‘The fundamental weakness of evaluations is you don’t know whether even high marks are going to translate into any change in behavior or performance.’
managers, there are all kinds of ways you can make it small and experimental — then you have more confidence that once you do make the changes on the big stage, it’s going to work out.
One of the things you talk about in Great by Choice is the “20 Mile March” — pacing yourself and having concrete, clear, intelligent, and rigorously pursued performance mechanisms. Planners struggle with how to measure the benefits that participants get out of their meetings. How can you apply the 20 Mile March concept to that challenge? I think there are two things to think about. The 20 Mile March is the idea that the path to great- ness lies in finding progress markers and being extremely committed to hitting them every quar- ter or every year, year in and year out — that it’s a long march to greatness. In your industry, what would that be like?
Clearly to me, it cannot be that you’re just seeing each event as an isolated event. What if your chal- lenge is to keep on improving just a little bit every time? You have to then set markers that are pretty hard on yourself. So first, the attitude towards suc- cess is long term, it’s across all the conferences and it’s focused on a few markers that we know make a difference. The second important question is, what markers? What do you pick if you are a meet- ing planner? There’s a parallel to my own world
here, because I teach a lot of executive education and of course we wonder — if we have a participant executive program for a few days — how do we know we’re successful?
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Right, how can you measure what kind of impact you’ve made on the participants? The only way to measure it today is the evalua- tion participants are filling out at the end of the program — [i.e.,] on a scale of one to five, rate the speakers, rate the sessions, overall how satisfied are you? How much did you learn? I happen to be very skeptical of the idea that what somebody got out of the program is going to translate into making them better leaders or performers. We do not know. So you are in a territory here where it’s difficult. The fundamental weakness of [evaluations] is
that you don’t know whether even high marks — say someone says [he or she] is really satisfied, that it was a great event, [s/he] had a good time — you have no idea whether that is going to translate into any change in behavior or performance. One option is to survey people after the confer-
ence, three months out. You might say, “We can’t do that — we’ll get even less of a response rate.” And that’s going to be difficult — people might have trouble pinpointing exactly what they took away from it themselves.