Sacred Time

I can't tell you how many times I've asked myself, "What city am I in again?" when traveling for business. If the extent of their host-destination experience is their hotel and the convention center — with maybe a restaurant or two thrown in for good measure — how can meeting attendees have a distinct impression of where they've been?

With the focus on cramming meeting itineraries with rich content to make sure attendees get what they came for, I hope we don't lose sight of the place they've traveled to. Giving meeting participants a few free hours between the end of a session and an evening event can be all they need to get a sense of their surroundings. Why not include suggestions for local activities, such as a short walking tour, in your conference program?

Sometimes, they'll just want to strike out on their own. An impromptu visit to an historic and cultural site, taken with friends and colleagues, can peg a meeting and its host destination in someone's mind for years to come.

Last week at the PCMA Education Conference in Montreal, Convene Account Executive Wendy Krizmanic, Scientific Societies Director of Meetings Betty Ford, and I took advantage of a few free hours to venture to St. Joseph's Oratory, on the northern slope of Mount Royal. Wendy snapped some photos (including the one above) while I filed the experience in my memory bank, where it will be linked with the conference as part of my wonderful experience in Montreal.

Climbing Everest Virtually

Mountaineer Jamie Clarke knocked it out of the park yesterday at the 2010 PCMA Education Conference in Montreal, speaking passionately about the failures he encountered along the way to successfully summiting Mt. Everest. Clarke made us laugh, made us think, and made some of us mist up. He kept me, along with the entire audience, on the edge of our seats -- although the particular seat I was sitting in was 300 miles away in my home office in New York.

It's not the first time I've gotten great content by logging on remotely to a conference -- last February I wrote about logging into the Virtual Edge Summit. But this is the first time the experience has felt so emotionally compelling, or that I have felt so much a part of the experience. I think there are two reasons for that.

First, Clarke is a master storyteller. He used details brilliantly to convey experience -- I could almost smell chocolate-chip cookies baking in his mother's kitchen, and taste the cups of tea brewed in at base camp as Clarke spoke. (Um, yuk, if you happened to hear the talk. Watch it here if you missed it.) Clarke broke the rules, exceeding the length of time that conventional wisdom says is an appropriate time to speak. But at 45 minutes in, the energy in the room was palpable, even when delivered via streaming video

And secondly, the remote audience was skillfully and warmly invited into the experience by Jessica Levin and Mike McCurry. They greeted those who made their virtual presence known and kept tabs on the quality of the video experience. There wasn't a lot of tweeting going on during the talk -- it was that mesmerizing -- but our online exchanges had the feel of shared glances and nods. There was a consensus about what stood out in Clarke's talk, arrived at by way of tweets and retweets: Failure is a good teacher, if you can just boot your ego out of the way. Success doesn't come in one big, individual leap, it comes through collectively facing down difficulties, one by one. Family and relationships matter more than anything. Including online relationships, as Mike McCurry pointed out.

There's been a lot of talk about whether or not videoconferencing will hurt face-to-face meetings. As satisfying as it was to be in the remote audience, I can't imagine that any of us wouldn't have rather been there in person.

Or hasn't made a mental note: 2011?

P.S. Jamie Clarke talked about about embracing adventure and climbing your own Everest in the July issue of Convene.