I have been going over my notes from the Pharma Forum 2012 lately, and this part really struck me: Mary Beth McEuen, executive director of The Maritz Institute, held a fascinating session on how to use the neuroscience of engagement to create more meaningful events. During the session, she discussed a Cornell study on face-to-face meetings that found three main things meetings can accomplish better than other means of communication:

1. They capture attendees’ attention with relevance and novelty. And capturing attention can be difficult. People tend to think they’re multitasking, when in fact they’re just switching back and forth between tasks so that no one thing gets their full attention or is stored in long-term memory. “When we build in novelty and provide a multisensory experience, we pop people out of autopilot” and gain their full attention, McEuen said.

2. They inspire a positive emotional climate. Emotions are contagious, she said, and “people adjust their behavior to the emotion of the room.” Emotions also are stored in our memories. So when you reflect on a meeting, the emotions you felt at the time will come back—and it will reflect on how you feel about the organization.

3. Face-to-face meetings are where you build your web of human relationships.

What else do face-to-face gatherings do that other types of communications just can’t quite accomplish? I’d add that the good ones provide a safe place to experiment and try out new ideas and ways of doing things, which emboldens people to actually put what they learn into practice.

This Wired article, while it’s talking about using the “flipped classroom” format for students, easily can be applied to adult learning as well. The biggest drawback to asking people to do the information transfer first, then use face-to-face time to apply it or deepen the knowledge, is just what one of the commenters points out: That people won’t do their homework and so are unprepared to take advantage of applying that information so it really becomes learning. I’ve seen that happen over and over at conferences—well, OK, not that much, since so few people ask participants to actually invest time in their learning ahead of a conference—but the few times I’ve experienced it, pretty much no one did it. So the educators had to turn themselves into presenters after all.

Why is that the case? I think part of it is that we’ve become accustomed to being very lazy learners. It’s so easy to just sit and listen to a lecture; not so easy to find an hour before you leave to watch that video, think about it, find ways you’d like to apply it, etc. And then go and roll our sleeves up and work through an actual application of some kind. After all, doesn’t that make a whole lot more sense than traveling a thousand miles to learn what you could have Googled from the comfort of your desktop, then going home and trying to figure out on your own how to make that info work for your specific challenges? That’s a whole lot harder, which is also probably a significant factor in why 95 percent of most of the info learned at conferences, in my experience, never get put into practice.

Though we all tend to say we go to conferences to learn (and network), I can’t help but wonder how many of us, if given the option to turbo-charge the info-dump into a true learning experience, would think it worth the effort involved? And if we don’t, why are we surprised that kids don’t, either?

You know that you feel differently if you’re dressed for a gala, work, or schlubbing around the house, but did you know that even wearing the same article of clothing can make you feel differently? According to this New York Times article, just donning a doctor’s white coat makes you more attentive, while slipping into the same white coat thinking it belongs to a painter does nothing for you.

This interesting human quirk is being called “enclothed cognition,” and it’s just one more fascinating mind/body connection that I believe meeting planners need to keep in mind, whether their meeting has a dress code or not. Wouldn’t it be interesting to provide attendees some sort of garment (hat, scarf, vest, whatever) that is somehow imbued with meaning the way a doc’s white coat is, and see if/how the learning behaviors change?

Today’s Boston Globe had an interesting tidbit called What What Religions are Good At that I found fascinating. It talks about a new book by Alain de Botton called Religion for Atheists, in which the author argues that one doesn’t have to believe in a religion to “enjoy the best bits.”

One example the article talks about is how religions handle education versus how secular society does. We send people to a university for fouryears (or however many years it takes) and then think all the learning has been done. The article points out, “You don’t go to four years of church, then stop going for the rest of your life. Instead, a religious tradition asks you to think about the same questions and ideas over and over throughout your life, even providing you with daily and annual schedules for reflection.

That’s the kind of education you need, de Botton argues, if you’re going to learn the things people really care about learning…” While how to make a better widget may not be up there with death, pain, and love, a religious approach, as he describes it here, does follow a lot more closely with adult learning principles than what we usually do. Interesting to think about on this lovely Sunday afternoon.

You may know (I hope!) how much room sets matter when it comes to creating a space where real learning can happen, but do you know just how much what’s going on with our bodies affects our thinking and, consequently, our learning? I know I’ve talked about cross-sensory perception before, and I even had the opportunity to tap into the brilliance of Kare Anderson to learn more.

And now I just ran across this New York Times article on how literally thinking outside the box can boost creativity. Illustrating that there may just be some truth in truisms, even those as trite and overused as “thinking outside the box,” is research by Suntae Kim, a doctoral candidate and Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, an associate professor, at the University of Michigan; and Evan Polman, a visiting assistant professor of management and organizations at New York University. According to the Times, students facing creative challenges came up with 20 percent more creative solutions when sitting outside a literal box than inside one. And the old saw about weighing something on one hand and then the other before making a decision? Again, taken literally, in students who were asked to come up with new uses for a university complex who were “allowed to switch hands — in other words, to think about a problem on ‘one hand’ and then ‘on the other hand’ — we found a nearly 50 percent increase in the number of uses generated.”

So, if people literally let a cat out of a bag, do they become more loosely lipped?
If you get people who haven’t been on one for years to ride a bike, do they find it easier to remember other skills?
If you have people fall off a horse and then climb back on, do they become more resilient in other areas?
If you have people sit in glass houses and throw stones, do they become develop better self control?

So much to research, so little time!

And now a little postscript that also relates to creativity, though in a different way: This was some seriously smart PR work on the part of SoHoSoleil Locations, which according to its Web site is an “exclusive group of New York rental spaces for corporate meetings, events, photo, TV, and video shoots.” Someone there forwarded the link to the NYT article to me, and it is a terrific argument for using just the sort of space I saw when I looked them up. Nice!

I remember a ski instructor using that as his mantra way back when on the scratchy slopes of Mount Tom, and I adopted for pretty much every slippery slope I’ve encountered in life so far (and have some pretty spectacular learning lessons along the way as a result). So when I saw this post on Gaping Void, I had to share: Failure is my muse. This is why we need EventCamp and PCMA and W2W and all the groups and people who keep trying new things and not just survive their failures, but are inspired by them.

Another great info-chunker is learning evangelist Kathleen Edwards, who is rapidly becoming one of my new favorite meeting design experts. At her 15-minute session at the Learning Pavilion, she had kind of a new year’s theme, as in “Out with old, in with the new.”

What’s out:
A small group of people on a program committee who may or may not know what the audience wants and/or needs making all the content choices for the conference.

What’s in:
Using technology to connect with the audience to learn what they really need.

What’s out:
Speakers who try to cram everything they’ve ever learned into a session.

What’s in:
Outcomes-focused, learner-centered sessions that focus on key points that can be digested over the course of the session.

What’s out:
Sage on the stage providing a one-way firehose of information.

What’s in:
Guide on the side who engages the learners and facilitates learning by making it all about you, the learner.

What’s out:
Learner apathy, as in people who just sit and passively absorb (or not) the information.

What’s in:
Learners who take charge of their learning. If they aren’t getting what they want, they’ll go somewhere else to get it.

I had a blast this morning facilitating (with a serious power assist from Velvet Chainsaw’s Jeff Hurt) one the Really Live Chats in the PCMA Convening Leaders Learning Lounge. The topic was “designing meetings for learning,” or something like that—in true chat form, we meandered around a bit.

The format was pretty cool. The Velvet Chainsaw peeps had recorded (some recordings more polished than others) a bunch of really interesting people saying some really interesting things about meetings, brains, learning, and how grown-ups perceive the world and each other. We would watch a video, or more likely, a short snip of a video, then talk about it, brainstorm, spark ideas off of each other, gain insights or just commiserate when we couldn’t think of ways to get at a specific issue.

As one person said, it was great to have the option to do something informal but not totally unstructured, as a break from the more formal breakouts going on elsewhere.

I haven’t had time to put my thoughts together too coherently, since I haven’t had a whole lot of time to stop and reflect on what came out of that Really Live Chat (one of the things we did talk about a lot was the need to build in reflection times so our brains have time to digest what we’re learning, but to do it in a more organic way than just say, “stop and talk amongst yourselves”). But I will say without much reflection at all that I love the format, and having the videos to get discussions started, and then tying what they talk about into real-life examples of what we do and what we now would like to do, is one example of a well-designed meeting component if you want people to learn rather than just hear content.

What I would love to do is, once the videos are posted (which I hear they will be), is to sort of reverse-reverse engineer the format and try to maybe put together a Google+ hangout or some other easy, informal way to continue the conversations as we learn more from the Big Brains, and/or bring new folks into the discussions. We only viewed maybe two full videos and a piece of a third; there is so much more there to talk about and we only have so many hours here in San Diego (did I mention the absolute hugeness of the content on tap here? Not just in the Learning Lounge and general sessions and breakouts, but there’s also the co-located Virtual Edge Summit’s plethora of interesting-sounding deep dives into hybrid, virtual, 3D, and who knows what else meetings?).

We all know that our senses don’t work in isolation, that what we see can affect what we taste (which may explain why green ketchup didn’t take off, and why Coke’s plan to help polar bears with a special edition of its regular Coke in white cans freaked out regular Coke drinkers, who insisted that it tasted like Diet Coke even though the formula was exactly the same). Retail stores have soundtracks designed specifically to slow you down so you shop longer.

But it wasn’t until reading this article on cross-sensory perception in The Boston Globe last week that I realized just how much our senses cross over to affect each other. (Though it’s not the same as synesthesia, which has always fascinated me, it has to be related.) A few examples from the article:

Research has found that “people rate potato chips as crisper and better-tasting when a louder crunch is played back over headphones as they eat. A study published this year showed that people thought a strawberry mousse tasted sweeter, more intense, and better when they ate it off a white plate rather than a black plate.”

And while we know that decor and environmental factors can enhance (or detract from) a dining experience, that strong-smelling floral arrangement centerpiece may actually be making the food taste bad. As the article points out: “…we are now beginning to understand that these elements don’t just create atmosphere and associations — they can actually make food taste different. For example, several studies have found that adding red coloring can make drinks taste sweeter, allowing a company to reduce sugar content while turning color up a notch.”

Also according to the article, a company called Condiment Junkie is finding ways to use sound to enhance experiences. For example, “The company has worked with Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, England, run by celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal, to develop soundtracks to bring out specific flavors in the food, based on their finding that hearing certain sounds (high tones, tinkling pianos) make people perceive a bittersweet toffee as more sweet, while hearing low-pitched tones and trombones make the toffee taste more bitter.”

Why meeting planners should care about all this? Well, for one thing, it’s already spawned a conference of its own to share findings around cross-sensory perception. And it has obvious F&B implications, of course. Here’s another: “And the new work may ultimately affect how the rest of us learn, as well. Shams’s group at UCLA has found that people learn a visual task better when it’s accompanied by sound, for instance — even when they are later tested using only vision.”

But more importantly, just think of all the things we can do to enhance our learning environment if we can quantify other ways in which one sensory input also affects other senses in ways that enhance learning. It sounds like we’re just beginning to untangle how all these sensory interactions mesh to enhance, detract from, amplify, or otherwise affect how we experience the world, and how we learn.

If anyone knows of good research in this area, please let me know. I’m deeply fascinated by the whole topic.

“Mission mirroring” is described as “the phenomenon that occurs when an organization [or a meeting, adds me] becomes enmeshed internally in the same conflicts it was founded to deal with externally.” When I read about it on Mark Athitakis’ Acronym post, I couldn’t help but think of all those meeting sessions I’ve been to on how to conduct good, relevant adult education, delivered didactically with hideously convoluted, impossible to read PowerPoint decks, with the speaker all the while saying, “Do as I say, not as I do.”

Uh, disconnect or what?

Mark asks, “Is simply acknowledging the problem quite enough to help fix it?” GIven my meeting example, definitely not, especially since it has been going on for at least the 12 (or is it 13 now?) years I’ve been covering this industry. While I have seen some small improvements (and to be fair, there are some people who rock the house at actually using adult learning principles to teach adult learning principles), it’s all too often still the norm. And these are the educators! I’m not sure what we can do to break this mirror. Any suggestions?