At my yearly review last week, I was asked when I last went to a conference just to be in the audience.

I had to think about it longer than I expected.

The honest answer was: not recently. Not really.

For the last several years, every conference I've attended has come with a slot on the programme.
A talk to prepare.
Slides to finish on the plane.
That particular low-grade anxiety that sits in your chest from the moment you land until the moment you walk off stage.

Which means I haven't just been somewhere in a while. Haven't sat in a seat without an agenda. Haven't listened without half my brain running a parallel track of what I'm doing next.

So when DFTB26 came around - our conference in Glasgow this summer - I made a decision. I'm going as an audience member. No talk. No slides. Just a seat, a programme, and the slightly unfamiliar experience of being present without having to perform.

And then I realised I'm not entirely sure I know how to do that well.

💡 ONE IDEA WELL

I spend a lot of time in this newsletter thinking about communication from the front of the room.

How to open. How to structure. How to make an idea land with a stranger in thirty minutes or less.

But a talk doesn't happen in isolation. It happens in the space between a speaker and a room full of people. And that room has a job too.

A great audience isn't just a passive receptacle. It isn't warm bodies in seats, phones in hand, waiting to be impressed. It's a living, breathing part of what makes a talk work - or not.

Speakers feel it. The energy in the room, the quality of attention, the sense that people are genuinely with you.

These things change what's possible. They change what the speaker is willing to risk, how much they open up, how alive the whole thing feels.

Which means being a good audience member is actually a skill. One most of us have never been taught.

Here's what I think it looks like.

🧰 LESS MESS, MORE MESSAGE

Turn up on time. Actually on time.

I know. This sounds obvious. It isn't easy.

Conference mornings are chaotic. The hotel breakfast takes longer than expected. You run into someone in the lobby you haven't seen in two years, and suddenly it's five past, and you're doing that half-jog down a corridor trying to remember which room it was.

But here's why it matters beyond basic courtesy.

The first two minutes of a talk are where the speaker sets the contract. What this is. Why it matters. Where we're going together.

It's the moment where a good speaker earns permission to take you somewhere unexpected.

Miss it, and you spend the rest of the talk reconstructing the map from inside the territory - playing catch-up, filling in gaps, never quite settling into what the speaker is trying to do.

Think of it like arriving at the theatre during the opening scene. You wouldn't congratulate yourself for that. Being on time is both a basic act of respect and a piece of enlightened self-interest.

Go to a talk you wouldn't normally go to.

There's a version of conference-going that's pure comfort food.

You attend sessions in your exact subspecialty, on topics you already know something about, by speakers whose work you've followed for years.

Every talk confirms something you half-believed already. You leave feeling validated and broadly unchanged.

I understand the logic. Time is limited. Energy is limited. You have responsibilities and a list of people you need to catch, and emails building up at home. The familiar session feels efficient.

But I think it's a trap.

Not because the familiar sessions aren't valuable, but because the most generative ideas often come from the adjacent field, the unexpected angle, the talk your colleague dragged you to while you were checking your phone.

The framework I use most often now - the one that changed how I think about decisions under pressure - came from a session I nearly skipped. It had nothing to do with my work, or so I thought. I was wrong.

In Glasgow, I'm going to pick at least one session that isn't obviously mine. I'll give it my full attention and see what happens. I'd suggest you do the same.

Ask a good question — and wait for the microphone.

​Simon Carley from St Emlyn's wrote a famous flowchart for this. It was designed as a bit of fun between friends and has since been shared thousands of times across the world, which tells you something about how universal the problem is.

You know the problem. Every conference has one.

The person who raises their hand in the Q&A and says: "Thank you for that talk. I have three questions and a comment, and, interestingly, in my experience, based on a study I did two years ago..."

And then the microphone becomes a monologue. The speaker is held hostage. The audience stares at the ceiling. The session chair does the quiet mathematics of how many minutes are left.

The most useful distillation of Simon's flowchart came from Chris Gray, and I think about it every time I consider reaching for a microphone:

Rule 1: Your first sentence should be a question.

Rule 2: There should not be a second sentence.

That's it. A question is not a speech. It's not a chance to demonstrate what you know or challenge the speaker's entire framework in front of their peers.

It's one thing you genuinely want to understand. If you can't put it in a single sentence, you probably don't have a question yet. Keep listening.

And one more thing, while we're here: wait for the microphone.

I know it feels slow. I know you can project. But not everyone in that room can hear you - and I mean that literally.

Some people are hard of hearing.
Some are sitting at the back.
Some are watching a livestream from another country.

Your question, however good it is, disappears the moment it leaves your mouth without amplification.

It won't make the recording.
It won't reach the online audience.
The speaker may even have to repeat it back just to give everyone a fighting chance, which eats time and slightly deflates the whole exchange.

Waiting for the microphone isn't bureaucracy. It's inclusion. It's the difference between a question that exists only for the people close enough to hear you, and one that belongs to the whole room.

(Simon is speaking at DFTB26, by the way. I expect the algorithm will make an appearance.)

Tell the speaker what landed.

This is the one people forget, and I think it might be the most important.

After the session - in the corridor, at the coffee station (but never in the toilets), briefly and without ceremony - if something shifted for you, tell the speaker.

Not as performance.
Not as networking.
Just a genuine sentence: that thing you said about X, I'd never framed it that way. I'm going to use that.

Speaking is an act of generosity. You've taken an idea that lives in your head, tried to make it transmissible, stood up in front of a room of strangers and hoped something lands.

Most speakers walk off stage not knowing whether any of it worked. The applause is polite and tells you almost nothing. The corridor is where you find out.

A specific, honest sentence takes thirty seconds. It costs you almost nothing. It can mean more to a speaker than they'll tell you, and it's usually the beginning of a real conversation, which is, when you strip everything else away, what conferences are actually for.

🎨 TRY THIS

At your next conference, pick one talk that's outside your usual territory. Book it deliberately. Turn up on time. Put the phone face down for the first ten minutes and let the talk land before you decide what's worth sharing.

Then, afterwards, find the speaker. Tell them one specific thing you got from it.

See what that does - for them, and for you.

🧭 ASK YOURSELF THIS

When did you last leave a conference genuinely changed by something you heard - rather than simply confirmed in what you already believed?

What made that possible?

And what would it take to create that condition on purpose?

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Speak soon,

Andy

P.S. If you're coming to Glasgow — find me. I'll be the one in the audience, for once, working out whether I'm any good at this.