The Nice Thing About Meetings Is ...

Do face-to-face meetings make people nicer? That's one way of looking at an article about the frequently vicious nature of anonymous Internet comments that was published in The New York Times the other day. What really jumped out at me was a quote from Kathleen Taylor, author of Cruelty: Human Evil and the Human Brain:

"We're evolved to be face-to-face creatures. We developed to have constant feedback from others, telling us if it was O.K. to be saying what we're saying. On the Internet, you get nothing, no body language, no gesture. So you get this feeling of unlimited power because there is nothing stopping you, no instant feedback."

It's similar to what Richard D. Arvey, Ph.D., head of the Department of Management and Organization at the National University of Singapore, wrote in a recent Point/Counterpoint column for Convene about whether virtual events are an acceptable substitute for face-to-face meetings (digital version here, registration required; text-only version here):

Real-time, face-to-face interactions also allow us to develop strong relationships, obligations, and social identities that are often hidden in virtual environments. Moreover, face-to-face meetings set up expectations regarding future obligations, social support, and opportunities.

Are in-person meetings inherently more civil than pretty much anything that happens online? Is there anything you do at your face-to-face events to ensure that? Or by dint of seeing each other in the flesh, do your attendees always behave themselves -- even when they disagree?

Lights! Camera! Act Green!

As crucial as they may be toward making meetings sustainable, low-flush toilets and double-sided copies aren't exactly ... fun. But these fake movie trailers created by the fertile minds at Travel Portland are. This is just one of a handful of faux trailers that will make you laugh while making the point that Portland puts a high priority on sustainable meetings. Find more on the Travel Portland website.

The Secret History of Earth Day

Happy Earth Day! Now let's talk about what really matters: how meetings played a crucial role in its creation. To tell the story, we need to (a) consult the University of Wisconsin's Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, and (b) travel back to Sept. 20, 1969, when, during a speech to "a fledgling conservation group in Seattle," Sen. Gaylord Nelson proposed that the United States hold "a national teach-in on the environment to send a message to Washington that public opinion was solidly behind a bold political agenda on environmental problems." He repeated the idea "six days later in Atlantic City to a meeting of the United Auto Workers." The idea picked up steam, became the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, and eventually spread around the world.

But for our purposes, it's enough to know that Earth Day happened because someone with a good idea had a forum in which to express it -- a meeting. Or two meetings, as the case may be. And, on this 40th Earth Day, we here at Convene take some comfort in the fact that we recently retired our Green Meetings department because specific initiatives to make meetings and conventions more environmentally conscious have become, if not common, then certainly not unusual. They're just not news anymore.

We keep this up and pretty soon we won't need Earth Day at all.

Today on Yesterday on Tomorrow

I love retrofuturism, so finding out about the blog Paleo-Future -- which offers "A Look Into the Future That Never Was" -- has had a truly threatening effect on my productivity today. Paleo-Future is full of old newspaper and magazine articles, advertisements, artwork, and other past media predicting how life would be lived in the years to come. And, amid the piles of things that never came to be -- the flying cars and moon outposts and robot servants -- are some things that kinda, sorta have, such as "laser-holography," whose development was predicted in a 1979 book called Future Cities: Homes and Living Into the 21st Century.

The specific technology for laser-holography, "which creates 3-D pictures apparently out of thin air," according to Future Cities, might not be here quite yet, but see if the applications foreseen by the book's authors, via the illustration and caption above, don't ring a bell:

On the left the heads of a branch office have just come in to their boardroom, first thing in the morning. Across their table is their boss. He is in the head office of the company in the centre of a major city thousands of miles away. ... 3-D cameras hanging from the ceilings of each room create the illusion of a complete room with the two sides present.... Electronic conferences like this would save enormous amounts of time, money and energy.

This sounds an awful lot like high-definition videoconferencing, which I wrote about for Convene a few issues ago (digital version here, registration required; text version here). Certainly the goals of laser-holography and, say, Tata Communications' Telepresence program are similar. As John Landau, Tata's senior vice president of global managed services, told me: "We telecom people used to talk about how the world is shrinking. Planes did a lot of that. This is shrinking the world that much more."

Which is pretty cool, even without the flying cars.

Thanks to Very Short List for introducing me to Paleo-Future.

Cold Comfort

My friend and former coworker Erin Fuller is an accomplished association executive and strategic consultant. Today she spoke to the National Association of Home Builders. This was her status update on Facebook just before she did:

Erin M. Fuller is about to speak at the Natl Assn of Home Builders' conference... In a very chilly room.

Yes, that's right: People will always notice if the room is too cold. But, say Erin had tweeted this and tagged it to your event, and you were monitoring the backchannel, so you found out about it as soon as she did. Isn't it pretty cool (no pun intended) that you'd be able to respond to speaker feedback almost immediately? If you couldn't bump up the temperature, you could at least bring her a nice cup of hot tea. And then it would be your turn to tweet.

Beginner's Mind

Change -- galloping, exhilarating, stomach-churning change -- has made most of us beginners again at some aspect of our jobs. No matter how many years you have invested in becoming really, really good at what you do, chances you are now having to learn new things -- and learning to think differently -- in order to remain effective.

And you're probably going to stink at the new stuff for a while. That's according to Ira Glass, the extraordinarily successful host and producer of "This American Life." But being able to tolerate being not-so-great at something while you work to become as skilled as you want to be is not only okay, it is absolutely necessary, Glass says. In the second part of a three-part video on storytelling, Glass generously shares some of the not-so-great work that he did on the way to becoming a master.

The segment brought to mind some of the ideas we've presented in Convene, including my talk with Stanford psychology prof Carol Dweck about the difference between a "fixed" and a "growth" mindset, and Chris Durso's exchange with author Malcolm Gladwell about the ingredients of success.

And, come to think of it, my yoga teacher, who said this morning as I lost my balance in a challenging pose: "Falling is doing."

Convene Reads: Nothing to Envy

In Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, Barbara Demick sketches a portrait of life inside North Korea by profiling six people who have managed to defect to South Korea -- including Kim Hyuck, who spent 20 months in one of North Korea's unforgiving labor camps. Demick writes:

"Nobody ever thinks they are going to die. They all think they will survive and see their families again, but then it just happens," Hyuck told me years later when he was living in Seoul. He had returned not long before from a human rights conference in Warsaw where he testified. Afterward he toured Auschwitz and noted the parallels with his own experience. In his labor camp, nobody was gassed -- if they were too weak to work they were sent to another prison. Although some were executed and some were beaten, the primary means of inflicting punishment was withholding food. Starvation was the way the regime preferred to eliminate its opponents.

Hyuck's story is harrowing, as is Demick's entire book. But maybe we can take some small comfort in the fact that conferences of the type that Hyuck attended in Warsaw are helping shine a light on situations like this.

The (Pillow) Case for Face-to-Face

Proof that people will do just about anything to get together and have a good time: The World's Largest Pillow Fight, in Union Square in New York City, on Apr. 3, in honor of International Pillow Fight Day. Full disclosure: I went with friends (and a pillow) and had a blast -- even if I only lasted ten minutes and couldn't stop apologizing ...

Reflections on the Nuclear Summit

The Nuclear Security Summit has just wrapped up, and it was interesting to see how this extremely high-profile, two-day international conference was treated here in the Washington, D.C., area. On the one hand, obviously, it was a story with global relevance -- a historic gathering of world leaders convened by President Obama himself -- and it was covered as such by, for example, The Washington Post. But it was also a big local story, mostly because of its impact on traffic, thanks to the cordoning off of streets around the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, the diverting of more than a dozen bus lines, and the closing of a key Metro station downtown.

Living through this dichotomy -- massive universal import, mundane local inconvenience -- has made me think about the meetings professionals who work backstage at events like this. Is it any different putting together something like the Nuclear Security Summit than, say, an annual trade show for the construction industry? Do the potentially world-changing implications lend it an emotional resonance that's lacking from an everyday convention? Might there even be something like stage fright involved, given all the heads of state walking around and the relentless scrutiny of the international media? Or is a meeting pretty much always a meeting? The sum total of the planning and organization that goes into it?

PHOTO: Chuck Kennedy / The White House

"Leading by Example" Subject (and Marine Corps WWII Veteran) R.V. Burgin on the Today Show

As we've mentioned before in this space, Convene's April issue contains a riveting (if I do say so myself) "Leading by Example" profile of R.V. Burgin, a World War II Marine veteran who last month published a memoir called Islands of the Damned: A Marine at War in the Pacific.

On top of all this (the 87-year-old Texan gets around!), Burgin is at the moment co-starring — well, sort of — in the new HBO mini-series The Pacific. When I say "sort of," I mean that Burgin, as played by Northern Irish actor Martin McCann, is a prominent character in the show.

As such, click "play" below to see a fun, four-minute interview with both Burgin and McCann on a recent edition of the Today show. When the tall Burgin was asked what he thought when he learned that the somewhat more diminutive McCann would be playing him, the wry, spry vet replied, "I thought they needed to stretch him out a little bit."

Watch on below, and then click here for the digital edition of Convene's April issue, where you can (after logging in or, for non-members, simply entering your email address) read my profile of Burgin on p. 60.