I challenge any reader of this column to tell us what a ho’oponopono is. You can find this term in fascinating book Koro, which explains untranslatable words. A ho’oponopono is a meeting among Hawaiians, meant to solve a problem. The meeting goal is clear enough: We have a problem, during the ho’oponopono we are going to solve it and as long as the problem isn’t solved, the ho’oponopono goes on. Anybody familiar with the SMART methodology will recognize this as being SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-related).
MPI’s Future of Meetings Task Force shows that the meeting industry is aware that the value of meetings needs to be made more explicit. As meeting designers, we experience clients’ efficiencies and effectiveness needs on a daily basis. They ask us (openly, but more often implicitly) to help them improve the efficacy of what happens inside the meeting room, to come up with solutions that tackle not only the efficiency of meeting logistics, but that also get results and outcomes for the primary meeting process—participants wanting to get somewhere.
Reporting on such outcomes is often dismal, a dirty little secret Google reveals in a few milliseconds. On post-conference Web sites, you find painful sentences such as, “The workshop provided a forum to discuss and examine various issues that play an important part and formulate recommendations for the future.” Do these words give us any intelligent clue about what participants did and achieved during the meeting? Would you spend your money on an event like this? Actually, the above describes just about anything.
Clearly, people rarely organize conferences or other meetings without a reason. At my company, we are convinced organizers don’t possess the language to describe meeting processes, objectives and outcomes. In the past 10 years, we have pinpointed some, but significant development work is still required.
If meetings are to become more effective, we need to be able to describe their impacts on participants and how to make those impacts measurable. And that is not an easy job. It means we have to figure out what things happening inside the meeting room are beneficial to meeting outcomes, what to call those processes and how to steer them. We need to do this proactively, because, if not, we are unable to demonstrate the value of meetings.
Are we able to help meeting owners clarify their goals with words such as ho‘oponopono? Yes, these words help to some extent, but we need more than just a few inspiring meeting formats. Crucial groundwork is required, and it is required urgently if the meeting industry wants to maintain its license to operate. The groundwork is: What are the main processes that take place during meetings and what words can we use to describe and quantify the specific quality we want these processes to have?
Developing answers to these questions is good for our clients and for us. If nothing else, it means we will probably no longer read sentences like these in conference reports: “This conference paid more attention to issues that received less attention before.”
MIKE VAN DER VIJVER is a free lance consultant, trainer and facilitator who resides in Italy and the Netherlands. He has more than 20 years experience in the meeting industry, and for the past eight years has worked as a meeting designer for MindMeeting, the company he co-founded.
