Three ways to create truly surprising meetings

Three ways to create truly surprising meetings

CoffeeGate

Two hundred people arrived for the opening breakfast at a 2015 Canadian conference to discover There Was No Coffee. The young first-time volunteer staff had forgotten to brew it.

Three days later, people were still grumbling about CoffeeGate. I bet that even today if you asked attendees what they remembered about the event, most would immediately recall the There Was No Coffee moment. A memorable moment, yes, but not a good one.

Experienced meeting planners know that every meeting has its share of unexpected surprises. While some thrive on the adrenaline rush of dealing with them, most of us work to minimize surprises by anticipating potential problems and developing appropriate just-in-case responses.

Minimizing surprises like CoffeeGate is the default behavior for meeting planners. We do not want poorly planned and/or executed events, because the inevitable result will be unhappy attendees and chaos of one kind or another.

Surprising Meetings

But not all meeting surprises are bad. Because meeting professionals want to minimize the likelihood of unexpected surprises during the execution of the events, there’s a tendency to unconsciously minimize planned surprises for the attendees. And that’s unfortunate — because planned surprises are one of the most wonderful ways we can improve attendees’ experience of the event!

Special events professionals know this. They do their best to make events surprisingly spectacular, typically focusing on food & beverage, decor, entertainment, and, occasionally, format.

In the realm of conferences and professional meetings, however, it’s easy to forget the value of surprising attendees. We’ve all been to meetings that followed the dreary welcome-presentations-meals-socials-closing remarks routine. Every minute is scheduled in advance, and attendees are told in advance everything that’s going to happen.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

To improve the attendee experience, we need to not only minimize unexpected surprises but also incorporate planned surprises into our events. And we don’t have to limit ourselves to the standard “surprising” elements that typical special events include. Here are three ways to create truly surprising meetings.

Keep the conference program secret

Each February I fly to Europe to attend the annual Meeting Design Practicum: an intense, immersive, invitation-only conference for thirty creative meeting designers.

The genius of this conference is that only one person, my friend and colleague Eric de Groot, knows everything that will happen during our 48 hours together. First, Eric and his MindMeeting crew come up with a metaphor for the conference. Then they solicit individual attendees to design and facilitate (typically experimental) sessions that collectively reflect and explore the chosen frame. Participants know what they will contribute, but nothing else about the program.

For example, in 2017 we convened at a Barcelona food market. We had no idea that within a few minutes we would be partnered up and choosing exotic food items on display for our new friend to taste, let alone being whisked away in a coach an hour later to Lloret de Mar for the remainder of the conference—with the rest of the program still a mystery. As you might expect, the continuous unfolding of the entire event added greatly to participants’ enjoyment and engagement.

You probably won’t want to do this for a conventional content-focused event. But meetings where the session designs use active, interactive learning can be made far more engaging if individual presenters are prepared for their sessions but only the event organizers know everything that will occur.

Be open to surprising possibilities that appear during the event

I’ve been taking yoga classes for decades with the genial Scott Willis. Our 75-minute yoga flow is pretty standard from week to week (and for me, on balance, that’s a good thing). But yesterday, I climbed the stairs to Scott’s yoga studio and found a jar of mayonnaise on the floor. I won’t recount in detail what happened next. Suffice it to say there was general merriment for a few minutes while the origins and convoluted journey of the jar were explored and explained. A little bit of spontaneous color never hurts even a mostly predictable event. In case you were wondering, I got to bring home the jar.

Another example of being open to novel possibilities is my story of the man who brought bagpipes to my event.

[Added June 18, 2018] Traci Browne (see comments) kindly reminded me of our pleasure when we stumbled across an unexpected axe-throwing competition during a 2012 conference.

Hold sessions in metaphorical venues

Finally, we can create a genuinely surprising session by seeing what the event environment evokes. At the 2017 Meeting Design Practicum mentioned above, Manu Prina noticed a children’s playground outside our hotel, so she developed a 4-corner game played (literally!) in the sandbox! her starting point was a child’s game, with movement, simple rules, and moments of playful competition. She used it to brainstorm ideas about a problem the group was working on. The archetypal space and our memories of play as children combined to create a joyful and totally novel experience for us to work together. That’s creativity!

Make your meetings surprising — in a good way!

I hope these examples stimulate your thinking about ways to improve your event design. Besides these approaches being intuitively appealing, we also know that novel surprises stimulate learning because we are wired to notice novelty. Creating formats that surprise attendees, and in the process help them learn more effectively, is harder than, say, selecting linens. But well worth the effort!

How to create breakthrough meeting designs with Elementary Meetings

create breakthrough meeting designs: photograph from above of the end of a hockey match with the players going through a handshake line. Photo attribution: Flickr user clydeorama
Would you like to create breakthrough meeting designs? If so, read on!

In their remarkable book Into the Heart of Meetings, Eric de Groot & Mike van der Vijver describe what they call Elementary Meetings:

An Elementary Meeting has a specific name and consists of an obligatory, tacitly agreed series of actions performed by those taking part in the meeting. It usually originates in a specific national culture.

Some examples of Elementary Meetings are weddings, court trials, Christmas dinners, autopsies, parties, and conversations.

You may be thinking: “What on earth have these got to do with creating an environment for participation at meetings?”

Eric & Mike explain that the power of Elementary Meetings is that they include a set of conventions and behaviors familiar to all participants. We’ve all held conversations, been to parties, and eaten holiday meals, and even if we haven’t attended a trial or an autopsy we’ve probably seen them enacted on TV or in the movies. If it’s possible to map the form of a professional meeting onto the form of an Elementary Meeting we can create an event where attendees possess a common underlying knowledge and/or experience of its components and flow.

Here are three examples of the power of this approach.

1) A wedding

Suppose a client asks you to design an event to prepare the workers of two companies that are about to merge. Merging two organizational cultures is generally a difficult task; two examples are the history of the AOL/Time Warner and the Chrysler/Daimler-Benz mergers. Most of us do not have direct experience of corporate mergers. But we are familiar with what happens at a wedding—a ceremony about the merging of two people’s lives! Making this connection suggests modeling the corporate merger event on the marriage process. This could include how the couple (of companies) met, “courted”, and got “engaged”. Other marriage components suggest themselves: “stag nights” before the wedding, rehearsal dinners, etc., culminating in the actual “wedding” of the two companies. In their book, Mike & Eric recount how they used this particular Elementary Meeting model for a successful company merger.

Notice how the wedding metaphor brings up all kinds of creative ideas for event process. Not only that, but any of the appropriated matching processes will be familiar and relatively comfortable to participants due to their existing knowledge of what the Elementary Meeting routinely entails.

2) A conversation

How would you design an internal corporate event to announce major changes at a company? Change is rarely easy, so you’ll expect a host of questions and potentially some confrontation. The likely first thought of most meeting professionals would be to use a standard presentation set-up: employees sitting in theater seating facing management making presentations on a stage at the front of the room. But here’s how Eric and Mike describe the message such a setup sends:

“Having management on the stage in the floodlight and the employees as spectators sitting in the auditorium in darkness carries a powerful message. The message is this: the employees are a passive audience of what the management wants to put across; there is a gap between management and the rest of the company and the employees are kept in the dark. The participants would feel this in an instant. It is not a message that is transmitted through words; it is transmitted through the experience they have when entering the theatre and the lights go out. They undergo a physical experience that tells them: you are mere onlookers, the important people are up there on stage. In fact, the gap is clearly visible, you can see it because there is an open space between the front row and the stage.”

What Eric & Mike came up with

Instead, what if we used a conversation as the Elementary Meeting starting point for the event design?

“All 450 employees were seated on the stage, in two groups facing each other. This made them actors in their own play. Centre stage stood a small pedestal, with a camera mounted on it. It worked as a whiteboard. Everything that was written on it was projected directly onto big screens, visible for everyone. Those who spoke stood in the middle, between the two stands. Meanwhile, each participant was constantly facing a whole bunch of people, namely their colleagues. This gave an instant feeling of ‘us’; having a conversation amongst ourselves.”

See how the simple metaphor of a conversation changed the dynamic environment for this event?

3) Saying goodbye

You can even use the Elementary Meeting metaphor to design a single session. In this final example, Mike and Eric describe the end of a seminar using a sports-based Elementary Meeting, namely the ritual used at the start of a hockey game:

“…the facilitator instructs participants to arrange themselves in two rows opposite each other, like ice hockey players before a match. They find themselves standing in pairs, one in front of the other. When he signals they shake hands, express a brief wish, and then step sideways to meet the next person. In just a couple of minutes, all of the 64 participants have exchanged a meaningful goodbye.”

Powerful metaphors

As you can see, when designing an event it’s worth investigating whether there’s an Elementary Meeting that will provide a familiar format for the entire meeting or a portion of it. Mike and Eric’s book is well worth reading for more examples of how to create breakthrough meeting designs, as well as a host of other fresh and innovative ideas about meeting design.

Photo attribution: Flickr user clydeorama