Simple-Minded In a hectic, complex world, it may be the way to go E
ach January, our magazine gets a fresh crop of PCMAmembers who volunteer to serve on the
Convene Task Force. Their mission is simple: Whether they plan meetings, sell venues, or market destinations for meet- ings, they’re the ones out in the field, boots on the ground. Our editorial team
relies on them to provide honest feedback on our articles and to offer ideas—ones that speak to them where they live—for us to follow up on. Our first get-together is at PCMA’s Annual
Meeting in January, and I never know where our conversation will take us. When some of the 2010 Task Force members and the editorial teammet in Dallas at the beginning of this year, the discussion was wide-ranging. But one theme seemed to resonate with the group: Can we please get back to basics? The frenetic pace of change, the expectation
that we stay plugged in 24/7, the bombardment of information we receive on a daily basis, doing more with less…it overwhelms us all. We don’t seem to find the time, the group agreed, for common courtesies, such as acknowledging receipt of an RFP (that goes for both suppliers and planners), or letting candi- dates knowwhere they stand with a job. That one struck a chord with me. When we
posted an opening for a senior-editor position here at Convene last fall, we were inundated with resumes. (If you think the meetings indus- try was off last year, you should take a look at magazine publishing.) But we felt it was impor- tant to send an e-mail to everyone who threw their hat into the ring.We simply let them know that we received their resume and would be in touch if we wanted more information. You can’t imagine how many grateful
responses we got, including this one: “I appre- ciate your actually responding. It’s a jungle out here, and after so many applications, it’s reassuring to know that some employers take
4 pcmaconvene March 2010
the time to acknowledge submissions.” Our discussion in Dallas about courtesy led
to thismonth’s Point/Counterpoint (p. 104), which debates whether handwritten thank-you notes should be de rigueur in today’s jobmar- ket. Convene Task Force member Kirsten Olean, CMP, picked up where we left off at our meeting and contributed the pro side. There’s something else I took away from
our conversation. In an increasingly complex workplace—and society at large—when things seem to be spiraling out of control, we hunger for simplicity.We seek simple solutions. Give me something I can use.Now. That’s why I’mso keen on The Checklist
Manifesto, a new book by Atul Gawande (see Leading Learning on p. 24, and an excerpt of the book on p. 60). Gawande, a surgeon and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, believes that simple checklists can help us man- age even the most complicated tasks—from flying a 747 to performing 12-hour surgeries to building skyscrapers. And next on my reading list is Switch:How to Change Things When Change IsHard, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, which also proposes an elegant solution to what seemto be hopelessly intractable prob- lems: Find a bright spot and clone it. I didn’t think I would find many bright
spots when I cracked open the results of this year’s Annual Meetings Market Survey (p. 32). But, despite the dismal year that was, planners seem determined to make 2010 better. I espe- cially like what one respondent said: “The meetings industry is definitely going to change over the next year because it is an evolving industry. I don’t believe it will change for the better or for the worse. It will just be different —and that is the best challenge of the job!”
FORGIVENESS EXPERT: You can’t find problems more seemingly insur- mountable than the ones psychologist Fred Luskin encoun- ters. Luskin, who is the subject of this month’s Leading by Example profile (p. 53), has helped people around the world, in even the most tragic of cir- cumstances, apply simple methods for practicing forgive- ness — and, as a friend of mine is fond of saying, “get on with the getting on.”