For many years, we have hosted seminars for mental health professionals. They’re intended to generate business. They work.

The format is pretty standard: we rent a meeting room from a local hotel, arrange breakfast or lunch, prepare a speaker, and conduct the program. We’ve got all the usual things you’d expect like nametags, PowerPoint, etc. The programs are always enjoyable and followed by a lively Q&A session.

Here’s where it gets interesting…

We get positive feedback from the attendees. They have a good time, they learn some things, and they enjoy meeting our lawyers.

But, over and over again, they report that their favorite part of the program isn’t the program.

What they love is spending time with other mental health professionals. They don’t get to see one another often enough. They’re busy working, and they’re not committing much time to professional meetings. They’re social people, and they love chatting with their peers. One after another, they come up to us and thank us not for the educational content but for the opportunity to get to spend time with their friends.

That’s not what I ever expected.

Those conversations got me thinking. We’re always taking referral sources to lunch. Usually, it’s one on one. We have a nice time, and we share information about our practices and our lives.

I wonder, however, whether that’s really the best thing to do.

I wonder whether we’d be better off taking a small group of peers to lunch.

What if we invited one person from three or four different practices and we all met somewhere? I wonder whether the discussion would take off between the other folks at the table. We might even get left out a bit.

Networking for introverts?

That might not be so bad, especially if you don’t really enjoy these kind of meetings.

Not so bad? What I mean is that having everyone else do the talking might be the greatest thing ever!

You’d get credit, gratitude, and appreciation for having created a fun event where everyone got something positive. You’d be associated with a successful discussion, yet you wouldn’t have to do the discussing.

This could be the biggest innovation in networking history. Maybe I’m overstating it a bit?

But seriously, maybe we’re on to something here? What do you think?