Chapter 44 of my book The Power of Participation explains how facilitators use participatory voting to provide public information about viewpoints in the room, and pave the way for further discussion. In particular, we often use participatory voting to assess consensus. It’s often […]
If people come to meetings to learn, how can we create the best environment for them to do so? It turns out that trust and safety are prerequisites for optimum learning at meetings. Let’s explore why. How we learn at […]
The essential characteristics of meeting professionals If there is a heaven on earth in the event industry, there are four essential characteristics of successful meeting professionals you’ll meet there. These four characteristics are essential because event professionals who possess and […]
Recently, I’ve been appearing as a guest at college event planning and hospitality courses to talk about meeting design. (I love to do this. Teachers, please contact me, it’s free!) Rather than lecture for an hour, I’ve been using an […]
My post on gamification last week garnered plenty of comments on LinkedIn. Many responses exposed the vague ways people use the word gamification to imply, well, something good about a service that some companies provide. Like advertising’s liberal use of improved! without […]
Gamification “makes about as much sense as chocolate-dipped broccoli”. Education professor Amy Bruckman, coined this analogy in a 1999 paper on game software design: “Most attempts at making software both educational and fun end up being neither. Fun is often treated […]
How can we design the optimum balance between control versus freedom at meetings? First, let’s get one misconception out of the way. As I wrote in 2010: The reality is that you never had control to begin with, just the […]
What makes attending conferences worthwhile? As I described in Conferences That Work, the two most common reasons for attending conferences are to learn useful things and make useful connections. But there are numerous other ways that conferences provide value to stakeholders. […]
In our natural desire to predict the future and make good decisions, we must always stay mindful of the danger of our drive to make sense. Nick Chater and George Loewenstein propose that evolution has produced a ‘drive for sense-making’. […]
Last week I immensely enjoyed participating in a two-hour Zoom brain trust on moderating online panels. So good, it should be shared with a wider audience. So here’s a treasury of good ideas and resources we uncovered. Huge thanks to […]