
• The first voice. The default: "Can you hear me at the back?". Designed: A sound check done beforehand, and a first line that names why everyone is here.
• The first image. The default: A sponsor slide or the Wi-Fi code. Designed: The idea of the day, in one picture.
• The first shared act. The default: None. Designed: Something the whole room does together, such as a show of hands or a moment of quiet.

The last row matters most. A room that has done one thing together has become an audience. Before that, it is a set of people who happen to face the same way.

Write the first and last minutes together

The opening asks a question, and the ending answers it. So write both into the running order at the same time, with the same care. Give the show caller cues for the opening, just as for the main moment. Light, sound and the first voice should land together.

Design the first minute

The audience decides how to listen before anyone has said anything worth hearing. Design that moment, or the Wi-Fi slide will design it for you.

An opening starts at the doors, with the room guests walk into. Monet shows a planned layout as 3D renders and walkthrough videos in the real room, so a producer can walk the route from the doors to the seats before the day.