Meetings as Structures

Sustainability in architecture is not a trend, it is now a given -- like inside plumbing, New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger said last night at the Tenement Museum in New York's Lower East Side. Goldberger also shared his top two favorite places in New York -- which turned out to be not buildings at all, but Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge --- as well as his views on "starchitects," the function of memorials in American culture, and the transforming power of architecture.

The evening made me think. About the built environment of New York City, but also about the parallels between events and buildings, how meetings can be seen as structures for creating community. They can play a role -- if a much more temporary one -- similar to that of architecture in shaping our social environment and interactions with each other.

Goldberger appeared at the museum as part of the "Tenement Talks" series, which occur every week, and sometimes more often. The events are far from fancy -- participants sip inexpensive wine from plastic cups, and sit on folding chairs. The main thing, however, is talk -- the series brings in an fascinating array of authors, academics, artists, and performers to speak about everything from historic waterfront strikes to Jewish cooking to Civil War history.

I love the museum, but I became a member because of Tenement Talks -- even though admission to them is almost always free.   I want to support them, because they connect me to people who share my interests.

The Architecture of Face-to-Face

Architect Witold Rybczynksi has just published a book called Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities. In an article in Slate that was adapted from the book, Rybczynksi traces the development of the American city from compact, densely populated, heavily industrial environment to decentralized, far-flung metropolitan area. It's an interesting read, and comes with the added benefit of validating this thing of ours:

Virtually every technological innovation of the last 50 years has facilitated, if not actually encouraged, urban dispersal. But the long-term effects of new technologies are often unpredictable. The telephone is, on the face of it, a decentralizing device. Yet telephone communication made working in high-rise office buildings practicable, which in turn produced the concentrated central business district. ... Laptops, personal digital assistants, and cell phones are held to be the tips of a great dispersal iceberg, but the migration of work to the motel room and the home office has been accompanied by a countervailing trend: the need for face-to-face contact. That is why there are more conferences, retreats, and conventions than ever before.

What do you think? Does technology create an ever-increasing demand for face-to-face interaction? If it does, is there an endpoint -- where technology will become sufficiently advanced to replicate face-to-face interaction perfect?

'Smaller Is Friendlier'

Erin Fuller, CAE, is group president of the Coulter Companies, which offers management, events, and consulting services for associations and other nonprofits -- meaning she has a lot of experience with a lot of different size meetings and conferences. In a post on Coulter's blog, she draws three conclusions about face-to-face meetings based on events that Coulter managed for two of its clients, the International Association of Continuing Education & Training (IACET) and Association Media & Publishing (AM&P):

1. Smaller is friendlier. This is actually stolen from Claridge's hotels, but rings true. The relatively intimate scale of the IACET and AM&P events made them feel special, and more like a celebration than a convention center filled with hundreds.

2. Bells and whistles might be overrated -- both events used a minimal amount of staging, production, signage and marketing.

3. We all obsess over lead time -- and just in time works just fine too. Neither event had a long lead time in terms of planning -- but the right people showed up just the same. When it is important, people will come.

The whole post is worth reading. And, lest you think Erin doesn't fully understand the intricacies of meeting planning, allow me to remind you of her last appearance on our blog. This is someone who knows what time it is.

Don't Monkey Around With Stress

Neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky spent a dozen years in Kenya studying the relationships within a troop of baboons and learned this: We primates really stress each other out. And, as a story about Sapolsky's work in the August issue of Wired relates, chronic stress contributes to a long list of health problems, including suppressed immune function, heart disease, depression, adult-onset diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, and many more.

The article suggest ways that individuals can help combat stress -- by getting enough sleep, for instance, meditating, and not getting into arguments. The article is less optimistic, however, about the possibility of zapping the external sources of chronic stress, particularly the stress of feeling out of control of your own experience.

In the meetings world, there's already a powerful movement afoot toward putting attendees' emotional and physical needs on the agenda, so that they can fully engage in learning and networking opportunities. Every meeting is in some ways its own universe, and organizers can make decisions along that way that reduce negative kinds of stress, leaving only the positive buzz of connecting with people and ideas.

One cure for stress are meetings themselves, and the relationship-building they make possible: Studies of monkeys show that the more socially isolated they are, the higher their levels of stress hormones and their mortality rate.

The Evidence-Based Case for Face-to-Face

There's new research to back up what most of us in the meetings industry already intuitively understand: Digital interactions can only get you so far. Sometimes you just need to meet face-to-face.

Gregory Northcraft, a professor of executive leadership at the University of Illinois, put three methods of communication to the test in a recent research project -- he compared the results of student groups who worked together by e-mail, Skpe and videoconferencing, or face-to-face. The group who worked face-to-face achieved more and trusted one another more than the other two groups. The videoconferencing group ranked second, followed by e-mail.

What's going on? "High-tech communication strips away the personal interaction needed to breed trust," concluded Northcraft, who holds a doctorate in social psychology and studies workplace collaboration, motivation, and decision-making. "Technology has made us much more efficient, but much less effective."

Northcraft isn't recommending that organizations stop using e-mail or videoconferencing. The key is recognizing the danger of relying exclusively on high-tech "lean" communications methods, he says. “If you don’t, the bottom line is that the job won’t get done as well.”

Northcraft's conclusions also offers compelling support for the case for attending annual meetings. It turns out that face-to-face is such a rich experience, it casts a glow over future digital communications -- at least for a while.

“Physical contact has a half life,” Northcraft said. “When people meet face to face, they can leverage that over a pretty lean communication medium for a while and the relationship will not degrade. But after a while, they need to get back together face to face to recharge the trust, the engagement and the loyalty in the relationship.”


Thanks to the PCMA LinkedIn group, and the University of Illinois News Bureau.

Rolling on the Floor, Meeting

If any more proof were needed that technology can lead to the creation of events, ROFLCon seems tailor-made to provide it. The conference, which was first held in 2008 and was reprised this spring on the MIT campus to a sold-out audience, is named after the acronym,"rolling on the floor, laughing" -- Internet-speak for "That was really, really funny."

The idea spun out from a tweetup of Harvard undergraduates who founded the conference as a way to meet their online heroes, such as the viral phenomenon known as The Tron Guy. Attendees seemed to have had a good time -- who wouldn't get a kick of out of meeting the creator of Clippy? -- while tackling serious subjects, like how the Internet is changing cultural notions of celebrity, and race and the Internet.

What really struck me is how durable the concept of meeting face-to-face is proving to be. For ROLFCon's attendees, who are utterly at home in cyberspace, meeting face-to-face still is something to get excited about -- even when the subject is cyberspace.