Tuesday Email: The Conference Trap

Happy Tuesday!

Every Tuesday I'd like to offer strategies for the week ahead and a thought to fuel your action.

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When you feel energized flying home from a conference, that's the moment to be suspicious.

That feeling is often a sign you learned the least.

I know this from experience.

We feel like we have it all figured out while we sit in the audience for those 45 minutes and listen to a speaker. Then we step out of that session, back into reality, and the knowledge is already gone.

Learning, the best learning we've ever had, is always difficult. It doesn't happen in a classroom. It happens in the doing.

Yet we spend most of our time reading the same popular resources everyone else in our industry reads, and watching the same people speak at the same conferences.

If we want to learn, grow, and evolve, we have to do. We have to learn by doing, and we have to pressure test what we know by exploring what's happening outside the industry we know best.

Conferences are valuable for building relationships. They are not valuable for learning and growing.

Passively listening is one of the weakest forms of retention there is. The best way to retain information is to teach it to someone else. If you can't teach it, the next best thing is to execute it, to put what you heard or read to work and see what happens.

Conferences aren't built for that. They're built to be heard, not done. And hearing is the lowest form of retention we have.

On top of that, conferences cram an enormous amount of content into a short window. That's great for maximizing our time there, and terrible for maximizing what we actually take home. Our brains need time to digest information, to reflect on it, to let it settle in. When we keep stacking new information on top of information we haven't processed yet, we struggle to retain any of it.

The Center for Creative Leadership found that learning follows a 70-20-10 rule. 70% of what we learn comes from on-the-job challenges (doing), 20% from peer-to-peer interaction (connection and reflection), and only 10% from formal coursework or training. Conferences live entirely in that last 10%, and we keep treating it like it's the whole pie.

Conferences are fantastic in one specific way: they pull us out of our daily routine and give us space. What we do with that space is on us. Building relationships is a good use of it. So is carving out time to explore something that's been sitting on your list for months. And don't explore it by sitting and listening. Grab a table at one of the 1,000 coffee stands they set up in the expo hall, pull out your laptop, and build, do, explore.

What if every exhibitor at a conference handed us a free trial of their software instead of a sales pitch? Imagine taking that trial and spending an hour inside it yourself instead of watching a demo. That's different. That's the hard, active work that learning actually requires.

One other place I'd push us all to grow uniquely, instead of growing the same way everyone else is, is to look outside our industry.

If we look at the newsletters we follow and the people we follow, we probably follow the same people and the same publications as everyone else around us.

These people and publications become the "holy grail." We're a follow-the-herd industry, so they give us comfort in what technology to use, what process to implement, even how to think about the future. Here's the trap inside that: when five different sources point us at the same idea, it feels like five confirmations. Most of the time it's one idea wearing five different outfits, traced back to the same white paper or the same platform's marketing campaign. We mistake repetition for validation.

The best leaders I've followed and learned from found most of their information outside their specific industry. Southwest studied NASCAR pit crews to figure out how to turn their planes around faster. Barry Marshall, the doctor who discovered ulcers were caused by bacteria instead of stress, spent over a decade being dismissed by his own profession before he won a Nobel Prize for it. He wasn't wrong. He just found his answer outside the consensus everyone else in his field was still reading.

One of the things I constantly push our team on, and myself on, is to learn from companies and people outside of wealth management. When we do that, we merge our technical and industry knowledge with a piece of information that's completely new and different from what anyone else in our space is looking at. That merge is where a unique idea to test actually comes from. And the unique results we learn from those tests are what let us differentiate our views and our strategy.

In a world that's becoming more commoditized, where the information we're all consuming is so similar, we have to find a way to differentiate. One way is how we interpret the information. Another is how we implement it. But both of those are enhanced when the information we're taking in is also uniquely different from what everyone else sees.

My suggestion isn't to stop going to conferences. My suggestion is to be more intentional with your time there.

Pair going to conferences with actual, dedicated time to "do" and learn through doing, while looking to consume information that challenges how you think, information that sits outside the scope of what our industry is already saying.

The FutureProof advisor will be the one who connects insights from a diversified set of areas in a way that builds a client experience and growth trajectory that never gets said from a keynote stage.

The future of how we work and how we serve our clients won't be heard on a stage at a conference. It will be earned through failures, and through connecting dots that everyone has access to but nobody has looked at quite the same way.

As we head into conference season again, keep this in mind. It's how you get more out of your time away.

The best is ahead!

-Matt

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