We (the NLP Conference Programme team) have spent days pouring over conference proposals, reading them, re-reading them and doing our best to create a balanced programme for the 2018 conference.
I thought I was pretty good at ‘squeezing a quart into a pint pot’ – I’ve always managed to do a good job at fitting just one more thing in the cupboard or one more strawberry into the dish.
However, fitting 215 proposals (over 320 hours worth of presentations) into a 2 day programme (72 hours) has really stretched our creative juices this week!
Whilst we have come up with some creative ways of adding another person in here or expanding the schedule to include one more hour, we are going to disappoint a lot of people…and I really do not like disappointing others.
Of course, I am hugely grateful that we are in an amazing position to have that much choice in the first place. We are doing our best to put together a programme that will maximise the choice for our guests…and yet we will still have to say ‘no’ to a lot of people who have taken the time and effort to apply in the first place.
I am sure there are many times when we do find ourselves in a position where we may have to say ‘no’ and risk disappointing someone.
The key thing, I believe, is to be congruent with the decisions we make, how ever tough they may seem. If we make those decisions with the best of intentions, then we have done the best we can.