Why Uncomfortable Meeting Attendees are Smarter

By Andrea Driessen, Chief Boredom Buster, No More Boring Meetings

On a recent adventure in China, I spent at least half the time being uncomfortable. Hot, sweaty, crushed by crowds, lost, confused. After a few days of being cranky, I realized that in exchange for this discomfort, I had the rare chance to experience forever-memorable moments that would have been impossible without first being uncomfortable:

Trekking the Great Wall, viewing Mao Zedong’s embalmed body, eating some of the world’s most delicious dumplings, communicating in a very foreign language, standing amidst some of the most gorgeous scenery on earth.

But I’m not here to talk about what I did on my summer vacation.

Via discomforting travel, I also saw a strong correlation between discomfort and meeting success….and how building in some discomfort into meetings helps attendees experience lasting—and positive—memories and deeper learning.

It can mean the difference between significant behavior change and complacency-maintaining status quo for your audiences.

How to purposefully add Discomfort to your Meeting Agenda….

It’s natural to view high levels of comfort as central to a successful meeting.
Of course, want to provide a comfy venue, lighting—and enlightenment.

Yet when attendees are UN-comfortable in particular ways…exposed to the unknown….they actually pay more attention—if anything, to regain some lost comfort.  And, they become more open to changing their circumstances and learning something new.

A few examples of intentionally building discomfort into your meeting—even at the executive level.

ENHANCE CUSTOMER EMPATHY

Let’s say you need to help employees gain more empathy for your customers as they learn to serve more effectively. In a meeting setting, put employees directly in the customers’ shoes by giving them the literal experience of how it feels to be a vulnerable new customer:

• Have everyone stand for the average length of time your customers spend on hold (our bodies hold the clearest, most visceral memories)
• Withhold the standard agenda, so they have no initial road map of what to expect, at least in the early hours of the meeting. (New customers don’t have any initial anchors either.)
• Write signage in another language. (Company jargon can feel that way to the un-initiated.)
• Serve dessert as the first course (On the premise that the best events surprise, confuse, even frustrate—and open up the learning channel).

With just a few adjustments in transforming your meeting format, attendees will physically, mentally and emotionally sense the same type of vulnerable experience that your customers do when they first consider your product or service.

Create a Twitter Fall

This popular concept in meeting formats is designed to showcase real-time input, reactions, and conversations from attendees’ Tweets. The “unplugged”/unedited nature does bring with it some level of risk—that’s where you get the discomfort. Yet again, in exchange for this discomfort, you gain fresh insights, feedback and “field intelligence” at a depth that only social networking can achieve.

In exchange for controlling all the content of your meeting, you gain richer content, longer lasting learning and more buy in to your organization’s most important initiatives.

Ask your venue AV staff how to project a TwitterFeed (AKA “TwitterFall”) from cell phones to big screens. Many planners find the TwitterFall screen one of the most popular, buzz-producing aspects of their meetings.

FORM UNLIKELY COUPLINGS

You really want to shake things up—and start problem-solving conversations that extend long beyond the life of your event?

Imagine the fascinating, unusual and perhaps sometimes-heated discussions that’ll take place with the following participants in one room:

• Gather a cross-functional mix of employees from each department (executive team, marketing, finance, sales etc). Give them (or have them generate) a list the top 5 problems that, if solved, would propel your organization to new heights.Then assign a variety of department reps to each table, and give each table one of the 5 problems to solve. Punch up the conversation further by asking: what within our processes gets in the way of exceeding these goals? After 45-75 minutes, have each table report back to the full audience.

• Olympic year or not, invite an Olympian or other top sporting figure to your event….and apply his/her experience with achieving top performance to your biggest business challenges.

Such groupings—which may first feel uncomfortable and even silly—can lead to exceptional, ground-breaking learning. And allowing the audience–not just ‘the sage on the stage’–generate content fosters more growth and positive change.

So…how will you grow more comfortable with discomfort–and give meeting attendees the chance to experience higher levels of growth? In these unusual times, it’s time for business as unusual—and for getting more comfortable with discomfort—in meetings and in life.

How will YOU foster discomfort in your next meeting?

Why most meetings suck, and what to do about it

By Andrea Driessen, Chief Boredom Buster, No More Boring Meetings

You know how we all like to complain about the problems with bad meetings…?

Here at No More Boring Meetings, we prefer to offer SOLUTIONS rather than complain about the problems.

We believe that meetings themselves should be solutions—and that we must start to hold solutions rather than hold meetings.

It’s time to a Declaration of Meeting Independence—and revolutionize how we plan, stage and experience meetings of all sizes.

3 easy ways to revolutionize meetings so they don’t suck:

1. Declare independence from a rigid agenda

For many meetings, working from an agenda often means reporting a wide range of ideas, reports, “check in’s” and unfocused presentations, with little or no common thread. Instead, as you plan your next meeting (um—SOLUTION!) … whether a departmental meeting or a large event…first determine:

What is the BIGGEST, most pressing problem is this meeting supposed to solve? What question does my meeting ANSWER?

Then be SURE that every element of your agenda supports that concept and that desired outcome.

For example: let’s say sales reps are selling without the most current insight learned from the last three focus groups. What needs to happen so they have the most relevant data by tomorrow?

Solution: John, Mary and Amed, who each led a focus group, will meet from 9-11am. All will come to the Solution with a report showing the top three findings and product changes as a result of their focus group. Then, on their own, sometime between 11-4pm, each will enter the key product updates into the database. So, by 4pm, all sales managers can print and distribute updated product specs to their salespeople.

In the above solutions-scenario:

• Only the key players are invited to the meeting–no extraneous people who would otherwise be distracted, thinking about all the work they SHOULD be doing.
• There’s absolutely no room in the discussion for any other topic beyond focus group results and product updates. That is, whenever someone tries to meander into a different subject, you have carte blanche to table it for another time.

• When the Solution is completed, there is a tangible, measurable outcome associated with the time spent.

Even the largest meetings, including multi-day employee events, will be more focused and effective when this problem-solution question is asked.

2. Throw off the shackles of PowerPoint

We all know that too much PowerPoint can ruin a meeting. Every single day in our Free Country, we are wasting $250 Million due to bad slide decks. For proof, click this link. (Note this is 2001 data; adjusted for inflation, more than $310 Million—every day!)

Why? A lack of solutions-thinking. Most presenters use their slides as a forum to share seemingly endless amounts of data….charts, graphs, statistics….ad infinitum.

So how do we move beyond data dumping and start experiencing Power-FULL presentations?  Again, the answer lies in Solutions-thinking.

Effectively designed presentations do not start with opening a PowerPoint template and creating bulleted lists and pie charts. They begin—and end—by carefully deciding what your #1 purpose is in delivering the program. What change do you want to invoke in your audience? What SOLUTION do you want to provide? What IS your most POWERFUL Point?

Start your planning at the end—with what you want the audience to take away—so your presentation is more interesting and effective… and streamlines your thoughts, saves you and your audience time, and earns you higher ratings as a presenter.

Then it’s time to build your deck, which is all the easier, because every single slide must support your most Powerful Point.

3. Tap the Power of the People (aka listen to attendees)

We all want our contributions to matter, in and outside of meetings. Younger generations in particular crave participation. Two easy ways to ensure everyone’s voice is heard at your next meeting:

1. Use audience polling….via the next generation of audience response systems, which are much more affordable than typical audience response systems (nothing to rent!) and are extremely customizable.
2. Stage an Open Space: free or nearly free, self directed, scalable, AND you’ll generate an enormous amount of useful data, input, ideas and input from any sized group

As the old saying goes: If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.

So, get yourself—and your attendees—on the Revolutionary Road to holding SOLUTIONS that keep everyone engaged, awake, and able to do their best work.