together a whole new team of people for each meet- ing — keynote speakers, breakout speakers, the hotel and production staffs, and other outsourced personnel. They contend with thousands of moving parts, and in distant cities. All of which activate the execution part of the brain instead of the part that needs to be exercised, nurtured, and supported.

‘The conference industry is the experience economy and the social-networking economy personified.’

And what part is that, exactly? The founder, chairman, and co-chief executive of Panera Bread, Ronald M. Shaich, said recently in a New York Times interview that in all organizations there is a delivery muscle and a discovery muscle. He went on to suggest that most organizations focus way too much on the delivery muscle and give the discovery muscle short shrift. The dis- covery muscle in the meetings industry is about how attendees’ needs are changing and if they’re really being fed on an emotional level. The mega- question is: How engaged are participants at your conference and what can you do to turbo-charge engagement and become indispensable to people? This is a new frontier.

So, are you saying that people come to conferences because they instinctively know they need to exercise their discovery muscle and they see your conference as a way of solving that problem? Exactly. The difficult global economy, the ramp-up in complexity, the amount of change in society, the explosion of technology, the sheer amount of information — all these forces and factors are like a fire hose coming at people every minute. These forces are literally rewiring our brains as we try to cope. But whether we feel exhilarated or exhausted, in control or out of control, is a function of how we integrate it all and make sense of it around the campfire! And that’s what a good conference does: It puts you into an immersive experience with other human beings on their journeys, and it lifts you up and renews your faith in the future.

How do we avoid burnout and live up to this potential? On a practical level, I encourage meeting produc- ers to actually write out a conference vision state- ment — [to] go off to their brainstorming space and write out the vision statement. Then measure — quietly and secretly — everything else people suggest that is not in sync with the vision, [such as,] “We can cut that out, we can put some filler in here, and we can cheapen that.” Measure input

108 PCMA CONVENE DECEMBER 2012 PCMA.ORG