Roth said. People interact in a variety of ways —one-on-one, few-to-few, one-to-many— and the environment was intended to support all of them. “If you need to write on the wall, the wall’s there,” Roth said. “If you want to sit down and meet, or if you want to stand up and meet, those conditions are there.”
CERTIFICATION MADE POSSIBLE
you kind of did them all,” Roth said. “The timing is so good now to say, ‘Let’s not do them all, let’s go back to those few objec- tives that we have. Let’s decide that collabo- ration really is an activity, and that we need to have the right content.’We are making relationships and creating moments that
‘EveryoneWants That Stoke’ The pilot worked. As participants interacted with experts, content, and each other, “Exchanges started to happen, and issues started to surface,” Roth said. Some discussions became “almost like a study group.” Participants were emo-
people can’t always get elsewhere.” You can put on a meeting that “stands out by having a
bigger spectacle, by putting on a bigger pageant, or putting more decorations in your space, but to what end?” Roth asked. “Wouldn’t you rather stand out through that emo- tional discovery, through that collaboration?”
A GRAPHIC ILLUSTRATION:When George P. Johnson created a deck of cards to illustrate a collection of expert insights, they were acting on the advice they gathered: Pictures simplify concepts.
tionally invested, Roth said, because they were able to engage in critical thinking. “When you have someone pre- senting a PowerPoint, maybe a light bulb goes off, maybe not, but you move on.” At the pilot meeting in Amsterdam, “We had people sitting around a table, saying, ‘I get that, that works for me, but what about this?’” The excitement was contagious. “Everyone wants that
stoke, that feeling of ‘I saw you over there and you guys seemed like you were having a good time, what were you doing?’ and ‘Oh, I’ve got to tell you about this one thing.’” Roth added: “It’s really fascinating, because it’s just about giving people the ability to be people and act like people and problem-solve like people, and not be robots.” The meeting was “not fit to this—I don’t want to say phony—but not conformed to this business shtick, this thing that on paper seems nice and orderly, but in reality it’s less effective.” The pilot meetings worked out pretty well on paper, too.
There had been fears that they would lead to increased costs, but the meetings actually came in under their pre-arranged budgets. While there were new investments in content, they were offset by significant savings in construction and loading costs. “In the recent past we had so much stuff to choose fromthat we really couldn’t decide what worked best—so
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And the business results? The original plan had been to
do more pilots, but the first ones were so successful that IBM scrapped the plan and decided to apply George P. Johnson’s methods to all of the company’s meetings going forward. But Roth and his team are far from finished. “The next step is to ratchet up the content,” Roth said, “to make it so partici- pants take what they’ve learned along with them when they leave, or to send to their bosses.” Convene spoke to Roth in mid-October while he was
attending an IBM conference in Las Vegas, where, he said, things were going very well. IBM executives were touring the show floor, which hadn’t been typical prior to the redesign project. At a dinner the night before, IBM staff had talked about how difficult it had been to move out of their comfort zones, but that the new design was yielding new sales oppor- tunity after new sales opportunity. They had seen their cus- tomers’ eyes light up, they told Roth. “At the end of the day, those levels of exchanges are the
most important. Everything you are working for is toward that,” Roth said. “This sounds kind of crazy. But two people [at the dinner] started to cry—that emotional, happy kind of crying. It was amazing.”
Barbara Palmer is a senior editor of Convene. www.pcma.org