Forget orange – meeting design is the new black

Two business events veterans are injecting new meaning into meetings by turning the attention towards creative and thoughtful meeting design.

Eric de Groot and Mike van der Vijver are experts in the field of meeting design. Biz Events Asia first experienced their legendary work at the 2014 Meetings and Events Australia annual conference held in Kuala Lumpur. 

The delegates walked into the dimly-lit plenary room where the chairs were stacked up like the barricade scene in Les Miserables with de Groot standing on top of it. Clearing belongings out of the way at the sides, de Groot then instructed delegates to construct various room set-up formations with fellow delegates they have not met.

At the end of the interactive session, de Groot said, “I managed to get all your full attention without you touching the phone,” drawing hearty laughter of relief from the modern-day professionals attached to their smartphones.

Fast forward to June 2016, Biz Events Asia attended a meeting design session in India conducted by van der Vijver. This time, we were eager to learn more about the importance of meeting design. 

Their book titled “Into the Heart of Meetings” spoke about meetings as a power means of communication. It explained that flat or dull meetings are often caused by the lack of courage/vision and knowledge. The book gave excellent insights and examples on how to use design to create a win-win situation for both the company organising the event and its delegates. 

Delegates are developing a phobia from attending an excess of bad mass-market meetings, and that shouldn’t come at a surprise. These meetings are filled with heavily sponsored keynotes and panels, where the content mostly serve the sponsors and provide insufficient substance for the paying audience.

Good annual meetings are challenged in exceeding set benchmarks, while content creators face an increased pressure to curate crowd-pulling programmes that educate and motivate at the same time.

The tightening of the budget purse strings has delegates questioning the value of meetings. Besides financial outlay, what is costing delegates is their time out of the office, possibly also time away from their families, accumulating workload and attracting unsuitable business connections. Not a lot to gain from it, is there?

For decades, meeting planners lived by the Benjamin Franklin motto of “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail”. This decade, event professionals are more into design; that’s right, meeting design. The core principle of meeting design questions the decision makers why a meeting is needed in the first place. 

Many Asia-based planners can already see the cultural hurdle and the career-limiting move of questioning the boss. Nothing could be further from the truth: if we want to host successful meetings, we must design it for the right purpose and for the right audience.

Read about the importance of audience-focused meeting design here.

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