The meeting industry’s sound of silence

It’s time for a “sound of silence” roundup of meetings industry pet peeves.

“…the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence”
—Simon & Garfunkel – Sound Of Silence (1965)

Venue air quality is still a secret

How many venues have upgraded their HVAC systems in response to the COVID-19 pandemic? Unfortunately, only The Shadow knows! I’ve never seen a venue website that features air quality upgrades, though the information is sometimes available on an obscure page. These days, I’ve found that if I call a venue, they will usually tell me what they’ve done. If anything.

Meanwhile, news of outbreaks at meetings continues. Just last week, an outbreak of several dozen COVID-19 cases occurred at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s annual three-day Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) conference. If the CDC can’t prevent an outbreak at its own meeting, who can? (Answer, anyone who still takes COVID-19 seriously.)

It’s true that COVID-19 is not quite as serious an illness as it was in the earlier stages of the pandemic for most people. Death rates in the U.S. are now down to around a mere 1,000 a week. It’s still one of the top ten reasons people die. But with elderly and immunocompromised people at high risk, and the unknown chance of contracting Long COVID, the meeting industry is still largely shirking its duty of care.

A hat tip to the Javits Center and The Venetian for having done the work! Who else has upgraded their air filtration systems to MERV 13 or better? Share in the comments!

The meeting industry’s dirtiest secret

Sadly, the meeting industry makes no meaningful attempt to discover (let alone evaluate) the long-term value of a meeting to attendees!

If you think about it, this is shocking. We spend vast sums of money and devote countless person-hours to holding a meeting. Yet we have no idea whether it made any significant long-term difference to the people who attended it!

Check out the above link for three tools you can use to explore the long-term impact of an event.

But I’m not holding my breath that any of them will be routinely deployed at meetings soon.

The continuing takeover of meeting industry education by suppliers with deep pockets

In my opinion (and many other event professionals with whom I’ve spoken) the educational content at the national meeting industry events these days is sub-par. I suspect it’s because the processes for choosing it are seriously flawed and completely opaque. Educational programs remain dominated by representatives of suppliers and sponsors who provide significant income to the industry association.

I’m not saying supplier and sponsor employees are incapable of providing good education, but there are a host of independent educators (yes, like myself) who have been relegated to the sound of silence over the last fifteen years. This is largely due to our unwillingness to share our valuable experience and experience at our own expense (no fee, no coverage of travel, meals, or accommodation.)

Don’t pay presenters unless they’re big names

Following up on the previous peeve. I’ve written a couple of posts (12) about the reluctance of the meeting industry to pay presenters unless they are household names and are seen as “inspirational”.

Nothing has changed in the last ten years.

Fighting the sound of silence

A black and white photo of Simon and Garfunkel singing "The sound of silence"

“Hello, darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again…
…People hearing without listening”

I’m going to close with a short tribute to someone in our industry who personifies the opposite of the sound of silence.

Her name is Joan Eisenstodt. Anyone who is truly listening will hear her. For decades she has spoken out about a myriad of often-overlooked issues in the meeting industry—the lack of care for the safety and wellbeing of the venue and hospitality employees that make our meetings possible, the lip service paid to DEI, ableism, the underrepresentation of minorities and women in positions of power, and the dire consequences of political decisions made at both the Federal and State level—to name just a few.

I think many would agree with me that she has been and remains the voice of conscience of our industry.

It’s a hard road to travel. I know I sometimes feel discouraged that some of the ideas I have shared have not become as widely accepted as I would like. So I wrote this to her recently:

“Dear Joan,
Sometimes it feels as though no one is listening and our efforts are fruitless. But, Joan, I hope you know that you do make a difference. Many people listen to you. Many are influenced in ways you’ll never know. In my case, you have inspired me over the years to speak out more about important issues. You have influenced me, and I am grateful for it. And so are many in our industry. You fight the good fight and make good trouble. Bless you for it.”

Let’s dispel the sound of silence as Joan does. Our industry will be a better place when we do.

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!

The meeting industry’s biggest dirty secret

Illustration of a group of people crowded around a table. Two people sit at the table, which holds a giant padlock.There are some things that the meeting industry doesn’t like to talk about in public. For example:

But the meeting industry’s biggest dirty secret is so embarrassing, we don’t even talk about it in private.

We make no attempt to discover (let alone evaluate) the long-term value of our meetings to attendees!

Before the event, we turn up our marketing to eleven, create FOMO, and do everything we can to get potential attendees to register. It’s going to be great!

During the event, we do our best to put on a heck of a show.

After the event? Crickets.

Once the event is over, it’s done. We barely look back; we’re on to the next one. Don’t look back! (You might not like what you see.)

This is fine for special events, which are primarily about creating an emotional experience and celebrating cultural rituals.

It’s not OK for any other kind of meeting.

Long-term meeting value for participants

Did the event have any significant long-term impact on the lives of the participants? Did anything significant change as a result? Or was the event effectively a short-term-feel-good, short-term-high-impact experiential blip?

If you think about it, this is shocking. We spend vast sums of money and consign umpteen person-hours to a meeting. And we have no idea whether it made any significant long-term difference to the people who attended it!

Notice I’m not concentrating on other meeting stakeholders here. Those who run meetings as a business can determine whether a meeting met their profit goals or not. Sponsors have metrics to help them decide if the event business booked, new connections made, and existing connections strengthened were worth the time and money expended. Even presenters, to some extent, can discover via feedback their audience impact and often find out whether their exposure led to future opportunities to speak or consult.

But long-term value to participants? We have no idea, because we don’t do anything to discover if there even was any, and, if there was, what it might be.

The invisible elephant in the room

Why do we ignore what I believe is the most important outcome of meetings from the attendee perspective: long-term change? After all, if you go to a meeting and nothing significant changes in your life as a result, what was the point of going?

I think we avoid talking about attendee long-term benefits from our meetings because we secretly know that most meetings do not lead to long-term change for most attendees. And we are embarrassed by this reality.

The meeting industry’s invisible elephant is that most meetings are incapable by design of producing significant long-term attendee benefits.

But, but … we do evaluate our meetings!

If you think that smile sheets dropped in a box at the end of a session, app-based evals, and online surveys that must be completed within a few days provide an accurate picture of the long-term benefits of a meeting, there’s a bridge I’d like to sell you.

Even if we include them (and we often don’t), short-term evaluations measure emotional impact, not long-term change and are unreliable[1, 2] measurements of event value. They tell us nothing about the impact of meeting attendance months later, when the stirring closing session story told by the motivational speaker that you thought was great at the time has been forgotten and, most likely, hasn’t changed your life or perspectives on it one bit.

OK, I hear you. So, if were brave enough to explore my event’s long-term impact, how would I do it?

How do we expose and face the meeting industry’s biggest dirty secret?

<soapbox>First of all, if you really want to create events that are maximally likely to provide long-term attendee value, you need to think about event designs that are likely to provide it! That’s why I design and facilitate meetings that meet participants’ actual wants and needs, rather than the traditional pre-determined, best-guess programs that, from my extensive experience, don’t.</soapbox>

Here are three tools that can be used to explore the long-term impact of an event.

Net Promoter Scores (NPS)

A time-delayed evaluation of conference and sessions’ Net Promoter Scores provides summary feedback about long-term value. (The link explains how NPS is calculated from respondents’ answers.) Use questions of the form:
“Considering the value you gained from Conference C/Session X, Y & Z, how likely is it that you would recommend Conference C/Session X, Y & Z to a friend or colleague?”

Adding an open-ended request for respondents to share their reasons for each rating will provide useful feedback on the value of a conference and its sessions.

A Letter To Myself

Set aside around 30 minutes just before the end of the event, supply each participant with notepaper and an envelope, and ask them to reflect on the changes they would like to make in their lives as a result of the event over the next [3 months/6 months/year/appropriate time period]. Attendees write letters to themselves about their changes and insert the letters into the supplied envelopes, which they then seal and address to themselves. The envelopes are collected and mailed out, unread, by the conference organizers once the announced time period has passed.

A Letter To Myself provides participants with a personal method to evaluate the long-term effect of an event, but meeting organizers remain in the dark unless participant responses to receiving their letters are shared back. That’s why I developed the following tool.

The Reminder

The Reminder is a more sophisticated version of A Letter To Myself that adds valuable long-term feedback to the conference organizers. See the link for full details.

Do it!

If you want to really know about the long-term value of your meetings to attendees, I’ve given you concrete things you can do to find out. I know it can be scary to ask these questions, because there’s usually that little voice in your mind that says, “Suppose I find out that what I’m doing really sucks? Then what?”

I’m here to tell you that the likelihood is very high that you will hear really good stuff about what you’re doing — and yes, there will be some unsettling responses too, because you can’t please everyone no matter what you do. Buried amongst the “not-so-great” responses will be nuggets of gold feedback you can use to improve your event for next time. Working on continuous improvement is increasingly important in the competitive world of meetings, and here are some implementation tools.

It’s your choice whether you use them or not.

Do you agree that not evaluating the long-term value of our meetings to attendees is the meeting industry’s biggest dirty secret? Do you have other suggestions for taking an honest look at what we’re providing to our meeting attendees? Please share your thoughts in the comments below!