Meeting Support Institute

Meetings organisers can get concrete thinking from their delegates using plastic bricks. Katherine Simmons explains

Utter the word ‘meeting’ to a colleague and you’ll be more likely to be greeted with a grumble than a giggle.

At VisitBritain’s National Meetings Week launch at Event UK this September, even our national tourist authority concluded that many people see the business of holding a  meeting as being a complete waste of time. Usual complaints include that meetings take too long, they’re boring, and are often dominated by the same people leaving others struggling to get a word in edgeways. Confex Group event director Duncan Reid even called for the phrase “meetings industry” to be scrapped because of its “negative connotations,” to be replaced with the younger, funkier, branding of “events.”

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Human beings just aren’t hard-wired for traditional meetings. Katherine Simmons talks to professor Ib Ravn, who evolved the format to create a natural environment for communication.

In previous articles in the Anatomy of a Meeting series, we’ve delved a little deeper into the failings and the foibles of the adult learner. We have a concentration span of just half an hour if we are lucky and if we’re talked at too long without being asked our opinion, we’ll probably just rebel and ignore whatever the speaker says anyway.

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Want to see real results from your conferences? Try making your delegates use their hands to creatively solve problems. Katherine Simmons explains

In recent months we’ve been exploring how to get the best out of conferences by creating a multi-sensory experience for our delegates. So far, we’ve looked at how sight, sound and smell can be used to positively enhance participants’ experience. We’ve also considered that people have different preferences for how they learn best, their best methods might be any of or a combination of the following modalities: audial, visual, reading and writing; or kinesthetic – a hands on experience-based approach.

Delegates are rarely given the chance to engage their hands in a traditional meeting set up. And it seems meeting organisers make a common mistake of separating the mind from the body when it comes to helping their delegates to learn.

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Do your meetings always come up roses, or do delegates smell a rat? Katherine Simmons reports on how olfactory experiences can be harnessed to aid concentration

Smell is the sense which can knock your socks off.

The power of smell can instantly transport you back to a definite place and time, whether its sweet peas in your grandmother’s garden or the vile stench of the Portaloos at a music festival. Leading scientists argue that it is one of the most powerful methods of memory recall, yet it still remains one of the least appreciated senses.

Memories, complete with their associated emotions can be conjured up by a single smell. The association is a learned one. For some the smell of roses will conjure up a perfume or garden, but others may associate the scent with funerals. The phenomenon is known as the ‘Proust Effect’ after Marcel Proust’s description of an event in the first volume in Remembrance of Things Past.

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Article about Maarten Vanneste's book "Meeting Architecture a manifesto" in eventos magazine of July - August 2008.

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Article about Maarten Vanneste's book "Meeting Architecture a manifesto"
in Meetings - Autumn 2008

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Pecha Kucha, which is Japanese for the sound of conversation, is a series of show-and-tell evenings for designers, architects, artists and creatives, started by Klein Dytham architecture in Tokyo in 2003. Under the registered trademark "Pecha Kucha Night" Klein and Dytham offer their imprint to a loose network of pecha kucha fora in cities around the world.

Since then, groups have sprung up in cities across the world (over 80 so far) and adopted the Pecha Kucha format: each presenter has 20 slides which are displayed for 20 seconds each.

Pecha Kucha taps into a demand for a forum in which creative work can be easily and informally shown. With the 20x20 format, presentations are concise, the interest level goes up, and more people get the chance to show their ideas.

The Brussels format includes designers, architects, artists, scientists, fashion designers, photographers, musicians, and creative entrepreneurs.

Our short term memory is at its best in the morning and decreases during the day. Before lunch we are most alert and after noon, our coordination is at it’s maximum. Around 16:00 / 4pm we have our fastest speed of reaction and around 17:00 / 5pm our muscle strength peaks and our heart and vascular system is most efficient. for meeting organisers: Organise the educational sessions in the morning and sports in the afternoon. Put the more difficult session (technical, theoretical, …) in the morning and the lighter ones (motivational, keynote’s, …) in the afternoon.

For speakers: Try to get the morning speaker slot.
 

Sport professionals that play well will often say ‘the ball seemed larger than usual’. It sounds like nonsense, but psychologists of the university of Virginia discovered that indeed sportsmen perceive a ball to be bigger on a good day and smaller on a bad one. Researchers studied play results of softball players and made them estimate how large the ball was after the game. Players with a good score pointed to significantly bigger circles than players that did not hit the ball so well that day. Psychologists will continue to research to see if visualisation techniques can improve the players performance.

Research idea / Question: Does a slide with larger fonts score better than a slide with a smaller font? December 2005

Every one can shout what’s on their mind and no one is to criticize any idea. That is the brainstorm in a nutshell a well accepted method to generate creative ideas. The results of a brainstorm however usually are disappointing according to Organisational Psychologist Eric Rietzschel. Why? ‘mainly because participants are to much focussed on the practical application of the collected ideas. After generating ideas, the group is asked to select the best ones and this is when the most original ideas drop out.' It seems that people see originality as unpractical. Despite the brainstorm’s goal to take down barriers for the unknown, is it the selection phase when participants will choose the more familiar, thus realistic ideas. Exit brainstorm?