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