Useful Beats Interesting, and other New York Climate Week Insights
Three rules for navigating the circus (and understanding how to choose your events)
Something I’m Learning
If you work in climate change, New York Climate Week (NYCW) is the biggest event of the year after COP. Last year’s NYCW was one of the most intense weeks I’ve ever experienced. Even this year was fairly packed, despite the fraught politics around climate change that led many people from other countries to boycott the week.
Last year, I wrote a post bemoaning how bad most events are: Staying Awake During New York Climate Week. This year, I paid a more attention to the rationale behind event design, given I was organizing multiple events myself that week.
I came away with 3 rules-of-thumb around event design and attendee behavior, which seem to influence each other in a yin-yang kind of way.
1. Events are designed for speakers not audiences
Most NYCW events are not designed for their audience. They’re designed for the speakers – or rather the event organizer’s desire to project that they can reel in high-profile speakers. This is especially the case with any “public” event but it’s also true of many, if not most, invite-only events. The audience is essentially there so the organizers have an excuse to invite brand-enhancing speakers. They are not there to actually be taught, entertained, or provoked.
One especially egregious example, from a high profile philanthropy regranter, had ~30 speakers in a 3-hour event, with multiple 20-25 minutes panels of 4-5 speakers. I spoke to several attendees who went to this event, drawn by the big name speakers, and they all came away saying ‘never again’.
2. Useful beats interesting
In comparing notes with a colleague about what we had seen across the week, and in light of one of our own lovingly curated events not attracting an audience, she noted that when people plan their agendas for the week, a “useful” (however they define it for themselves) meeting is always going to trump a cool or intriguing one. Show ‘em the money!
3. The value of an event is inversely proportional to its openness
A good rule of thumb is that the more ‘open to the public’ an event is, the less useful it’s going to be for you. By far the most valuable events are closed-door and invite-only. This is – intentionally – exclusionary and elitist. Which is infuriating if you’re not on the list (cue outraged/sour grapes LinkedIn posts about elitism). In reaction, there’ve been several attempts to organize more open gatherings, but when you know what is going on behind closed-doors, those efforts seem all the more quixotic as a result.
Trying Something Different
But I’ve always liked quixotic. So after spending most of the week in invite-only funder gatherings, I appreciated our Climate Talent Networking event all the more. Co-hosted with two peer organizations, we made it invite-only but not exclusive. That balance seemed to work. The room felt warm, energetic, relevant, and grounded.
And I loved being surrounded by practitioners: the doers, the field builders, the problem solvers. It reminded me how much I like spaces that are not too formal, not too big, and designed to enable serendipity between genuine, curious people.
I hope to do it again next year, and to keep experimenting with formats in order to strike those difficult balances of being both useful and interesting, private and inviting, and above all, designed for the audience and not the speakers.
Something to Consider
A very good take on the UNGA/international development side of the week. The End of Aid.
Something to Quote
Everything changes, and often without us knowing that it’s even happening. You’ll read about the death tolls from a war or disease, but the small cumulative steps of healing and recovery never make headlines — until they reach a tipping point… Nobody left New York this year on a high. Things were heavier, more uncertain. But we did walk away with something more durable - a deep-seated reassurance that the people fighting for a better world aren’t giving up.
- Amy Rose and Elizabeth Isaacson, The End of Aid (the piece mentioned above)