Tools for Meeting Effectiveness
Use Your Left Brain and Right Brain When Planning Your Next Meeting
Our new Esprit eNewsletter kicks off this month by starting a three-part series exploring how event planners can learn more about whole brain thinking, and use these tips when planning their next event.
What is the objective for your next meeting? For just about any meeting, the purpose is to communicate information and elicit some form of behavioral change. Meeting planners, speakers and event staff members communicate and send thousands of messages, some overt and others subliminal. The event’s look, feel, and brand; its layout; agenda topics; and even the PowerPoint style all send important messages to attendees about what they should learn, feel, and do. The aggregation of all these bits of information shapes the overall event experience.
The problem, according to Dr. Richard Ackley, professor of business psychology at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, is that meeting planners don’t typically consider how the brain processes all the information that comes at them during an event, and as a result many corporate meetings fall short of achieving their full potential. “The way material is presented at conferences caters primarily to the left brain (which processes facts), sometimes to the exclusion of the right brain (responsible for intuition and emotion). When this happens, the overall learning process is stunted,” says Ackley.
One of the key ways to appeal to everyone is to take a whole brained approach. Many of us tend to operate with an emphasis on one side of the brain or the other, so by taking a whole brained approach you can appeal to different ways of thinking, and engage your audiences more completely. The overall message of your meeting should fall into both these categories, and as we design meetings, we need to consider both parts as they are equally important.
Setting the Stage
When meeting organizers are planning an event, Ackley says the first thing they need to ask themselves is, “What do we want the attendees to take away from this event? What behavioral changes do we want to make? Will our attendees already have what they need to understand the subjects or do we have to provide context for them?”
Not only must meeting planners consider these questions regarding what they want to accomplish before designing the conference, but also ask the audience what they want to hear. Consider sending out a pre-event survey or questionnaire. You can ask anything from where attendees would like the conference to be held, to what sort of speakers they would like to hear.
With the answers in hand, meeting planners can then organize, sort, and present their information so that attendees can see the big picture, organize the facts, evaluate their options, focus on the details, and finally embark on a process to complete the task.
How Do You Do It?
In developing content, Ackley says meeting planners should have at least a rudimentary understanding of how the brain works to make sure that the information appeals to both the left and right sides of the brain. For example,
Left Brain – What Do We Want Them to Know?
According to Ackley, before an attendee can understand the information being presented or change their behavior, the data they are receiving must be organized and contextualized. “The more information that conference organizers can share with attendees ahead of time, the better the overall experience is likely to be,” says Ackley.
For example, don’t overlook the importance of sending out pre-event information in well-designed e-vites or dimensional mailings. This will frame the event for attendees making it easier for them to receive information on-site.
In the same way, general session presentations and meetings should be planned around an intuitive and logistical flow so participants don’t have to think about moving from room-to-room. In the same way, content should be organized and structured to make it easy for attendees to follow and make sense of the information being presented.
Right Brain – How Do We Want Them to Feel?
One important thing to consider when you are planning a meeting is that people learn differently. Not everyone absorbs and retains information in the same way.
Therefore, it’s important to consider different learning styles when planning a meeting. There are three different learning styles: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic.
• Visual learners learn through seeing.
• Auditory learners learn through hearing.
• Kinesthetic learners learn through doing, moving and touching.
The most successful events incorporate information in a way that appeals to both sides of the brain and accommodates a variety of learning styles to reach as many people as possible.
TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) shows have become very famous over the past few years. Videos of speakers from their invitation only conferences frequently go viral on the Internet. The presentations are short — only 18 minutes — and feature a fascinating assortment of thinkers and doers from around the world.
Similarly, TED meeting planners are also creative. So that everyone might enjoy all the speakers that the conference offers, the TED conference offers monitors not just in the main room but everywhere in the meeting space, so you don’t have to be in your seat in the auditorium. This works great with technology and strong social media types of groups, but it would not be as successful for other groups who might prefer to be sitting in person in front of the speaker. Meeting planners need to consider the audience type and plan accordingly.
There are myriad methods that can be used in your event to appeal to people of varying learning types. Hands-on raining is excellent for kinesthetic learners, who no matter how many times something is demonstrated, don’t completely learn and own something until they do it themselves. Round table discussions are also a great way to learn for some in your audience. The smaller, more intimate information sharing sessions are more personal and appeal to people who feel lost or intimidated in a bigger group. Giving your audience an opportunity to meet the speakers and speak with them personally can make a huge impact. It’s a real thrill for your audience to meet someone whose work they respect and it can be a great — and memorable opportunity — to ask follow up questions.
Next month we will explore other facets of left brain/right brain thinking including presentation structure and room set-up.