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!

Nine learnings from the first Meeting Design Practicum

learnings from the first Meeting Design PracticumI’ve returned from a wonderful 48-hour whirlwind of experiments and play with 30 meeting designers in Utrecht, The Netherlands. We came from Europe, South America, Slovakia, and the U.S. (me) to learn, share, and connect at the first Meeting Design Practicum, hosted by Eric de Groot and his merry gang. Here are nine learnings from the first Meeting Design Practicum.

Similar in spirit to the many EventCamps held around the world since 2010, the Practicum was a safe place for event professionals to experiment with techniques, approaches, ideas, and formats without the obligation and pressure of a “successful” outcome for a paying client. We met informally at an ancient Dutch fort, cooked meals together, did our own housekeeping, and quickly built an intimate community with connections that will continue to reverberate into the future.

Learnings from the first Meeting Design Practicum: a panoramic indoor photograph of the participants seated in a circleI can’t give a complete survey of everything that happened at the Practicum. For one thing, I couldn’t attend every Practicum session because we often had to choose between simultaneous sessions. In addition, some of the important takeaways were already familiar to me, so I don’t include them here. Rather, I’ll share new insights that made an impression on me during our three days together. I apologize for not attributing them to specific people; suffice it to say that every single participant brought important insights and contributions to our gathering.

Elementary meetings

One of the great concepts Eric & Mike van der Vijver introduced in Into The Heart of Meetings was modeling portions or an entire event on the familiar format of what they call Elementary Meetings—such as weddings, legal trials, birth celebrations, etc. The Practicum provided several examples of this.

Our journey through the event was mapped onto a large wall “tree”, with our influences mapped onto the roots at the start. We added our learnings from the Meeting Design Practicum as leaves to the branches as the Practicum progressed.

Practicum tree

Participants had the opportunity to share a single short meeting design tip/trick. This was mapped onto the magic competitions of Asterix and Obelix where druids demonstrated their magic to the tribes. On several occasions, those of us offering magic disappeared into a small room, only to reappear wearing impressive druid beards. One at a time, introduced by a flourish played on a trumpet we shared our tips. At the end of the Practicum, we chose the most useful tip. The winner, Victor Neyndorff, took home the golden snouieknife (sp?).

24979167006_7142ce0087_z

Gardening

Metaphors provide powerful ways to communicate, and I find them surprisingly difficult to discover. A delightful and effective metaphor for meeting design was shared early in the Practicum. Seeing the meeting designer as a gardener maps so many aspects of meeting design process onto the familiar act of gardening that enumerating the parallels is left as an exercise for the reader.

Objects

In 2007 – 8 I was a participant in a year-long leadership workshop held over a dozen weekends. For our last meeting, we were asked to bring a personal object and share its meaning and relevance to what we had learned and our experience. I found this a moving and bonding experience, as we told our stories, each linked to an object that we held in our hands or placed at the center of our group.

The Practicum reminded me of this format, thanks to a session on using objects at events. We concentrated on using individual objects with attributes that evoked a desired event theme, message, or mindset. One interesting aspect of this approach is that you could use it to replace the common practice of saturating the event environment with theme/message decor. Imagine—no more branded cocktail napkins needed! Another interesting suggestion was the use of two or more interacting objects. (For example, a mirror ball together with lights held by participants.)

Improving a traditional presentation with closing Q&A

Instead of moving straight into Q&A after a presentation, provide a short time for participants to share possible questions in small groups. This helps introverts get their just-as-good-as-anyone-else questions out. It also provides a check for those wondering whether their question is a good one, or optimally phrased.

“Never trust a leader who doesn’t dance at the event party”

I’ll let this stand without comment, except to say my experience bears this out.

A good question for pair-share

“What motivates you the most?” An excellent question for energizing participants by reconnecting them with their personal passion.

Working with status-conscious leaders at events

Some leaders are heavily invested in their personal status. At events, they may insist on speaking at length to everyone, even though the audience may widely consider their talk a waste of time. We discussed this issue at one of the four Practicum “challenge sessions”. One possible solution suggested was to elevate the leader’s status, for example, by adding a short well-produced video showing the leader to best advantage. Then the leader may accept more interactive and interesting formats, such as an interview by key participants with preplanned questions.

Relief from discomfort

My philosophy when facilitating is to bring participants as gently as possible into situations or experiences that may be uncomfortable but are needed to satisfy desired outcomes. During the Practicum we went through “a Maori discussion format”. We found an issue on which our group was roughly equally divided and, with the two groups standing facing each other, took turns arguing for our point of view using the format “YOU think that… WE think that…”

I found the format artificial and uncomfortable (not least because none of us had any idea of what the other members of our group actually thought). What was interesting to me was the next step. We all came together, sharing hugs and reconnecting across the groups, followed by a debrief where we all lay down and spoke about the experience when we felt we had something to say (rather like a Quaker Meeting). The relief felt after the “confrontation” was much stronger than if we had used a less aggressive discussion format. The experience made me think that there may be times when it’s worth increasing the discomfort at some points of event process to improve post-discomfort bonding.

Escape Rooms

On the last evening of the Practicum, we piled into cars for a mystery outing. Our destination was revealed to be an Escape Room or rather three Escape Rooms.

escapethisroom-logo

We had an opportunity to cooperatively solve (or watch others solve) a myriad of physical and mental problems in order to either escape from a room or, in my case, to compete against another team in an identical room. I had heard about these rooms but never experienced one before. For a group to solve the puzzles, members had to communicate effectively with each other. Our group worked fairly independently, calling out or showing findings to the other members as we found clues and objects needed to increase our score or unlock further puzzles. I heard afterward that our competitors were less effective at listening to each other, which is why we ended up “winning”. Video cameras watched us as we worked, though the staff told us that the video would stay private.

I had fun working with my six first-time teammates!

The Escape Room experience is an effective way to expose existing or potential communication problems in a group. It could be debriefed afterward using video of the session. However, it might be a rather negative experience, as there’s certainly potential for intra-team conflict. So I’m not sure if it’s an optimum environment for team building.

Learnings from the first Meeting Design Practicum

I’ve shared nine learnings from the first Meeting Design Practicum that this unique event uncovered. As always, reading about an experience is a pale ghost of the experience itself. Just as important was the opportunity to reconnect and deepen relationships with old friends, and make some wonderful new connections. I hope that Eric and Co will do this again; I will be among the first to sign up!

Mom killed that idea: One way that kids are smarter than adults—and the implications for events

mom killed that idea: photograph of three girls setting up an outdoor lemonade standMom killed that idea

In his fascinating and thought-provoking book The Educated Mind, professor of education Kieran Egan tells the story of kids at a lemonade stand where a customer jokingly asked if they had any beer or scotch. The five-year-old proprietor went into the house and asked Mom “whether he could have some beer and scotch for the stand. He emerged a minute or so later, shrugged, and told his siblings, ‘Mom killed that idea.'” His three and four-year-old siblings had no difficulty interpreting this sentence.

The importance of metaphor in learning

Egan emphasizes the important role of metaphor in learning. Studies have shown that very young children are capable of “prodigal production” of metaphors. Such metaphorical capacity declines as children become older. “Younger children’s production and grasp of metaphor are commonly superior to that of older children and adults.”

Young children’s effortless invention of wonderful words to describe objects in their lives amuses us. My grandchildren’s lovely constructions passerports (passports) and glovins (gloves) come to mind. These are delightful reflections of their minds’ ability to conjure up melanges of ideas and words that express their reality.

We often assume that we get smarter as we get older. By “smarter,” I mean our abilities are superior, and the likelihood we’ll use them is higher. While this is true in many respects, our demonstrated decline in metaphorical capacity means that we are less likely and less able to use metaphors as adults.

The lack of metaphor in education

This is a loss for event education, as metaphor is one of the most powerful methods for extending learning. The philosopher Max Black said, “It would be more illuminating…to say that metaphor creates the similarity than to say it formulates some similarity antecedently existing.” Metaphor then, Egan says, “becomes a key tool in aiding flexible, productive learning”. It “helps us to acquire knowledge about new domains, and also has the effect of restructuring our organization of knowledge.”

So, how do I describe my recent experience of trying to get internet service restored at my home? By comparing it to being stuck on an airplane for days waiting for it to take off without any announcements about what’s going on or when we might leave (if ever). Similarly, my mentor Jerry Weinberg published a book about writing employing a single metaphor—building a fieldstone wall—to illustrate every stage of the process. Both examples illustrate our harnessing a metaphoric plow to prepare the ground for seeds of learning [oops, I did it again.]

Further, I wish more attention had been paid to metaphoric fluency in my early education. As a result, I find it hard to summon up useful metaphors for ideas I’m trying to convey. For this, we can perhaps blame Plato and his successors, who insisted that the “poetic” be eliminated from intellectual inquiry. Consequently, literacy education discourages our use of metaphors.

Some people seem to have a natural ability to dream up apt metaphors. They are usually engaging and memorable presenters (great comedians frequently share this gift too.) Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” and Reagan’s “Break down this wall” speeches obtain great power from metaphor.

Metaphor and event design

How does all this relate to event design? Two examples. Eric de Groot & Mike van der Vijver‘s techniques for formulating meeting objectives and their Elementary Meetings model rely on the power of metaphor to create stakeholder buy-in for meeting objectives and design. Also, good production designers know the importance of choosing event themes that connect at a metaphorical level with underlying goals for the associated meeting.

In conclusion, I believe it’s worth cultivating our skill at employing metaphors or seeking out those who are good at it. So let’s not have to say “Mom killed that idea!” Better events may well be the result.

Photo attribution: Flickr user adwriter