The Gathering Report
The Gathering Report is Brandon Klein's ongoing study of how gatherings are designed. His agents read 23,624 public event agendas and judged each on its design. More than 9 in 10 show no evidence anything changed after everyone went home.
Not a hot take. A read of the published record. And one limit stated up front, because it matters: this judges the design of an event, not what happened in the room.
Almost nobody designs for the room to move.
The agenda is the one honest artifact an event publishes before it happens. It's the plan, in the event's own words, for what a few hundred people will do with a day of their lives.
So my agents read nearly 23,000 of them. Conferences, summits, workshops, offsites, all-hands. They judged each one on a single thing: how it was designed. Not the speaker names, not the venue, not the production budget. Did the published design show any intent for people to leave different than they arrived?
More than 9 in 10 did not. The keynotes are stacked. The panels have moderators. The breaks are timed to the minute. And the part where anything is supposed to be different after everyone goes home simply isn't there. It was never designed in.
I've spent my career designing gatherings, so I wanted this finding to be wrong. I went looking for the counterexamples first. They exist. They are rare.
The deck was never the point. A room that moves was the point.
What this measures. And what it can't.
A finding is only as good as its limits. Here are mine, stated plainly, before you ask.
Agendas were judged on their published design, not audited for outcomes. Nobody sat in these rooms and scored what actually happened.
An agenda is what an event says it will do. It is not proof of what happened in the room. Plenty of gatherings come alive in ways the paper never promised.
This is a claim about design, not a causal claim about results. If your event changed lives off script, this data can't see it. What it can see is that almost nobody designs for that change on purpose.
This is edition one.
The Gathering Report opens a series. Each edition takes one piece apart: the format, the follow-through, who is in the room, and what changed on Monday. Same data, one question at a time.
Which brings me to the question worth asking before your next offsite: when did a gathering last change what you did on Monday?
Frequently asked.
+What is The Gathering Report?
An ongoing study of how gatherings are designed. Brandon Klein's agents read 23,624 public event agendas, from conferences and summits to workshops, offsites, and all-hands, and judged each one on how it was designed. It opens a series: each edition takes one piece apart.
+What did The Gathering Report find?
More than 9 in 10 agendas show no evidence anything was designed to change after everyone went home. The talks are scheduled, the breaks are scheduled, and the part where the room actually moves is missing from the published design.
+How were the agendas judged?
On their published design only. An agenda is what an event says it will do, not proof of what happened in the room. This is a claim about design, not a causal claim about results. Agendas were judged, outcomes were not audited.