When the Movement Shifts

It was the spring of 2014, and a couple of colleagues and I were on our way to a client we were helping ‘transition to agile.’ I remember exactly where we were located on the highway when I was chatting to Paul Dolman-Darrell about copy and pasting his Spark the Change UK conference in Toronto.

Many years before that, I had spoken at my first major conference, and I was excited about it. I remember exactly where I was sitting working as a product owner in a CRM company when I submitted my session. I also remember the first vendor party night because I was hanging out with someone who told me that all of these events were, pardon the language, masturbation. He went on to describe how that particular event and other conferences were simply vendor schmooze-fests designed to sell consulting services, and to further the agenda and to appease the ego of the creators.

Three years later, my jadedness reached his level as I had grown so completely tired of the agile conference scene. More-so, I was tired of agile people bitching and moaning about ‘bad conferences’ and then never doing anything about it. My parents always taught me that if you didn’t like something, change it, otherwise shut the fuck up.

I wanted to create an event for people (not consultants) who were passionate about changing their organizations from the inside. The ideas I had were simple:

• no more than 100 people to keep it intimate
• more experiential
• MORE FUN
• no sponsors
• no advertising
• cool venue, no boring beige conference centre
• organizers aren’t allowed to speak or market their services
• some singing, dancing, and great food and coffee instead of vats of gross chicken and dirty water that passes as conference coffee.
• Discipline agnostic so we could attract HR, change, OD, and agile people.
• one-stage, one-track so we could have deeper conversations and cross-pollinate good ideas from various disciplines

Over the years we had singing, dancing (ZUMBA had become our thing!), LEGO, drum circles, big-ass hungry-hungry hippo on skateboards, and more. Each year the format changed to keep it fresh, and each year we managed to top the previous years’ event.

I don’t remember how I can across Spark the Change UK, but I do remember talking with Paul on the fateful spring day while on the way to a client site with my collegues, Mike and Shawn. Spark the Change was exactly the messaging I was looking for, so I decided to run the 2nd ever Spark conference in Toronto. Since then, there have been at least 12–15 Spark branded conferences all over the world, and many still think I invented it. I did not. Paul did.

I decided I was all in, and then reality sunk in.

How the hell do I run a 100% self-funded event with no sponsors or advertising or other investments? Thankfully plenty of my colleagues told me it was impossible and that I *should* reach out to company X or association Y. Thanks for the support, and it looks like one of us was right, and it sure as hell wasn’t you.

Then I found event planner extraordinaire, Elizabeth Plouffe. Within 30 seconds of meeting her, she tossed out an F-Bomb, and I knew I had found my event coordinator!

I’ve told this story at a couple of the Spark events in Toronto, when asked, but mostly I am writing this to document a time in my life when it’s time to move on because as someone that helps organizations change, it’s important to be reminded about how freaking hard it is.

We decided not to run Spark Toronto 2020, and I’m happy and sad all at the same time. We’ve had enough feedback from attendees that Spark has been the best experience people have had, and one miserable person who didn’t appreciate one of the speakers who swore too much.

We never intentionally worked on gender or race equality. Well, except for the one year where we had no white adult male speakers, so we added a couple. We simply brought in awesome people with great ideas and it turns out that the best ideas come from a group of cognitively diverse people, who come from all over the world, vary widely in age, ethnicity, and background. We even had a 15-year-old talk about blockchain one year!

I always had the idea of putting on a KISS concert for change people, and in that context Spark never lived up to my over-the-top rockstar vision for it, but it did help so many people with practical ideas to help them nudge their organizations forward.

This year, it felt right to end the Spark Toronto experiment. After 6 years and 5 events, we knew the time was right to hit the pause button. Some contributing factors were the energy of the whole team to try and top last year, and also the dramatic increase in the number of cold-calls from professional speakers who wanted to speak about their sure-fire, guaranteed (and trademarked) method for ensuring successful change. No offence to these folks intended, there are plenty of conferences that enjoy peddling easy answers, that’s just not our jam.

We could have kept going, heck, we were already 15% sold out without announcing a date, theme, format, or speakers, but in the end, we believe Spark Toronto has served its purpose, and it’s time for the next chapter.

I want to thank Elizabeth, Hazel, Andrew, Sue, Shawn, Mike and Julie who were volunteer organizers over the years. None of us received a cent, mostly because our goal was to break-even. Some years we were in the red, some years we were in the black, but it all worked out in the end.

I wish I had a list of all the volunteers over the years so I could mention them as well. I’m far too lazy to go through our web archives to mention all of our speakers over the years but without them and their energy, Spark Toronto wouldn’t have been what it was.

In the end, I am still more sad than happy because closing the door on something you feel so strongly about is hard, but all things come to an end, or shift in some way.

Overall, I’m glad I had the opportunity to run Spark over the years because I always wanted to run a conference. I tell my kids often: there are millions of things out there you can try. Do as many as you can before the show’s over.

For me, it’s time to change the channel. I know what we’ve accomplished with Spark Toronto has made a positive impact in many lives, and that my friends is what being an agent of change is all about.