Unique ideas for breaking away from traditional meeting formats, whether you have five attendees or 5,000.
To generate groundbreaking ideas for meetings, I first ask: "How will we engage meeting participants in ways that could never be experienced outside of this event?"
This one question elevates and disciplines event design. It also generates engagement tools that are exceptionally suited for building more meaningful connections among participants and delivering content that makes long-term impacts. Whether your time slot is five minutes or five days, what makes meeting formats fresh and effective?
- Focused: Apply it to a specific subject to boost takeaways.
- Flexible: Caters to a range of skill levels, ages, audiences, topics.
- Functional: Can stand alone or be integrated into the larger event. (The 20-minute TED format is crazy-popular because it can be inserted anywhere in an agenda. Or you can string together 20-minute segments to form the entire meeting.)
- Fun: People want to engage and participate.
With these "Four F’s" in mind, let’s consider meeting formats that engage attendees in innovative ways. What’s cutting edge today, in the same way that TED, Pecha Kucha and Open Space were once novel?
- Post-Program Pair-Up: This is a simple, powerful exercise I’ve designed to increase networking and the likelihood of positive change. Whether you have five or 5,000 attendees, near the end of your event, have participants find partners. Each dyad discusses new goals they want to reach in the next 60 days. They record their objectives—plus each other’s contact information—and together commit to reaching these milestones. Smaller audience? Take commitments to a higher level by inviting everyone to state their goals before the whole group—sharing publicly means you’re more likely to succeed.
- Second Loop of Learning: Speaker John Izzo takes the above a step further. Both meeting goers and leadership commit to what they’re going to achieve. He encourages executives to also email what stood out for them at the event, describe what they’ll do differently and ask attendees to personally share what they’re doing differently. Leaders report their progress and their challenges—plus call out some audience members each week to highlight their accomplishments for the entire group. Voila: greater engagement, leadership transparency and more goals realized.
- Need to Solve the "Unsolvable?" Try Cricking: Think of historical figures, celebrities or someone outside your industry. Then consider: How would Oprah approach this problem? What’s Mark Zuckerberg’s POV? What does the founder of Zumba bring to the table?
- The Flip: Turn attendees into participants by changing who gets the most "air" time. Ask speakers to present for, say, 15 minutes; follow this with 45 minutes for participants to discuss their resultant ideas, applications and strategies.
In developing and producing unique meeting formats, Jim Gilmore, co-author of The Experience Economy, speaker and event designer, draws from a rich mix of footprints and techniques.
- Regiception: Participants typically use receptions to just connect with those they already know. Foster fresh energy and easy networking with a "Regiception"—a mash-up of your registration and opening reception at which attendees mingle and register to experience something truly new. Include food, drink and a variety of themed activities, such as throwback board games, so multi-generations can play with and learn from each other.
- Small Group? Savor a Lunch of One. Feed them both physically and mentally with a "lunch of one" as you give unexpected, welcomed quiet time. Each diner receives an envelope noting his or her meal location. The catch? You’ve booked a local restaurant for a table-for-one, alone. Each participant is asked to spend time over lunch recording what he or she learned so far at the meeting. Upon reuniting, they share key learnings with the group. The power of remembering new insights is first in reviewing concepts soon after exposure—not simply returning to work with a folder on a hard drive or a notebook on a dusty shelf.
- PowerPoint Improve: Have attendees bring favorite image-rich slide presentations on flash drives. Place all drives into a bowl; participants grab a drive—and must immediately make a presentation based on slides they’ve never previously seen. It’s just the ticket when you want something participant-led and entertaining.
- The Live Transmedia Experience: Developed by No Mimes Media, this concept combines a range of ways for attendees to learn and engage. The audience first discovers a puzzle box in the meeting room and hears a plea for help. In an effort to assist, they uncover a URL, make a cell call, read a blog, view a YouTube video and search the Internet to "liberate the prisoner." Correct answers elicit an autoreply and, eventually, a simultaneous call back to all participants’ cell phones as the answer is revealed. The collective experience is a fun, engaging way to involve everyone in problem solving, explains No Mimes founder and president, Behnam Karbassi.
Gilmore offers what we might call "Function Follows Form" formats that force us to re-imagine meeting structures.
- Field of Teams: Whether everyone is really in a field, in a ballroom or on an otherwise-stale trade show floor, establish stations at which participants can have a distinct experience—something practical such as talking to a tech expert or seemingly frivolous but fun like writing a note to be sent off in a helium balloon.
- Power of Narrow Thinking: Don’t curse your long, narrow room. Instead, set up chairs to resemble the inside of a plane fuselage, as Gilmore has. Issue boarding passes (as name badges). Serve F&B on rolling carts down a middle aisle. Content equals flight instruction.
- Meeting Outside the Box: Use spaces not normally set for daytime meetings—a rooftop, a revolving restaurant, a judo studio, a nightclub—at noon. Ask venues about useable space that’s never been used.
- Unlikely Pairs: Combine not-previously paired formats. Graphic illustration meets open space, for example. Avoid typically boring, droning awards ceremonies and elicit engagement-by-surprise by announcing a couple of award-winners periodically as "commercial breaks" in your regularly scheduled content.
Which of these formats will you use to freshen up your next meeting? Or what will you design yourself? Get on the cutting edge of meeting design—by defining it. One+
Andrea Driessen
Andrea Driessen is chief boredom buster for No More Boring Meetings based in Seattle, Washington. Driessen has been busting boredom and building engagement in events for more than 20 years. Visit www.NoMoreBoringMeetings.com and follow her on Twitter at @nomoreboring.
Comments:
Yes… and love the ideas. Greatest obstacles to great meetings are facilities that "won’t" adapt to new formats re rooms: space ratio! Who has great ideas to overcome that? (This from an experienced meeting designer, contract negotiator, etc!) (Joan Eisenstodt, 26 March 2013)
