For most of my career, I have been involved in the planning and management of pathology conferences. Such events obviously have value and staying power as evidenced by their continuing popularity. If you were to have previously asked me about the basis for this popularity, I would probably have replied with two words: learning and networking. I tend to use this latter term to describe the social and educational interactions that occur among conference attendees. However, a recent article on the "triumph of humans" provided me with some additional insights into the value and purpose of medical conferences (see: Humans: Why They Triumphed; subscription required). Below is an excerpt from it:
But the sophistication of the modern world lies not in individual intelligence or imagination. It is a collective enterprise. Nobody—literally nobody—knows how to make the pencil on my desk ....The knowledge of how to design, mine, fell, extract, synthesize, combine, manufacture and market these things is fragmented among thousands, sometimes millions of heads. Once human progress started, it was no longer limited by the size of human brains. Intelligence became collective and cumulative. In the modern world, innovation is a collective enterprise that relies on exchange....We tend to forget that trade and urbanization are the grand stimuli to invention, far more important than governments, money or individual genius. It is no coincidence that trade-obsessed cities—Tyre, Athens, Alexandria, Baghdad, Pisa, Amsterdam, London, Hong Kong, New York, Tokyo, San Francisco—are the places where invention and discovery happened. Think of them as well-endowed collective brains.
Stimulated by the ideas in this article, it occurred to me that a medical conference can be viewed as a "transient village" located in a hotel or conference center and populated by people of like interests. Attendees can be viewed as traders, if you will, in specialized knowledge. Some of the ideas circulating in these transient villages are contributed by the manufacturers of new products such as drugs, medical devices, or lab software and computers in the case of the conferences that I work on. Also participating in the dialogue are the purchasers of new products, hospital-based pathologists and lab scientists in my case. Faculty members deliver lectures to the group. They describe their new ideas and approaches to a common set of problems. The lecture hall can be viewed as the village square where people congregate to learn.
In my view, one of the inefficiencies of a medical conference is that so much time is devoted to formal lectures rather than discussing new ideas, which would seem to be more efficient. Ideally, one could ask the participating faculty members to present their most important ideas in, say, ten minutes. The remainder of the time could be then spent assessing their value and relevance. However, I think that the standard 45-minute faculty lecture will persist for the near future. The value of this longer lecture assigned to the faculty members is to provide background information about their ideas and then try to convince the group that they are worthy of adoption -- in essence, to "sell" the new ideas.
One of the major limitations of themed conferences of any type is that they tend to attract people of "like interest," i.e., those who have already developed an interest and perspective in the conference theme. It has been argued that the most useful ideas, particularly breakthroughs, are often associated with collaboration and sharing information across disciplines. These cross-disciplinary ("boundary-spanning") connections are made between people who differ in primary interests and perspective, but are similar enough in key ways to recognize a cross-disciplinary opportunity. Currently these part-similar, part-different collaborators connect mostly by serendipity; improving the efficiency of this process is an important unmet challenge for the modern research environment.
Posted by: Jim Harrison | May 24, 2010 at 09:57 AM