Reinventing Meetings

The meetings industry is in a giant rut, and if we don't do anything to shake things up dramatically, there will be little reason for meetings -- as we know them -- to exist. That's the strong opinion of folks like Jeffrey Cufaude of Idea Architects in Indianapolis, who specializes in creating keynotes, workshops and conferences that promote learning and community.

"Adult learners tend to want to bring their life experiences into the learning format and share it with others," says Cufaude. "This demands more participatory, peer-to-peer formats."

"Thinking is the most important thing that happens at a meeting," insists Jeff Hurt, the Dallas-based director of education and engagement for Velvet Chainsaw, an industry consulting firm. "In all the events I've ever planned, I've said, 'Let's cut your content in half.' "

Proponents have a number of names for this paradigm -- most prominent are Meeting Architecture and Meeting Design -- but it boils down to a few truths:

A) All of the straightforward information your potential attendees need -- whether they are corporate employees, trade association members or members of an esoteric social group -- now can be found online.

B) People attend events to network and learn.

C) Events that are built up from defining concepts, goals and desired learning outcomes have a better chance of engaging attendees and bringing them back for more.

That means meetings where people don't sit in rows but in circles or groupings; where participants (not "attendees") interact via iPads or other devices; and where everyone plays an active role in the learning experience. Sessions (sans PowerPoint) might last about 30 minutes, with 30-minute breaks in between to allow thoughtful discussions to take place in the hallways.

"I don't think the industry has a choice in going in this direction," says Hurt. "Our registrants have become more sophisticated. And over time, you can't stay competitive presenting an experience that is passive in nature. We don't want to go to a meeting where we are spectators."

An evolution of imperatives The shift in focus toward enhancing the participant experience has been prompted by factors such as the stubbornly anemic economy and the ever-burgeoning Internet. At the same time, there has been a growing emphasis on strategic meetings management programs -- essentially the gathering of data surrounding events, including sourcing, to manage spend, increase efficiency and streamline costs. A well-implemented SMMP allows meetings departments to articulate the return on investment of events in concrete business terms.

But in the wake of the Great Recession and the resulting downturn in the industry, which saw many events canceled and others come under intense scrutiny, content and interaction have come into the spotlight to make conferences important enough to attend.

"Meetings are on the radar in a way they never have been before," says Terri Breining, CMP, CMM, a 30-year industry veteran and principle of the consulting/training firm the Breining Group in Encinitas, Calif. "The effect of canceling events, the introduction of procurement into the process, the growth of SMMP, the shift in looking at meetings as a whole instead of as a decentralized concept -- all are creating greater interest in this evolution we are experiencing."

Making this shift requires meeting professionals to get in earlier on the planning process, asking stakeholders what they want participants to learn, asking potential attendees what they want from the event, and then surveying participants at the end to measure the experiential return on investment instead of a monetary ROI.

But step one requires taking a look at the science of learning.

At the core Meeting architecture begins with the concept of how adults learn, something that has largely been ignored in the past.

"We don't measure how people learn at events," says Jeffrey Cufaude. "We should be asking, 'What percentage of the conference content can you see yourself applying personally or professionally?' "

And adults need a way to process what they've heard. Consider Cufaude's idea for the follow-up to a keynote: Right after the general session, have a track of 30-minute breakouts, all of which relate to different aspects of the keynote. "Maybe you repeat them twice so people can go to two different ones," he suggests.

The breakouts could approach the information in different ways. For instance: Do you want to discuss what you heard? Gather in room 101. Do you want to work on a case study? Go to room 102. Want to read about it? Find that in room 103. Want to answer some questions about it? Get together in room 104. The most important element this model offers is time to reflect on the information that has been presented, which is essential for adult learners.

This falls in line with the concept of streamlining prepared content. "I'll ask speakers to tell me three things they want the audience to remember when they leave," says Jeff Hurt. "I design the program around those things and give people a chance to work on them."

To implement such changes, however, planners need be involved right from the meeting's inception, which doesn't happen very often, observes Debi Scholar, CMP, CMM, a New Jersey-based travel, meetings and training consultant with particular expertise in strategic meetings management. In the corporate world, she says, planners aren't brought in early enough to contribute to the aesthetics and content design of an event.

Scholar suggests that planners arrange monthly meetings with typical customers -- department heads, executives, association boards, independent-planner clients -- not to talk about a particular event, but about the annual calendar of meetings. "Having regular, ongoing conversations gives participants a great chance to talk about the architecture of the meeting before it's actually all planned out," she says.

Hurt believes planners should throw out the play book and try to plan even oft-repeated events from scratch. "Ask executives what the goals of their meetings are and how effective they think their meetings are," he suggests. "It becomes about designing the experience, asking a lot of tough questions of people, like why are we doing this, and why this way? Is there a better way to get a better outcome for our participants? Stop looking at the face-to-face meeting as a one-time experience, and see it as part of a larger ecosystem of touchpoints with our customers, so it blends well with a whole year's worth of experiences."

A young industry gathering called Event Camp was built with learner outcomes as the focal point. People who were regularly communicating on Twitter using the hashtag #eventprofs wanted to put faces to names, and a conference was born, cobbled together in two months via a process of considering only the experience the participants and planners wanted to get out of it.

"The real spirit of the event is collaboration and experimenting with concepts," says Michael M. McCurry, strategic account manager for third-party planning firm Experient and a founder of Event Camp, which was first held in February 2010. A number of events have been held since, and two will take place concurrently this month in Washington, D.C., and Vancouver, British Columbia.

At Event Camps, meeting professionals attend in person, watch webcasts and/or participate in Twitter conversations. "We experiment with technology and how it works with events, with an expectation that some of it will fail. It's a catalyst to promote change within our own organizations," says McCurry.

Going global Three years ago, Maarten Vanneste, president of the Meeting Support Institute and an A/V and production expert in Belgium, decided to put on paper how strongly he feels that the industry needs to change. The result, his self-published manifesto called Meeting Architecture, has evolved into a movement to create an entirely new education module for meeting professionals.

"We want to develop educational packages," says Vanneste, who is launching the Fresh Conference (thefreshconference.com), Jan. 15-17, 2012, in Copenhagen, Denmark, to explores his concepts. "We are figuring out what needs to be inside the toolbox, what the core knowledge needs to be for a meeting architect and how we bring it to potential architects. Then we want to roll it out for the entire industry, globally, using the existing channels."

Breining is on Vanneste's bandwagon.  "This is a very interesting idea, something that can become a profession on its own," she says, envisioning a meeting architect as being in on the event design from the beginning, influencing all the elements that go into it, from site selection and room layout to lighting, A/V, food, agenda and how the information is presented, all in support of the objectives. In fact, Breining has joined Vanneste in presenting to organizations and corporations, talking up the concept as much as possible. "It is the idea of starting with the development of objectives," she says. "It sounds absurdly simple, but most meetings are not begun with objectives, but with aspirational ideas."

One long-time industry expert notes that these concepts aren't new -- and they're difficult to set in motion. "Meeting architecture is the ideal," says Joan Eisenstodt, a Washington, D.C.-based meetings and hospitality consultant, trainer and facilitator, who has been frustrated for years in her efforts to get the facilities she uses simply to set rooms in ways more conducive to interaction ("If I even want to put chairs in a circle, hotels have a nervous breakdown!"). She is a firm believer in the idea that bringing a sense of play to a meeting also enhances participants' learning experience. "I want this to work, but meeting professionals aren't dealing with content first. After the venue is booked, they are fitting square pegs into round holes. My gut is that we keep tilting at windmills."

Nevertheless, industry associations such as the Chicago-based Professional Convention Management Association have started employing some of the new-wave design initiatives. And Dallas-based Meeting Professionals International just granted to Maarten Vanneste this year's RISE Award for Meeting Industry Leadership.

According to Didier Scaillet, chief development officer for MPI and the MPI Foundation, "We are not just looking at forms from last year anymore and picking the most popular speakers and topics, but also learning how our members want to interact. They can consume content online in any format they want."

When determining what will work for the organization's events, Scaillet says the conversation now centers on how the interaction will take place and how people will learn. "The purpose of our meetings, such as our World Education Congress, has changed drastically, and the need to design them to meet these objectives is imperative," he says.

To that end, MPI is exploring the concept of meeting architecture and its implications for the many facets of our industry. The organization is conducting research as part of its continuing Future of Meetings study. Heading the project is John Nawn, CEO of the Perfect Meeting in Chicago, who is an organizational psychologist by training. "We are soliciting feedback from traditional planners, learning professionals and the design community, including sensory designers and emotional designers," he says. "We have completed about 150 interviews of meeting professionals to date, and we will go back and explore what we've found in more detail."

The goal is to analyze the results and present them at MPI's European Meeting and Events Conference in Budapest in February 2012. Nawn, who this past July took groups of World Education Congress attendees in Orlando around the Orange County Convention Center to analyze room sets and design elements of the building, will apply the design findings to sessions, room layouts and more at the venue (the Novotel Budapest Congress) for the EMEC.