My work at a pre-con is different from that of a typical meeting planner since I focus on the meeting’s design and facilitation. I’ve been convening meetings for decades, though, so I know a fair amount about meeting planning. As I prepared to review the venue’s meeting spaces, room set options, and traffic patterns, I thought about how, today, competent logistics are the new meeting minimum.
Unfortunately, you wouldn’t know this from looking at meeting planning textbooks. I have a pile on my desk as I write this. With a single exception — Tahira Endean‘s excellent Intentional Event Design: Our Professional Opportunity — they devote minimal space (usually a single chapter) to the importance and the how-to of exploring meeting objectives and outcomes before hundreds of pages on site selection, food and beverage, lodging, decor, entertainment, technical production, transportation, budgeting, trade shows, registration, etc.
The traditional bread and butter of a meeting planner’s job.
Yes, all these logistical considerations are important and need to be done well! But when you’re spending all your time on these issues it’s easy to forget that they are not what meetings are about. Today, competent logistics are the new meeting minimum.
The deficiencies of meeting planning textbooks and education
Such textbooks barely mention the essence of a meeting: what has to happen to achieve clearly defined meeting objectives and outcomes? Why? Because they make assumptions that what has to happen is what happened at just about every meeting their authors ever attended. They assume that meetings will consist of sessions with speakers on a stage. They assume that the core purpose of a meeting session is to transmit content to an audience. And they assume that when attendees are not in sessions, we should ply them with food and drink and entertainment.
When meeting planner textbooks gloss over the key ways that meetings can be made much more effective and useful for all stakeholders, planners remain ignorant, and traditional broadcast-style meetings continue to be the norm. Sadly, few clients know any better. Most assume that a meeting planner is all they need. They aren’t aware that professional meeting designers and facilitators exist and have great value.
Competent logistics are the new meeting minimum
I love to design and facilitate meetings that are great because they use participant-driven and participation-rich human processes. I have little competition. But I feel frustrated that so many opportunities to improve our events are going to waste. In my opinion, meeting planner education is deficient. Planners could be educated so they can help their clients with meeting design. Or they could learn and understand the importance and benefits of including meeting designers in the meeting planning process and encourage clients to use them. Either outcome (both could coexist) would cause a significant upgrade in the quality of meetings.
Steve Jobs said, “Design is how it works”. And good event design is about how a conference works. Combining perfect logistics with a traditional meeting design only leads to a flawless traditional meeting. That’s better than a flawed traditional meeting, of course, but we can do so much better. That’s why competent logistics are the new meeting minimum.
Earlier this month, the folks at Gatherly kindly invited me to host an event of my choosing for their clients and potential users. I decided to facilitate an online workshop in Gatherly that took full advantage of the platform. This coming June will mark my 30th year of designing and facilitating participant-driven and participation-rich meetings. So I designed the workshop as an “Ask Adrian Anything” about meeting design and facilitation.
I’ve shared the why? and the details of how I typically run this format here. In this post, I cover the additions I made, issues that arose, my impressions, and the feedback the workshop received.
An experiment: I try something I’ve never done before!
I like the Gatherly platform and have reviewed it a couple of times (1, 2). Gatherly’s best feature, in my opinion, is its user interface for online social interaction. The platform uses a birds-eye view of rooms (there can be more than one of them on different “floors”). Each participant is shown as a named icon. Deciding to talk with someone is as easy as clicking on their icon, which moves you to their position in the room and puts you in video chat. The two of you then form a “huddle”, shown as a circle with the number of people talking at its center.
Moving your mouse cursor over a huddle shows you the names of the people there. Others can join a huddle by clicking on it; you can leave a huddle at any time by clicking on the floor outside it. Gatherly currently supports huddles of up to fifteen people.
Because Gatherly allows you to see where people are in a room, it can support a fundamental technique I use at almost all in-person events I design and facilitate: body voting, aka human spectrograms.
So I was excited to see whether I could implement body voting online, something I’d never tried before.
Incorporating body voting experiences into the workshop
I ended up incorporating four body voting experiences into the workshop:
“How did I get here?” (run in trios)
“If this workshop was really great for you, what one thing would you want to learn about/discuss/happen?” (run in pairs)
“What industry/job role fits you best?” (See the floor plan we used below.)
Body voting map for “Where do you live?”Body voting map for “What industry/job role fits you best?”
Read on to find out how I implemented these exercises in Gatherly and how they worked out.
Designing an online workshop in Gatherly
The first decision we had to make was how long the workshop should run. Since the event was participant-driven, the Gatherly staff and I agreed to let it run as long as it seemed people wanted, with a 2½ hour limit.
Up until now, I have used Gatherly as a pure platform for online socials. For this workshop — indeed for any workshop — I needed to provide separate whole-group-together and small-group-work environments. Just like every other meeting platform, Gatherly has developed a broadcast/stage mode (see the first image in this post), where one or more speakers can broadcast to everyone else. When you start a Gatherly broadcast, the room map is still visible but huddles are disabled.
So in this workshop, we frequently switched between broadcast and map (huddle) modes. In broadcast mode, I provided short segments of content and instructions for upcoming group work. We also used broadcast mode for fishbowl discussions and the core “Ask Adrian Anything” session.
All meeting platforms that have a small-group/breakout mode pose a communication problem for the meeting host or facilitator. Small groups meet via video chat, so messages from the meeting host to everyone can’t be sent through audio — the standard communication mode when in broadcast.
In Gatherly, the tool I had to address this issue was text chat. I asked everyone to select the Event chat option (the red Event button in the first image in this post) and to monitor text chat for exercise instructions during their huddle small group work. I also asked participants to also use text chat for important issues, so this communication channel wouldn’t be filled with distracting messages.
Leading folks through small group work in Gatherly
Before the workshop, I prepared a text document with step-by-step instructions needed to lead participants through all the exercises I had planned.
Here’s a sample:
For each small group exercise, I did the following:
In broadcast mode, verbally explain and go through the exercise steps.
Switch to map mode. Cut and paste each prepared prompt into the Event text chat at the appropriate time.
Provide a final prompt that we’d be returning to broadcast mode.
Switch back to broadcast mode.
Once I’d practiced this flow beforehand for a while, it was easy to run.
Using raise hands during the workshop
I chose to use Gatherly’s raise hands tool in a couple of ways during the workshop.
During the geographical map and industry/role body voting exercises, I asked people who lived outside the United States, or who placed themselves in the “Other” area of the industry/role floor map to raise their hands. When you do this in Gatherly, your name rises to the top of the participant list, so you’re easy to spot. In broadcast mode, we brought these folks briefly onto the stage and asked them to share their name and where they lived/their role. This is analogous to walking around and interviewing such individuals at in-person meetings. Recognizing people who are a little outside the main group’s geographical focus/job descriptions is interesting and helps to bring them into the group.
During fishbowl-based group discussions, including the Ask Adrian Anything segment, we asked people to raise their hands if they had a question or wanted to add their voice to a current conversation. Only Gatherly admins can remove people from the stage, so we asked people to lower their hands when they wanted to leave the current discussion.
A major issue that arose during the workshop
While facilitating this online workshop in Gatherly, I made heavy use of Gatherly’s broadcast mode for the first time. Unfortunately, the broadcast mode did not work reliably for some people. At times, the video stream for some participants on stage (including me) was blank. When this happened to me, I wasn’t aware of it since my screen showed my own camera-direct video, and I was only made aware of the problem through text chat.
I’d seen this problem while testing the workshop platform beforehand, using two computers in my office on different ISPs and networks to join the session. At the time I assumed it was a temporary glitch or technical issue involving the OS/Chrome version used by one of my machines. This turned out not to be the case. Most people showed up fine, but functionality like this — a basic feature of pretty much every meeting platform these days — should be rock solid. (I’ve never seen this happen on Zoom, for example.)
Given that I’ve found the video chat provided in huddles (map mode) by Gatherly to be more reliable than any other platform I’ve tried, this deficiency is puzzling. I hope it’s eliminated soon.
My thoughts and impressions of the workshop
Almost everyone stayed for the whole workshop!
I had no idea who would show up for the workshop or how long it would run. When we did the geographical map exercise, a substantial proportion of participants were from outside the US, which I did not expect. But what really surprised me was that almost everyone stayed for two hours, until after the Ask Adrian Session was over. (And a few people shared at the start that they weren’t going to be able to stay the whole time.)
Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve found that when you create meetings that allow and support engagement at any time on participants’ terms, people stick around.
A small group remained for informal discussion and feedback, and we reluctantly wound up when we reached our 2½ hour hard limit.
Guiding participants through small group activities
Before the workshop, I wondered how well using text chat to prompt small group activities would work. Would participants, busily engaged with each other, follow the prompts? (This can be a problem when in person too, but it’s easier to see when it’s happening.)
I needn’t have worried. Participants responded to my directions to form groups of various sizes much more quickly than I expected. In fact, they divided into groups of the right size faster than in an in-person workshop! The Gatherly birds-eye view of everyone in the room, plus the displayed count of each huddle size makes it easy to see who’s not yet in a group, and which groups are too large or too small.
Feedback on the workshop
The Gatherly staff were impressed that so many people stayed so long, (and I was pleased)!
Several people commented that although they could not see me during portions of the broadcast segments, my audio feed was all they needed to stay engaged. Yes, it’s nice to see people at online meetings. But it’s worth remembering that for those who aren’t hearing impaired, audio beats video every time.
The small group exercises were popular. And people thanked me for showing the value of what we did, not only by experiencing it but also by learning how to facilitate the formats for their own communities.
Conclusions
I learned that I can successfully run body voting online, at least on Gatherly. (Wonder will probably work too.) Body voting is perhaps the best way for a group to quickly learn important information about who’s present. To have this capability online is valuable. (See my book The Power of Participation to learn more about body voting.)
One suggestion I have for Gatherly to improve its product is to provide a better way for meeting hosts to broadcast instructions when participants are in huddles. This could be done with text messages that are displayed more prominently than at present to all huddle members.
Would I facilitate an online workshop in Gatherly again? Absolutely! (As long as the broadcast video problem is fixed.)
Miles Franklin, the Australian writer and feminist best known for her novel My Brilliant Career, wrote the above words in her autobiography. Like Miles, I believe that all people want and need opportunities to share how they’re thinking and feeling.
Meetings of every kind offer these opportunities. When I walk into our tiny town rural post office, I sometimes see folks for whom a conversation about almost anything with the sole postal worker is clearly important. Perhaps that customer will have little or no other human contact that day. What is talked about is far less important than the act of telling.
Personal meetings like these, whether brief or extended, between good friends or strangers, are fundamental. Many of us are lucky enough to have “someone to tell it to,” though some do not.
Someone to tell it to at conferences
Conferences, whether in-person or online, are also potential arenas for conversations. They are places for participants — who have something in common with each other — to find someone to tell it to. Even if the teller believes that they weren’t fully heard, the act of telling is valuable. (Otherwise, people wouldn’t journal and practice self-affirmations.)
But some conferences offer better opportunities than others. Traditional events relegate conversations to the hallways, to breaks and socials. No conversations occur during lectures. Even post-presentation Q&As rarely evolve into a conversation, which is always between the presenter and a succession of audience members.
Given the fundamental human need to tell, meeting stakeholders owe it to participants to create opportunities and environments for rich conversations in the sessions, rather than just the gaps between them. I have been doing this for 33years, and it’s clear that meeting designs that integrate meaningful conversations into sessions have a transformational effect on almost all participants. (Read any of my books to learn specific techniques and designs that create meaningful and valuable conversations during meeting sessions.)
In 2006, Cory Doctorow wrote: “Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.” Content is everywhere, but conversations require tellers and listeners. While telling something to ourselves is better than nothing, it doesn’t compare to telling it to and being heard by another human.
Let’s give attendees the priceless gift of someone to tell it to at our events.
Children listening to each other image (cropped) by J. Verkuilen, licensed under (CC BY 2.0)
I’m a longtime proponent of more engaging activities, participation, and connection around relevant content at events. Sometimes, I feel like I’m whistling in the wind. So I felt happy when I saw the following in a global poll by PCMA of 4,500 members of Generation Z.
If you could change something about the business event(s) you’ve been to in the past, what would it be?
(In case you were wondering, interviewees could choose more than one option.)
Over two-thirds of the respondents chose “more engaging activities” as something they wanted to change at their meetings!
Now I’m not a fan of what I’ve called the Generation XYZ baloney. I think core motivations to attend events remain fixed over time. To put it another way, human nature doesn’t really change between generations, though circumstances and the consequent opportunities do. (And it’s the latter we should focus on.)
Whatever your beliefs on generational culture, this finding means that stakeholders need to act on building more engagement, participation, and connection into meetings if they are serious about improving the attractiveness and effectiveness of events.
We’ve known how to make meetings participation-rich and connection-rich for decades. Younger generations are more exposed to active learning formats in school, like flipped and group learning. Yet most meetings shun these powerful modalities for the same old relatively ineffective lecture formats.
This poll suggests that the young are seriously dissatisfied with current opportunities for meaningful engagement at events. As time passes, these folks will move into positions with increasing responsibility and influence.
Companies bombard me with offers to check out online meeting platforms. Sadly, I simply don’t have time to explore most of them. But every once in a while I hear about a platform that intrigues me enough to schedule a demo. Butter is an online meeting platform that is designed to support the facilitation of great interactive meetings. The demo impressed me enough to delve into the platform, and I liked what I found. So here’s my review of Butter, a meeting platform for facilitators to shine.
In this review of Butter, I’ll share a big-picture overview, what I think is Butter’s finest feature, an example of how to implement a meeting design in Butter, and my closing thoughts.
The usual caveats
Butter is less than a year old. Like just about every recently introduced online platform, its developers are continually updating it. (In fact, my demo focused on a brand-new capability which I think is one of the best features of the product.) So by the time you check it out, some aspects of this review may be inaccurate or incomplete.
In addition, this is not an in-depth shakedown of the product. I haven’t had an opportunity to take Butter through its paces with a full crew of participants and co-facilitators. If you do so and have additional observations, please feel free to share them in the comments below.
Butter — the big picture
Butter is a meeting platform designed for planning and running online “workshops”. I’ve written about workshops that aren’t, and I’m happy to report that the Butter design team defines workshop as I do: a meeting that emphasizes the exchange of ideas and the demonstration and application of techniques and skills. In other words, workshops involve significant amounts of participation and active learning.
What I like about Butter is that it’s easy to use, has a short learning curve, and, most importantly, its design provides efficient and effective meeting facilitation. I’ve facilitated in-person meetings for decades and online meetings for the last ten years. And, as facilitators with experience in both environments know, there’s a significant workload difference between these two environments.
The challenges of facilitating online versus in-person
I can normally facilitate an in-person workshop with, say, fifty participants by myself. If there are tools I need — whiteboards, flip charts, a few slides, sticky notes, pens, room layouts, etc. — I can set them up in advance and bring them into play if and when needed. Because these tools are an integral part of the physical environment, introducing them during the session is a natural part of the facilitation process.
I can’t run an online workshop of the same size without additional help. Guiding participants through the session while paying attention to group energy and dynamics takes all my attention. I simply can’t do this well while simultaneously handling the event production. (For example, setting up breakouts, running polls, monitoring chat, noticing that a breakout group has only one member, reading participant energy from a host of tiny windows on multiple screens, etc.)
Butter makes facilitating online workshops easier. I explain why below.
A perfectly serviceable platform for most online meetings
It’s worth mentioning that, while Butter lacks some features available in competing tools, it’s a perfectly serviceable platform for vanilla online meetings with fewer than 200 participants. So it’s reasonable to consider adopting Butter for all kinds of online meetings with a specific group. This can ease the inevitable learning curve issues associated with introducing any new tool.
I think the best feature of Butter is its recently introduced Session Planner. The Session Planner provides an integrated run-of-show, called the agenda, which is more than a detailed production agenda. Many production teams use spreadsheet tools like Google Sheets or Excel to create production schedules, though high-end run-of-show software, like Shoflow, is also available. What’s cool about Butter’s Session Planner is that it integrates any desired combination of Butter’s tools into the run-of-show agenda, so they become available for use when needed.
The Session Planner allows you to prep your entire workshop beforehand, just like I do at in-person workshops, where I set out my tools in advance. You build a Butter agenda with blocks, and each agenda block can be customized to your needs with the tools — whiteboard, breakouts, polls, Miro boards, Google documents, YouTube videos, and more — that you’ll need for that block.
What’s more, the same agenda, minus the production details, is also available to attendees, so they know what’s going on.
Integrating your chosen tools into the production schedule in this way makes it much more feasible to effectively facilitate an online workshop by yourself. (Butter’s paid versions allow you to add co-facilitators.)
How Butter spreads
Butter’s excellent orientation and Handbook provide detailed information on how to use the product.
You can create and preplan as many meeting rooms as you like. Paid Butter plans allow you to share your room designs with other users.
Let’s hold a meeting session in Adrian’s workshop room.
Each room has its own link, which you can customize and share in various ways with attendees.
Once you’ve created a room, you can add a Waiting room, co-facilitators (paid plan), custom Tools to be used in this room, and the all-important Agenda.
Let’s look at each of these in a little more detail.
Waiting for Butter
When participants join a meeting, they arrive in a waiting room, like the one above. There they can add their name and a profile image (photo or avatar) if they don’t have a Butter account. Attendees have the opportunity to download the Butter desktop app and can test their camera and microphone while waiting.
You can customize a waiting room with an image, background color, and optional wait music that an attendee can mute. (Butter has some audio clips, or you can upload your own.) You can also choose whether attendees can enter a meeting session immediately or must “knock” for the meeting room owner to let them in.
In addition, you can choose to share the meeting agenda with attendees in the waiting room. And a Tips menu informs waiting attendees about how they can react to what’s going on in the meeting, and Butter’s hand-raising system for queuing participant comments, questions, or ideas.
Butter tools
Butter includes a comprehensive toolset that you can customize and add, as needed, to a room’s meeting agenda blocks. Each room has its own unique toolbox. A really important feature is that some of the tools — Google Drive: docs/slides/sheets, YouTube, Miro, and Whiteboard) — integrate core resources from other providers directly into Butter. For example, participants can work collaboratively on Miro boards during a session without having to run Miro in a separate app or browser window. Similarly, you can display and work on Google Drive files and watch YouTube videos in a seamless fashion.
Butter breakouts
Importantly, Butter provides breakouts quite similar to those available in Zoom, and with some features that Zoom lacks. You can prebuild two kinds: Rooms and Groups. Participants can move between Rooms, and initial participant assignments can be prechosen or random. With Groups, you decide the number of participants you want in each Group, and Butter assigns people automatically when the breakout begins. Participants cannot move between Groups.
In addition, you can assign tasks for breakout groups. Butter shows these tasks in each breakout, and breakout members can mark them complete. This is a nice feature that obviates the need for the session facilitator to message breakouts to tell them what to do.
What’s especially cool is that you can assign tools to breakout groups! Members can watch a video or work collaboratively on a Google Doc or Miro board.
While breakouts are going on, a facilitator can monitor what’s happening in each breakout. You can observe a breakout without joining it, and see the tasks they’ve checked off. Participants can ask for help, and you’ll be notified and can join their breakout. You can broadcast messages to all breakouts. And you can reassign participants to different breakouts, or reshuffle Groups to get a fresh set of people in each.
Butter breakouts provide a well-designed feature set and user interface that other meeting platforms would do well to adopt!
Polls, timers, and whiteboards
Basic polls are another tool. You can create multiple-choice or open-ended polls, which should be sufficient functionality for most situations. Upvoting is available for open-ended polls.
Buffer’s integrated countdown timers provide a welcome tool for keeping sessions on track or timing a break. You can prep them beforehand and start them with a click. Facilitators can stop the timer and add an extra minute. Participants will see a timer task description and can click a button when it is done. The facilitator can see how many have finished. I love this feature!
Tool use flexibility
You can preset just the tools you need for each agenda block, ready to use when the time comes. But should you need a different tool during a session you can add one on the fly.
The heart of a Butter session — the Agenda
To give a taste of the heart of Butter, here’s a hypothetical meeting design and how you might implement it in Butter.
Meeting design case
Twenty-one people are meeting for the first time as a group to work together on an issue: increasing governmental and non-profit support for the elderly population in their region. The group will meet regularly over the coming year. Some of the attendees know a few other people in the group. The first desired outcomes for the meeting are:
Participants get to know each other better;
The group creates a coherent set of initial issues and topics to address at subsequent meetings, and;
The group identifies those who are interested in and willing to work on the selected issues and topics.
Oh, I nearly forgot, we have just one hour for our initial meeting. Obviously, that’s not enough time to completely address these outcomes, especially #1. But let’s see what we can do in the available time.
A possible design
To begin, after a brief welcome, we’ll use one of my key facilitation techniques: The Three Questions. (See my book Event Crowdsourcing for detailed instructions for designing and running this powerful process.) Because of the limited time, we’ll run The Three Questions in trio shares. This will start to satisfy the first desired outcome, while simultaneously uncovering issues and topics that the group wants to explore. Next, we’ll address #2 using a Miro board for participants to share the issues and topics they think are important and/or want to work on. Participants will also cluster what they share during this block, addressing outcome #2.
Finally, we’ll switch to a facilitated group discussion on what’s been suggested, and work on next steps for future meetings (outcome #3), followed by a short closing.
Agenda example
Here’s a potential Agenda for the one-hour session.
I built this Agenda quite quickly in Butter. It’s built of Blocks, each of which can be given a title, description, duration (with the option to show to participants or not), associated tools (see above), and private notes for the facilitator(s).
In the above example, I’ve added several tools to the relevant session blocks: Google Slides to introduce The Three Questions, a Group breakout for trio sharing answers, and a Miro board for sharing, clustering, and reviewing topics.
When I begin this session, each Block’s tools are shown in a sidebar, with a Start button for each tool. A click activates the desired tool. Like this.
I haven’t seen an easier online platform for facilitative process tool integration than Butter.
Check out Butter’s extensive Agenda help to learn more about how it works.
Additional capabilities while spreading Butter
Butter includes a spotlight mode, which you can use to bring one or more participants “on stage”, as shown below.
…and the especially useful Raise Hand Queue. This is another feature that facilitators will love. Here’s how a participant raises their hand, with an idea, comment, or question.
And here’s how a facilitator chooses who speaks next.
Butter also includes public, private, and facilitator-only chat. Chat can be “popped out” to a separate window, which is handy if you want to read it on a second monitor. Nice!
Butter quality, onboarding, help, and more
I found Butter unusually easy and intuitive to learn. You can run it in a browser (preferably Chrome) or a desktop app. The user interface is simple and logical. I never found myself thinking, “Now how do I do that?” This is a common experience with other online meeting platforms. I think most new users will have little problem getting up to speed.
Though I haven’t used Butter in a demanding environment, I encountered no errors or glitches while investigating its capabilities. The only limitation I found is that I can only access my root Google Drive folder; I can’t see its subfolders. Hopefully, Butter will remove this limitation in the future.
The Butter Handbook succinctly explains how to use the platform. It’s clearly written, available during a session, and includes excellent graphics, animated when appropriate.
When the platform needs a moment to implement what you’ve requested, a lighthearted message appears letting you know what’s going on. The whole product has a “we don’t take ourselves too seriously” vibe.
You can invite participants via Google Calendar, a Room link, and even during a live session.
Online support from Butter is built into the platform. It currently states a response time of under two hours. I didn’t hear back in that time period, but, hey, I asked on a Sunday…
Butter currently has three pricing plans: one free and two paid. The free plan, which I used for this review, includes up to 50 participants and one facilitator.
The Pro plan ($25/month or $300/year) ups the maximum number of participants to 100, allows up to 2 co-facilitators via shared rooms, and includes the capability to record sessions in the cloud.
Butter’s Legendairy(!) plan ($42/month or $500/year) ups the maximum number of participants to 200 and allows unlimited co-facilitators.
Cheska, my demo partner, told me that Butter is reviewing its pricing and may drop the maximum number of participants in the free plan to 20 in the future. I asked about one-off pricing, and she told me the company was considering it.
In my experience, it’s common for new platforms like Butter to adjust their pricing models over time, so check here for current information.
Wrapping up this review of Butter
Butter’s tagline is “Virtual collaboration as smooth as butter“. While I have enjoyed thinking up butter-related phrases to use in this post, I’m not a big fan of the product name. (But I’m not a marketing expert either.)
Have you attended in-person meetings where your hallway conversations were the highlight of the event? I’ve certainly experienced my fair share, and I bet you have too. Don’t get me wrong. Hallway learning and the connections made through conversations struck up between sessions are often valuable and important. But I see meetings where hallway learning trumps a majority of, if not all, conference sessions as failures of design, rather than a fact of life.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could improve the quantity and quality of hallway learning, conversations, and connections throughout an event?
Well, we can. Here are two ways.
1—How to improve conventional hallway conversations
We can increase the quality of conventional hallway conversations by designing a physical meeting environment that encourages and supports them. Create an architecture of assembly: spaces outside the session rooms where people can talk comfortably. Provide a range of spaces. For example, chair pairings, small group furniture arrangements, standing areas with places to park food and beverage, covered outdoor spaces, etc.
“…people, even very smart people, are unable to anticipate the benefits of in-depth interaction with colleagues until they have experienced it for themselves” —Nancy Dixon, The Hallways of Learning
Read Nancy’s article to learn how an office redesign strengthened connections amongst a group of formerly loosely connected peers. [And she gets a hat tip for inspiring this post!] Similarly, your design layout will affect the likelihood and value of hallway learning conversations. And participants most likely won’t even be aware of it!
In addition, be sure to schedule enough time for hallway learning to occur. Give your attendees plenty of breaks. Then they can rest and recuperate, consolidate what they have learned, and have time to engage in conversations that matter.
2—How to significantly improve hallway learning and connection throughout events
“Typically, a presenter offers what happened in his or her own situation, but that is not what learners need to hear. Learners are interested in knowing how to adapt the lessons to their situation and for that they need to have a conversation so that the other person can understand their context, and they also can understand the context of the other.”
The trick is to use session designs that blend short useful pieces of content with conversations among participants. In effect, you’re providing structured hallway conversations about the content that’s just been delivered. There are many different formats you can use for such conversations (described in detail in my books): pair and trio share, facilitated small group breakouts, fishbowls, etc. You can create conversational groupings at random (“pair up with someone you haven’t met yet”) or use human spectrograms to assign attendees to like-minded folks.
Building hallway learning opportunities into our meeting sessions has additional advantages. Once a session is over, and traditional hallway conversations are about to begin, attendees are ready to continue or start new conversations with the people who were in their session. They are primed to continue to explore and deepen their hallway learning.
Conclusion
I’ll close with a final Nancy Dixon quote from a different post:
“Before people can learn from each other or collaborate on issues, they need to build connections – that is, gain some understanding of who the other person is, including their skills, depth of knowledge, experience, and attitude toward others. People are unlikely to ask each other questions or ask for assistance, until they have built a connection that allows them to learn that the other person is knowledgeable enough and respectful enough to engage.” —Nancy Dixon, Connection before Content
To maximize useful connection and learning at our meetings, optimizing hallway learning throughout the event is the way to go!
Most of the event industry and our clients continue to assume that if you can make the meeting bigger it’s a good thing.
It ain’t necessarily so.
How we got here
The massive disruption of in-person events since March 2020 has shaken our industry to the core. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, in-person events that weren’t canceled have seen drastically reduced attendance compared to prior years. Online and hybrid meetings have seen less drastic reductions.
One bright spot has been the normalization of online meetings for routine connection and collaboration. We have also seen the emergence of new forms of online events, supported by solid business models.
So as I predicted in 2020, we haven’t seen the old normal since the pandemic started, and it’s likely we’ll never see it again.
What we shouldn’t do
The event industry unduly focuses on large meetings. Our trade magazines mainly report on big events, the ones with big-name speakers and eye candy razzle-dazzle. Pandemic-induced smaller audiences engender hand-wringing. What to do? How can we get our old, big events back?
Some respond by increasing their event marketing. Often, however, that’s not a smart move, as Seth Godin illustrates:
Make the announcement louder. Make the logo bigger. Yell. Call more people on the phone to sell them an extended warranty. Send more emails. Hustle harder. None of it works. The problem with the fountain isn’t that they didn’t make a big enough sign. The problem is that the fountain itself is poorly designed… …If you get the design right, you can whisper instead. —Seth Godin, “Make the sign bigger!”
What we should do
For too long, we’ve equated a meeting’s “success” with its size. “Bigger is better.” But if we concentrate on increasing attendance, we overlook getting the meeting design right. Improving an event’s design makes the meeting better for all the stakeholders: meeting owners, sponsors, and participants. In contrast, large meetings are usually less effective at satisfying stakeholders’ desired goals and objectives.
Do yourself a favor, and rid yourself of the “bigger is better” meeting mindset. It may help to remember that in reality, most meetings are small meetings. And that’s OK.
So don’t try to make the meeting bigger. Instead, make the meeting design right. (Get in touch if you’d like some help.)
Tired of meetings that don’t end on time? Who isn’t? Things were bad enough when we held our meetings in person. Now so many meetings are online, it’s easy to saddle remote workers with back-to-back meetings. When one overruns, you’re late to the next one. Hey presto, your tardiness snowballs! (And, no, you can’t be on two Zooms at once without going through tortuous hacks.) Sure, sometimes you’re at the mercy of others. But you can stay on time at online meetings when they’re your meetings — if you follow the guidance below!
NOTE: Many of these suggestions are good practice for any meeting!
Before the online meeting starts
Set expectations
Apart from those rare meetings that are ritual courtly dances with every step minutely choreographed, what happens at a meeting is unpredictable to some degree.
Ideally, the only unpredictable parts should be when you’re doing useful work, like sharing ideas, discussing options, making decisions, etc. And setting expectations for the meeting before it starts is key to minimizing the time-wasting behavior that we’ve all experienced during meetings.
You have two tools to set meeting expectations: creating agreements and the meeting agenda.
Creating agreements
I’ve facilitated meetings for decades. In my experience, the best way to reliably improve a meeting is to create and (gently) enforce agreements about how participants act there. Consensual group norms generate powerful motivation to keep meetings running smoothly and productively while discouraging unruly behavior. I’ve found that having an appropriate set of agreements eliminates the vast majority of common problems. And if someone still goes down an irrelevant conversational rabbit hole, interrupts others, or talks too much, it’s much easier to lightly redirect them.
Agreements can either be communicated before the meeting or at the start. While there’s no single set of agreements that’s optimum for every meeting, some base agreements should be familiar to anyone who regularly meets online. For example:
Signal via a pre-agreed protocol when you want to say something, e.g., by raising your hand (literally or via a platform mechanism like Zoom’s “Raise Hand”), or via text chat.
If you’ve joined by phone, say your name before speaking.
Additional agreements
Additional agreements that are generally helpful include:
Commit to being present at the meeting unless an emergency occurs.
Don’t interrupt. Instead, use an agreed process to indicate you want to speak.
Follow the group’s discussion and decision processes.
Respect agreed time limits on speaking.
Support the meeting’s scheduled ending time.
Besides meeting-wide agreements, agreements about processes you will use during the meeting are very important. Create agreement and a clear understanding of how participants will:
take turns to speak;
discuss issues; and
make decisions.
The processes to use depend on the meeting’s goals (see agenda) and implicit or explicit power differentials between attendees. For example, you’ll use different procedures if a decision is going to be made by consensus, majority vote, or the presiding CEO. I’ve included some examples below.
Whatever processes you chose, be sure to explain how they work either before or at the start of the meeting. Make sure that all supporting technology, such as an on-screen timer, is available and there’s someone responsible for running it.
Providing an agenda in advance
An agenda is a vital tool for staying on time at online meetings, in fact at any meeting. Providing participants with a clear, detailed agenda in advance is respectful and smart. “In advance” doesn’t mean five minutes before the meeting. It means giving attendees enough time to read and review beforehand. This allows people to formulate questions, ideas, and positions on agenda items beforehand, saving time during the meeting. Whenever possible, include participants’ input into the agenda by distributing a draft with a deadline for questions, corrections, and additions for a final agenda before the meeting.
Timed agendas are very helpful for staying on time. Even if it turns out the written times can’t be fully adhered to, they give attendees an idea of what’s expected and make it easier to reschedule upcoming agenda items on the fly.
Be clear about who is running the meeting. Online meetings often need various kinds of support. Be sure everyone knows their responsibilities for note-taking, setting up breakout groups, displaying visual aids, polling, monitoring text chat for questions or requests to speak, maintaining time agreements, etc.
Occasionally, an itemized agenda is impracticable because the meeting is preliminary and exploratory: for example, a group meeting for the first time to discuss a possible collaboration. Even under these circumstances, be sure you circulate a brief description of the meeting goals and a start and end time.
Check that everyone involved with meeting tasks and support — facilitation, note-taking, setting up breakout groups, displaying visual aids, polling, monitoring text chat for questions or requests to speak, maintaining time agreements, etc. — is present and ready to do their work. If the meeting is large, a backchannel for these folks to communicate, like Slack, can be very helpful.
Online discussions can often become messy, with people interrupting, taking up too much time, or going off-topic. To avoid this:
gently enforce time limits for speakers. I use an on-screen timer program, ManyCam, but low-tech solutions such as a timekeeper displaying their phone’s countdown timer work too.
Expect to readjust your schedule during the meeting
If you haven’t supplied a timed agenda, it’s important for the meeting leader to share their thoughts on how the group will use the time available. Since it’s rare to precisely follow such plans, regularly recalculate the time allotments as the meeting proceeds, and update/consult with participants on any changes you think you’ll need to make.
If you complete the meeting agenda ahead of schedule, end it early! No one will complain. 😀
Finally, end on time! It sometimes becomes clear during a meeting that the agenda scope was unrealistic. More time is needed to satisfy the meeting’s goals. Asking to extend the meeting duration may be an option, but don’t just keep going. Instead, before the meeting is scheduled to end, estimate how much longer is needed and poll attendees to see if they can stay. Respect their responses and proceed appropriately. Options include:
Continue for an additional agreed-upon time (which you may need to negotiate).
Continue without one or more participants if you can still achieve your meeting goals despite their absence.
Schedule another meeting to finish what’s been started.
Conclusion
It’s important to stay on time at online meetings. Yes, running late inconveniences everyone attending, and some people may have to leave on time, with the consequent loss of their contributions and involvement. In addition, every corporate or community meeting that runs late reinforces the all-too-common dysfunctional cultural norm that all meetings will overrun. The resulting psychological, and emotional burden imposed on attendees who routinely experience losing control of their time is high.
Hopefully, these ideas will help you and your colleagues stay on time at online meetings. Do you have further suggestions? I’d love to hear them in the comments below!
It’s easy to start working with Stooa. Registering a (free) account requires the usual information: name, email, and password. You can also add your Twitter and/or LinkedIn profiles if desired.
Once you’ve registered your account, you’re ready to create a new fishbowl.
As you can see, you can specify a discussion topic, add a description, and schedule the fishbowl start and duration (up to four hours; though that would be cruel and unusual punishment). You can also choose a language to use. Currently, the choices are English, Spanish, French, and Catalan. On clicking Create fishbowl you’ll see a summary of your new fishbowl, together with a link to distribute to others so they can join it. You’ll also receive an email with the same information — a nice touch.
Starting your fishbowl
When you click on Go to the fishbowl, Stooa will ask for permission to use your camera(s) and microphone(s). (Once you’ve joined a fishbowl, you can choose which ones to use.) Enter how you’d like to display your name, and you’ll see this screen:
When you’re ready to begin, click Start the fishbowl. At this point, the camera and microphone will be active just for you. Share a short introduction with the waiting attendees. When done, you’ll appear in one of the five fishbowl “seats”. Click Allow attendees to join the conversation to begin a discussion.
Running your fishbowl
At the top of the screen, you’ll see the remaining time for the fishbowl, a button to end it, and the number of attendees present. Clicking on the latter displays a list of people currently in the seats, followed by the remaining attendees. The list includes links to the Twitter and LinkedIn profiles of each attendee if they entered them.
At this point, attendees can enter/leave one of the fishbowl seats by clicking on the Join/Leave the conversation button at the bottom of the screen. The other buttons allow participants to choose and control their camera and microphone.
Five participants is a good maximum for a controlled and useful discussion. Stooa smoothly implements the entry and departure of fishbowl participants.
When your discussion is over, use the End fishbowl button to close the session.
Stooa review — what do I think?
Here are my initial impressions from a brief look. First, I want to acknowledge Stooa’s creator, Runroom, for developing this tool and making it Open Source: software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify and enhance. Hosting the software so that anyone can use it is another Runroom gift. They explain why they did so here. Thank you Runroom!
Stooa was easy to register and use on Chrome or Safari. First-time users should have little difficulty, as the entire onboarding process is designed very well. I haven’t used the tool with a large number of attendees, so I can’t say how it holds up under load. Given that the number of folks simultaneously on video chat is limited to five, I expect it will work fine.
Stooa succeeds admirably in its purpose as a single process tool that facilitates effective group discussion.
Limitations
Currently, you can’t remove a fishbowl participant. This could be a problem if you used Stooa for a public fishbowl discussion, publicized via a link on social media.
In addition, with all seats filled, there’s no way for waiting attendees to indicate that they’d like to join the discussion, so a fishbowl host doesn’t know how many others are waiting to speak. To deal with this, attendees could use a backchannel tool like Slack to message the host that they’d like to join in. Alternatively, adding a hand raise option to the attendee list would help to solve this problem. And incorporating a simple text chat for all attendees into Stooa would provide even greater flexibility.
Stooa is not the only tool for running online fishbowls. In July 2020, I shared how to use Zoom to run fishbowls online. Zoom is, of course, a fee-based platform, but many organizations own a license and Zoom does many other things as well. In this situation, Zoom includes attendee text chat and hand raising. And its breakout rooms allow you to create, inside a single tool, the fishbowl sandwiches I use to facilitate group problem-solving.
In an ideal world, the tools we use would include only the features we need. We don’t live in such a world, and Stooa is a well-crafted platform that allows groups to meet and discuss online. Whether it includes everything you need to make such discussions effective and fruitful is ultimately up to you to decide.
More about Stooa
I hope you’ve enjoyed this Stooa review and found it useful. Here are some additional resources for exploring Stooa. Feel free to add your experiences and thoughts in the comments below!
For better meetings, we need to focus on learning, not education.
Yes, sometimes, cultural or professional “requirements” mean we have to provide education. That’s so we can “certify” that we’ve educated attendees to some prescribed standard. But is that all our meetings should be about?
Learning, not education
After all, it’s what we actually learn that’s important, rather than the “education” we receive. As Seth Godin says:
“Education is a model based on scarcity, compliance and accreditation. It trades time, attention and money for a piece of paper that promises value.
But we learn in ways that have little to do with how mass education is structured.
If you know how to walk, write, read, type, have a conversation, perform surgery or cook an egg, it’s probably because you practiced and explored and experienced, not because it was on a test.
Seth is talking about the potential failure of online education, but his point that we need to practice, explore, and experience to learn is true for any kind of meeting. Albert Einstein and Oscar Wilde pointed this out a hundred years ago:
My work at a pre-con is different from that of a typical meeting planner since I focus on the meeting’s design and facilitation. I’ve been convening meetings for decades, though, so I know a fair amount about meeting planning. As I prepared to review the venue’s meeting spaces, room set options, and traffic patterns, I thought about how, today, competent logistics are the new meeting minimum.
(In case you were wondering, interviewees could choose more than one option.)
Companies bombard me with offers to check out online meeting platforms. Sadly, I simply don’t have time to explore most of them. But every once in a while I hear about a platform that intrigues me enough to schedule a demo. 
Have you attended in-person meetings where your hallway conversations were the highlight of the event? I’ve certainly experienced my fair share, and I bet you have too. Don’t get me wrong. Hallway learning and the connections made through conversations struck up between sessions are often valuable and important. But I see meetings where hallway learning trumps a majority of, if not all, conference sessions as failures of design, rather than a fact of life.
Tired of meetings that don’t end on time? Who isn’t? Things were bad enough when we held our meetings in person. Now so many meetings are online, it’s easy to saddle remote workers with back-to-back meetings. When one overruns, you’re late to the next one. Hey presto, your tardiness snowballs! (And, no, 
I’m a big proponent of 
For better meetings, we need to focus on learning, not education.