I remember attending my first MPI event. I had just joined the Kansas City Chapter as a student member and was attending the annual EduCon with one of my fellow classmates. I was nervous and excited to be attending my first “professional” event. I didn’t know what to expect. I assumed my friend and I would be viewed as outsiders since we didn’t know anyone there and we were not professionals but just students there to learn all we could about a field we were interested in pursuing.
The moment I walked in the door I knew I had been wrong. There was something different about this place. There was an energy in the room that pulled you in. Despite the early hour, people seemed happy and excited to be there. I was immediately surprised by the warm welcome I received from everyone around me. Then I stopped for a second and realized a key detail—there was “pump up” music playing. I recognized the song and caught myself shaking my shoulders a little. I couldn’t help but smile. This music lit up the room and created a warm, comfortable and inviting atmosphere for attendees.
I am convinced that the background music before the conference began is what calmed me. After that, I was no longer nervous; I was ready! Throughout the day, I couldn’t help but notice that music was everywhere. Music helped set the mood. Every time we convened, music was playing. The uplifting, fun tunes helped keep spirits high, encouraged participation and energized people. It was brilliant on behalf of the planners, and it showed me what a powerful tool music could be.
No amount of caffeine can lift someone up as much as a fondly remembered, upbeat old song. It creates an energy that can’t be duplicated by any icebreaker or warm-up exercise. It sets the tone and makes a difference. I took special note of that tool at the conference and it’s something I won’t forget as I prepare to enter the field.
I have seen the impact of music on meetings.

JACKIE GAUGHAN is majoring in communication and sociology with a minor in hotel and restaurant management at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She’s a member of the MPI Kansas City Chapter and hopes, upon graduation, to become a meeting planner focusing on special events.

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more than a speaker with a PowerPoint.

Learning is the second element you measure if you are interested in calculating ROI for meetings or events.

If your participants learn nothing new, your event is just a cost. If they did learn something and they apply it so it has an impact and generates an income: ROI, that is when your meeting or event has become a revenue generator for the company, not a cost.

Rather than cutting 10% of the budget annually corporations and institutions now will want to invest in meetings. Learning is crucial to that effect so should meeting planners be educational specialists?

adult learning at meetings

There is a lot to be learned about learning at meetings. This is a complex and vast terrain and here are just a few basics we can cover in this article.  First thing you need to consider is that adults at meetings do not learn optimally from lectures or presentations. Adults learn much more from each-other. This is studied by the Learning Lab in Denmark and is based on 50 years of educational research.

We call these educational directions top-down for presentations and horizontal for peer to peer learning (learning from each other). A good presentation (top down) is short and provides material for discussion. The real learning than happens at round tables, where small groups of participants share ideas, cases and best practices. Smart organization see the powerful potential this has to make the organization even smarter; through bottom-up education.  This happens when the participants share their knowledge with the group and the organization. “Harvesting wisdom” (cfr. Lary Cherri) is what smart organizations do at every meeting to stay smart. This can be done in different ways and with different systems, before, during and after a meeting.

To name just a few: use Synthetron as an online brainstorm tool before the conference, use the cyber café to do an on site survey, use Group vision, or Chrystal interactive as high end collaboration tools. Use Spotme-II for live brainstorming during sessions. (more on www.meetingsupport.org) Any of those tools, (or even paper and pens) will help you to retrieve rich information, ton’s of ideas and great improvement suggestions form your participants.

new format for your sessions

A possible session format for your next conference could be 5 minute presentation followed by 10 minute discussion about the presented topic at the tables, including note taking or the use of one of the mentioned tools, and than 10 minutes feedback to the whole group. And repeat this 3 or 4 times for one session.

This touches briefly on the format of a session and the use top down, horizontal and bottom up education (aka spherical education).

the Meeting Content Manager

The profession of adult education at meetings is yet to be invented and looking at its scope, it will be a profession. For more, check out the knowledge base on www.meetingsupport.org and you will see there is lots more to discover to learn about adult learning at meetings. There is even more to develop and let’s hope this industry will be able to get the funding behind research projects that will build this new profession that I would call Meeting Content Management.

© Maarten Vanneste  10 November 2006

Meeting Europe (MPI)

November 2006

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Everybody networks, but few do it consciously and pro-actively. Meeting planners can make a huge difference by helping the attendants network better. In this article you will discover some very practical tips for yourself as a meeting planner and for your events. You will also read three concepts that you can apply to stimulate networking at your events.

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Excerpt from the article Learning at Conventions: Integrating Communities of Practice – to be published in the Journal of Convention and Event Tourism, 8(1).
Association Conventions as Learning Events
Associations are organizations that are created to serve the needs of people who share a common trade, profession, or interest. In that sense, associations are professional communities as defined by Lave and Wenger (1991) in their original development of the communities of practice concept. While Lave and Wenger (1991) used the examples of midwives, tailors, and butchers, today’s association world consists of professional communities of aerospace engineers, counselors, nurse anesthetists, meeting professionals, and more. Association members spend more than $10 billion annually to participate in association education programs (ASAE, n.d.). Rose (1992) divides conference attendees into three groups: (1) “the tourist who never adopts the conference culture,” (2) “the expatriate who turns on the home culture and enthusiastically embraces the conference culture,” and (3) “the learner, who recognizes the dual membership that participants hold in both the home culture and that of the conference and who is open to the conference while maintaining some distance and critical capacities” (p. 10)...

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What takes more energy, 2 meetings of four hours or four meeting of 30 minutes? The latter say American Psychologists. One week long they made test persons take notes of what they did and how they felt. Analysis showed a clear connection between the number of meetings end the fatigue / perceived work pressure. Interestingly enough, the content nor the length of the meetings seemed to matter. The investigators believe meetings break the daily routine and with an head full of work thoughts, employers need to take new information in at meetings. The more this happens the more we feel tired.

Comment:

If this is true for meetings in workdays, how does this translate to sessions in conferences?

Is it than correct to say that it is not good to have 36, 10-minute presentations like in many medical association meetings? Medical professionals go there to learn, but do they actually learn? Do they rightly get CME’s (points for Continued Medical Education) for attending? And do presenters rightly earn even more CME’s for giving such extreme short presentations?

Should we not than have 3 times a 2,5 hour presentations per day as a conference standard for good learning?    

Maarten Vanneste

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Capuchin monkeys systematically pick out cards with symmetric patterns and looked longer to those than to cards with asymmetric patterns and designs. According to Scottish researchers the test monkeys had a real fascination for regular patters while throwing away  asymmetric cards or totally ignoring them. From Human babies, it was already know that they have a preference for symmetry, but the results of the monkey test suggest that our aesthetical preferences have ancient evolutionary roots. The Capuchin monkeys were separated from human related primates. Scientists believe that we like regular patters because in those regular patters it is easier to spot irregularities and potential danger. Also can irregularities in food point to bad quality. In the Human body, symmetry demonstrates health an better balance and more agility.  Attraction towards regular patterns has an evolutionary advantage.

Comment:

A symmetrical set in plenary and other sessions may have a calming effect on the participants in meetings and conferences. Should we therefore always strive for symmetrical sets? A central screen for the PowerPoint and one banner left and one banner right? A speaker desk left t, one right and the panel table in the center?

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Thinking makes tired, now it is scientifically established.

Neuroscientist Maarten Boksem discovered which mechanism is responsible for mental fatigue: our dopamine system.

What is Mental Fatigue?

‘When doing a task we like dopamine is released in our brain. This is the fuel for the anterior singular cortex, a little brain area that is responsible for control processes. When at a certain moment the brain struggles to concentrate on one task, the dopamine level drops and so the activity of the anterior singular cortex. That is what humans feel as “I’m tired”’.

Dopamine isn’t that the reward substance?

‘Indeed, if dopamine drops, your brain tells you the “reward” is not in balance with the task. Some individuals will make more mistakes, other just work slower. In both cases, the work is adapted to the reward’.

Without dopamine, no good work.

‘For a moment you can, put yourself over that fatigue, but people that ignore these fatigue signals, structurally could risk a chronicle shortage of dopamine. With potentially some nasty consequences. A dopamine shortage is seen a one of the potential explanations for chronical fatigue and burn out.

Promotion Rijksuniversiteit of Groningen, the Netherlands, February 2006

Comment,

How can we make sure our audiences in meetings are not in danger of dopamine shortage? Do we need to ad more fun? Check their happiness using audience response systems? ask our audiences more what they want to do so we can make sure they have fun in doing it? In any case, as with most articles quoted in this section it is clear that Neurology should be part of any meeting planners curriculum.

Maarten Vanneste

It is a somewhat strange thought, but a sample of fear sweat on your desk could improve your professional performance. The stimulating effect was recently discovered in research at the Rice University in Houston, USA. For this occasion, researchers made an army of volunteers watch a neutral documentary and a horror movie. During watching, the volunteers held a dot of cotton under their arm to collect some sweat.

Next, other test persons got one of those dots of cotton fixed under their nose during a test with word games on a computer. The results? The group with sweat from the horror viewers performed 6 percent better that the group with the “neutral” sweat. Asked about the specifics of the scent they smelled, both groups commented identical. Both groups found the smell as intense and disgusting, be it “fear” or “neutral” sweat. The fact that sweat of fear makes us extra attentive, can be explained evolutionary: it is in ones advantage to be sharp and alert when danger is threatening.

Comment

Can we isolate the chemical that improves performance and make it available to meetings for use in scent machines? Today you can buy small machines to spread the scent of apples, fresh cut grass, grapefruit chocolate, etc.. Would it be ethical to use the chemical of fear, to improve concentration?

Maarten Vanneste

Neuroscientists can predict if a test person will remember a word, even before the test person has seen that word. Researchers from the University College in London, UK use an EEG scanner for their predictions: a cap with electrodes that measure brain activity.

On a screen a word appears, followed by complex decision task. After a series of those an unexpected memory task is given; to name as many words from the experiment as possible. It showed that the brain activity measured just before a word appeared, is a good indicator for memorizing it. Hen the brain activity in the frontal lobe was high; the chance of remembering the word was high too. With low brain activity in that area, the words were usually forgotten.

The fact that the brain has a sort of ‘preparing memory position’ is a big revelation for scientists. Until recent, it was thought that brain activity during and after an event were of influence on memorizing it.

COMMENT

If learning is connected to memorizing, and learning is part of the 5 step chain to ROI in meetings than all knowledge to improve memorizing has an increasing ROI of a meeting as a consequence. What Meeting support managers should think about is how to activate the frontal brain before giving the audience a crucial piece of information?

More research and experiments to apply this knowledge in meetings would certainly be welcomed. Maybe the Meeting Support Institute can play a role to get that kind of research conducted. Any candidates for a “task force research”?

Maarten Vanneste

A happy smile, the head slightly backwards, chest out, hands resting on the hips or in the air: research shows that four year olds can recognize this universal expression of pride, even members of an isolated tribal community in Burkina Faso, Africa.  With that, pride can be added to the list of basic emotions, recognized all over the world: happiness, amazement, sadness, fear, anger and disgust. This supports the idea that pride has an evolutionary basis, says the American psychologist Jessica Tracy: ‘When you booked a success, it is important that other people know about it, it says “I am someone you should not reject.”’

Psychology Magazine June 2006 (Monitor on Psychology March 2006)

Comment:

If pride is such a basic and old emotion, and assuming that pride is one of the building blocs of motivation (that generates ROI in meetings), how to implement that knowledge in meetings? Can meeting support stimulate sense of pride from (all) individuals in meetings? Awarding individuals is common practice, but for a group to be successful, do we need to pay attention to the pride of all individuals? By making the meeting more professional, dynamic and innovative, can we make each participant of that meeting proud of just being member of that community?

Maarten Vanneste.

If the past 50 years of educational research has established the inefficacy of the lecture as a learning tool, why is it still the centerpiece of conferences everywhere?

Link to PDF article:  Click here

also see http://www.bbt.be/Library/guest/guests012006.cf

(2006). Meetings in Organizations: Do They Contribute to Stakeholder Value and Personal Meaning?   Download publication (Almindelig tekst)

(2005). Transformative Theory in Social Research: The Case of the Learning Conference.   Download publication (PDF)

(2005). The Learning Conference.
Download publication (PDF)

No more PowerPoint presentations - let's have audience participation!

Abstract
Far too many meetings are chock full of PowerPoint presentations.
At a learning meeting, on the other hand, there are only a few presentations, the audiences experiences are brought to light, and everybody gets to know everybody else. In the knowledge society, the participants are the valuable commodity.

When Presenting More Material Results in Less Understanding

In 4 experiments, college students viewed an animation and listened to concurrent narration explaining the formation of lightning. When students also received concurrent on-screen text that summarized (Experiment 1) or duplicated (Experiment 2) the narration, they performed worse on tests of retention and transfer than did students who received no on-screen text. This redundancy effect is consistent with a dual-channel theory of multimedia learning in which adding on-screen text can overload the visual information-processing channel, causing learners to split their visual attention between 2 sources. Lower transfer performance also occurred when the authors added interesting but irrelevant details to the narration (Experiment 1) or inserted interesting but conceptually irrelevant video clips within (Experiment 3) or before the presentation (Experiment 4). This coherence effect is consistent with a seductive details hypothesis in which the inserted video and narration prime the activation of inappropriate prior knowledge as the organizing schema for the lesson.

This issue speaks to the topic of speakers. In my work, I have the opportunity to hire, coach and work with speakers. I also appear as a speaker at conferences and meetings. I have been witness to the good, the bad and the ugly. In hindsight, I have learned many lessons. Speakers may consider themselves celebrities, subject matter experts, motivational, sports, keynote, break-out, or entertainers. Innovative meetings occur where there is a good match between Speaker, Topic, your Requirements/Needs, Desired Outcome and the Setting with a twist of the right Chemistry. This issue of Tips for Innovative Meetings and Events aims to help you make that right match. It starts with you so be prepared to speak out in your search for the optimal choice.

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PowerPoint Usability: Q&A with Don Norman, Ph.D., usability expert and author

What does one of the world's leading authorities on usability say about PowerPoint? As cofounder of the Neilsen Norman Group and author of the classic The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman is a strong advocate of user-centered design and simplicity. Surprisingly, Norman disagrees with PowerPoint's most vocal critic, information design guru Edward Tufte.

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