Think about the last corporate conference you attended. What
stands out the most? Was it the lavish surroundings; the food;
the golf; or the stimulating sessions, insights gained and rewarding
new relationships?
Or ... are you having trouble remembering anything about it?
Putting on a large company meeting is no minor expense. Travel,
hotels, food, speaker fees - these add up quickly to some enormous
numbers. Not to mention the cost of having employees away from
their jobs for days at a time. If a sizable portion of attendees
at your conferences have trouble with the question I've posed,
or in a moment of candor respond with a, b, or c, chances are
you're not getting your money's worth. If, after a couple of
weeks, they can barely recall the major themes of the meeting
or what actually transpired, it's a good bet they were simply
going through the motions of attendance, rather than really attending.
Unfortunately, this is a more common circumstance than most
would like to admit. Conference attendees often complain of boredom,
of topics that lack relevance to their jobs, and agendas that
are either overplanned or underplanned. Above all, they feel
passive and uninvolved, as they listen to speaker after speaker
impart information while they sit, often for hours on end.
Just think back to your days in college or graduate school.
What were your most memorable courses? Granted, some traditional
lecture courses can be quite fascinating, depending on the subject
matter and the instructor's style of delivery. Chances are, though,
that the ones you remember best were those that had a high level
of interactivity between the instructor and students, and among
the students themselves. Classes in which the learning was in
the doing. Where discovering things together was at least as
important as being given the facts.
Recent research on adult brain-based learning confirms what
common sense tells us to be true - that a high degree of interactivity
and emotional involvement in the learning process not only increases
the amount of information taken in, but also the retention of
that material over time. Our minds perform optimally when learning
is multi-sensory, offers variety and contrast, and alternates
between periods of high mental activity and quiet reflection.
In addition, we tend to make more sense of newly acquired material
and remember it better if there is an opportunity to verbally
share our understanding of it with other people immediately afterward;
in effect, "sealing" it in our brains.
All of this should be taken into account when determining the
design of a corporate conference. Too often, though, design is
driven primarily by content - that is, the subject matter that
needs to be covered - rather than by process, or how this material
should be addressed. The result is that while the subject areas
do get covered, the actual impact they have upon many attendees
is questionable.
With this in mind, therefore, here are a few basic design principles
and process suggestions which should go a long way toward helping
you put together a conference people will remember for something
other than the golf:
1. Start with a clearly-stated purpose for the conference - a unifying theme
- and plan all activities with it in mind.
This will serve as your guide in designing the various group
exercises, and as a touchstone for attendees who tend to perform
best when they know what is expected during their time together.
2. Plan a variety of group experiences, and alternate between
them.
In addition to varying the size of the groups, think also about
what people will be doing in them. Going from a large keynote
in which people sit quietly and listen to smaller venues where
they sit quietly and listen, isn't much of a change. Groups of
any size can be highly interactive if they are skillfully facilitated.
Even within a single session the group dynamic can be significantly
altered by having people pair up or form triads to process a
particular point or engage in generating new ideas.
3. Don't limit the group to Q&A after they've sat through
a presentation.
It's not that asking questions and getting answers isn't valuable,
but you can do much more here to get people involved. This is
a time for capturing the audience's top-of-mind ideas, and the
connections they're making between what they've just heard and
their own jobs; their own lives. De-briefing a speech in this
dynamic way actually encourages people to make it more relevant
to themselves, increasing its perceived value and creating the
emotional involvement that is key to good learning and retention.
4. Use this time to engage people in problem-solving real challenges
faced by the company.
Conference designers who look primarily at content tend to think
about what attendees will get - the "takeaways." Those
who look equally at process think about what attendees will do,
and what they can give. This is an excellent time to involve
people in working on some of the company's toughest issues. You
have on hand your most diverse set of thinkers, they're away
from their everyday routines at the office or laboratory, and
they want the action - to actually create something. You also
have the opportunity in a large meeting to put fresh, new combinations
of employees together - people who may never have had any previous
contact - and find out what these new "chemistries" might
produce. It adds excitement to the conference and - who knows?
- perhaps the next big breakthrough idea!
5. Make available to all attendees a record of the proceedings,
recommendations and action items.
The more people are involved in actually doing and creating
things at the conference, the more they will want to see their
recommendations captured and acted upon. Appropriate follow-up
activities should be as much a part of the conference design
as the on-site sessions themselves. In this way, your employees'
emotional involvement continues long after the meeting is over,
and the meeting itself assumes greater strategic importance than
the more typical "one-shot" event that people may or
may not remember several weeks later.
Jeffrey A. Govendo is president of The Innovative Edge(TM)
Inc., a consulting firm based in Massachusetts that helps client
organizations tackle tough challenges through creative problem
solving.
Mr. Govendo works as a project consultant, group facilitator, trainer and
conference designer, enabling organizations to achieve their goals by
increasing their capacity for innovation.
He can be contacted at: 508-497-9096
www.innov-edge.com
