Close the gap between the stage and the seat.
principle — attributed to Colja Dams
Why do people attend events? To meet other people. Not because of the brand that invited them, the venue, or the food. Dams states this with the plainness of someone who has tested it for decades. The agenda of the person in the seat has almost nothing to do with the agenda of the person who built the stage, and the events that close that gap are the ones that work. Every design decision runs through this filter: does it serve the attendee's actual reason for coming, or the host's reason for inviting them.
For program designers auditing an agenda. The practical move is to count the minutes explicitly engineered for attendees to meet each other and compare that number against the minutes serving the host's messaging.
attendee-agenda, program-design, connection, purpose