Designed Meetings

Hallelujah! It is fantastic to discover like minds out there. Mary Boone of Boone Associates just published a fantastic paper on making meetings strategic. From this link, you can download the full PDF of the paper. I highly recommend it.

She talks about several key shifts in meetings. The first is a shift from evaluating meetings based on "efficiency" alone, to evaluating them on both "effectiveness" and "efficiency". Look at how your meetings are impacting your company's strategy and performance, not just how much they cost.

The second key concept is to evaluate all of your organization's meetings as a portfolio -- this includes offsites, trainings, retreats, conferences, kick-offs, and any other gathering that you organize. What are the different components of your meeting portfolio, and how does each component contribute to the strategy of the company? This allows executives to make intelligent choices about where to invest their resources, rather than just cutting items that arbitrarily look "too expensive".

Finally, meeting design vs. meeting planning:

"The problem to date has been that many individual meetings may be expertly planned, but not expertly designed. There is a real and significant difference in these two concepts.

"Meeting design is the purposeful shaping of the form and content of a meeting to achieve desired results. Meeting design incorporates methods and technologies that connect, inform, and engage a broad range of relevant stakeholders before, during, and after the meeting. Good design helps meeting owners establish clear objectives and desired outcomes, integrate the meeting with other communication activities, maximize interactivity, and create a significant return on investment." (emphasis mine)

She goes on to distinguish meeting design from both planning and instructional design.

As we design Illumination Galleries for clients, we focus on precisely these elements -- connections and interactions to achieve results. We base our Galleries on our 20+ years of experience designing and facilitating corporate collaborative sessions to solve strategic challenges. When we looked at the larger world of "meetings", we saw a huge opportunity to make these investments of people, time and resources vastly more productive. We constantly seek out new tools and methods to connect people, to engage them, and to help them collaborate to create real results in these sessions. Otherwise, what's the point, really, of getting all of those people together?