The initiative’s paradigm-shifting ideology was resonating with people—and making them wonder where and how else it might be applied. “We were asking, how can IBM meetings be made smarter?” Roth said dur- ing a case-study presentation at EventCamp Twin Cities in Minneapolis last summer. “And in the context of smarter, how are we improving the quality of those experiences?”
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ethnography, publishing, sales, theater, and literature. “Hundreds of insights came up,” Roth said, much of it what he called “touchy-feely stuff”—not typically the province of business management. “If we could gather all these insights in the right way,” Roth said, “we figured we
Engage, Inform, Discuss, Persuade, Inspire The reinvention of the company’s meetings was also driven by IBM’s philosophy of continually embracing change. In
could develop a new framework for the way human engage- ment should happen in the business-to-business world.” Sure enough, as the team sorted through all the responses, match- ing like insight with like insight, patterns began to emerge across the diverse disciplines. Regardless of whomthey spoke to, Roth said, there was a kind of informal consensus
RESHUFFLED: Ben Roth and his colleagues consulted a global array of experts to learn what drives human engagement and interaction. Their insights fell naturally into five main areas: engage, inform, discuss, persuade, and inspire. Roth turned the best and most accessible of these insights into a deck of cards.
our everyday lives, Roth said, we’ve become used to intelli- gent controls built into everything fromcars to appliances, and we’re comfortable—even dependent—on new ways of accessing information. “If the kiosks went away tomorrow at the airports,” Roth said, “many of us would be very con- fused as we tried to get on a plane.” IBM’s decision to drill deeply into meeting design also was based on the realization that “over the last 10 years, there has been a lot of advance- ment in science about how people think and behave—but not a lot of it has gotten into the work that we were doing in the event-experience world.” The project was not without peril. IBM meetings “have a
massive footprint,” Roth said. “You are risking billions of dollars if you screw up.” Roth and his colleagues began their work in research
mode, contacting the world’s leading authorities on human interaction and engagement—and deliberately looking for resources outside the meetings industry. In an interview with Convene, Roth said: “We knew we had to step outside of the event-experience world.” Instead, his teaminterviewed scores of experts via phone, email, and video, from fields including neuroscience, military training, journalism, museum design, cognitive and behavioral psychology,
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about five major processes that lead to better learning and relationships: engage, inform, discuss, persuade, inspire. “This is not something we manufactured as much as some- thing we recognized and saw coming out of our study,” he said. “It really drove a lot of our subsequent thinking.” Taken together, the five processes describe a cycle that has
the potential, Roth said, to move individuals fromengage- ment to action.Within each process, the experts’ insights that the teamhad collected served as navigational aids as they applied what they’d learned toward IBM’s meeting design. One theme that emerged across all the categories was the
importance of storytelling in human interaction—and that problem-solving is embedded within effective stories. “A story is a piece of string with a knot in it—it’s about solving the problem,” said Roth, quoting children’s book author Peter Reynolds, one of the experts his teamconsulted. You don’t want to tell everything up front, advised
another expert, British broadcaster Jon Briggs: “Create knowledge gaps for your audience, and roomfor themto take an active, collaborative role in creating a storyline.” Also from Reynolds: “Your ‘story’ is not the end—it’s the means to an end. The power of storytelling is the ability to