At a time when conferences are cancelling, participants are staying home in large numbers, and the flavour of the month is to replace live meetings with webcasts and virtual events, there are two sure criteria that still make it essential for groups to gather in person:
• A clear, immediate purpose that is best served by face-to-face deliberation, and
• The need to capture the energy and momentum that bring participants together and make it even stronger by the time they return home.
For sheer urgency, it’s hard to beat the global climate change summit that convened this week in Copenhagen. On MeetingsNet this week, I argue that the conference has already served a profoundly important purpose, bringing a new seriousness and initial political commitments to an urgent international dialogue that had been stalled for a decade.
But sometimes, it’s hard to see the impact of a major international meeting over the short term. That’s one reason I’ve been thinking back to what one of our project teams was doing just over 12 years ago, at the conference where we got to help ban a weapon of mass destruction.
It’s a story we tell often because, to this day, the Landmine Treaty Conference is one of our firm’s proudest moments.
It took 14 months of negotiation, with many, many preparatory meetings along the way. But by the time they gathered at Ottawa’s Government Conference Centre in December, 1997, diplomats from most countries of the world were ready to ban a product that had been described as “a weapon of mass destruction, moving in slow motion.”
Landmines have killed more civilians than both world wars, and they represent a fundamental barrier to international development, blocking access to food, water, and other essentials long after the warring parties that laid them have moved on. Before the Treaty Conference, there were dire warnings about the supposed risks of banning landmines, just as we now hear anti-scientific rants from climate deniers who will go so far as to steal private emails, then misrepresent their content, in a last-ditch effort to scuttle a global climate agreement.
To no one’s surprise, implementing the landmine treaty is still a work in progress, but there have been huge gains. In mid-November, just after Remembrance Day and just before the anniversary of the treaty, Mines Action Canada reported that 3,200 square kilometres of land had been cleared of mines and other explosive remnants of war, and new casualties “declined significantly” to 5,197 in 2008.
“Serious challenges remain, with more than 70 states still mine-affected today, and assistance to mine survivors falling short of what is needed,” MAC stated. Still, looking back, a face-to-face meeting was the catalyst that brought negotiations for a global landmine treaty to a successful conclusion. The job could not have been done with a webcast or TelePresence, even if those technologies had been available in 1997.
Last month, the Canadian chapters of Meeting Professionals International (MPI) released an economic impact update that documented the 70 million participants who attended 673,000 meetings in Canada in 2008, generating C$23.8 billion in direct spending, C$71.1 billion in industry output, 552,000 full-year jobs, and C$14.2 billion in government revenues. Those results matter, and you could probably crunch similar numbers for the Landmine Treaty Conference or the Copenhagen meeting.
But what’s the economic impact of banning a weapon of mass destruction? Of many thousands more children surviving to adulthood, with all their limbs, in dozens of countries around the world? Of landmine removal making it safer for those children to go to school when, “in a very poor country, just one year of education can increase lifetime earning capacity by 10%,” according to former U.S. President Bill Clinton?
And then, once we’ve answered those questions, why are we satisfied measuring the economic impact of a major international conference by the meals, room nights, and airline seats its delegates consume?
If we want to justify our existence as an industry, while bringing greater purpose to our work as meeting professionals, the first step is to align more deliberately with the urgent problems our participants try to solve by going onsite. As our industry scrambles to prove its value and measure its economic impact, we can look to the Ottawa Treaty—and, we should fervently hope, to the Copenhagen summit—for evidence that the results we produce are so much more important than the goods and services we consume.

Are you a ContentChat Subscriber?
Click Here to receive the latest news and posts as they are published!