• by Kendall Allen , May 9, 2011

The first time you­ experience the "industry panel" during your career, its quality may not strike you one way or another. But, once you've experienced this rite a hundred, thousand or many more times over as participant or attendee, you know how brilliantly or abysmally one of these can go.

I believe that great panels are some mystical mix of compelling thematic - thoughtful leveraged casting, where well-chosen characters play off one another; collaborative, engaged preparation; and the right structure and orchestration, or manner of spurring dialogue.  To a certain degree, an able, seasoned moderator can help bring that mix to life.

In any case, after a week of panel and program experiences, I find myself thinking about panel characters. I find myself thinking about truth serum. Here's why.

If you've sat on or attended enough of these panels, you know you tend to see a certain cast, a cast that crops up a character at a time, all year long, sprinkled about on stages around the world. Hopefully, you do not encounter them all on a single panel in one sitting. But you come to know them at a glance when you see them. They are recognizable for the roles they play, which become transparent to you over time. For all the panelist types we love, a certain set of bogus types should be avoided. Today, for fun, in looking at the role these types play, I'm imagining how things would play out if they were dosed with a little truth serum before their turns at the microphone.

Imagine these players:

Steven: "Good afternoon. I am most pleased with myself to present to you the very same presentation I have given on this topic eight times this year and four times last year. I honestly don't grasp that it is the same presentation I give every time - because it does not occur to me that you may have unluckily found yourself in multiple audiences of mine, sitting before me, drooling yourself off into a bored haze. Yes, my !$@%# is canned. But, because I fancy myself professionally superior, I'm hoping to keep this trick up. It's my signature bit." Recognize him? He totes his canned, patented Powerpoint wherever he goes, continually recycling the exact same material. His zero-effort game rendered him irrelevant about nine panels ago. But, he remains oblivious and smug.

Then, there is Lex: "It's 'transemanticmogrification.' Yes, I just made up that word, and I'm sticking to it. It truly is jargon of the worst sort, jargon brewed out of my love affair with my own intellect. But, there's no need for me to explain it to you here now, on my feet. Or, back it up. It just sounds cool. You should intuit its meaning and write it into your go-to vocabulary list, attributing me of course. After all, it stands on its own." Know Lex? He's got his own catchy lexicon - which he unfurls one snazzy burst at a time, wherever he rants. But, when put on the spot, he never explains beyond some vague, pithy blurb. He regards himself as one-part digerati, one-part literati.

Oh, hello, Margeen: "I may as well be up here all by myself. This would have been far more impactful if I just breezed in for my 20 minutes. So glad that Gary finally stopped talking. I'm not sure at all what he said, but you will now be dazzled by what I've got for you. Thought he would never stop. So, listen up, I'm on for 20 - and then I will zone out again in my own thoughts waiting for my next chance to speak. Ideally, I will be the one to deliver that one zinger remark at the end to send you home for the night. That's kind of my gig. Plus I really don't understand what anyone else is saying." This is the worst kind of conversationalist - transported to stage. This is the person who does not listen or engage but simply waits for his or her turn to speak. As a result, Margeen injects dissonance to the panel - which she somehow mistakenly perceives to be a speech.

Last up, Seth is in the house: "I position myself as a bit of a guru - 'A seasoned veteran with over 27 years of digital experience.' I like to say that I've been around since the inception of everything. This means nothing of course. I do like to pretend - especially to my friends outside the industry - that I get this stuff, all this media and technology, inside and out. They usually believe me.  But, I do think they were confused when I apparently posted videos to their Facebook walls of Osama bin Laden's death this morning, and unleashed viruses to my entire social graph like a total amateur. I am pretty sure I am still a guru though." This one speaks for itself.

In poor panel scenarios, some things of course are the fault of the moderators or the conference content folks. But, keep an eye out for these characters. And, of course, if you are on the circuit, try to keep yourself self-aware. Because it's kind of like that saying about sanity and friends: "One out of four friends is crazy. If you look around and you don't see 'crazy,' guess what? It's you."