Meeting Support Institute

The 2008 PEC-NA was different, in many ways.
For the Meeting Support Institute, it offered many opportunities and insights. Opportunities to share the vision and member information and insights in new technology and other innovations and ideas like visual facilitation, the Shark Tank, a book on informal learning, etc. And of course, especially the people made it worth while. Getting together with some friends is great: Ib Ravn, the Author of ‘the Learning Meeting’ (and doing his so needed missionary work), Joan Eisenstodt, this PEC speaking on Q-Storming™, Tyra Hilliard who is back at the George Washington University and many more.

And to top it all of, you meet new people.
Sue Tinnish who wrote a curriculum for meeting architecture for the book Meeting Architecture overnight and I had never met before. Lars Blicher - Hansen Who informed me about the Visit Denmark's project that demonstrates meeting logistics and content can go hand in hand. Kathy Nelson, Ph.D, an assistant professor at UNLV, John Nawn, VP Education at PCMA, etc.
I’m very happy to have spoken to Mary Boone who introduced the concept of meetings as solutions to complex contexts based on her paper in Harvard Business Review (A leaders Framework fro Decision Making). An intriguing theory on leadership and how meetings (Large Group Methods) can be designed for open discussion with set barriers dissent and diversity. She introduced the Café meeting format that resembles Open space, as the format for the whole Monday morning, a daring step by MPI that I can only applaud.

Together with those Cafés the Emerging Technology Lab by Jeffrey W. Rasco and took place in three rooms. 6 Meeting Support Institute members were present: A2Z, nTag, Abbit, and LOG ON. The Meeting Support Institute was represented by Maarten Vanneste and the member lists were a popular take-away for most visitors. Log on also provided the mobile phone/On line services for this conference and was sponsored by the Mexico CVB. An ever increasing number of sessions had topics about the content of meetings and even Bruce Mac Millan (the CEO of MPI) himself facilitated one where he and Elliott Macy (the Macy Centre) challenged the 200 participants about the future of meetings. In this session almost everything completely revolved around education consciously setting aside the classic venue and logistics issues.
Besides the room based sessions, a number of inspiring activities also took place outside the meeting rooms. One was the video cell; a sound proof booth in the lobby where anyone could enter and leave a video message. Secondly the message board where any one could write down ideas and suggestions in one of four themed spots. Thirdly, a corner where people could work on a painting together and finally a group of young students creating a game (based on input from passer-by’s) that was launched on the last day.
In short, too much to write down in a one page report, but to summarise: things clearly are changing in the meetings industry. I would say, give it a decade or two and we are looking at a different industry where meeting logistics and meeting content go hand in hand. Or is that a utopia, and will we discover these two are just not combinable? Will logistics and content merge or will they lead a separate life?
Whatever it will be, there is clearly an emerging move towards the content side of meetings, and being part of the Meeting Support Institute, I cannot wait to see more.

Maarten Vanneste, 5 February 2008.