Why are international conferences so bad, and what can be done about it?

Last week I attended the OECD’s 4^th World Forum on Measuring Wellbeing. Actually, I sampled it, ducking out to look at Oxfam programmes in Delhi, meet people and give a couple of lectures in local universities. Lots of people do this, so it ought to have a name – conflirting? Condipping? Any better suggestions?

My overall impression was that official interest in well-being and its measurement continues to grow, but has moved to a national level, where numerous governments are seriously trying to put it into practice (here’s where the UK has got to, big report due next month). Although it has set up its 36 country ‘Better Life Index’ (with a funky interactive website where you can construct your own measure of well-being) and has launched the wikiprogress site, the OECD is not driving the debate as it was when I attended the previous Forum in Busan in 2010, (many fewer delegates this time around, and not much new in the debates). That is probably a good thing – national action and experimentation is what really matters.

Back to conflirting, because despite the hard work and dedication of the OECD staff, I suspect one of the reasons people do it is because many international conferences are so mind-numbingly dull, and I’m afraid much of this one followed the standard pattern. A few ‘keynote speakers’, bleary with jetlag, stumble through their papers (Joe Stiglitz and several politicians whose names escape me), or give a speech on their current interest, completely ignoring the subject of the conference (Jeff Sachs). Dry-as-dust panels of disconnected presentations – chairing is feeble in keeping to time and/or panels are over-stuffed with speakers, so there is never enough time for questions or interaction between the speakers.

As the days pass, fewer people turn up (and interestingly, start to abandon smart clothing – everything gets more casual). Even if they do, most people are on their phones doing their emails or tweeting about the meeting (guilty as charged).

Often, the only really useful activity is the networking on the margins (and in the bars, quite memorably so in Delhi, but that’s another story), but conferences take no account of this in their design, except to allow lots of coffee breaks (when those survive encroachment by over-running panels).

In terms of the timesuck of highly qualified people, and the money involved, this seems spectacularly amateurish/cavalier, especially when compared to the huge investment in improving the impact of research and development programming. So come on multilaterals and funders, what about funding/designing a ‘Conference for Impact’ programme. What would you do differently? Some ideas:

Narrow the agenda, broaden the minds: Set a specific question to be answered by all participants. At the same time as narrowing the question, broaden the range of disciplines involved – the Wellbeing conference was largely made up of government and multilateral officials and economists, (with the odd token NGO like me). What about philosophers? Religious leaders like the Buddhist abbot we consulted in Busan? Psychologists? Psychoanalysts?

Avoid academic conference formats, which seem to be the most stultifying. Panel presentations plus Q&A has to be one of the least productive ways to spur creative thinking. Import some of the less cringeworthy methods we use in NGO discussions – groupwork, world cafes, speeddating, sandpits and other innovative formats. I’m sure the private sector has lots of others.

Sort out the presentations: Ban anyone from reading out a paper; find a way to limit Powerpoints to a maximum of 20 words per slide (and urge speakers to use images); install amber and red lights on the mikes, which cut the sound off after the speaker goes into the red. Maximum of 3 speakers per panel, and ask the audience to buzz with their neighbour before going into Q&A, to get some energy back into the room.

Set up a feedback system: A public Ebay-type ratings system to show which speakers/conferences were best. As an extreme method, adopt instant audience feedback, Occupy-style (thumbs up from audience if they like the speaker, thumbs down if they don’t) or a twitter wall behind the speaker to show how they’re going down with the public.

Avoid distractions: One of the reasons people got more involved in Busan may have been the lack of opportunities for conflirting. Delhi on the other hand is stuffed with institutions people want to visit. And (provided the other factors are dealt with to create a useful event), maybe choosing a state-run hotel where the internet keeps going down (as it did in Delhi) is not such a bad idea after all.

Any other conference braindeath survivors want to add suggestions?

And here are some previous, slightly more highbrow, reflections on the purpose of conferences. I probably won’t get invited to any more now. Oh well.

100 indicators of well-being or just one? Stiglitz v Layard

The OECD conference I’ve been attending is winding down. Lots of banquets, but not much booze, so I never had to try the hotel’s tempting room service item ‘outer leaves of cabbage broth to chase a hangover.’ What’s the takeaway (ideas rather than food)?

The key debate seems to me to be over complexity. The various presentations described literally hundreds of different indicators already being used to measure progress, and proposed hundreds more. The World Bank reportedly has 27 indicators of governance alone. The Stiglitz Commission proposes ‘dashboards’ of indicators, allowing different people and institutions to combine them in different ways to measure and track the things that matter most to them (mental health, carbon emissions, citizen participation or whatever).

But there’s a cost to that, as Geoff Mulgan pointed out. Decision makers and ordinary people can only keep a limited number of indicators in their heads (Geoff put it at about 5). Above that and they get increasingly baffled. A South African number cruncher lamented that ‘an indicator cloud has descended on Africa, creating a fog of confusion’, while an EC statistician worried that composite indicators rapidly become a political football as each member state argues for the combination that puts its own performance in the best light, and each successive government changes them, meaning you lose comparability both between countries and across time. For similar reasons I started to harbour heretical doubts about the merits of ‘bottom up’ indicators designed by communities – fine, as a way for the community to understand itself, but the cost is that the government won’t be able to compare progress with the village next door (which will have designed its own, different bottom-up indicator).

Geoff’s answer was to combine the merits of simplicity and complexity by picking 3-5 standardized indicators, each of which would be at the centre of a cluster of disaggregated numbers allowing policy makers and researchers to drill down into the relationships between different aspects of people’s lives (eg between income inequality and child well-being). A key to this model’s success is what the conference called ‘visualization’ – efforts to make data much more intelligible and interesting – including the launch of what looks a potentially remarkable ‘wikiprogress’, which among other things is going to use graphics software that’s even more funky than gapminder.

Richard Layard was more drastic. He argued that ‘we have to go much further than the Stiglitz report and establish a different metric from the metric of money.’ His preference is self-reported life satisfaction (i.e. happiness), which he predicts will replace GDP within the next 25 years. Like Mulgan’s model, satisfaction would be reported across a number of domains (health, family, work, income, community, environment etc).

The conference (and the OECD, judging by its roadmap for future work on well-being, distributed in Busan but not yet online), largely sided with Stiglitz. They had doubts about the robustness of happiness as an indicator – does it really mean the same thing in different countries? If people are happy through ignorance of what they are missing, does that invalidate their view (false consciousness alarm bells)? Don’t things like voice and engagement matter on their own merits? Are we proposing the social lobotomy of a Brave New World of drugged, happy, obedient slaves?

But I’m leaning towards Layard. This was a conference of the modern data magisterium, the ‘counting community’ as one speaker called it. They live and breathe statistics and complexity. But most people are not like that. If you want to measure well-being in a cash-starved low income country, communicate messages to the public, or interest politicians, simplicity is vital.

The Layard v Stiglitz debate set me thinking about paradigm shifts. One typical feature of a paradigm shift is that as the old model starts to get into trouble in describing reality, layers of complexity are added to it to try and keep it afloat. Eventually someone like Copernicus comes along and says ‘let’s put the sun at the centre of the solar system, not the earth’ and the complexity melts away. Layard feels much more like the Copernicus of well-being than does Stiglitz or any other speaker at this conference.

The last word on this conference goes to the wonderfully serene (and enigmatic) abbot of Beomeosa, a breathtaking Buddhist monastery on the outskirts of Busan. I asked him if he could help us by telling us what happiness is and how we could achieve it. He smiled and told me to drink my tea, and then he would answer. ‘Did you like the tea? Yes? That is happiness.’ He also described happiness as ‘thinking about happiness’ and ‘the undivided mind’. Put that into your metrics, guys.