As the Fall season gets underway, and large organizations are once again making decisions about whether and how to meet for purposes of organizational focus, there’s a new kid on the block – a new option for engaging your people – about which we thought you might enjoy hearing some perspective.
Twitter has emerged in the last year as a “back channel” for participant communication in certain types of group settings, notably conferences. As people hear stories about how a new discussion channel can be added to a learning conference, and how people were able to stay in touch with conference proceedings from home, they begin to ask themselves, “Should we be using Twitter in our organization’s meetings?”
Twitter isn’t the only new kid on the block, rather it’s the most widely used of the new technologies that make it easier than ever for participants to have a “voice” – to actually participate – in settings in which they were only mute observers in the recent past.
Over the last eighteen years CoVision has developed and practiced a methodology for engaging participants’ “voice” to build alignment and create innovative solutions in large organizational meetings. The blossoming of technologies that enable hearing that “voice” today is truly encouraging. Meeting designers are beginning to consider giving their participants that ability to be responsive. If you are thinking in those terms, here is a simple framework that can be helpful.
Effective Use of Participation Techniques in Organizational Meetings
Meetings in which the participant has little chance to respond, and which are not designed well or facilitated, risk becoming boring and unproductive for the participant – at best, it’s business as usual. Moving from the lower left quadrant upward – designing and facilitating the meeting well – that meeting becomes much more interesting and effective.
Giving participants the ability to respond in a meeting can also alleviate the boredom and drowsiness of one presentation after another. Moving from the lower left quadrant to the right, participants get a chance to respond to the proceedings, but often for purposes that are light and entertaining. Without a skillful design that is focused on the objectives of the meeting, this new response-ability can produce unfocused input that risks diluting, obscuring or even derailing those objectives.
In our experience, the ideal design provides a robust channel for participant response throughout the meeting, that is designed well into the detailed process flow. Moving from the upper left quadrant to the right, adds repeated opportunities for feedback and collective understanding that is focused on accomplishing ambitious organizational objectives (objectives that actually depend on that robust participation channel in order to be realized).
When people ask “Should we be using Twitter in our organization’s meetings?”, what they’re really asking is, “Will it be more productive if our participants are able to respond to what they’ll be hearing?” The answer from our perspective is an emphatic “Yes!” But it would be a mistake to consider participant input as a “back channel”, or to use it merely to “build a little excitement” in the room. The ability for participants to respond, and the ability to respond back to their collective ideas seriously, are the keys to achieving high levels of understanding and alignment within a group. And break-through results come by focusing that capacity on the organization’s most critical issues.
If you’re considering any particularly important meetings, and increasing the ability for participants to respond in them, call us to help you explore your many options.
Posted by Lenny Lind
Direct: +1 415 810 8194
Comments (4)
Lenny, outstanding insight!
Although we’re just an AV company, we’ve been doing our best to assist planners and producers in the best methods of integrating Twitter/Social Media into the very core of a live event. Frequently a plannner crafts a well-structured and well-executed social media plan for their event, resulting in a vibrant and active Twitter community participating in remarkably profound conversation. Then, unfortunately, it’s also often lost to the speakers, organizers and other attendees who have no idea of the knowledge sharing occurring in the very same building, lobby or even row where they sit!
Please keep the great thoughts coming, you have such a fabulous, unique perspective that is so refreshing.
Midori Connolly, Chief AVGirl
http://www.twitter.com/GreenA_V
Oops, I forgot one more thing, which is an outstanding article from Olivia Mitchell on how to speak to an audience that is Twittering…it ties in perfectly with your message of an engaged, interactive audience.
http://pistachioconsulting.com/twitter-presentations/
Enjoy!
Great article, Lenny. Thanks. Tricky thing is relying on Tweets for high-impact meetings. If the stakes are high, can’t take the risk with Twitter. Just tried to log on and it was over-capacity. If I were relying on it for the meeting I’m at now, would have been a disaster.
Thanks, Midori, for your post and good cheer. I’d like to take exception to your claim of Pulse Staging as “just an AV company” (!) We’ve worked with many and talked with many more over the decades, and find that AV companies who are willing to propose real interactivity in large meetings are few and far between. So, kudos back atcha.
If the problem were conscious, I’d say it’s a battle between those promoting one-way communication and those promoting two-way. But it’s clearly not conscious. I think the biggest competitor to implementing, as you said, a well-structured and well-executed social media plan for an event, is simply not knowing what is possible (and, incidentally, executives and AV companies alike not knowing how they can profit from it). They’re also unaware that there are some of us out here who by now know A LOT about how to implement interactivity to its fullest extent.
So when Twitter came along, we observed yet again how easily a new, fun technology could seduce folks into using it, willy-nilly, in apparently serious situations. I’m not saying it can’t be useful — it definitely can be — but rather that in most cases it’s use hasn’t been thought through in terms of meeting purpose, outcomes, sequencing, briefings to executives and presenters, instructions to the group, processing the twittered ideas, feeding themes back to the group, focusing subsequent discussions on those themes … and more. Those are many of the differences in our model, above, between the lower right and upper right quadrants. Tools appear in the lower right … using them well defines the upper right.
I have a hunch that you know what I’m talking about. Let’s pass it on …