What Happens When You Give 60% of Your Program Away to Conversation

October 16, 2026

The business events industry has spent years talking about networking as a priority while still designing agendas that treat it as filler. One international event is handing 60% of its programme over to connection, and the early lessons are worth paying attention to no matter what kind of event you run.

Every planner has heard some version of the same post-event feedback: the best part was the hallway conversation.

We nod, we note it and then we build next year’s agenda with 80% content and a few 15-minute coffee breaks.

The data has gotten hard to ignore. Freeman’s latest Trends Report found that people would ideally spend 54% of their learning time outside traditional session rooms. Separate Freeman research found that 51% of attendees name successful networking as a reason they would return to an event.

We have collectively agreed that connection is where the value lies, yet left it almost entirely to chance.

Designing for Conversation Is Harder Than Designing for Content

Handing over a majority of your programme to networking sounds like less work. But it is not as easy as it sounds.

Unstructured networking is a lottery. Most of the time, extroverts win and everyone else endures. Freeman found that 40% of younger attendees say networking feels awkward and 30% struggle to start conversations at all, while nearly half want to be told in advance who they should meet.

At ICCA Congress this year, we have committed 60% of the program to networking and connection. It doesn’t mean 3-hour lunch breaks or no official program in the afternoon. It means facilitated formats with defined outcomes, matchmaking built around stated business objectives, small-group sessions where participants arrive knowing what they are there to accomplish. It also means giving up a substantial amount of stage time we have historically used to deliver content.

That’s design work. It requires knowing why each person is in the room and building mechanisms that increase the odds of the right encounters happening, rather than hoping proximity does the job.

I want to be honest that we do not know how all of it will land. Some formats will work better than others. Some may not be as effective as we thought. But we saw the data. We hear the feedback. We understand we need to treat this as a live experiment, so the global events community has something to benchmark against.

Why a Genuinely International Room Matters

One reason that gives us the confidence to go with this direction is because our audience is truly global.

A well-run national conference connects you with peers solving similar problems inside similar market conditions. Useful, but bounded. Put a convention bureau director from Ghana in a structured session with a venue operator from Japan and an association executive from Brazil, and different questions get asked. Assumptions get tested. What one market treats as settled practice, another has never attempted.

The ICCA Congress welcomes attendees from more than 80 countries. Last year, 18% were C-level and 67% were senior-level managers. These numbers are why peer exchange is necessary — no single session speaks equally well to such a varied room. It is also why a networking-driven programme can work. When most people in the room have something to share, the job becomes connecting the right people rather than putting the right person on stage.

Opening the Program Voices Outside the Norm

Another experiment ICCA is trying this year is less about format and more about willingness to invite other voices.

We in business events have a habit of benchmarking against ourselves. We study each other’s programmes, borrow each other’s formats and converge on shared assumptions about how events should work or what matters most to people.

This year we handed portions of our programme to five organizations: IEEE, UN Tourism, CAF – Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean, AC Forum and UNRISD – UN Research Institute for Social Development. The point is not novelty. It’s that these organisations also think about convening, knowledge transfer and impact measurement but might do so differently.

We call the theme “CrossWorlds,” but the underlying idea isn’t complicated: sustained insularity is expensive, and the cost is usually invisible until someone from outside points it out.

We’ll Learn Together

None of this is settled. This November, we’re running experiments with a few thousand peers from around the world. If you’ve been curious how a programme like this holds up in practice, join us in Panama and be in a genuinely global room.

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