As the only North American participant at both Meeting Design Practicums, Mike Van der Vijver asked me to write about my 2017 experience from the perspective of my national culture. Of course, what “U.S. culture” means is a matter of some debate, and I should mention that I was born in England and lived there for 25 years before emigrating to the Northeast United States. Nevertheless, here goes…

Each year, the Practicum has joyfully reminded me of the incredible range of assumptions and responses to shared experiences that different cultures exhibit. In the U.S., cultural behavior changes slowly over distances of hundreds or thousands of miles, while the European Union has led to a familiar melange of cultural experiences and expectations, formerly contained to some extent inside largely pervious national boundaries.

Although I’m not a typical U.S. citizen (70% of us have never left the country!) I suspect that many of my fellow citizens would be uncomfortable with the kinds of experiments and willingness to suspend assumptions and judgement that were routine during our 48 hours together in Barcelona and Lloret de Mar. It’s this discomfort with the common and understandable fear of doing something new that all meeting designers grapple with as we try to introduce new ways to be together to our clients, stakeholders, and participants.

Threaded throughout this year’s Practicum was the use of specific familiar cultural experiences to move people into a new yet familiar way of being. The idea of “tasting” our experiences was a theme that all of us could relate to, in the same way someone in the U.S. might be persuaded to try out the food at a new kind of restaurant.

Four highlights:

I loved Manuela Prina’s 4-corner game played (literally!) in the kid’s sandbox outside our hotel. She took a child’s game, with movement, simple rules, and moments of playful competition and used it to brainstorm ideas about a problem the group was working on.

The Lloret de Mar portion of the Practicum opened with an exercise I’ve refined over many years: The Three Questions. I’ve primarily used this with North American audiences, so it was great to receive valuable feedback about the session, immediately afterwards, from the multicultural perspective of so many meeting designers.

Our surprise evening with Lloret de Mar families in their homes was clearly a highlight of the Practicum. All nine groups had unique and very special experiences. Ours included — after a spectacular home cooked meal in which we participated — a sneak preview of a float for the Lloret de Mar Carnival that our host was organizing. This was truly an example of how simple, facilitated connection can create genuine long-lasting experiences for everyone involved.

Finally, I think all of us greatly enjoyed and appreciated the progressive revelation of each portion of the program. Only Eric and his trusty cohorts knew everything that would be happening (I don’t think anyone expected to be whisked out of Barcelona for the majority of the meeting). The rest of us only knew what Eric had asked us to do, and the anticipation of what would happen next added unique spice to our time together.

Bio: Adrian Segar is a meeting designer and event facilitator with over thirty years experience, and an energetic champion for participation-rich and participant-led meetings that uncover and satisfy attendee needs for relevant learning, connection, engagement, and action.

Having gotten my VISA on the day of travel, I didn’t have much time to set expectations before landing in the beautiful city of Barcelona for my first visit to the Iberian peninsula.

Most of my expectation setting happened at 34000 feet above ground and despite being closer to the heavens, it was like a staple Indian rice dish, the Khichrdi!

Khichrdi It basically is a rice-based dish with lentils, vegetables and pretty much anything that comes in a hand’s reach, mixed up. So Khichrdi is a synonym for when things are mixed up, entangled, spiraled and so on. You get it! Incidentally it has a long lost cousin in the Spanish Paellla, but this I learnt only on my travels.

With 16 nationalities being represented in a group of 30, the average International-ness of the Practicum would put any leading International Association’ biennial congress to shame, that is almost every second attendee was of a different nationality! Try beating that!!

So, the expectations were mixed: Looking at the attendee profile, I knew there would be some learning in it for me, an opportunity to transform some long standing acquaintances into friendships, break new ground, make new friends and so on…

Meeting Design is a new discipline, one that I have placed my bets on, making it one of the solution pillars of my start-up agency in India solving attendee engagement and creating more value for meeting owners off their events. Like all new entrants, it is trying to find firm ground and develop an identity, all its own, and in years to come. It sure will. However, it is as experiential as it gets, so I would spare my reader of reading my personal experiences and learnings from these pages, urging them to close their eyes and rack the left side of the cortex (usually used for imagining things).

Since ‘taste’ was much the ‘rice’ (binding bridge) of this khichrdi, let me draw an anomaly that the International reader of this blog will be more able to relate to.

My Practicum experience was no less than the magic potion of Druid Getafix (borrowing a character from the Asterix series) and pretty much stood for what it is: No one really knows what goes in but what comes out is a magic potion with secret ingredients that give superhuman strengths to who drinks it. In other words, it provides tremendous unimaginable value personal to the consumer. This is pretty much my experience at the Practicum 2017, put up together by the indomitable Eric De Groot and his friend & partner Mike van der Vijver.

There were new experiences, some learning and unlearning, but what stood out was overarching moments – some abstract, some profound, some remote, some clear, some foggy, some relaxing, some unnerving. A high point was an inter-personal evening, a unique and fulfilling experience for all of us, and that really brought in the essence of this event and its design!

Lalit Chadha, CMP, is Chief Curator, for SEES, Strategic Engagement & Event Solutions, India

Helsinki, 6^th of October 2016,

A new word was born on this day. During a Keyshop for Meeting professionals in Helsinki, Finland. The word is contribience. We made it up because there is no good word for what we wanted to cover in the Keyshop: the trend for attendees to become actively involved. More and more people demand to leave the passive role of being an audience. They want to contribute. They do that on YouTube (Broadcast yourself!), on Facebook and in Wikipedia…so why not during meetings?

The title of the Keyshop was “From audience to contribience”. The word Audience refers to the Latin verb for listening: Audiens. So an audience is a group of people that listens. A contribience, however, is different. Its meaning is this: meeting attendees that contribute. Why do we, meeting professionals, need a new word for this?

MindMeeting introduced new words and expressions earlier. The notion of Venue Message helps to talk about the influence of venues on meeting processes. Content Flow refers to the dynamics of processing content. A Keyshop, as a new format, dsecribes the option to deliver a Keynote and working formats for large groups at the same time. It turns the traditional one-way communication in a Keynote into interaction and knowledge exchange. These words support the understanding of the very core of the meeting processes. Words can help options to materialize, imagination to flourish and understanding to grow. That is why we need new words, every now and then. Contribience is the next new-born.

The word contribience helps us understand meetings as an instrument to harvest what a group of people has to offer. The potential of an audience of – let’s say – 1,200 people, in ideas, experience, solutions and relationships, is staggering. Not harvesting that potential is not very intelligent. You could put it differently: it is stupid. Having these 1,200 people listening is not enough. Calling them a contribience is the first step to unleash the potential.

The second step is to understand what will make them contribute. In the Keyshop we identified these factors:

• give attendees the bigger picture
• get the buy-in of their boss
• interview them to know their allergies and deep wishes
• offer them a safe environment, the guarantee that they can speak out without negative consequences
• give them space to diverge at first, and later help them to reach conclusions
• capture the results
• decide who owns the results, who is responsible for processing the results after the meeting
• and plan follow-up communications carefully

 In the Helsinki Keyshop we asked which of these requirements is most difficult to fulfill. What would be your answer for your country? The Finnish answer was interesting. It revealed the forces which, in Finland, may obstruct participants’ contributing. Of course, we had a number of solutions ready. But our input was not necessary. We asked the Meeting professionals themselves to answer their own questions. And they did! The answers were very, very useful. How come? A contribience in action!

Not long ago, Meeting Association MPI held its annual EMEC Conference, this year in delightful Kracow, Poland. I had the rare opportunity there to conduct a session under the title “The Meeting Lab”. It involved a number of experiments about the behaviours of meeting participants and how to influence these behaviours. The experiments were real, so we had no idea what the outcomes would be. Session participants kindly acted as guinea pigs (if any of the participants read this blog: thanks for being a sport!). There was actually one participant with a weak spot for guinea pigs, so she had the unique chance to feel like her favourite pet for a while – but this is beside the point.

In one experiment, I wanted to test whether it was possible to influence feelings of benevolence participants would feel towards one another. This is roughly how it went. Together with co-presenter Chema Gomes Merino, we made two random groups, without any particular introduction. Group 1 sat in theatre style and for five minutes listened to a presentation, defining altruism. Group 2 went to the other side of the room and for the same amount of time did a simple physical exercise. They performed it rhythmically and all at the same time.

At the end they all answered this question: “How close are other people to you?” They independently expressed the feeling they had in that moment, on a scale from 1-10, where 1 represented not close at all and 10 very close. The average score for Group 1 was 6.2 while Group 2 produced a score of 7.8.

Although we didn’t perform the experiment according to rigid scientific and statistical criteria, this is still a striking difference! And even if we are not entirely sure whether it is a statistically significant outcome, it is still worthwhile to think of a tentative conclusion.

Neuroscience research suggests that people who take part in rhythmic group activities, such as line-dancing and Tai Chi, produce more oxytocin than those under “control” circumstances. Oxytocin is a hormone that is considered a stimulant for so-called pro-social behaviour. In words that my auntie Mary would understand, it helps people to like each other. So, if in meetings you want to align participants and help them to achieve shared outcomes, it may be a good idea to offer them an hour of rhythmic, physical group exercises. If only people weren’t so hung up about formalities, they could try this at the next peace conference for some regional conflict…

Of course it remains to be seen whether the effect really translates into more benevolent behaviour of real meeting participants. That sounds like a fascinating experiment to try during a next conference somewhere! Any meeting organiser out there willing to try??