In the beginning, the meetings industry was without cell phones, email and the Internet....

I wasn’t actually present at the creation, but I can remember a time when the main tools of the meetings industry were slide projectors, wired phones, and audiocassettes.  As a business and technology trends researcher and forecaster, I have presented over 2,000 keynote speeches over the past twenty-three years; roughly half of them to corporate events, the other half to national or international associations, governments and educational institutions.  The wide variety of industries I’ve worked with, coupled with my track record of accurate forecasts, provides a unique vantage point from which to assess where the meetings industry is coming from and, more importantly, to offer some valuable glimpses of its future.

First the past: What was it like before we were wired 24/7? – It’s hard to remember isn’t it?  Why?  Because technology has changed the way we live, work, and play.  It has given us the ability to do what was previously impossible.  In addition, technology-driven changes are not cyclical, they are irreversible.  

When I think back to when I first started speaking, multi-tasking had not progressed much beyond chatting on a clunky phone and fiddling with a primitive remote control device that offered three TV networks and a smattering of other choices.  My first PC in 1983 didn’t even have a hard drive much less an Internet connection.  Based on my research, I saw the digital future, but I knew I would have to wait to experience it.

For meetings professionals, the pace of change has always seemed fast, but as you all know, technology-driven change has been coming at us at a faster and faster pace every year.  Changes that once evolved over decades before being fully assimilated and adopted are now taking a few years, and in many cases only months.   Now, most of us go on the road equipped like Batman, and hardly break a sweat surfing hundreds of cable channels while answering email via WiFi, blogging, PODcasting, streaming video, playing computer games, downloading a DVD, uploading photos of the kids, and taking part in a video conference using our laptops across three time zones with no long distance fee.  Piece of cake!

Looking back, it seems like the whole world – let alone the meetings industry – has come a long way, and yet much remains the same. The cornerstone of your business is still the art, science, and magic of relationships. The need to meet, establish relationships, share information, knowledge, and above all wisdom is not going away.  No amount of high tech gadgetry is going to change that in a fundamental way.

In the mid-1990s, just after Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon.com and a host of other net-based companies started taking off, I recall reading a prediction that large face-to-face business meetings and conferences would soon be history; done in by e-meetings and videoconferencing.   Our days would be spent in a cubicle attending virtual meetings without ever again boarding an airplane, checking into a hotel, and getting lost in a labyrinthine conference center. In addition to being wrong, the prediction was just plain silly.   That’s what happens when you look at the capabilities of technology without looking at human needs.

Virtual meetings or e-meetings, Web-conferencing and videoconferencing have indeed come into their own as important business tools, but face-to-face meetings are still the dominant form of meeting and extremely relevant because there is no better way to build trust, and in our increasingly global marketplace trust is the glue that creates strong, successful, and enduring business relationships. Those who anticipated the end of face-to-face meetings made the mistake of using either/or thinking, which often occurs when dazzling new technologies first appear; the new thing is seen as destined to totally supplant the old thing – except that rarely happens.

Instead, the new and the old tend to coexist by doing what they do best. E-meetings, Web-conferencing and videoconferencing are superb tools for saving travel time and expense, focusing on a structured agenda, obtaining senior-level points of view in real-time, building consensus, and making announcements. They’re not so good at, smoothing out contentious give-and-take, or handling emotional or sensitive issues.  Fortunately both virtual meetings and face-to-face meetings are readily available. It’s not either/or anymore.  Both/and thinking is the new paradigm.

Technology is driving change at such a fast pace that we need to pre-solve tomorrow’s problems today before there is disruption. One future problem that I foresee is the growing need for more meetings in an interdependent world that generates increasing quantities of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom that needs to be communicated.

Some problem!

But it is one, if you neglect to develop guidelines for determining what type of meeting to have.  The key is to look at the meeting’s goal.  One of the traps meeting planners fall into is looking at business goals instead of human/emotional goals.   Think of it this way.  Is your goal to inform, motivate, inspire, persuade, influence, sell, gain trust, negotiate, gain respect, establish new relationships, strengthen existing relationships, share information, share knowledge and experiences, gain credibility, change how people think, solve a problem, determine a strategy, or simply create dialog?  Thinking about the goal for the meeting in this way makes it easier to decide what type of meeting will be best and what technology is most appropriate. 

·        If the goal is primarily to inform by sharing data and information, then a meeting may not even be necessary.  It might be far better to use e-mail, groupware, a wiki, a blog, or an Intranet or Extranet and let people collect and absorb the information at their own rate and in their own time. 

·        If you determine that sharing the information at the same time with everyone would be best, then consider audio conferencing and/or web-conferencing as an alternative to a face-to-face meeting.

·        If the information delivery during a meeting will primarily be one-way, then an e-conference would serve the purpose.  If, however, informing involves hands-on demonstrations and/or high levels of interactivity, then a face-to-face meeting is definitely in order.

·        If the goal is to influence, build on existing relationships, share knowledge and experiences, gain credibility, solve a problem, or determine a strategy, then a face-to-face meeting is best, but it is no longer the only option.  Technologies such as high-end videoconferencing and satellite-broadcast services that use full-motion video could help you accomplish your goals.  If all participants have access to broadband connections, and today most do, then web-conferencing offers another increasingly attractive option.  Audio-conferencing could also be a viable option depending on the number of people attending and the amount of interactivity required during the meeting.

·        If the goal is to gain trust and/or respect, or to inspire, motivate, persuade, establish relationships, negotiate, or change how people think, then a face-to-face meeting is a must.  If this is not possible, then the next best thing would be videoconferencing. 

The key is to think of your overall meeting goal, the number of people in the meeting or conference, the amount of human bonding and connection that accomplishing your goal will require, and the amount of interactivity that will be needed.  Then look at the tools available to you to see if an e-meeting will work.

The meetings industry needs to be reminded that technology is a friend, not an enemy. Sure, rapid, pervasive change can be a challenge; even so, there is insight in the adage, “no pain, no gain.” For every disruptive technology, there is eruptive opportunity.  How do you avoid the former and embrace the latter? One way is to set out to be tech-smart by not using new technology in the same old way. Many organizations utilize Return On Investment (ROI) as a benchmark, and justify their expenditures for new technology as a way to cut costs elsewhere. It’s the reason why change is so disruptive and eruptive opportunity so elusive: Everyone ends up being asked to do more and more with less and less, faster and faster.

The “investment” usually boils down to time and money.   But perhaps the “return” should be a behavior change based on actionable knowledge and guiding principles that can be applied to create better results.  I recommend using another benchmark – Return On Wisdom (ROW). Wisdom is the ultimate high-value, results oriented outcome meetings industry can deliver.  After all, people go to kindergarten, then on to elementary school, middle school, high school, college and graduate school – and then what? They go to meetings.

Meeting planners are in charge of the world’s adult education curriculum. That’s an immense responsibility and a heck of an eruptive opportunity.

 By using the simple ROW Triangle that accompanies this article as a template for evaluating the real investment return that is earned by your technology expenditures, eruptive opportunity becomes possible. There isn’t any metric voodoo involved in using it. Just a glance will tell you whether you’re in the low-value commoditized zone of data or the zone of its slightly more valuable cousin, information. Another glance and a few questions will reveal if you are focused on knowledge that is meaningful and actionable. Finally, at the apex – are you mining, cutting and polishing the true gems of human experience?

Time is the currency of the 21^st century. If your product or service exists in the bottom two tiers of the ROW Triangle, it probably means you are wasting your customers’ time (and therefore, money). They could have gotten that on the Internet or by email without going to a meeting. The top two tiers are actually saving time, and people welcome the opportunity to be at meetings with other people because for every dollar (or hour) they invest they gain hundreds or thousands in consultative value. The top half is where trusted advisors operate.

A successful speakers bureau knows the power and profit of being a trusted advisor. They move beyond offering a list of speakers to getting to know the exact needs of the meeting planners and working closely with them. Likewise, speakers should locate themselves on the triangle and ask, “Am I giving meeting participants loads of data in the form of charts and graphs? If so, am I wasting time they could better spend on Google? Perhaps I need to offer them actionable knowledge and guiding principles.”

I have started out many speeches by saying, “I going to predict the future – and I’ll be right.  How? By leaving out the parts I can be wrong about.”  Here is my prediction for our industry: The meetings industry will continue to be a human, relationship building industry.  Emerging technologies, such as 3D Web browsers, and IPTV, will continue to drive major changes in the meetings industry. Things that were impossible a decade ago will be commonplace a decade from now. You will succeed according to your ability to develop guidelines that leverage both old and new tools to build trusting relationships that foster greater communication, collaboration and community. 

About the author:  Daniel Burrus, CSP, CPAE, is the author of six books including the international best seller, Technotrends.  He researches global innovations in science and technology, and consumer trends based on the impact of technology. He is a strategic advisor to executives from many Fortune 500 companies, helping them to develop successful competitive strategies based on the creative application of leading-edge technologies.   For more information, contact mtaubleb@promenadespeakers.com or call 718-789-1136. This article is reprinted with permission. Reproduction without permission is strictly prohibited. For reprint permission, contact office@burrus.com or www.promenadespeakers.com.