Panel Discussions Are a Time Suck.
This blog post started as a LinkedIn post, but it’s such an important topic (and hot take!) that I felt it needed further exploration.
Black History Month is a time to honor those who have come before us as we chart a continued uplifted vision of our future. Instead of doing that, people host panels. Panels suck. They do. Truly. They are broken, uninsightful, wastes of everyone’s limited and precious time in 2024.
I went to an event a while back that had a series of panel discussions. It was a gigantic missed opportunity to capitalize on a room full of AMAZING ecosystem builders, founders, investors, and supporters. The room was filled with the exact people necessary for an event that would have moved the needle. Many panel discussions do indeed draw a great crowd. However, we were talked out for hours until we left. That’s what happens with most panel discussions, and it’s such a damn shame.
🙄PANEL DISCUSSIONS ARE ALMOST ALWAYS A WASTE OF EVERYONE'S TIME❗and here’s why:
1. Panels limit organic and meaningful interactions between people in the room. They demand attention be turned to the stage. They negate the power of the people not on stage. And in most rooms, those are the most interesting and important people. Leveraging the brain power and the interest of dozens or hundreds of people in a room would seem to be a no-brainer as compared to having a small handful of people spout off their opinions (with no checks or balances on the validity of them), but panel discussions are EASY to throw together, which is why people continue to do them. Meaningful engagement with the audience requires time to design, and unfortunately, many people do not carve out that time.
2. Panels typically rehash the same topics over and over. Participants are not learning anything new or impactful, they are only receiving sound bites that sound great on Instagram reels and allow the organizers to boast about the “gems” that were dropped. A major reason for this is that messages are not fine tuned for the audience. A room full of Black entrepreneurs doesn’t need a discussion on the lack of funding for Black entrepreneurs. WE KNOW! True value has to be crafted with forethought.
3. Panelists are not typically chosen with any kind of methodology that justifies them being on stage. People who are wildly unqualified are regularly positioned as experts and are lent inherent credibility by the mere fact that someone put them on a stage and gave them a microphone. Many MANY people do not deserve this credibility, which they frequently use to push rubbish to people who don’t know better. I’ve found that panelists are typically chosen at the nexus of who will draw a crowd and who is available, not their expertise on a matter.
4. Collective action does not come from panels. Never in the history of a panel discussion has meaningful impact been designed and executed. We leave with no action steps. So even if people get fired up around a topic, situation, or concept, panel discussions do not offer a pathway to participate in a solution.
Please, please, PLEASE - stop organizing panel discussions. They are incredibly lazy time sucks. Things to do instead:
1. Organize a “war room” around a topic. The moderator will run the room in a sprint fashion to workshop an issue, leveraging the minds and expertise of everyone there, and leave with real results.
2. Create an intentional mixer with designed interactions between participants. Give people prompts and matches, and curate true interactions between amazing people who should know one another.
3. Host 1 person Q&As with true VETTED experts that allow for in-depth questions and dialogue with the audience about the topics and issues that matter to them.
4. Just don’t host an event. It’s not by force as is said in Nigeria. You don’t have to organize an event just to be seen. It’s ok to just do the actual work. 🙂
Note: I am always happy for debate and dialog. Do you disagree? Do you have more ideas for effective events? Let me know!
