When it came time to organize the Texas Hill Country Chapter’s Texas Education Conference 2012 (TEC 2012), event co-chairs, Mandy Begley and Paulina Van Eeden Hill, got creative, planning the entire event using Facebook chat, text messages, emails and phone calls, and it worked—flawlessly.

“We live about 45 minutes away from each other, and work for different associations, so during the day we would Facebook chat. Toward the end we would talk on the phone, but I mean, we met twice in person,” Van Eeden Hill said. “We never met with our committee; it was all over the phone or over the Internet.”

The key was organizing productive committee brainstorm “sessions.” 

“That part may not work for every chapter, or every event, and maybe we got lucky having just the right mix of people on our committee, but it worked really well for us,” Begley said. 

Collaborate Creatively 

The group using their own personal experiences and needs, as well as taking advantage of the expertise of their supplier partners proved successful. The committee brainstormed creative ways to turn the ordinary into unique and to foster new ideas for everyone in attendance.

From unorthodox meals like breakfasts on couches and outdoor lunches provided by local food trucks, to paper-topped tables meant to inspire creative doodling and idea sharing, the planning of TEC 2012 exploded into an eclectic mix of ideas that drove valuable takeaways for every attendee. 

“It was kind of like, how many ideas can we put into one bag,” Van Eeden Hill said. “We were hoping that we would provide hundreds of new ideas and maybe a couple of them could be integrated into all of our planners meetings.”

Collaboration wasn’t just between event committee members—Begley and Van Eeden Hill also looked to the event’s speakers and their supplier partners for creative ideas as well. 

“As planners, we’re always at our own meetings,” Van Eeden Hill said. “We don’t always get an opportunity to really go out and see what’s going on, so when you talk to your suppliers, and ask ‘Hey what’s the new set? What’s everyone doing differently?’ That’s a great way to get those ideas.” 

Push the Envelope

Begley and Van Eeden Hill agreed that the planning of past TECs had one thing in common—similarity. There was nothing unique about them—nothing that made the attendees uncomfortable. They decided right out of the gate they wanted TEC 2012 to be different. 

“It was funny to see people walk in the room, scan the room and see that there are no banquet rounds, that there’s actually bean bags and funky couches, and they all thought, ‘Where am I going to sit?’” Begley said. 

For this planning duo, the “old-school” way of setting a room banquet-style and hiring a speaker to simply talk to audience from behind a podium wasn’t going to cut it. 

“We are bound to get some negative feedback,” Begley said. “But I think it would actually be a compliment if we pushed someone beyond their comfort zone.”

Improvise Onsite

Not everything went according to plan on site, though—when does it ever?

The key, the organizers said, is to go with the flow and think on your feet, and most importantly, don’t be afraid to fail.

One particular flub came during the “tour sessions.” Begley and Van Eeden Hill had coordinated a series of concurrent tours that would feature the Dallas Convention Center and the newly built, attached Omni Convention Center Hotel. On one tour, planners could tour the Dallas Convention center and then brainstorm in a roundtable setting about how to make the transition from planning meetings in hotels to meeting in convention centers. 

“Once we got over to the convention center and did a poll of who was on the tour, there wasn’t a need for us to have that conversation,” Begley said. “The planners in the group were already meeting in convention centers. The takeaway for us was that we had to give attendees what they wanted, and they wanted to know what the convention center had to offer them. The scope of that session changed on the fly and I threw out all my roundtable questions, and we went with the audience questions. It ended up a very successful event, it just was not what we had planned.”

That’s okay, though. Don’t be so married to your idea that your attendees’ needs get lost along the way, Begley suggests.

Leave a Positive Impact

As little as five years ago, event organizers were trying to avoid having to plan a community service project, and attendees used that block in the schedule as free time to check email rather than get involved. Today, organizers are coming up with creative ways to leave a positive impact on local communities and attendees are excited to get involved.

“The Art of Meeting” was the theme of TEC 2012, so it only made sense to give back to an organization dedicated to fostering the arts in the community.

TEC attendees were asked to bring art supplies with them to donate to the Achievement Center of Texas, an organization that helps people with disabilities express themselves through art. 

But, Begley and Van Eeden Hill didn’t stop there. Besides collecting more than $1,000 worth of art supplies, they coordinated a “special delivery” to the Achievement Center’s CEO at the event’s closing luncheon, so attendees could see and hear first hand how their donations would leave a positive impact.

“You have changed lives with these supplies,” said Marilynne Serie, executive director of the Achievement Center of Texas. “The supplies are a godsend for the people we serve and to our organization’s efforts.”

Having the community organization tell their story (albeit briefly) at the event turned the donation of simple art supplies into a human story—touching the hearts of those in attendance. 

Don’t Miss TEC 2013!

Regardless of which MPI chapter you call home, the 2013 Texas Education Conference is going to be worth the trip to San Antonio, November 21-22. Add it to your calendar—it’s one you don’t want to miss!

Editor’s Note

I’d like to personally thank TEC 2012 event organizers Mandy Begley and Paulina Van Eeden Hill for the invite to attend the conference, and I’d also like to recognize all the wonderful and passionate members of the Texas Hill Country Chapter (and other MPI chapters as well) who were in attendance. You epitomized what the MPI community is all about—education, networking and leaving a positive mark on the community. Thank you.

Photos compliment of the Texas Hill Country Chapter.

We recently published a column by Jackie Mulligan about why downtime is critical for your conference. 

"Many people report their most creative moments come to them when they least expect it, when they just begin drifting off to sleep, when they take a shower or simply ride a bus," Mulligan wrote. "New ideas squeeze into our consciousness when our mind takes a break. This is why downtime rocks."

Another reason downtime rocks is because it reinforces newly learned information. In an article to be published in the journal Psychological Science, a publication of the Association for Psychological Science, psychological scientist Michaela Dewar and her colleagues show that memory can be boosted by taking a brief wakeful rest after learning something verbally new and that memory lasts not just immediately but over a longer term.

“Our findings support the view that the formation of new memories is not completed within seconds,” Dewar said. “Our work demonstrates that activities that we are engaged in for the first few minutes after learning new information really affect how well we remember this information after a week.”

In two separate experiments, a total of 33 normally aging adults between the ages of 61 and 87 were told two short stories and told to remember as many details as possible. Immediately afterward, they were asked to describe what happened in the story. Then they were given a 10-minute delay that consisted either of wakeful resting or playing a spot-the-difference game on the computer.

During the wakeful resting portion, participants were asked to just rest quietly with their eyes closed in a darkened room for 10 minutes while the experimenter left to “prepare for the next test.” It didn’t matter what happened while their eyes were closed, only that they were not distracted by anything else and not receiving any new information.

When participants played the spot-the-difference game, they were presented with picture pairs on a screen for 30 seconds each and were instructed to locate two subtle differences in each pair and point to them. The task was chosen because it required attention but, unlike the story, it was nonverbal.

In one study, the participants were asked to recall both stories half an hour later and then a full week later. Participants remembered much more story material when the story presentation had been followed by a period of wakeful resting.

Dewar explains that there is growing evidence to suggest that the point at which we experience new information is “just at a very early stage of memory formation and that further neural processes have to occur after this stage for us to be able to remember this information at a later point in time.”

We now live in a world where we are bombarded by new information, and it crowds out recently acquired information. The process of consolidating memories takes a little time and the most important things that it needs are peace and quiet.

Remember that the next time you attend or plan a conference. 

(Story materials via the Association for Psychological Science.)

There is a great discussion about connectivity on our blog in which David Basler asks, “Are you designing connectivity, or just planning a meeting?”

If you follow any of my blog postings (hi Mom!), then you know I’m very interested in the inner workings of group gatherings. 

Basler writes, “It will take a combination of art, science and magic to be leaders in our field, but with that recipe we will be creating the best kind of meeting interaction—the kind in which humans truly experience and learn from each other and take away relationships that keep the connection going long after the meeting’s close.”

For now, I’d like to focus on the science part of his statement and give some insight into states of being when people meet.

Laura L. Carstensen, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Stanford University, published a paper in 2006 titled “The Influence of a Sense of Time on Human Development.” In the paper, Carstensen explained that “the subjective sense of a future time plays an essential role in human motivation.”

According to her studies, when time is constrained, a person’s motivation priorities focus on emotional states rather than knowledge gathering.

“When time is perceived as open-ended, goals that become most highly prioritized are most likely to be those that are preparatory, focused on gathering information, on experiencing novelty, and on expanding breadth of knowledge,” Carstensen wrote. “When time is perceived as constrained, the most salient goals will be those that can be realized in the short-term, sometimes in their very pursuit. Under such conditions, goals tend to emphasize feeling states, particularly regulating emotional states to optimize psychological well-being.”

The feeling to connect on an emotional state cuts across all ages.

“Young or old, when people perceive time as finite, they attach greater importance to finding emotional meaning and satisfaction from life and invest fewer resources into gathering information and expanding horizons,” Carstensen wrote.

Most meetings last two-to-three days. Agree? If so, then it makes sense that people will want to meet their emotional needs more than their knowledge needs, because they’re under a time constraint. That’s why we see so many cliques at conferences. That’s why networking events turn into reacquainting clubs. In fact, you see this more so with older attendees than younger.

“Older people were observed to have smaller social networks, to be drawn less than younger people to novelty, and to reduce their spheres of interest; at the same time, however, they were as happy as (if not happier than) younger people,” Carstensen wrote. “This makes sense if motivational changes with age lead people to place priority on deepening existing relationships and developing expertise in already satisfying areas of life.”

Carstensen reaffirms, though, that any differences are not due to age, but to future time perception.

"...endings need not be related to old age or impending death," Carstensen wrote. "They need simply to limit time horizons."

Knowing this—that limited time increases a need for emotional connection—how would you design a meeting? What kind of sessions would you plan? How would you design networking events? How would you control time to your advantage?