This week Kyle Bowen at Museum as Progress made a lengthy post about why they design their gatherings the way they do. What was interesting to me was how clear they are about what they are trying not to be.

Through surveys they learned that potential participants value “Safety. Small size. Continuity. Shared challenges.” This eliminated the large conference or webinar formats.

In fact, when asked where people turned when working through hard professional problems, conferences were at the bottom of the list.

Recognizing there is a lot of published content and podcasts, they identified a gap between published content and informal conversations that needed to be filled.

Bowen lists three types of group sessions they are going to begin offering that pair participants up with 1-10 other people depending on the intent of the sessions. Some are one time focused on skill practice, others are recurring discussions of data and patterns. He emphasizes that there will be a guiding structure to the conversation rather than being a forum for receiving advice.

Based on early readings and consideration the concept of these sort of structured conversations with peers is appealing to me. But as I said, the process Bowen went through to identify an unmet need that has elements of what people value in their professional interactions is what really caught my attention.

The obvious question is, can a similar approach be used to identify unmet needs of audiences and communities. Perhaps participation in a structured conversations like the one Bowen is designing will lead to an answer.