For Meetings that Work, Get Them Talking

Are people actually talking to each other at meetings? While you would think that most basic of meeting goals is a given, a leading facilitator says it’s not so.

The usual formats in which rows of attendees face a speaker do little to encourage networking and communication, according to Misha Glouberman, head of Collective Intelligence in Toronto and author of Chairs Are Where the People Go, a book that synthesizes his ideas about meetings and other matters.

Glouberman, whose background as a performer and improviser colors his work at connecting people, spoke with Travel Market Report about how planners can get meeting attendees to, yes, talk to one another.

Why is connection between people at meetings so important?
Glouberman: It seems so evident but it’s still hard to make the case. What is clear is that there has to be a good reason for people to travel halfway across the country, stay in a hotel and put in all the energy a conference takes. The traditional conference model is to receive information. That’s a crazy thing.

The reason organizations have events is so people can talk to each other. But when it comes time for the event, why is everybody spending 80% of their time in rows of chairs facing forward while one person talks to them? The printing press changed that way before the Internet came along. You can read the speaker’s book or watch his talk on video. What is productive is to meet other people. You get the kind of learning you can only get from others in your field – and you can establish connections.

So why aren’t more meetings about that?
Glouberman: The tricky part is that planners don’t think they can design a meeting like that. Part of it is about placing trust in the person putting it together. It can be scary. If you pay a speaker you know what you’re going to get. If you just let people loose to talk to one another you don’t know what’s going to happen. But it always works.

How do you do this specifically?
Glouberman: You usually do need a facilitator and you want goals. When I plan a session that I will be leading, I work very closely with the client. I ask what they are trying to accomplish. Sometimes you do need content and more structure. But having a speaker is often the opposite of having people meet each other. Keynote speeches can have value but they stop the audience from talking. One solution is to give people an opportunity to talk immediately after the keynote – so they can discuss what they just heard.

Doesn’t the emphasis on networking favor extroverts?
Glouberman: It’s the exact opposite. A lot of the structure that gets people talking to one another is good for extroverts – but they are even better for shy people. What I do is provide topics and break the audience down into groups of four or five. At the end of that you will have met a bunch of colleagues and actually talked to them. It changes the whole meeting.

Is this kind of meeting growing?
Glouberman: I see more and more interest in this – especially in the technology sector. You see a lot more camp-type conferences – much more experimental and open. One difference with the camps is that you usually don’t see professional facilitators. This is even happening in teaching college students. Rather than having a lecturer speaking in front of a huge group of students, there is more interaction.

So what should planners be doing?
Glouberman: They should build in ways for attendees to talk to one another. Of course, it depends on what the event is for. Frequently, people don’t articulate why they have an event. You can spend a lot of time simply doing that.

Does everybody at a meeting have to be on the same page?
Glouberman: Attendees can have adversarial interests. There are a lot of conferences like that. That’s why it’s important to have direct contact, so people can get to know each other and get different opinions.

You talk about Open Space Technology. What is that?
Glouberman: It was invented by a gentleman named Harrison Owens in the early 1980’s and is based on a concept of self-organization. In brief, you get people in a room and put up a blank schedule. The participants fill in the schedules. That’s the short version but you can add to that. Among the 100 or however many people there are in the room there is a tremendous amount of passion and intelligence. The question is how to divide the work among them to get the most out of the group.

How is that different from an unconference?
Glouberman: That was a later term and comes mostly out of technology events. The word unconference is a now being used a lot but the definition is fuzzy. It tends to mean an open space with a lot of self-organization. Professionals in the tech world have come up with structures and exercise within the open space or unconference. Even if you have some something like a product introduction – usually a very structured event – you can build an unconference structure where that can be done.

How can you sell this to the organization’s leaders who are paying for a meeting?
Glouberman: If you’re a boss and paying someone to fly across the country to hear a luminary, that’s a waste of money. You have to ask: Why are you actually sending that person?