What would happen if meetings were scaled back to the barest of essentials, on the principle that the best event is the one that is just good enough?
It isn’t an idle question. There’s an emerging trend that is reshaping everything from long distance telephone to video cameras, from the design of military aircraft to the delivery of health care. The implications for meetings are by turns provocative, productive, and alarming. And our choice of adjectives depends in large part on whether experienced, professional meeting planners and suppliers are making the decisions.
The “Good Enough Revolution” was heralded in the September issue of Wired magazine, a publication that combines product reviews and nifty Silicon Valley gossip with much of the philosophical underpinning (some might call it ideological support) behind the rise of social media. The article was signposted as a story about gadgets, but its scope went considerably beyond the latest electronic toys.
“Cheap, fast, simple tools are suddenly everywhere,” wrote correspondent Robert Capps.
“We get our breaking news from blogs, we make spotty long-distance calls on Skype, we watch video on small computer screens rather than TVs, and more and more of us are carrying around dinky, low-power netbook computers that are just good enough to meet our surfing and emailing needs. The low end has never been riding higher.”
If Capps is right, we can watch for our clients and customers to put a premium on services that are convenient, accessible, and cheap. “We now favour flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect,” he wrote.
“Suddenly what seemed perfect is anything but, and products that appear mediocre at first glance are often the perfect fit.”
A subtext is that tough times call for tough choices: “As the worst recession in 75 years rolls on, it’s the light and nimble products that are having all the impact,” said Capps. But he showed that the trend goes well beyond IT products.
With services like Skype, customers willingly accept the occasional dropped call in exchange for a free service.
But in health care, when Kaiser Permanente began placing micro-clinics in shopping centres, it turned out that good enough was actually better: the clinics deliver up to 80% of health services more affordably than larger, centralized hospitals, in settings that are closer by and more convenient for patients.
For anyone who has built their career on quality, diligence, and the ability to anticipate a client’s strategic risks and opportunities, the Good Enough Revolution could make it that much more difficult to argue for meetings that really make a difference, or the budgets that make them possible.
Yet this is familiar territory for meeting professionals who have always seen cost-cutting as their highest calling, the industry veterans who would arrive onsite in time to (literally) count the coffee cups and cut the pastries in half to keep food and beverage costs under control. To these old-school planners, the Good Enough Revolution is nothing new. The risk is that their own jobs may be the next to go if they’ve eroded their meetings to the point of irrelevance.
So what’s it going to be?
Are we going to shift high-end meetings from five-star hotels and resorts to more basic facilities?
Is anyone out there planning to give up state-of-the-art production values that have become an expectation for participants at opening general sessions?
Will we replace gala dinners and award banquets with more modest programs that substitute meaning and a sense of connection for flash?
Will we decide that live meetings are nice to have, but virtual meetings are good enough?
Do we think we can recreate the impact of face-to-face networking in refreshment breaks and expo halls by directing everyone to Second Life?
Do we think the stream of consciousness in a volunteer blog, or the stream of varied but often disorganized responses it generates, can replace a succinct, objective, and timely session summary?
For most meeting professionals, the short answer to many of these questions will be: “It depends.”
In the short term, high-end meeting properties are encouraging planners to balance “good enough” facilities against unsustainably low pricing, though clients like the U.S. Social Security Administration and resorts like The Biltmore are seeing that optics can still be a problem.
Companies like Timberland are finding out that a local community service project can be more memorable than the most glittering soirée, generating experiences that last and stories that are retold for months or years.
A virtual meeting might be preferable for a particular audience or purpose, particularly if it’s part of a continuing sequence that combines live and virtual gatherings.
There are interpersonal connections that can only be made online, if only because the protagonists would never have a reason to meet at a face-to-face meeting.
But there’s a catch. Each of these “good enough” solutions depends on the context in which it takes place, the organization that hosts it, the audience it brings together, and the purpose of the gathering itself. In each case, one group’s elegantly simple solution could be another organization’s unmitigated disaster. Someone needs to sort out the options, sweat the details, and make sure every decision aligns with the purpose behind the meeting. That’s where meeting professionals can and must learn to shine.
The Crash of 2008 won’t be reversed overnight. Until the economy recovers, we can expect to see more and more pressure to keep it simple and basic. By all means, we should go along when that’s what makes sense. But in a “good enough” economy, we dare not skimp on the strategic judgement that is our industry’s best product and most precious resource.