The old meeting industry normal is long over, and many event professionals are still hoping and waiting for a new normal. In October 2020 I wrote two posts [1, 2] about what a meeting industry new normal might look like. As […]
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 […]
What do we need to understand to mediate connection effectively today? Inventor and computer scientist Danny Hillis gives us some helpful context: “We humans are changing. We have become so intertwined with what we have created that we are no longer […]
The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated the in-person meeting industry. Though it took too long to recognize that COVID-19 spreads via air transmission, we finally have effective procedures (vaccine mandates, masking, air quality standards, and social distancing) to reduce infection risk […]
In 2009, the biologist E.O. Wilson described what he saw as humanity’s real problem. I think it’s also a meeting problem: “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.” —E. O. […]
September 2021 — Are in-person events COVID safe? The worldwide meeting industry is desperately, and understandably, waiting for the answer to this question to be “Yes”. Well, Freeman, the largest global event management firm, has just announced “The truth is, in-person events are […]
The Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) has published some useful lessons learned from organizing six online scientific meetings during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here is my summary of what I think are the most interesting findings, plus […]
Ever since my first encounter with the hybrid hub and spoke meeting topology at Event Camp Twin Cities in 2011, I’ve been a big fan of the format. Yesterday [see below], I realized that hub and spoke is a great format […]
[My June 2021 guest post for BlueJeans by Verizon on event ROI.] What is event ROI? Return On Investment (ROI) is such a familiar business concept that it’s easy to gloss over the complexities of defining it in the context of events. So let’s […]
Right now, I am a long-distance facilitator. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I only facilitate meetings with people who are not in the same room. Often, they are thousands of miles away. And, like Colin Smith, the protagonist (played by Tom […]