HAVING JUST WRAPPED-UP THE INTELLECTUAL AND INSPIRATIONAL MAELSTROM THAT IS THE WORLD EDUCATION CONGRESS (WEC) last week, I went about the task of synthesizing the mass of hand-written notes, iPhone task entries and voice notes, business cards and, yes, even cocktail napkin scribbles to piece together the resulting learning and action items that would change someone’s world. Add in a couple of hundred e-mails, office voicemails and some unanswered Facebook messages, and the post-event glow felt more like an interrogation lamp. I struggled mightily to get on top of it all. So I spoke to other members to see if it was just an (digital) age thing, and interestingly their experience was similar: a post-event hangover that had nothing to do with Smash Mouth.
We tout face-to-face interaction as the richest of all human connections. An experience that history and research has shown spawns ideas, creates relationships and activates opportunities that literally change the world. So after reviewing my meticulously prepared calendar and briefing book, it struck me that while I had incredible rich face-to-face interactions during WEC, I had zero time to ponder their implications in the big scheme of things—that would be my professional life—while actually at the WEC. This made it much more difficult to attach sufficient context to the notes or streams of consciousness I documented when I eventually sat down to articulate and act on the significance of what I had experienced. In my quest to be religiously efficient with my time and energy at WEC, I forgot to program in crucial white space to cultivate in my mind the significance of the human connections I had just discovered.
I’m afraid this is an all too common meeting axiom these days: time is precious and time is money so it’s imperative that every attendee’s waking moment be richly programmed in order to deliver the most value. Well…no. Enter the economist’s tried and trusted axiom: the law of diminishing marginal returns.
In today’s 24/7/365, always-on, 3GS mobile world, I believe we have hit a point where technological connectivity and social expectations for communication decorum have surpassed the average person’s ability to effectively consume and process the richness of the human connections at a conference or meeting. More is actually delivering less in this case. And as meeting professionals, we need to understand that it’s not the sheer quantity of the connections we create but rather our ability to inspire the attendees to activate on them.
What to do? Despite the pressure to include more connection opportunities for attendees in the same narrow time window, provide them with “white space”—time that is completely unstructured for everyone and space that is available to everyone. I saw this work remarkably at Elliott Masie’s annual Learning conference; 2,000 knowledge professionals were turned lose for 60 minutes in the middle of the day to consider and share the human connections they just experienced. Some blogged, some found spaces outside to talk, some stayed in their session rooms to meet. And in the process of exploring their connections, they were also building community and likely collaborating on the next big idea. Isn’t that the ultimate measure of the power of human connections?
With unrelenting pressure on meeting professionals to deliver high-value, cost-effective results in today’s economy, including white space might just be the new program experience your attendees appreciate the most.
BRUCE MACMILLAN, CA, is president and CEO of MPI. He can be reached at bmacmillan@mpiweb.org. Follow him at www.twitter.com/BMACMPI.