Some people when asked this question, look for their friends essentially,
look for people they know and they want to sit in a table with people they know.
That's a very reasonable, natural consideration.
Some people think about I don't want to sit at a table and
then no one else comes and sits behind me, so
I want to sit at a full table, basically, I don't want to be isolated.
And that's again a human instinct and understandable.
What other considerations might you bring to this?
Some folks think who do I need to work with at this conference,
who might I have some interest in talking to?
It might not be a friend, it might be someone of purely professional interest,
let me go get a chance to sit at the table,
it may be the only chance I have to talk to them.
Also, reasonable.
Some ambitious people think, let me sit with people who I don't know or
aren't like me, or I won't have a chance to visit with in any other situation.
That is relatively rare, but I do hear that response sometimes.
How would you do this?
How would you decide?
In many ways, what we're going to talk about in today's lecture
is this kind of consideration.
You're building relationships all the time,
not formal or hierarchical relationships, but
informal relationships, can we bring some structure to how we do that?
Can we bring some insight into the consequences of how we do it?
A lot of it will look like the decision on what you do here at the registration.
The one suggestion I would offer here and we talk about this when we talk about
this exercise with our daytime students, is what about serendipity?
What about what would happen if you sat at the table with only one or
two seats filled so that you're rolling the dice,
essentially, on the next seven or eight people that come to sit at that table?