The influence of venue on a planner’s options on site is one of the hottest topics in meeting design, meeting designer John Nawn told a Monday evening session on the meeting of the future.
Too often, venues “define the kind of meetings we can have, as opposed to us designing the meeting we want and the venue supporting that,” said Nawn, founder of The Perfect Meeting. If meeting professionals are to create comprehensive experiences and collaborative contexts for their participants, “we really need to spend more time thinking about where we meet and why we meet there.”
Nawn defined meeting design as “the creative use of meeting elements, driven by measurable business objectives, which result in a framework for an event,” then listed the design characteristics he’d gleaned from a recent social media discussion among meeting professionals. Keywords included: strategic; collaboration; stakeholders; sharing; venue; audience; objectives; the “how” of getting things done, and participants’ physical, social and emotional needs.
Asked what an effective meeting design would look like in practice, the online respondents talked about participatory keynotes and panels, peer-to-peer learning and sharing of content through multisensory experiences like songs, skits and game shows.
Using a World Café format, session participants circulated through the room to identify key design elements for the periods before, during and after a meeting. At the end of the session, the top three items in each category were:
• Before: Clear, measurable goals and objectives; audience polls and review of past meeting results; and efforts to generate buzz and excitement “through every kind of meeting you can think of”
• During: Taking the meeting outdoors; using bicycle power to recharge electronics; open meeting formats and Unconference sessions where participants set and run the agenda
• After: Online forums that extend beyond the onsite participant group; case studies to capture practical applications of onsite learning; incenting case study submissions by offering sessions at future conferences to present the best ideas.