Neuroscience and the Art of Meeting Planning
by Harvey ChipkinWhat does neuroscience have to do with conducting great meetings? Plenty, as evidenced by a recent virtual global leadership meeting for Cisco that was structured around key neuroscience principles.
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Regina Gordon, marketing programs manager for Cisco, worked with consultant Lynn Randall at Maritz, the travel consulting company, to use neuroscience to make the Cisco meeting less complicated and more productive.
In pre-meeting talks, Randall made neuroscience sound like “exactly what we needed as we moved from a live to a virtual event,” Gordon told Travel Market Report. “We couldn’t take wild guesses on how to get people to pay attention; we needed to deal with how people are actually built and how they function.”
Those processes are fundamental to neuroscience as it applies to meeting planning, according to Randall. While neuroscience broadly refers to the study of anything related to the nervous system, as Maritz applies its principles it’s simply about “how the brain works,” Randall said.
After a Maritz executive was impressed by the potential of neuroscience after hearing about it several years ago, the company created The Maritz Institute, which aims to translate “a deep understanding of people” into more effective business practices. Toward that end, Randall has taken the lessons of neuroscience and applied them to meetings.
Best for the Brain
“Just as there are best practices for the physical elements of a meeting, like seating and lighting, there are best practices for engaging the mind,” Randall told Travel Market Report. These include connecting people more comfortably, engaging people during sessions, assuring good exchanges between speakers and attendees, and understanding how people socialize.
A meeting planner who uses neuroscience principles to engage meeting participants can better transfer knowledge and information. “At its core,” she said, “you hold a meeting to transfer beliefs; and you can only enable this transfer if you capture the attention of attendees.”
And that means preventing brain meltdown.
Neuroscience tells us that the brain can only absorb so much information at a time, Randall said. “It has to be broken down into smaller bits and made interesting. Also, everybody’s brain loses attention after seven to ten minutes. At those points in time, the speaker should tell an emotionally relevant story or take the brain to another place in some other way. They might ask a relevant question of the audience or make them do a task.”
In addition, visual elements are crucial according to neuroscience principles. Noted Randall, “Your memory is made up of a bunch of pictures whereas usually a PowerPoint shows type on a page which is far more difficult for the brain to retain.”
Neuroscience in Action
The basic principles of neuroscience focus on the learning cycle. This involves four distinct mileposts as the brain gathers information and consumes sensory input, reflects on what has been gathered (the “sleeping on it” period), brings connections to that information (the creative period), and finally tests the knowledge by applying it in “real” situations.
Randall worked with Gordon to incorporate these neuroscience concepts into Cisco’s virtual, global leadership conference. The purpose of the event was to get everybody on board for the coming year’s goals – including what those goals meant for the person’s specific team and how they could make it all work.
Weeks before the event attendees were provided with information through videos and documents, allowing for a period of passive reflecting. Once the virtual conference began – conducted via teleconferencing and Web – connections were made. The testing period involved talking through the information, writing it down, and sharing it with each other after the event.
The meeting results were measured, and they demonstrated a stronger collaboration across the company than in previous years.
As one measurement, participants were asked if the meeting gave them the tools “to be more effective.” Respondents said the conference “was really useful, that they could walk away and do something with the information,” according to Randall.
“The biggest principle was the human learning cycle,” Gordon said. “We were giving them a ton of information and we had to insure they would be able to process it.”
Based on neuroscience principles, more visuals were incorporated and the meeting took into consideration the natural attention spans of delegates; the 7- to 10-minute standard was made part of every presentation.
When post-meeting measurements were done, “We scored a lot higher marks in terms of cultural elements, which means that people felt more connected and believed that they understood our strategy,” Gordon said.
Editor’s Note: Lynn Randall is conducting a webinar for Meeting Professionals International on “The Neuroscience of Effective Events” on Wednesday, Dec. 8, 11 a.m., EST. Regina Gordon will also participate. The Webinar is free. See www.mpiweb.org for details.
