This article was originally published on Linkedin

Author: Nikica Zunic

When I started in this industry as a young apprentice, I had the good sense to ask questions before assuming I understood anything.

The person I asked the most questions was Frano Falkoni. I feel sorry about that now because I was hassling him a lot.

Frano had organised some of the biggest congresses in Yugoslavia. Major scientific meetings, international gatherings, events that required coordinating hundreds of delegates across multiple countries at a time when none of the tools we take for granted today even existed. Like mobile phone, email, internet or anything like that. While working as internship in well known rental company (AS Kongresni Servis) there were dozen of purchases and hundreds of memo’s signed by him. He had also worked on the some part for the Olympic Games — a scale of organisation that most of us will never approach.

I wanted to understand how someone like that worked. So I asked him to walk me through a normal morning – what is the first thing that you normally did in the office?

He thought about it for a moment. Then he said something I have never forgotten.

“You come in. You check the fax machine. You see if any new registrations came in overnight. Then you look at the notebook at what you were doing when you left yesterday — and you pick up from there.”

That was it.

No inbox. No notifications. No system sending alerts. You arrived at your desk, you walked to the fax machine, and you read whatever paper had come through while you were sleeping.

If no fax had come, there was nothing to process. You moved on to the other work of organising — the venue, the programme, the speakers, the logistics that no machine was going to handle for you.

The thing that strikes me now

I have thought about that conversation many times over 20+ years. What strikes me now is not how primitive it sounds. What strikes me is how calm it was. Without noise just focus.

Frano was not overwhelmed by registrations. He was not buried in corrections and follow-ups and confirmation emails. The fax machine held everything. It was slow, but it was contained.

When email arrived, we all celebrated. Registrations would come faster. Delegates could register from anywhere. No more waiting for paper to arrive.

What we did not anticipate was that faster also meant more. More registrations, more questions, more corrections, more follow-ups, more people emailing to ask if their registration had been received. The channel got faster. The volume got larger. And somehow the administrative burden did not shrink — it grew.

Then came the online registration form. Another celebration. Delegates could register themselves, any time, any device. No manual entry. The data would flow directly into the system.

Except someone still had to manage the institutional invoices. Someone still had to correct the VAT numbers. Someone still had to chase the payments and send the confirmations and respond to the delegates who registered but never received the email.

The technology changed. The underlying problem did not.

What registration has always really been

Here is what I think Frano understood intuitively, even if he never said it in these words.

Registration is not about collecting data. It is about giving a delegate confidence that their place is secured. The fax did that. Slowly, on paper, with a confirmation typed and sent back through the same machine. But it did it.

Every technology since has been an attempt to do the same thing faster, for more people, with less manual effort. The fax became email. Email became the web form. The web form became — if you are keeping up with where this is going — the conversation.

Today, a delegate can open WhatsApp, answer a few questions, and receive their confirmation, invoice, and badge QR code in 47 seconds. The institutional billing is handled automatically. The VAT is applied correctly without anyone checking it manually. The confirmation arrives without anyone pressing send.

Frano would recognise the principle immediately. A delegate signals their intent to attend. The system processes it and confirms their place. Everything else is implementation detail.

What has changed is the distance between intent and confirmation. In Frano’s time it was days. With a web form it is minutes, if everything works. With a WhatsApp conversation it is 47 seconds, with a 98% completion rate, on any device, in any time zone.

What I learned from asking a simple question

The best lesson I took from Frano was not about fax machines. It was about understanding the job at its core before getting attached to how it is currently done.

He had organised congresses at a scale most people in this industry will never reach, using tools that look laughable by today’s standards. He was not attached to the fax machine. He was attached to the outcome — a confirmed delegate, a smooth congress, a room full of the right people.

When the tools change, and they always change, that attachment to the outcome is what lets you adapt without losing what matters.

I have been in this industry long enough to watch three generations of registration technology come and replace the one before it. Each time, the tool changed. The job — connecting the right people so that knowledge can move between them — stayed exactly the same.

Nikica Zunic is the CEO of Penta, a professional congress organiser based in Zagreb with 20+ years of experience in the field. This is the first in a series of articles about what a long career in congress organisation teaches you — about technology, about people, and about what actually matters when you are putting a congress together.