happen at Sage Summit. But she knew that she needed to find a way to create and sustain a deeper level of network- ing for her attendees — “Something more than what you can do,” Cote said, “over a coffee and a bagel.”
TRAILBLAZER WANTED Redesigning Sage Summit was a “big, big project,” Cote said, and she knew she needed help. But as she began to contact networking experts, she seemed to run into a brick wall. As she explained her goals, the people she reached out to quickly lost interest. In-depth network- ing might work for smaller groups, they told her, but trying to orchestrate it on a large scale, with hundreds of attendees, was destined to fail. Only one person — networking
expert Sarah Michel, CSP — was inter- ested. “She was the only person who said, ‘I’m in, I can make this work,’” Cote said. The two later would laugh about the dispirited first message that Cote left for Michel, almost taking it for granted that Michel, too, would say no.
“For anyone who hasn’t done anything new, it is really scary,” Cote said. “You need someone to be a pioneer and trail- blaze with you.” Michel is a dynamic and compelling
motivational speaker, but her interest also is in facilitating attendee interac- tion. She was introduced to Open Space Technology methods at a National Speakers Association workshop, she said, and “was blown away by the depth of the connections I made.” The experience convinced her to seek out additional training as an Open Space facilitator. In that role, instead of acting as “the
sage on the stage,” you are the “guide on the side,” Michel said. She added:
“You give up control and you are listen- ing more than you are speaking. It’s a totally different energy.”
PCMA.ORG
BUILDING SAGE CITY One of the tenets of Open Space is that attendees are self-organizing and define topics of discussion themselves, but with hundreds of attendees expected at Sage Summit 2012 — on Aug. 12–14 at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Con- vention Center in Nashville — it was impractical to wait until the conference began to initiate the process. So Cote and Michel used a modified Open Space design, relying on information gathered and refined through focus groups and collected through the conference reg- istration process. That allowed them to map out in advance what were likely to be hot topics for discussion, making the design flexible enough to allow them to create new groups on site. Their design also included using a
small army of guides whose role on site would be to help attendees connect with groups that closely matched their interests and to lead discussions. Sage invited its partners — vendors who sell the software to customers — to be trained as facilitators, through a series of webinars and in-person training programs conducted by Michel. Michel also trained dozens of Sage employees to back up the vendor facilitators. “It really was a comprehensive pro-
cess and took a lot of great effort,” said Greg Jones, a senior associate for strat- egy at Cramer, a Norwood, Mass.–based creative and production agency that also worked with Cote. “Our challenge was to take the [hundreds of ] people in one room, and fit them into different places in the Sage ecosystem. It was very important to quickly segment rooms into smaller chunks.” The process of breaking a large group
into more than 100 different special- interest groups was a complicated one, said Cote, who credits Cramer with pull- ing the elements into a single concept
— “Sage City” — that attendees could easily understand. Special-interest groups were divided into villages, with partner-facilitators designated as may- ors. Attendees then just had to pick a village and look for a “hot topic, ” which was labeled on a lollipop-style sign. The physical design of the meeting
space also reflected the idea of a city made up of a series of villages, with a
“road” — a carpeted path with a yellow stripe — circling the 55,000-square-foot Delta Ballroom at the Gaylord Opry- land. The room’s décor, by Los Angeles– based event designer Roger Hampton, created a series of globally inspired environments: a beer garden strung with lights, a cantina, park benches set against a skyscraper-filled mural back- drop. And the cost of decorating the room was distributed over the entire conference — the ballroom also was the setting for an opening-night party, with a central fountain later replaced with a center stage for the opening session.
SHOW TIME Although Cote and her team prepared extensively for the Aug. 14 Sage City session, opening session, the outcome was ultimately out of their hands. “We have done so much planning and dis- cussing and strategizing,” Cote said in an interview the week before Sage Summit 2012. “We’ve done what we could — now it is up to the attendees.” Minutes before the session, Cote told her boss she needed to excuse herself for a moment — to throw up. Convene had been invited to attend,
so we were there to see how Sage City was received. Things opened with the dramatic staccato of drum notes, and then Michel took the stage, explaining the session’s structure — which had already been detailed in multiple plat- forms, included pocket guides tucked
OCTOBER 2012 PCMA CONVENE 39
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108