PCMA CONVENING LEADERS 2014 PREVIEW

Mike Walsh on Innovating Like an Anthropologist

Rather than giving people lots of surveys, asking them whether they like the food you were serving, just look at what they’re eating. Look at where they’re hanging out. What are people doing? Give somebody the job of keeping a diary during the meeting, just following people around.

Where are they hanging out? What are some weird prob- lems? Like when you go to a tech conference — the first thing that everyone is fighting over is electricity plugs.

Look at what people do. Then, rather than fighting their behavior, the second step is to [ask yourself,] if my at- tendee is in charge of innovation, how can I let them lead me to make this a better event? The key is don’t do a focus group. Don’t do a survey. Just observe.

But let’s say that before they added you on those social

networks, you met them first at an event. You spent even just five minutes over coffee talking about your mutual interests. When they then add you on a social network, you’ve got a context for that relationship. In fact, the social networks at that point will strengthen those ties. There is actually a kind of a symbiotic relationship between interpersonal physical interactions and social networks.

So when you meet face-to-face, your conversations start at a different level? I would reverse that. I would actually say that when you meet face-to-face, your virtual interactions made more sense. Because it’s kind of creepy when someone you don’t know says, “I’ve been following you,” [although] we don’t admit it. The other side that’s interesting is that it’s not just public

Can you talk about why you think that technology is creating more, not fewer, meetings? I think people see this a lot in my line of work — people often think about technology in binary terms, that one technology replaces the others. That the meeting industry was going to be in decline because new forms of communication would mean we were not going to meet anymore. And it’s not just the meeting industry. If you look at the whole, the business market in general, it’s really fascinating some of the kind of trends around human interaction and how they’re changing. [Yahoo! President and CEO] Marissa Mayer made quite a startling pronouncement when she said to everyone who was working from home at Yahoo! that they would start reporting to the office at 9 a.m. the next day. This is in Silicon Valley, [amid] the companies that created the very tools which were seen as the end of hav- ing to turn up at physical spaces. There are a bunch of these things hap-

pening. People are traveling more than ever, meetings are becoming more important than ever. People are redesigning their offices

social networks. The big trend now in companies is enter- prise social networks. This is relevant, I think, to the people who organize corporate meetings rather than big public events. Because new tools like Salesforce, Chatter — you could think of them as kind of internal Facebooks — are just for the company. The same logic applies inside a big company as well as [to] people connecting outside of the company. Because of technology and because of new business

ON THE WEB

— moving them away from big corporate cam- puses into urban locations that people actu- ally want to hang out in. Because they realize they’ve got to get people to actually interact physically now.

› Mike Walsh will be a General Session speaker at PCMA Conven- ing Leaders 2014 in Boston on Tuesday, Jan. 14. For more infor- mation, visit convn.org/cl-2014. › Learn more about Mike Walsh at mike-walsh.com. › Read more of Mike Walsh’s career advice for meeting profes- sionals in the June issue of Con- vene at convn.org/be-prepared.

challenges, the company of the future is very global. It’s dis- tributed, and uses internal social networks to get people to engage, to collaborate, and create value together. At the heart of the company of the future is communication.... Because meetings, especially for global companies, are going to be critical for their best partners to be able to meet to give them- selves context for their relationships — and to effectively manage the complexity of a modern world.

What skills are going to be important to meet- ing planners in the future? The first is the ability to think like an edi- tor. To be very skilled at curating content: Have I found the right content that engages the public imagination? Is this meeting the business’ need? That is a very unique skill around editorial judgment — picking the right people to help bring [a meeting]

How do social-media connections intersect with physical meetings? Let’s say 10 people [connect with you] on LinkedIn or Face- book or Twitter — you haven’t met any of them. Now, you form a view of them based on the content they generate. It’s quite a high threshold for you to actually take them seriously.

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to life. That’s really been the success of TED. They’ve man- aged to take people and subject matter that would have only appealed to supernerds, basically, and make them interesting and sexy. The other thing I think is very important is community

building. This is especially relevant if you’re building a confer- ence. Conferences and trade shows have moved away from the monolithic model to very focused seminars and conferences.

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