Now that we’re starting (finally) to understand that lectures aren’t necessarily the best way to go for educational sessions, some people are confused over how to use the expertise of presenters and still get people participating. Check out Mickie Ropps ideas on how to make it work.

Tech guru Corbin Ball has written an interesting new article on how technology is impacting adult education. The upshot of many of his points is that the Web is making us more impatient with some of the typical meeting problems, like PowerPoint abuse and talking head lecturers&8212;it’s about time we just said no to this stuff! But new tech tools also are giving us lots of ways to augment learning through audience participation, from real-time Web-based audience polling on cellphones to blogging and Web archives of conference sessions. He doesn’t break any really new ground, but it’s a good wrap-up of what’s going on technologically and how it is shaping the learning environment.

And what meeting planner isn’t? Check out this manifesto on Change This. Called Mind of the Innovator: Taming the Traps of Traditional Thinking, author Matthew May backs up what he’s talking about with examples.

One that took me aback was an experiment he did, giving the right answers to an exercise to the lowest status person in each group. Since no one listens to the low man/woman on the totem pole, no group came up with the right answers to the problem. Think about that one. Does this have any relevance to what happens when you’re brainstorming answers to a problem you’re facing?

Another great nugget in today’s RSS feeds: Pecha Kucha: Get to the PowerPoint in 20 Slides Then Sit the Hell Down from Wired magazine. The goal is twenty slides, 20 seconds per slide. It’d make those internal meetings fly, that’s for sure, though I’m not sure it “combines business meeting and poetry slam to transform corporate cliché into surprisingly compelling beat-the-clock performance art.”

It’s worth clicking through, just to see A Whole New Mind author Dan Pink’s example of Pecha Kucha in action. Plus, his PowerPoint is about the emotional intelligence of signs, which every planner who deals with signage should study, I think.

Sometimes, the process of just asking questions can be almost as powerful as answers; hence the potential of processes like Q-Storming. Jamie Notter takes a different take on questions as training tools. Referencing this article from Associations Now (which is a great read, BTW), Jamie says about conflict resolution training he does:

I have people pair up, where one person has a problem, and the other is the “coach” who will help solve the problem. I encourage people to use actual problems—things they really aren’t sure how to solve or what to do next.

The coach has one important restriction: she or he can ONLY ask questions (interrogative-led questions are recommended). You can’t ask questions that are really suggestions (Have you tried talking directly with the boss?). They must be open ended (What have you tried?).

You may be surprised at how incredibly difficult it is to ONLY ask questions. We want to solve problems, and we want to provide answers. To help means to tell others what they should do. Suggesting to others what they should do is not evil—but it does not get us the same results we get when we merely ask questions and THEY figure out what to do on their own.

That’s it exactly. You learn by doing—in this case, by going through the thought process yourself to come up with the answers. I wish more learning opportunities used this approach. There would, I bet, be a whole lot more learning going on.

I’ve never understood why more meetings (or all meetings, for that matter) don’t incorporate good adult education principles. If you’re as adamant as I am that meetings actually are about learning, check out these articles:

Education Grows Up

10 Things We Must Change about Association Meetings

Shake It Up

Think Bold

Inching Forward

For Adults Only

More on adult learning from the face2face blog

As any meeting planner knows, the environment can make or break a meeting. And now, thanks to the Journal of Consumer Research, we’ll soon have a study to prove it, at least in terms of ceiling heights. If you have a lot of details to work on, a low-ceiling room will help keep people grounded, the study found. But if you want people to concentrate on the big picture, high ceilings will help their brains get in the right frame of mind (so to speak).

Thanks to the Church of the Customer blog for the pointer!

It’s now official: PowerPoint is bad for your brain. Here’s the science. (Thanks to Seth Godin for the pointer.)

Here’s an interesting study for those among us interested in adult education: Watching With Intent To Repeat Ignites Key Learning Area Of Brain. A snip:

As detailed in the Dec. 20 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, found that when a person watches someone else perform a task with the intention of later replicating the observed performance, motor areas of the brain are activated in a fashion similar to that with accompanies actual movement.

I haven’t looked into this in any great depth, but it seems like this info could be useful to those whose sessions involve teaching motor skills of some sort—from surgical techniques to cake decorating. (Thanks to Guy Kawasaki for the pointer.)

So far, the 3rd Annual Pharmaceutical Meeting Planner Forum, which started today at the convention center in Philadelphia, has been pretty interesting, if I do say so myself (we co-organize the show with The Center for Business Intelligence).

For example, the session I attended this morning on planning and executing R&D and investigator meetings was an excellent case in point on good educational formatting, I thought. The session leader gave us a case study that, she said, was based on actual things that happened at four investigator meetings. Each table in the room spent the next hour or so gasping, sighing, and railing at all the stupid things the organizers did (what, they didn’t know there was going to be construction going on at the hotel? The lead guy adds six breakouts, with full AV, F&B, laptops and flipcharts, at the last minute?), and then devising ways to keep those stupid things from happening. While a lot of what we came up with was of interest only to pharmaceutical meeting planners, some general takeaways for any meeting planner are:

-Set up a pre-meeting with all the meeting stakeholders and rough out meeting goals, objectives, rough agendas.

-Define the roles and responsibilities of all parties involved, from in-house planners to third parties to those in charge of calling the meeting to be held in the first place.

-Site selection has to be based on what’s important to achieving the objective, not where the internal stakeholder has relatives he wants to visit, has a daughter who is the social chair of her sorority and “corporate party planning is something she would like to explore,” etc., etc. (and that party planner thing got everyone at my table’s ire up big time—”someone has to explain to Leonard [the fictitious internal stakeholder] that what we do is not party planning,” said one irate tablemate of mine).
-Ensure that the facilitator can control the discussion. If not, have a staff person who can step in if the meeting starts getting off-topic or stuck on someone’s personal pet peeve.
-Hold a weekly or biweekly call with all the stakeholders. “I dread these calls,” said one participant. “But things come up, like AV requirements, that I wouldn’t have known about otherwise. You need to know what they need to set your budget.”
-Have a standard contract addendum that deals with construction at the hotel over your meeting dates, competitors holding meetings concurrent with yours, and other critical issues.

After a break, we had roundtable discussion on various different topics that ranged from technology to tools and tips to meeting registration challenges, to partnering with legal, compliance, strategic sourcing, and procurement. I took it as a good sign that the room was just as full after the break as it was before. Our table got a little off topic, but we ended up having some best practices to share with the room at large once time came to report out, so we must have done something right!