A MOVIE WITH ELEPHANTS AND PENGUINS

Our team is often invited to help designing, structuring, and facilitating the yearly conference/meeting for top 30/80/100/200 managers.

The central question that is critical to ask but often overlooked or glanced over, is: ‘What kind of management conference does this organisation really need the most at this moment?’ Building a good meeting is one thing, making it the meeting that is critical to have is not necessarily the same. Looking back at past management conferences, you get the impression that this is one of the few areas where ROI reasoning is yet to be applied!

It is tempting to fall into ‘filling the agenda’ mode instead of ‘the engaging on mutual expectations’ mode. There is a huge opportunity to go beyond a mediocre management conference that people will remember for the cocktail or small talk in the corridors. We have no excuse but to maximise the value of it, and avoid the common pitfalls of many management conferences, such as:

ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

Ignoring the elephant in the room: the topic(s) we all expected to talk about or to raise, gets marginal, if any attention;

THE PENGUIN EFFECT

We all politely applaud the speakers (as we should – remember: the biggest fear for many people is to speak in public), yet we are not sure whether we all applaud for the same reason or know what is expected of us as we applaud it, or even what (not just who) we really applaud;

DEATH BY POWERPOINT

Unfocused messages (a lot of data, but real message gets lost in data overflow) with lots of words, bullet points and animation that make us feel professional;

IMBALANCE

Imbalance, even in amount of time spent, between sending messages and providing the space for people to digest, build ownership and integrate what it means for them;

COPY-PASTE

Copy-paste inspirational speakers from other conferences without proper contextualisation and proper transposing of their messages to what it means for our organisation;

LACK OF CONSCIOUS DECISION-MAKING

Lack of conscious decision-making on who should be the target audience and no adaptation of the content to the target audience (what can they really do with what we share with them?);

ISOLATED EVENT

Management conference is organised as an isolated yearly event and not part of a structural communication and interaction with the management community (sending generic messages on the meeting but forgetting to follow up with more specific messages on specific agenda points after the meeting);

HABIT OR AVAILABILITY

Timing is driven by habit (“we always have it in February”) or the availability of the conference centre, rather than by the right timing for the company/its people and the proper moment in the business cycle of the organisation.

BREAKTHROUGH MANAGEMENT CONFERENCES

We invite our clients to look at their management meeting as an important and unique instrument to inspire, engage and to focus their target audience.

To make your management meeting an icon of success (beyond just another meeting), think about the following questions:

• What are the critical, big, and important topics, the famous elephants in the room that we really need to spend quality time on, and we should truly aim to create the (safe) space to address them, in a way that helps us progress?
• What are the breakthroughs we need to realise in this meeting (beyond getting together)?
• What are the three things you want people to say, do and feel when they walk away from the meeting and what energy do we want to radiate at this meeting/from this meeting?
• What are we expecting the audience to know, understand and do (or not do) (that they would not know, understand or do without this meeting)?
• How will the board take ownership of this conference?

The real cost goes beyond the out-of-pocket and time spent by your most ‘expensive resources’: the real cost is the opportunity cost of not having achieved what the company really needs from this audience, the cost of not provoking/embedding the right thoughts, relation(s), commitment, ownership and energy.

ARE YOU LOSING OR MAKING THE PLOT?

If you want to move people in and through the conference … why not direct it … as if it was ‘a movie’ … Nobody watches movies that are just sequences of random scenes on trivial topics with poorly directed actors, and lots of words but without a story line and a plot … Are you losing or making the plot of your next conference?