Essays

You’re only as good as your last session

How to run a good session for an executive network or peer group.

James Loudon · Practice · 8 min read

When most people think about what makes a programme work, they think about the agenda and structure. But a programme is a stack of meetings, and a meeting is a stack of sessions. The session is the unit to work on, every time. If the session is dead in the water, the whole thing falls apart. You have to get obsessive about every single one.

So let’s unpack the session’s ingredients, which are people and ideas. Good peer exchange sessions bring perspectives together in a way that is structured and coherent, yet improvised and surprising enough to stay fresh.

My mantra for running a programme: you’re only as good as your last pizza.

The pizza is the session. You can run the best programme, with a good reputation and engaged members, but if your last session was a dud, that is what everyone remembers.

Over a decade in Shanghai I ran between sixty and eighty meetings a year, and a single meeting might hold up to four sessions. That is enough repetition to see the patterns. This piece is a first attempt to put that experience on paper.

Session sizes

There is the small meeting, with 8 to 12 in the room; the medium exchange, with 25 to 30; and the large exchange, with 35 to 50. In a peer or expert exchange of any kind, communication runs many to many, and at least half the room says something. Otherwise it is a broadcast, and then you can run events for 100 or even 1,000 people. That is a different format.

Keep it human

Don’t stick to meeting templates. That is overly cautious. A peer exchange is closer to theatre than to a lecture or a Teams status call. You have a running order, a cast, a room to engage, and a mix of planned and improvised facilitation decisions.

Seen that way, the options open up. A classic presentation followed by Q&A. A session led by two or three member commentators, with a domain expert brought in afterwards to reflect. A five-minute framing off the cuff, followed by open dialogue. A raw, new case study first, unpacked afterwards, or the other way round. Experimenting is part of building a repertoire, as long as you keep the context of each session in mind.

• Where is it in the programme?
• Who is in the room?
• Does the topic need a particular treatment?
• What feedback came in before this moment?

Guest speakers are useful, and risky

Expert perspectives often fill the gaps members are looking for. But it is a balancing act between what the guest wants to say and what the members came for.

A partner from a Big Four firm once spoke to a group of executives on post-merger integration. He had a beautiful 50-slide deck, which he promised to go through quickly. Over our briefing lunch, I suggested he present slide 49. Slide 50 was a blank “thank you”, so it could go. Slide 49 had the ten do’s and don’ts of post-merger integration. Slides 2 to 48 didn’t go in the bin. They moved to the appendix, ready to put on screen if a point came up in Q&A, unless I wanted to move into open dialogue, depending on whether the room wanted clarifying questions or experience-sharing. This works better with thirty in the room than in a boardroom of twelve.

Cutting his presentation to a single slide cost him nothing and made him look better.

In a peer group session, you want to get straight to the point. The expert is not the product. The exchange between members is the product. You don’t want a guest speaker to make it look as if you have simply given their firm more distribution.

A guest speaker can play different roles.

• A commentator in the room, expecting to be called on.
• Someone who leads part of the session at the start, or comes in later with their perspective.
• A co-chair or co-moderator, with real authority to run the session.

Facilitating with imposter syndrome

You will not always have the expertise a session requires. I ran finance sessions without being a finance person, and they worked, which surprised me at the time. Two things made that possible.

The first was a mental model from my mentor. Imagine the session is your living room and these are your guests. That’s all. Once I held it that way, I was comfortable, because hosting is something I know how to do, and the pressure to cover my gaps as a non-CFO went away.

The second was a stopgap. A banker in the room was there to talk about cash management. She was briefed not to sell her firm’s solutions, but to jump in once we reached the technical side. That let me stay at the level of the overview, dip briefly into a side track, and come back to the main line of the discussion.

Two people running the room works, if the chemistry is right and the preparation is done. With a co-chair who covered the expert side, I could still dive into the substance as host, and even make mistakes, knowing the session would never fall over because the depth was covered.

One member said I was good at making fun of myself without losing credibility. I used to call myself the court jester in a room full of royalty, at least when it came to domain knowledge.

There are many ways to design a session, and one article can’t do it justice. It is a balance between structure and improvisation. When the discussion drifts a little off line but has momentum, you let it run. Whatever your style, keep it real. There is enough digital content out there. When people get together in person, make it as human as possible.

The quicksand moment

The part you cannot put on the agenda is the quicksand moment. You are in a room with 20 people, and it goes silent. It sounds like every moderator’s nightmare.

Flip it around, though, and it can be valuable. Everyone may be digesting a serious thought. Or the conversation went slightly off course, or someone rambled. There is a collective introversion.

Seek the silence

Embrace that moment. I learned to love silences. The diversity of the room lets you switch perspectives and catch people by surprise, so the meeting doesn’t feel standard. I have seen moderators avoid silence like the plague, rushing to fill it and working mechanically through their running order. Then it feels like someone is ticking boxes. Silence gets everyone’s attention.

Sometimes people don’t know each other well, and the session isn’t a true peer group. I once hosted a session where a quarter of the participants were APAC and China R&D leaders, a quarter were strategy heads, and the rest held other functional leadership roles, plus a couple of general managers. They didn’t meet as a group, and their CEOs had delegated them to a breakfast roundtable on innovation that I designed, produced and facilitated.

I couldn’t rely on the room to carry itself, because there was no shared relationship to carry it. So I planned more interventions and stitched the meeting together, finding angles that made one person’s problem relevant to someone across the table in a completely different job. That stitching takes less skill than planning and nerve.

How did I find the confidence to seek the silences in that session? I had a good deck of cards. Commentators were briefed beforehand and announced in the invitation or at the start. The trick is to keep one name up your sleeve. That is my joker card. It is someone I know relatively well, also briefed, but asked to stand back until I call on them.

The joker card has two uses. If the room goes quiet, I bring that person in casually, as if it were spontaneous. Often, just having them primed changes the room before I play the card. Someone quieter leans forward, almost as if they feel they have to save the meeting, once the more extroverted participants have stopped jumping in. If there really is silence, that is when the joker comes in. They are in on it. Everyone else sees a natural intervention.

This works well in larger forums. Smaller peer groups don’t need it, because a senior group can manage itself. And remember the opposite case. If the meeting is going brilliantly, you still bring the joker in, because they prepared, and you use them to make a specific point or turn the discussion.

Executive programmes are not mass-market products

B2B peer groups and executive network programmes sit between B2C media and bespoke consulting, as I set out in The unit economics of information. A membership programme is not a frozen pizza, made in a factory, shipped to the supermarket freezer and warmed up by whoever, however.

To stay with the pizzeria, it is all about the experience, but the pizza is the core of it. The session is the pizza. The meeting is the meal. If the antipasto was amazing, the dessert a real surprise and the atmosphere brilliant, but the pizza was mediocre, the weakest link takes down the whole evening. Get obsessive about the pizza, and about every part of your guests’ evening. Executive programmes work the same way.