4/28/2007 Maarten Vanneste (c)2007BEFORE YOU START READING:

WHAT KIND OF MEETINGS THIS BOOK ADDRESSES
This book focuses on conferences and meetings that are larger, longer, and more geographical spread that the classic, every day office meeting. For example a 2 day corporate meeting with 45 participants taking place in a Hotel, or a 3 day 950 participant association meeting taking place in a conference centre. We look at meetings and conferences like the annual, international sales meeting, the annual user group meeting, the annual global meeting of the international association of the newspaper printing industry etc.
If we would talk about the daily, small internal meetings in the office, where 5 people or even 10 meet in house, we would refer to this as an office meeting or a team meeting.
( Yes this is the kind of meetings I'm interested in

THE READERS
This is a book for corporate and association executive level, senior or VP procurement, meeting owners, meeting industry people, meeting profession educators, senior meeting planners and press.
All people involved with meetings and conferences: initiating them, paying the bill for them, measuring them, wanting to cut cost by redesigning or cancelling them, believing much money is wasted in meetings or looking for a method to make them more turnout focussed.
( Yes I fit the above description

WHAT PART OF MEETINGS DO WE TALK ABOUT
This book focuses on the content side of meetings: What happens during the meeting that is important to the meeting owner, the meeting initiator. What changes in the mind of the participants, what influences the participants, what supports the objectives of the meeting for things like learning, networking and motivation.

This book does not look at the hospitality side of meetings nor do we talk about the travel side of meetings: we do not focus on flights, destination, venue, accommodation, catering, etc.
( Yes this is of interest to me

TAKEAWAYS
This book talks about a vision for new profession. It analyses the Meeting industry from a certain perspective and comes up with long term ideas and options for the future. It has a few practical tips and trick that one may start to use in meetings but more in an exemplary fashion, not as a comprehensive overview. This book is a roadmap to new or enhanced career paths, inclusion of new professionals and expansion and innovation towards a new industry future.
( Yes this is of interest to me

If you checked all of the above checkboxes, this book will be of interest to you.
If non of the above correspond with your professional activities, this book may be less of interest.

INDEX MEETING ARCHITECTURE A PROFESSION WITH A FUTURE
Table of Contents
1. Introduction 1-8
Foreword by 1-9
2. About the Author 2-10
A world tour, psychology or film director 2-11
3. How it all started 3-13
Video killed the radio star 3-13
Jolly July 3-14
Via Video Nights 3-14
Tour de France 3-15
From AV to business focus: 3-16
The Dirk Reyn meetings 3-17
Let's focus on meetings 3-18
CONCLUSIONS: How it all started 3-20
4. The meeting industry 4-21
What do we have 4-21
Multi billion dollar industry 4-22
The little brother 4-23
Degrees for this industry. 4-23
The geographical connection 4-23
Complexity of meeting planning 4-25
Cables and buttons 4-26
BBBBB 4-27
Best of both worlds 4-28
AV companies 4-29
Production companies 4-30
What do we need 4-31
Innovation 4-31
Trends that support and drive change in the meeting industry 4-32
Procurement 4-32
Business tourism, a cost? 4-32
Return on investment 4-33
ROI evaluation levels 4-33
Roi all the way? 4-35
ROI driving improvement 4-36
From measuring to action 4-36
One level up 4-36
CONCLUSION about the MICE industry 4-38
5. Meeting Content 5-39
Definition 5-39
Why meetings 5-39
Learning, Networking and Motivation connected to ROI methodology: 5-40
Learning: 5-41
Networking 5-44
The middle positition 5-45
ELABORATE 5-46
Motivation 5-46
Nobody asks to be motivated. 5-46
The three terrain formula 5-46
Meeting Content Matrix (r) 5-48
The holistic approach 5-49
The meeting owner, the meeting planner and the meeting content manager 5-50
Ménage a trois? 5-50
CONCLUSION Meeting Content : 5-52
6. Meeting Content Support 6-53
Definition 6-53
3T model 6-53
Terrains 6-53
Tools 6-53
Time 6-54
Get the basics right 6-55
Meeting Support Matrix (r) 6-56
Meeting support tools: CHATTY tools 6-56
Simple or complex tools 6-57
Daily use tools or purposely made tools 6-57
Tangible and intangible tools 6-57
Tools with or without assistance 6-57
Tools with a high or a low wow factor 6-58
Strategic or operational tools 6-58
Long or short preparation tools 6-58
Arty or techy tools 6-58
Specialty tools 6-59
Meeting Support Company 6-59
From AV company to Meeting support Company 6-59
In house av 6-60
Meeting Support technician 6-61
Definition of meeting support technician 6-62
Meeting Support manager 6-62
Meeting support manager 6-63
Definition of Meeting Support Manager 6-63
Focus on meetings 6-64
Meeting Support Knowledge 6-64
Long term collaboration 6-65
When to use a Meeting Support Manager? 6-65
The Meeting Support Institute 6-67
Goals, Mission 6-67
Expanding on limited knowledge and limited choice 6-67
The holistic approach 6-69
CONCLUSION meeting support : 6-70
7. The Meeting Architect 7-71
Definition of meeting architect 7-71
A new profession is about to be born 7-71
The other consultants. 7-71
A PCO 7-71
A service company 7-71
A Meeting designer 7-72
A facilitator 7-72
A product or format consultant 7-72
Building that missing profession 7-72
What's in a name... 7-73
... comes out of a name 7-75
The four Phases of a meeting's yearly life cycle 7-77
The long term lifecycle 7-78
Phase I: Analyse 7-79
Phase II: Design 7-81
Phase III: Execute 7-83
Phase VI: Report 7-84
Let's get some science in 7-85
Let's Get some other sectors and industries in 7-87
Marketing and communication 7-87
HR / The employee involvement association 7-87
AV and production industry 7-87
Training industry 7-87
(Adult) education industry 7-88
Facilitation world 7-88
Virtual meetings industry 7-89
Drama 7-89
Books to read 7-89
Magazines to sign up for 7-90
associations to join 7-90
Continued education 7-90
The architect styles 7-91
The meeting architect professional choices 7-92
The meeting planner and the meeting architect 7-92
The marriage 7-92
The Honey moon? 7-93
The reverse case: 7-93
A divorce? 7-93
the gender balance 7-94
the meeting planner in the construction metaphor 7-94
The holistic approach 7-95
Conclusions meeting architecture: 7-96
8. A degree in Meeting Architecture 8-97
Why? 8-97
Current master degree in meeting management. 8-97
How? 8-97
Getting other faculties on board 8-97
The Curriculum 8-99
Suggested framework for a Meeting Architecture Curriculum 8-101
Degrees 8-103
The Students 8-103
Continuing education Staying up to date 8-104
The effect of the Title Meeting architect 8-104
The job market 8-104
CONCLUSION a degree in Meeting architecture: 8-105
9. meeting architecture and other entities in the MICE industry 9-106
The effect on organisations 9-106
The effect on corporations 9-106
the effect on associations 9-106
the effect on agencies 9-107
companies with meeting support tools 9-107
The effect on individuals 9-107
Effect on Meeting Owners 9-107
Effects on Meeting planners 9-108
Tourism Industry 9-108
Travel industry 9-108
Hospitality industry 9-109
The meeting industry associations 9-109
The meeting industry tradeshows 9-109
The media 9-110
Meeting management education 9-110
The production companies 9-110
10. Conclusions 10-112
11. Bibliography 11-112
Existing books 11-113
Books to be written 11-113
12. I WORD LIST (use CIC?) 12-114
13. List of contributors: 13-115
14. Table of figures 14-115
Organisational charts 14-115
Figures 14-115
Tables 14-115
Graphs 14-116
15. Proof readers 15-116

One of many hobbies Maarten had as a child was photography; a hobby that stuck longer than many other hobbies. As a 14 year old boy he installed a darkroom in his bedroom and started to develop his own black and whit pictures. With antique wooden cameras and light sensitive paper he experimented with artistic photography and a Canon Reflex camera always accompanied him on his travels. In the youth club he co-founded a photo club that organised courses etc.
An image says more than a thousand words.

For students, in the late 70's there existed a great initiative from the combined European railroads called Interrail. This was an affordable ticket for young people that gave access to all railroads all over Europe for a whole month. Maarten travelled as a 16 year old kid with two friends to Spain, Italy and Greece etc. with € 250,- and a backpack. Sleeping on a pebble beach in France, a sandy beach on Corfu, Greece, a railway station in Italy was part of the deal. In cities a youth hostel provided a scarce option for a shower. Catching a squid in the rocky coast and having it prepared on a pizza in a beach. Swimming to an island that seemed closer than in reality, was probably the most dangerous thing they did. Due to the strong current, it took much longer than expected they already got separated halfway. Everyone made it, but now they were on this small deserted island, a dangerous half hour swim away from their backpacks...
Than they bumped into a friendly sailor, maybe the owner of the island, that ended his fishing and took them back in his small sailboat.

In Athens where they enjoyed the local port cuisine amongst the sailors, Maarten's precious reflex camera was stolen. This Interrail trip ends here for Maarten's two friends, 1 week early. They had no money left and decided to go home. Maarten was now on his own, 16 with little cash but a plan to travel from Athens, through former Yougoslavia to the Alps and than back north via Paris to Belgium. In Greece Maarten was invited by a kind family to a marriage dinner that was taking place on a square in a small village. He was offered a plate of Greek meatballs and after finishing them he looked up to see that everyone else was still nibbling their first meatball. Cultural differences became obvious for him and a bit embarrassed for "breaking the rules", he kindly thanked his hosts and moved on.

In the Alps he did a part of the Tour du Mont-Blanc, hiking from refuge to refuge alone and enjoying it 100%. In Paris he remembers talking to an American Girl in English and after a few minutes she asks from what state he came; his English seems to have an American Accent. Raised in Dutch but watching TV in Original languages and Subtiteled in Dutch makes most Belgian Kids real naturals in English. And since TV is dominated by US made series and cartoons, an American accent is unavoidable.
With his last cash he buys a French sandwich: a Baguette filled with fries the cheapest meal available and gets on the train heading home.

Maarten was an average student, at least his school results were average. This was probably the result of too much time spent on too many hobbies. Growing vegetables since the age of 10 was one of them. However when looking at side activities in school Maarten was all but average. President in the school council, organising the open days in school and parties, he demonstrated his leadership skills.

In his last year at school, as an 18 year old, the last 100 days of school were coming close. This is a moment that is traditionally intensively celebrated by local students. Maarten took the initiative to invite for the first time ever, all 8 schools in the local Cultural Centre and organised with that group the first ever "100 days celebration" with all schools rather than many separate activities. This resulted in a free podium with a few punk bands on the old City square, a parade through the city and the biggest party the city had ever seen. About 3.000 participants in 1981, that was never done before. Besides one girl that was pushed through the glass entrance door before the party even opened (She only had a few scratches), no accidents happened and nobody was hurt.

"Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
Margaret Mead, Anthropologist

A world tour, psychology or film director
When 18 it is also time to make a big decision: what next? What profession will he choose? Where lies his Future? Which degree does he want from which University or what diploma from which high school? Maarten, diversely interested as he was, checked out a few options. Psychology was one of them. This University degree seemed doable, but finally did not promise to be exciting enough. Too much theory and books, not enough practical, hands-on...
As he was active in photography the next option was film director. Maarten went to Brussels and Gent to check out the 4 different high schools where this was taught. Two af those combined photography and film but were in his eyes too artistically oriented. Another one was too much focussed on preparing students to go work for the national TV and all four of them were too much behind, not doing anything with this new and exiting technology called video. Film, as in 16mm and 35mm film was an old and has-been medium he decided. Since nothing really crystallised, a world tour of one year seemed a good option to take some time off to make up his mind.
Than in the summer of 1981 TV was on the news and one hot topic was the popularity of the home video recorder. VHS from Panasonic, Beta-max from Sony and Video-2000 from Philips were still about €2.000,- but very popular. Every family wanted one to be able to play rented movies and record from TV. Maarten's father saw the potential of this boom. He decided it would be great to produce educational videos for schools so children could see and hear educational video's and learn from them. He reasoned that Maarten's interest in Film and psychology, combined with the state of the education and his son's leadership skills could only lead to one conclusion: Maarten should start his own video production company. Mother agreed and so the career of a young man was put on tracks.
Interesting detail: Maartens father is Blind. As a 70+, he works with a normal PC and Keyboard, writing, e-mailing, surfing the web.

Can we see what a blind man sees?

This first chapter first takes us through the first 25 years, so you can see and understand why and how this project came to be. A man like me, with no degree or diploma, only has his story and accomplishments to show for.

Video killed the radio star
Panasonic editing equipment
When you are 18, coming straight from school, you don't really know anything about running a business, let alone setting up one.
I did however manage to produce a binder with about 50 pages of hand written plans and calculations: today, I would call that a business plan. The people from the bank, my parents were not that rich, were impressed and agreed to the loan. Maybe the fact that my parents signed with their house as bail may have helped too. A loan of 500.000 Belgian Franks; the equivalent of about 15.000 euros or 20.000 dollars in 2007. Back then that seemed a lot of money to me, but looking back, I know it was not. Certainly not to start a business, especially a video production company in a time that a videocassette costs as much as a video recorder today.
I rented a house just around the corner from the street where I was born, came up with a company name and designed the logo so I could put it on the wall. Abbit was an dreamed up name, based on three criterions:
1 Alphabetically on top of lists, getting A's and B's in the first three letters would help
2 The same number of letters as in video so it would fit long and square places putting Abbit above Video fits nicely because both have 5 letters.
3 Internationally pronounceable, I tested French, Dutch, English and German and decided it would sound good if ever the company would go international.
Than came the more difficult bit: What equipment to buy? If you want to make video productions for educational purposes or other, you need a camera to film and an editing system to put all the good images together and ad sound. In 1982 camera's where a little bigger than today. They also did not have a video recorder built in. The cameras in those days worked with tubes. Cigar sized glass tubes with an image sensor on the tip. Professional camera's had three such tubes; one for each of the RGB colours: Red, Green and Blue. Such a professional Sony Camera (Sony was clearly market leader in the professional arena) costed more than my starting capital so that was no option. I had budgeted for a one tube, Industrial or institutional camera Panasonic had what I could afford. The video recorders that were connected to the camera with a thick cable also came in different types. The professional portables used the U-Matic system that was looked down upon by TV crews that still used film. Slowly however video recorders started to be used for TV and U-Matic was the best you could get. Again, Not me, I had budgeted for a VHS portable recorder and Hitachi had what I needed. Now I only needed a system to edit and Panasonic had "professional" VHS machines for editing: I could afford one player and one recorder of this brand new line of VHS editing machines. Unfortunately these high tech machines were high maintenance and almost every other edit failed. I did one fashion show en two marriages with them and that is about it. The one tube camera was really not ready for the market and one could only conclude I had s invested 80% of my sead money, thrown away almost all of my start capital.
Welcome to the real world...

As an 18 year old boy, you also have no idea about sales and Marketing. I put up my sign, opened my door, sat down by the phone and started waiting; how about that for a marketing campaign!
Anyone can imagine what happened next. Not a lot. But this boy was not going to sit still for long.
Jolly July
With a positive and entrepreneurial spirit I soon jumped up from my chair and started dong stuff. One of the first things I did in summer of '82 was starting a new not for profit project called Jolly July. With some friends and the support form our local CC (cultural centre), we organised weekly creative public activities and events in open air, in otherwise dead quiet summers. This lead to a few things: One of those friends, Hildegard, later became our first employee and Abbit Video would survive in its first critical three years, doing such activities.
One of the activities we did involved a local punk band. When they broke up, they sold me their sound system. An old mixing table with a few cheap microphones, a 100 watt amplifier and two enormous copies of JBL Disco 200 loudspeakers. I rented out those for a few parties and with my video background and a few second hand TV's I started organising video parties, very innovative in those days. I travelled all the way to the Virgin Megastore in London just to buy the latest VHS tapes with popular video clips. Soon I was able to buy a second hand Grundig video projector that was used as a TV by a family that lived in town. The projector was a massive block with three tubes, it took two men to pick it up, and it came with a wooden parabolic shaped silver screen of about 1 meter 20 wide, somewhat bigger that today's 50 inch plasma screens. With a friend from school we were able to buy 9 old TV's and build our first video walls. He took the old button tuners out, connected each of those to a 5 meter long cable and built them into a box next to each other. Using a ruler, we were now able to push nine buttons from 9 TV's at once and switch all TV's at once, from one channel to another. A video switcher "avant la letre" was born. We could play a clip on all nine TV's with one video recorder and than switch to the next clip, playing on a second video recorder. We were real VJ's and did many parties. The summer 1983 we did a tour of the Belgian coast in about 10 different clubs, sponsored by Safari, a new adult beverage. The Belgian Importer of Safari paid us 500.000 Belgian Franks as our sole sponsor; the same amount I had as the total starting capital, only one year earlier. This is probably the right place to thank the person that trusted us back than.

Via Video Nights
The next big thing was our project with a Belgian TV celebrity, Bart Peeters that did a National TV program called Electron that combined educational information with video clips. This guy, Bart Peeters was very popular amongst the younger generation and we thought it would be cool (that word did not yet exist) to have him as part of our video parties. The idea was to have him as a VJ, on a video tape, and if the club could afford it ha could also come for a live performance. We called it the Via Video Nights. We invited him and he agreed to what he felt was an innovative project. We spent one Friday filming scenes in our ware house during the day and at night in a local club, the rap time. Bart was playing the records as a DJ during one hour. We recorded permanently with one camera filming the TV star and the dancing youth. Later we inserted some of the images filmed in the ware house and also some clip images that corresponded to the songs he had played. The result was a dynamic one hour video with stereo dance music. We toured the country with it with mixed degrees of success.

Another TV celebrity and farmers:
Based on that project, an event agency Culturama found us or should I say found me, because I was still a one man band. This, also one man, agency was connected to an agricultural magazine called Agra Magazine that organised events for its readers, the farmer community. They hired a TV personality, called Walter Capiau that did the number one Daily TV quiz at that time: called "Higher - Lower": a simple game with large playing cards.
Bringing that to the local ballrooms or party rooms combined with sponsored cheese and snacks proved to be a real hit. I was the whole crew for set building, sound, light and video. The set was composed out of 4 self made wooden monumental pillars and front elements on top, plus a number of backdrop curtains. The sound was the ex-punk band equipment and the lights were four self made wooden boxes with each ten household spots in one colour. We played promotional clips for the sponsors and some other images on the Grundig with Parabolic screen. I did the transportation and the set-up, I operated the whole show and I disassembled everything on my own. After every show I drove back home since there was no money for hotels. Sometimes this could be a three hour drive and some of those rides were the only ones ever I had to stop for a nap in order not to fall asleep driving. Good I was only a teenager with tons of energy.

During the day, I still had my company and step by step it evolved into a small AV company.
Hildegart was hired and a few years later Paul, who is still with the company today, celebrating his twentieth year with the company.
The company hired its first staff, the turnover grew year by year and like any AV company we sold AV equipment, rented AV equipment and did video productions for everyone that needed anything for any kind of activity.
Abbit Video was a BARCO dealer and sold video and data projectors to the Belgian army and Janssen Pharmaceutica (a Johnson & Johnson company) amongst others. We rented video monitors for tradeshows in Paris, and VHS camcorders to local individuals. We produced more and more video', but most of the 80's we worked with a dear friend, Gerrit Steensen, who did all the filming and editing fur us. He had a 3 tube camera and a u-matic editing system.

Tour de France
An other highlight arrives in 1988, our sixth year of existence: The Tour de France. Promobus, a Brussels based company had won a contract to set up a big open air dance club in the city or village where the Tour de France arrived. Abbit Video Was contracted for the video part, a contract Of 2.000.000 Belgian Franks, about € 50.000,- in 2007. This contract was as big as the turnover of our whole first year.
6 screens of 4 by 3 meters and 6 Barco Video-600 projectors were our display system. 2 cameras , a video switching installation and a VJ system allowed us to play clips and advertising and show camera images. The massive truss construction stood on 12 Legs of 7 meter high and covered an area big enough for 2.000 party goers. Hundreds of spots and dozens of loudspeakers turned any French square into a discothèque, be it the parking on Alpe Duez or a fancy square with antique fountains in Nice. Two sleep-busses (we started with only one) served for combined sleeping and travel. No time for real sleep, that was how tight the schedule was. Wake up call at eight in the morning, A self made shower and a meal form the catering truck later it is nine and the 30 technicians start to unload the 4 trailers. By 8 in the evening everything is ready to roll and the show starts with a TV celebrity doing some interviews and a quiz for the national French radio. Around 10 in the evening it is dark enough for the lights and video projector to start the party. And two hours later the music stops and the working lights swith on. All partygoers that are still there kindly are asked to leave and the de-rigging starts. 4 in the morning, it all is loaded and all technicians can "go to bed" in the sleep busses that drive in a caravan with the four trailers, the catering bus and the technical bus for the next Tour de France arrival place. Most of the time guided by the French Gendarmerie on motorcycles. After four hours "sleep" in a riding Bus it starts all over again. 21 days in a row with only one free day in between. And that is the day when the technical bus breaks down so our team spends all day and night to move all equipment to the replacing bus. What an event! It only took place once because most cyclists go to bed early during the Tour and loud music until midnight is just not compatible with an early good night sleep. The tour organisers probably got a few complaints from the yellow shirt.


From AV to business focus:
In those same years that these events take place, Abbit Video also grows more and more into corporate work. Video productions, av support for tradeshows, opening events, and some meetings become more and more evident. Most of the events we did like the ones for the Farmers are a, in a way, lot like meetings and conferences. A large group of people, some presentations, some sound, light, projection etc.
One clear stepping stone for Abbit into the Meeting activity was a call from Paul Van Steenbergen.... He was organising the national sales meeting for Janssen Cilag Belgium in the 80's. He invited me to talk about some equipment and we concluded that Abbit Video could do all their AV needs for their sales national meeting. We combined sound, light, projection, presentation, video production, photography etc. The first real meeting support moment had arrived.
The club scene had one big disadvantage: it paid late, and sometimes not at all, and it was always working at night.
Abbit Video in those days starts using a tag line "Industrial Professionals" and later "Business communication" to express its growing focus on the corporate market. Corporate clients are better clients and the added value we could provide in meetings was much more of an intellectual challenge than what we could do in the party and event world.
We said goodbye to the night scene around 1987 and it would lead to many similar decisions in the years to come. The next one was the closing of our doors. This meant we stopped renting things like TV's and video cameras to individual consumers. Some of them were not reliable and did not return the rented, and we did this also because our decision to go for professional work for corporate was firm.
The next big decision was to stop selling equipment in 1992. Selling equipment is a very different business and requires a different service model, different staff with different skills and even a different business model as a whole. If we really wanted to focus on meetings, we had to organise ourselves completely towards the specific needs and requirements of meetings. Our vision of our market became more and more focused.

One of the last major decisions in that evolution was the end of dry hire. This means a hotel or a company could no longer knock on our door to rent a flipchart and a microphone or a TV and a video. We made the crucial decision to totally go for projects, meetings and conferences more specifically.
Two main factors made this possible. Number one is the simple fact we are not based in a big city. Big cities have many meeting venues and these would provide us with so much business in dry hire that we would probably have evolved into a normal AV company running around with many small vans and technicians delivering one LCD projector and a laptop, or two loudspeakers and a screen. Being literally far a way from that market, we could afford to exclude that from our scope of activities and go for projects.
The second major reason was the closeness of Janssen Pharmaceutica, a large pharmaceutical multinational where a few people were organising meeting in a way that today still is seen as a best practice case. We were lucky to be hired and challenged in a way that opened our eyes for the real potential of meetings.

Abbit was no longer a typical AV company anymore because it offered a wide range of integrated services for a narrow market. It is not a production company either because it has in house equipment. Most production companies have no in house equipment so they choose the kind of equipment they need for any kind of event they produce. We were focussing on Meetings and we felt we needed specialised equipment and our own control over equipment to guarantee quality.

The Dirk Reyn meetings

One of the most inspiring clients I have ever worked with is Dirk Reyn Form Janssen Pharmaceutica. Janssen Pharmaceutica is based in Beerse, a village 5 minutes outside Turnhout. It is Belgium's largest pharmaceutical company that operates on a global scale. Founded by Dr Paul Jansen in 1953 it produced hundreds of medicines of which dozens are globally well know like Imodium and Motilium. In the early nineties, Dirk Reyn was the international product manager for Prepulsid; a product with an active component for stomach and intestines. It was a potential success product in 1990, when he invited us, based on what he heard from Paul Vansteenberghen who had worked with us for his national sales meetings.
Dirk was, from day one, challenging us to come up with new and innovative ideas to make his meetings more successful. Like no one I ever met before, he understood the potential of meetings. He saw the potential in education, networking and motivation and for the About 100 participants, all national product managers and marketing managers, he wanted to create an experience that would stick. In order to do so, he stimulated us to open up all our registers, to dig deep into our potential and to think out of the box. This is exactly what made us perform at our best with all available creative, technical and early technological tools. Eight years in a row from 1991 to 1998 we innovated as much as possible at every meeting. The concept of meeting support, or meeting architecture (see later in this book) did not exist yet, but Dirk in fact was a true meeting architect, spending lots of time and resources in analysing, designing and executing the meetings on the content side. For the travel and hospitality side, he worked with a travel agency from the UK and for the content side with a medical communication agency from the UK and Abbit. The travel, the hotel, the receptions and dinners were all taken care of so we could fully focus on the meeting itself and creating that educational, networking and motivational experience for the participants. Fist of all we got the basics right: Good sound, good light, a good stage and set and good quality presentations. A team of 5 to 6 qualified and specialised technicians. Dirk was the first to ask us if we also could do PowerPoint presentations besides 35mm Slides. After that meeting is went straight to the computer shop and bought our first ever PowerPoint, version 2.0.
Besides taking good care of those basics, we did lots of creative and innovative things. Long before the digital camera existed, we produced personalised certificates of attendance on site, with the picture of the participants included. In those days we made pictures with a 35mm reflex camera and took them to a developer in town. The pictures were printed and than rushed back to the hotel. There we scanned them, cropped them and added them to the certificates in Corel-draw before printing them on sophisticated paper ready to designed by the meeting organisers. At the end of the closing meeting the certificates were put on a few tables and all participants were very excited with this certificate. Most of them would have it on their wall in their office for at least a whole year.
An other idea we executed for Dirk was the welcome tapes in Barcelona. A sound cassette with a welcome word from Dirk and the theme music was played during the taxi ride from the airport to the hotel. A simple and low cost tool, but what an impact. Not only were the participants surprised to get a message halfway their taxi ride, but also did they arrive prepared and excited, having heard, the meeting host introduce the key issues of that meeting. An exciting (motivational) en informative (educational) experience.
Once video editing on site became an option, we started making closing videos. Interviews with participants were part of it from the first one. And soon we did a daily news bulleting in the morning, about the day before, a great way to wake up and start the day. An other application of on site editing was for every country to make a 30 second promotional video that would promote that country's marketing materials as models for other countries. This co-creation and educating each-other was exceptional in those days where the average speaker with slides gave the audience a 3 minute Q&A and that was it for interactivity. Not in these Prepulsid meetings in the 90's. When voting systems or Audience Response Systems (ARS) did not yet exist, this group frequently used the red and green cards for gathering opinions and surveying the group. The Prepulsid Promotion Club was another great way of involving and motivating the audience; stimulate peer to peer learning and driving the networking. This Promotion club Gave each country a small table and a panel to display it's promotional material. The country name and flag was displayed on the panel and power plus AV support was provided for those with a computer or a video. Half the group was exhibiting and half was walking around, visiting stands. Halfway that activity, the groups switched position and the exhibitors became visitors and vice versa. In a short time everyone was able to discover some great and clever ideas of the other countries and meet the people from that country. All key objectives were taken care of by this activity,
learning: seeing good ideas from other countries and discussing about them,
networking: meeting peers form other countries
motivation: allowing individuals to show their creations, to share and be listened to,
making it one of the most valuable moments of the meeting.
These and many more intense and creative ideas were all presented under a meeting logo that evolved only slightly each year and repeated the colours and basic shapes, turning it into a recognisable sequel. The main goal was a certain budget in sales by the year 2000 and since the first meeting was held in Cyprus, the meetings were called the Olympus 2000 meetings after the Greek god and mountain.
The key messages remained the same all those years and were called the Four C's. Culture, Creativity, Consistency and Commitment. These four C words were always present and served as an umbrella for every topic that was addressed.

This brings us to the more strategic level behind the meetings. Dirk had organised these meetings as a series, I simply call that serial meetings. There was an end goal, and even an end date of this series. Each meeting was reporting on the progress and kept clearly focussed on the end goal. Each meeting was a stepping stone towards the next meeting and incremental progress was made. That kind of a real long term vision in serial meetings is even today a rare case. Obviously, long term collaboration with suppliers and buy in from management were crucial.
Dirk Reyn hit the target before the planned date and we are proud that we were part of the process where meetings really were the driving force and the glue that kept it all together and focussed. He accomplished a paradigm shift in my mind, although I only woke up to it a few years later. It is the focus, the drive and creativity of Dirk that planted the seed of the concept of Meeting Support, the Meeting Content Matrix (r) and eventually Meeting Architecture. If any one ever was a true meeting content architect, it was Dirk. Today it is still rare that a meeting owner, the meeting initiator, the meeting host is so much involved in such a holistic way in analysing, designing and executing the meeting.

Let's focus on meetings
In May 1998 Abbit organised its first own internal meeting called X-tra themed 'Let's focus on Meetings'. This was the year we officially decided to fully focus on the market of meetings and conferences. This was because we had great value to ad, we liked the product and we felt there was a healthy market.
In 1995 I decided to visit some agencies in the Brussels area that were listed as conference organisers in the yellow pages. One of them was Nikitra and as I was waiting in their lobby I browsed through a few local magazines about meetings and events. I had no idea there were magazines about meetings so I immediately subscribed and soon was invited by the magazine owner, Eric De Ridder for a focus group meeting about the content, direction and future of the magazine. Since I was so convinced meetings were our company's' future, I went without hesitating. There I bumped into Herve Bosquet, at that time a full time PCO (Professional Conference Organiser) and President of the Belgian Chapter of MPI. MPI is Meeting Professionals International, an association with at that time around 16.000 and currently (2007) about 22.000 members. I immediately signed as a member, became part of the board and just three years later became president of the Belgian chapter. Today I am an internationally active member and a regular supporter and sponsor of the Belgian Chapter. MPI is the biggest global association in a wonderful industry, a young industry. MPI exists about 40 years now and the industry has grown a lot in those year, it became, in a way, truly professional.

From than onwards things really started to kick off. In 1999 Abbit grew with 72% and in 2000 with more than 40%. I checked the details of this growth was completely thanks to MPI through which I could network with meeting planners that became clients. Some of them big ones a lot from the US and organising meetings mostly in a European country.

As a host sponsor of MPI's European conference for five years in a row, our company was able to really understand and connect to a group of meeting professionals and learned a lot in doing so.
In 2002 we were looking for a good way to describe our activities. By then we provided almost everything there was available to support meetings in their key objectives. We had no name for our activity which did not really exist. We were not a normal AV company, we were not a production company, we were not a PCO nor an Event agency. After an internal meeting, one of our team came up with the term "Meeting Support" which since than we adopted and so now we call our company Abbit Meeting Support. We provide meetingsupport to our clients and we have meeting support managers.

MPI and later also other industry events also offered me the opportunity to talk to a lot of professionals and also speak to audiences up to 2.000 participants. This made me think, discus, prepare presentations, write and rethink my ideas around this industry. A great sound board to bounce off ideas and concepts that helped me stay focussed and really develop our company's strategy and the content of this book.
The CMM course (Certification in Meeting Management) was another MPI breakthrough moment where I was pushed to thinking and organising my professional life in a strategic way. It also made me write the business plan for what today is the Meeting Support Institute (see later in this book).

In the 25 years we really evolved a lot. The last few years I kept on working and thinking about what it is we do and where our true value lies. It did not stop at meeting support; it kept on going and with the critical comments of some highly appreciated industry friends we kept on going until we now think the pinnacle is in sight. This next big thing on the horizon is Meeting Architecture and I look forward to be part of making that happen in the coming 25 years. The next few chapters will address this path step by step.

CONCLUSIONS: How it all started
The evolution towards the writing of this book all started with an 18 year old boy starting his own video production company in 1982. 5 years of surviving, 10 years of focussing and 10 years of innovation is what made me realise the time is right to take the next step. Moving this industry from the shell for meetings to the shell and the substance of meetings is a dream. I will be proud if I can take a small part in that dream.

NEXT CHAPTERS
The next chapters I will share my vision on the meetings industry from the outside in, than what I observe to be clearly missing, than how we could develop and support that underdeveloped side of meetings and in the final 3 chapters about how meeting architecture as a profession could be the catalyst to make it all happen.

This was my big wake up call. This industry of meeting professionals has totally shifted
into one direction: the direction of the Hospitality/business tourism. Or did just a part of the tourism industry adopt that name "meeting industry", to be taken more seriously?
However it came to be, this industry was not mine so a quest started. Where did I belong? Where did my company belong? I started a long journey, looking for a place I would feel professionally home, a place with peers; people with an interest in the core of meetings, the content side of meetings.

Today I have found the words to describe what I only instinctively felt in the late nineties. The fact I came to a good understanding of the industry, with the big question, lingering in the back of my mind, made me see things, and come to some critical conclusions. This story I want to share with one goal: to help the meeting industry come to maturity, grow and prosper.

"The 2007 meeting industry is proficient in creating the shell, in which meetings take place. The only thing we have to do is look inside that shell, put in a grain of sand and after a few years, harvest the pearl."

Magazines
Getting more and more into the meetings industry, I got more and more magazines. Today I know about 30 different magazines of which I get about 10 on a monthly basis. Magazines from Europe, North America, and Asia, called CIM Conference Industry Magazine, Conference Valderen, Convegni, QM Quality in Meetings, The Meeting Professional.

On a warm summer evening in 2005 I was in New York with Lori Cioffi, the chief editor of the worlds largest magazine in this industry; MC (Meetings and Conventions). Lori Is a smart woman and a great personality. I met her, like so many great people at one of the two annual International MPI conferences that take place in the US. Lori has a few Belgian friends so it is probably through the Belgian CVB (Conference and Visitors Buro). We were on our way to a restaurant and just when we were going in, a young couple with a bugaboo with babie walked out. I overheard them speak Belgian Dutch and we started talking. After a few minutes the woman that worked in the NY banking industry in asked, "so what industry do you work in?" and without any hesitation, Lori said 'the travel industry'. Later that night I ask Lori why she said that, and not the meeting industry. And she explained that this was the easiest way to make people understand without to much explanation. But surely it also demonstrates how the meeting industry and its media lean towards the "tourism" side of this industry.

In 2006 I made an analysis of a series of magazines. To see where the real business in this industry lies, I thought it could be a good exercise to count and analyse the advertising. Advertising costs a lot of money so it shows where the money is, and where the real players of the industry are. And guess what? 98,5% of all advertising was about destinations (Countries, States, Regions, Cities) and Venues (mostly hotel chains).
No explanation needed to understand that the meeting industry exists only through the hospitality industry. Also looking at the magazine content, most of it talks about the hospitality side and the other big group of articles talk about general topics for personal and professional development. General in the sense of time management, leadership, risk management, entrepreneurial skills, work life balance, stress management, conflict management etc. Topics not directly connected to the meeting industry, but generally applicable, for personal, work or business life.
Only very seldom one finds an article that addresses the substance of meetings.
Topics like how to innovate presentations, increase interactivity?
What kind of education methods can be applied at meetings and which to use when?
What to do or not to do to harvest the wisdom of all meeting participants?
What methods or tools can a meeting planner use at a corporate meeting to increase cross divisional collaboration?
How to create teams and start taskforces at a meeting?

Multi billion dollar industry
Is the meeting Industry part of the business travel / tourism / hospitality industry?
I guess it is, for many reasons very natural that the MICE 1industry is so strongly connected to and influenced by the tourism / hospitality industry.
Looking at the globalisation of companies and associations alike, the number for international meetings and conferences has been growing a lot in the last few decades.
If we organise a Global conference for the sales managers in a multinational, only one of them can come by car; the one that lives in the host country. All other participants fly in or come by train. If the Global Conference for diabetes takes place on a different continent every year, it enables doctors of all continents to participate once in a while in the top educational event in their field. This IDF conference also brings together about 20.000 doctors that all have to fly in and stay a few nights in a hotel. This kind of conferences generates millions of seats in airplanes and room nights in hotels. The airline industry has 40% of her business thanks to meetings. The Hotel industry runs for 56% on business travellers of which 75% travel for a meeting or a conference.
When one realises that a conference participant that takes part in a residential conference (stays the night in a hotel) spends on an average € 250,- per day in the city the conference takes place. The industry may be not well know, but its total turnover in travel, hotel, etc. Was 122,31 billion US$ in 2004, making it 29th biggest industry in the US.

Revenue portion for MICE
airlines 131,5 Billion 17,39 13,2%
hotel industry 113,7 Bilion 36,8 Bilion 32,4%

(CIC, 2005)
The companies that operate here are large companies like hotel chains and airlines. Companies with thousands of employees, global brands and multi million dollar marketing budgets. In contrast to the companies that work in the substance side of meetings, the content side of meetings. These usually are small or even one man companies like moderators, speaker trainers, presentation designers, meeting designers up to small or medium size companies like meeting focussed AV and production companies, or sections of PCO's, parts of event agencies and sometimes a department in a marketing and communication agency.

In most cases, there is only a partial focus towards meetings. Companies or people doing many things, and also meetings. Real meeting focussed companies are rare to find. So on this side also it comes natural that this part of the meetings industry is no where to be seen. Totally fragmented, to small to even have a marketing budget, let alone a brand.

So yes, the meetings industry is currently part of the hospitality (travel and tourism) industry. That is my conclusion, as an observer, looking from the outside. I see an opportunity and whether that opportunity will develop is entirely up to the industry.

The little brother
The Economic Impact Study 2004 of the CIC (Convention industry Council) shows a breakdown by Expenditure in Conventions exhibitions direct spending. In travel hotel and F&B (Food and Beverage) we see about 85% of total spending. 15% goe's to Business services (12%), Technoloy (0,2%) and other (3%). In there we must look for what is spent on the content side.

CIC defines Direct Spending: All expenditures associated with an event that flow into the host destination's local economy. Direct spending includes attendee spending, exhibitor spending and event organizer spending.

This means in fact that we do not have numbers on how much is spent on the content side.
The table on p 28 shows one corporate example where 10% is spent on production and AV and 90% on Logistics. Is this exemplary of how meetings are budgeted? Or are we missing information to see the complete picture?
I would dear to assume that the meeting industry's spending on the actual meeting objectives is relatively small or even insignificant. Is this the industry's catch-22?

Degrees for this industry.
Conference management studies or a degree in meeting management are in most cases a section of tourism departments. Professor Rob Davidson who I met at the annual conference of MPI the Netherlands, is Senior Lecturer in Business Travel and Tourism at the Westminster University in London. He teaches a course in Meeting management. He had read some of my articles and he joined my session about the content side of meetings and how this currently is not or under-developed. The session also touched briefly on the focus of current meeting management education and what it could be or what should be added to make it complete.
After the presentation he came to me and explained enthusiastically about how he now realised there was a gigantic opportunity for the meeting management courses and degrees and also for the global Meetings industry as a whole. He agreed that the current curriculum is mainly geared towards the tourism and hospitality side of the meetings industry and does not teach on the real reasons why people organise meetings: the content side of meetings. The 'what to achieve in the minds of participants' part is not addressed. Nothing is taught about how the meeting objectives for Learning, Networking or Motivation amongst meeting participants can be designed, supported, met or measured. It's all about the shell, and nothing about the substance.

The geographical connection
Besides the big global players; the airlines and large hotel chains, there are also big local players. Every country, many regions and most cities have an office that promotes that destination for incentives, conferences and meetings. These are called the CVB's, short for Conference Visitors Bureau. Most of the time these offices are part of the tourism departments for obvious reasons: The city sees conference participants as tourists because they generate, for the city, an income in the local tourism industry: besides venues and Hotels a lot of other spending like in restaurants and shopping takes place. The Economic Impact Study 2004 (CIC, 2005) shows a figure of about $ 128 Bilion for the US alone.
The real reason why meetings are organized generates earnings (no numbers available) elsewhere, not in the destination. What people learn at a conference in Denver may be applied and therefore generate an income in South-Africa and dozens of other countries. So for Denver, the stakes are totally in the tourism and hospitality side of the meeting, not in the meeting objectives. These bureau's are governmental and politically connected and supported because a city that has 100.000 two day visits for conferences generates about € 50.000.000 turnover for Hotels, Restaurants, Gifts, Souvenirs, Entertainment, ... for that city, generating two to three million in taxes for the city alone and much more in labour taxes, other taxes 2and VAT for the country. Part of that is used to fund the CVB and where else can we position a CVB, but in the tourism department of a city or region?

This explains why the meeting industry is part of the tourism industry. And because it is part of the tourism industry, it cultivates its tourism side. This makes it less concerned in the things what meetings are really about. Because it is less knowledgeable in the content side of meetings, it remains part of the tourism industry which is a catch 22.

Figure 1: "The tourism catch 22" that chains the meeting industry to the tourism industry

At tradeshows in the meeting industry we can see lots of large stands from countries, regions and cities. They occupy about 90% of the space at such tradeshows. Their presence and their activities to win meeting planners for their destination, emphasises the tourism/hospitality side of the meetings industry.

Example The members of the Antwerp CVB
Province of Antwerp
Horeca section hotels
De Lijn (Public busses)
University of Antwerp
Unizo (organisation for SME's)
City of Antwerp
City Region Antwerp - venues
NMBS (Railroad)
(GOM) Regional Development Agency for Antwerp
Voka - chamber of Commerce
City Mechelen
Green Region Kempen (venues)
SN Brussels Airlines
High Council for Diamond

Toerism dept of the Province of Antwerp
City Region Mechelen (venues)
VLM Airlines
Provincial Museums
Table 1 This Table shows the natural leading position of Travel / Tourism / hospitality entities in CVB's.

Complexity of meeting planning
Meeting planners are the ones that get a degree in meeting management, visit those tradeshows and read the magazines. They are the target audience and the Hotel and destination industry is targeting them to get their groups in their city or hotel.
Meeting planners have challenging jobs. On an average they are extremely busy, they travel a lot and they work under constant pressure of absolute and sometimes extreme deadlines on one hand and budgetary restraints on the other.
75% of meeting planners in the Pharmaceutical industry say they have no or limited impact on the content side of the meetings. They do have a big say in the hospitality side of the meetings. Meeting planners search an appropriate venue, book and contract meeting space and bedrooms, arrange travel, arrange busses for transfers, organise meals and coffee breaks, find and book special venues for the closing dinner, book restaurants for the free evening, etc. And all of that for a diverse group with all kinds of special dietary and other individual needs. Invitation, registration, payments, badges, hostesses, welcome desks, etc.
On an international scale this job requires a lot of knowledge about Cultural differences in areas like food, habits, time, etiquette, safety, shipping, customs, finance, etc.
Many meeting planners organise multiple meetings in a row for their company, association or clients. They travel around the world for site inspections and to assist at the meetings they organise. Travelling is what many meeting planners get so much of that a free trip to Beijing does not excite them a lot.
Meeting planners have absolute deadlines which means that they can not postpone the opening reception with a day for whatever reason. The deadline for the construction of a new building is not absolute. If the building is ready one year late, we still have a building. If the meeting starts one day late everything is lost. On top of that mostly they don't get enough lead time from the people they work for: the meeting owners. Finding and contracting a venue and planning all that needs to be planned is seriously underestimated in many cases. This is why meeting planners are hardworking, task switching, stress resistant and well organised professionals. Almost 3/4 of them are female as membership numbers in MPI show. All their time, attention and energy is needed to organise the travel and hospitality side for one meeting or conference after another. With such a workload, it seems quit normal that these meeting professionals are not looking for extra work by getting involved in the content side of the meeting.

WAAR MOET DIT?
1) .
Presentation Judith Miller Montreal
2) strategic meetings management is all about procurement, finance, Budget. The next step now should be, now we spend financially sound, how about the results? Do we spend it smart in a sense of analysing objectives, designing executing and measuring on objectives.
3) Honywel procurement tool : meetings insteken en only than bills get payd. How about providing a methodology for analysing the objectives, designing execurting the meetning and measuring the results based on objectives.
4) the bigger meetings are not in sisco's system and hard to get on board. The ADEM methodology.
Options for senior meeting planners:
1 stay in that job
2 lead a team of planners
3 Procurement, finance
4 meeting architecture, ADEM methodology.

Most meeting planners are glad that they can focus on the hospitality for meetings, others would like to move into the content side and become more involved in the substance and driving the objectives of the meeting.
This later category has the potential to become what this book is all about; meeting architects.
Most meeting planners have skills and maybe even more important their hart anchored in hospitality. This is what they love to do: getting people together and make sure every one has a good time and feels well looked after: the true hospitality mindset.

Cables and buttons
Most meeting planners are not so much skilled and educated into technical matters like AV and ICT. Many meeting planers are asked to book the AV for the meeting and they do so because it is part of their job. Not because they get all excited about offers with mixing tables, microphones, light dimmers, LCD screens, internet connections, groupware, networking technology, etc.

In these circumstances, it is also challenging for an AV or production company to work. A client that does not really understand the technical things and puts his hart and sole in the five course dinner rather than the closing Presentation. It is a tough sell with a product that is an intangible service and hard to demonstrate, unlike a venue, a meeting room and even a dinner. Showing how the closing video will look like is just not possible until it is time for the closing session.

In those circumstances it is quit normal and acceptable that the content, the objectives of the meeting are left untouched by the meeting planner. The meeting owner, who is a marketing director or sales manager, is on his own for meeting content, in some cases supported by a marketing or communication person. Manny core elements of meetings are not addressed at all: the need for designing the program, selecting the right formats, training the speakers, involving facilitators, investigating and selecting the right networking tools, maximizing the before and after potential of a meeting. Only a few meeting owners really spend time on these key issues and even less have the fully informed and specialized people to rely on.

WHERE DO WE FIND THE MEETING OWNER? There is no meeting owner association.
How do we call a meeting owner? Meeting Initiator. Meeting holder we don't even have a name for it...

BBBBB
This is how we get to see some strange and extreme spending behaviour.
Comparing two cases I witnessed personally:
One group is 950 participants high ranking military personnel and the other group is 120 product managers and marketing people in a pharmaceutical company.
One meeting planner for the 950 group spends € 5 per person per day on all the AV, Production, ICT etc.
The meeting owner of the smaller group spends 250,- per person per day including a big set, opening video, perfect AV, the best presentation technology, spectacular light, great speaker support, facilitation etc. a massive spending difference of 4900 percent.

The interesting observation in this case is that both groups use 5 star hotels and spend 3 to 400,- per person per day on conference package, meals and a room night.
Both parties understand the value of good hospitality in meetings, but they clearly differ in their approach towards the investment in the meeting objectives.

Looking at the cost per person per day is not done on the meeting content side. The opening video costs 5.000 and it is not common practice to divide that by the 120 participants. The hospitality side is calculated, offered and budgeted per person. The cost for a room night per person remains the same irrespective of group size, as is with flights and meals etc.

If we call the meeting content side the brain side of meetings: learning, networking and motivation takes mainly part in the brain, and we call the hospitality side the body side travelling sleeping, and meals are mainly body support functions, than one could analyse the resources allocated to Body and Brain in a meeting. For a certain meeting, or for a certain company or association, a balance will be reached at a certain level that is appropriate for that meeting and that organisation.
This is what we cal the Budgetary Balance Between Body and Brain.
Comparing different meetings, we will see that one meeting spends no attention to the brain side with a 90/10 ratio and another reaches an almost 50/50 balance. Can we call a meeting that spends 90% of its budget in hospitality a meeting? Or should we call it an incentive? What is your acceptable budgetary balance between body and brain? What is a good balance to maximise the meeting's potential?

Figure 2: The balance between the two crucial sides of meetings must be addressed in order to get productive meetings.
Of course it is not as black and white as I present this body and brain difference. Great hospitality of course also influences the learning, networking and motivation.
It is clear that good hospitality is fundamental. Literally we can not build a meeting without that foundation. It needs to be good or participants start in a bad mood and all else is a waste of time. On the other side, one should not forget to construct an equally great meeting on top of that great foundation. Both should be appropriately addressed and resources should be spent in a balanced way in order to get the best results.

Best of both worlds
I consider a meeting or conference the most complete type of activity in the MICE3 industry. MICE stands for Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Events. (Many English language people don'tlike the term because mice is the plural of mouse. )
I believe a good meeting contains all of the above. The incentive and the event elements are both part of a good meeting. An incentive as in a motivational trip to stimulate people's performance. An incentive trip contains a nice destination, a great venue, fun activities, entertainment and great catering. In many cases it also includes travelling to exotic places and impressive hotel accommodation. This are purely travel and hospitality elements combined in a great experience. Any good conference spends lots of attention, with the help from a planner, to make all those elements optimally support the participants wellbeing. A good meeting is in that sense partially an incentive, and motivation is one of the three key objectives in meetings (education, networking, motivation) In a meeting, motivation can be supported in many more ways than the travel hospitality elements.

An event usually is a non residential stage focussed activity. A group, usually national, so without much travel, gets together in a venue for a show, entertainment and some product presentation. The staging and production are the main focal point in an event. Any good conference will also have those elements combined in an opening and or closing session. A performance on stage, a spectacular opening show or video, a big production are some of the elements that overlap in events and great meetings. Motivation is again the most important key objective combined with some limited networking.
As a real Meeting and conference person, I tend to think that an Incentive or an event, are in fact meetings that lack a few things.
An incentive is a meeting that lacks education.
An event is a short meeting that invests highly in entertainment.
This doesn't mean that incentives or events should become meetings but they all contain elements of meetings. Meetings and conferences also need to pay attention to their incentive and event side in order to be complete and better.

On top of the incentive elements and the event elements, a meeting ads some unique features that make it a meeting. These elements are mainly educational and networking, but also in a very specific way motivational. An opening video, an impressive set, a great key note speech, good AV and production all are such motivational elements.
The budgetary balance should be taken into consideration to analyse whether a meeting is a meeting or an incentive. A meeting that spends all its budget on the hospitality side may considered an incentive rather than a meeting.

AV companies
An important basic component for executing meetings is AV: Audio Visual material. Many AV companies in the classic sense are first level in the value chain.
They take the order and bring whatever a meeting planner asks for.
The second level in the value chain is when an AV company aks questions like "How many people do we expect in what room?" in order to decide how many loudspeakers we best install. This is when an AV company ads some value.
The final level takes us into the key objectives of the meeting and once those are analyzed and know, the AV company may advise to use a voting system or Audience Response System because they understand that gathering the opinions or creating more active participation is an objective.
Very few AV companies do that because of a different interests and a lack of focus on meetings and conferences.
Most AV companies do it all for everyone. They sell equipment and install it in meeting rooms, café's, theatres, etc. They rent equipment to individual users like a DJ or someone that organises a birthday party or some one that needs a plasma screen for a tradeshow or a hotel that needs two flipcharts.
Thirdly they work for projects like an event, a tradeshow booth, a party, a theatre show, a concert, and yes, once in a while also a meeting.

The average AV company combines all kinds of service in al kinds of markets and has no real focus.
The kind of service we need to give clients when we sell equipment is very different form the service we provide in projects like meetings. When selling equipment there is a deadline, but the value of the sold good is still there when delivered a few days or weeks later. A meeting has an absolute deadline. This means that it has to be delivered on the planned day or its value is gone and damages of a manifold of the cost arise immediately. A product launch for a new medicine failed because of serious problems with the sound equipment. The launch had to be re scheduled to the next year costing a critical year of advantage on competition, and also permanently damaging the brand. We also can not postpone the opening session of a conference with even one day. The international participants won't be able to stay for the, also postponed closing session because their flights are booked.

After the meeting took place, the work is finished and next year's file can be can be started. In sales we have a permanent service and we have to go whenever there is a problem. Very different type of service from a meeting where there is one big peek moment and everything happens at the same time.

The microphones we need for speech at meetings are very different from the Microphone a DJ or a singer needs. If the average AV company does a meeting, it should buy the appropriate meeting microphones, but usually the DJ microphone is used for the speaker desk leading to all sorts of problems. The AV technician than blames the speaker for not having a good microphone technique while we all know the speaker is not a professional performer. He AV company has different equipment and different people than a Meeting Support company

Most AV companies never grow bigger than a small, hardworking little unit that in many cases hardly survives and will do anything for anyone competing with its neighbouring AV companies.
There is no diploma or certificate needed, so anyone can start an AV company.

This makes most AV companies perform sub-optimally for meetings. If on top, meeting planners change their AV supplier every time they have a meeting, it becomes hard to even get the basics right. In such circumstances it is hard to make meetings improve over time on the content side.

Meetings need and deserve a focussed and innovative AV supplier that has all the special kit a meeting needs. A supplier that combines all the skills and competences a meeting needs like AV, IT, presentation, video, signage, photograpy, etc.
A meeting also needs a long term relation with such a supplier to build year after year one the last meeting and keep participants involved.
Only with focus on meetings and innovation in place combined with a long term relation, a meeting can grow and prosper on the AV, and that is part of the content side of meetings where we so urgently need to improve performance.

Production companies
Some meeting planners will work with a production company or creative agency that in its turn hires an AV company and other suppliers.
Such production companies are creating stage performances and will create a great experience for, let's say, an opening session.
They will create a theme and design and produce creative elements based on the meeting theme. Usually they combine artists like dancers with Audio Visual production like music and video, a light and laser show with a set / stage. Great opening shows have been made for meetings by wonderful creative directors. When impressing the audience (Motivation) is the number one key objective of the conference, this is certainly a good way to spend the money. If however a conference as mainly Educational, secondly networking and only thirdly aims for motivation, one may think twice and relocate some of the 200.000 that goes into the opening show.

Of course it is very gratifying to create a big wow effect and one could almost say it is 'cheap' to spend so much money on a big spectacular show. Cheap in a way that it is easy success, like it is a guaranteed success to book the best hotel and give the best champagne and the best food. Every one knows that is going to be much more difficult to create a wow with substance than with show. It's a big challenge to have les lobster to leverage the learning. The industry today knows how the wow can be made through exquisite hospitality and a big show. In a way that makes it vulnerable because this only takes meetings to the first of five measuring levels towards ROI. See Return on investment on page 29

Roughly we can say that the meeting industry is geared towards the Hospitality side and the two main partners that could help to develop the Content side are not able to help because of a lack of professionalism and a lack of focus.
What do we need
As an industry, it is needless to say the meeting industry wants to prosper. It wants to grow, do well, increase its importance and decrease its vulnerability. To prosper as an industry, the number one focus is clients. What do they want? They want to meet their objectives and satisfy their clients, the meeting owners. Meeting owners have reasons why they organise meetings: the meeting's key objectives. Who-ever can satisfy those needs or meet these objectives, holds the key to success in this industry. If we ask meeting planners the WHY question they will tell us why they organise meetings. The main groups of key objectives of meetings are always the same: Learning, Networking and motivation of participants. This industry can start to address those and become more than the creator of the environment ( the shell) in which someone else addresses the meeting objectives. If this industry expands it horizons to that arena, it may find itself much more wanted in the executive room. Meetings will become more of strategic importance if they can address the real needs, the real key objectives. If the meeting department knows how to analyse, design, execute and measure meetings based on the key objectives, they will be seen as crucial to the process. Today, still, in many cases the marketing managers assistant will plan the logistics for the marketing meetings. Since it's just about booking a hotel and a few rooms. Becoming a strategic partner with a real focus and understanding of the objectives and how to reach them is a very different game. Offering meetings as a strategic revenue generator based on a professional methodology also will reduce the "assistant scenario" and increase the influence of the industry.

Innovation
With its current assets and people, the mice industry has become truly professional in the hospitality end of the business. The need for new companies, knowledge, tools and people to address the key objectives is clear. Professionals in adult education at meetings, some behavioural psychology for motivation, and tools to improve the networking will become instrumental to this industry's next level of success. These companies and individuals are different from the current population in the MICE industry. These companies will also be new to this industry. The meeting industry will have to invite them, welcome them and support them to make sure they are successful and become real players in this industry and see it as their market.
I have seen many come and go in the last 5 years and we need to stop that process and turn that into a positive spiral.
An example of how serious it is shows this story. The winner of the technology award for EIBTM in 2004 was a company that specialises in organising and structuring the networking at meetings and events. As far as most meeting planners say, networking is the number two key objective in meetings. One would therefore think that meeting planners would be interested in such an innovation. The winner gets a free stand on the tradeshow only to conclude at the end of 3 days that 'these people (the meeting planners) are not interested in our product. They have no influence or buying power so this is not our market. Meeting planners are only looking for and maybe deciding on the destination and the venue to have their meeting, not for tools to improve the networking at their meetings.'
This is just one story of many disappointed companies with tools or services that impact the learning, networking or motivation at meetings. If we talk to companies that look at the meeting industry as a market for their product, they tell us how frustrated they are when talking to meeting planners. How confusing it is to those newcomers that the meeting planner, actually does not plan the meeting, but only organises the environment in which the meeting takes place.
If the industry could open itself to the content side of meetings and make those companies more welcome, it would change a lot, for the better.
Trends that support and drive change in the meeting industry
Where is the magazine that talks about the content side of meetings? We see just the od article on technology or learning in the Business travel or meeting magazine.
Where is the tradeshow that gathers all players on the meetings content side? We get a few stands at the meetings tradeshow where hotels and destinations take 99% of the space. Or maybe a general marketing tradeshow with a few stands that also address meetings.

CORPORATE MEETING SPENDING
Hotel
4.8
hospitality

Air transportation
6.0
hospitality

F&B
4.4
hospitality

Production AV
2.0
Meeting Support
10%
Miscellaneous
1.8
Hospitality

Ground
1.0
Hospitality

Total
20.0 Milion US$

100%
Table 2 Annual spending by a corporate meeting department shows a 10% spending on the content side and 90% on logistics/hospitality.

Where is the university where we can get a degree in meeting content management? Not an optional Event management in the marketing and communication school. Not 5% of the curriculum in Meeting Management degrees? These and many other things are clearly missing. An industry that calls itself the meeting industry is actually like the tire industry calling itself the car industry, or the wood industry calling itself the furniture industry. But what's in a name...
There are a few tendencies that may help the industry to become more complete and ultimately more rightfully claimant of the term Meeting Industry.

Procurement
Business tourism, a cost?
One of the new trends putting pressure on meetings is procurement. Purchasing departments in large corporations have discovered meetings, events and incentives. In some companies the total spend is known and in many cases procurement start cutting costs. In many cases they see a large portion of the meeting spend goes to travel and
accommodation. Their simplified conclusion is that that is probably not necessary. They see meetings as a cost, not as a revenue generator.

Table 3 This is an example of a real budget from an existing organisation.
Since nothing in this budget shows the educational effort, this budget looks like an incentive trip rather than a meeting.
Procurement people think in terms of consolidation, standardisation, commoditising. And corporate travel managers have been working with procurement since many years. In travel and hotel booking a lot of consolidation took place. Many corporations now know how much they spend on individual travel: 5 star hotels and individual flights. They use that to leverage their buying power.

If a travel manager consolidates al flights from a multinational, and he can negotiate about 100.000 tickets, he surely gets some good deals.
Travel executives have the travel spending well under control since a few years now. Their logic next field of action is meetings and events. This puts additional pressure on the planners. The challenge here is that meeting budgets like the one above indicate a lot can be saved on the travel and hospitality. Meeting owners and meeting planners both come under increasing pressure to cut cost. Which I believe in some cases makes a lot of sense in other cases is the wrong approach and in most cases a missed opportunity; the opportunity to re-organise the way meetings and conferences are held and being able to turn them into profit centres rather than costs.
We now see smaller teams doing more with less, resulting in even less time for working on the content.

Return on investment

In 2005 I was part of a focus group for a Belgian Magazine called Rendevenement. In the focus group we had event agencies, pco's, venue owners, exhibition centres and hotels and a few corporate meeting planners. The goal was to identify some trends in the MICE industry. One of the topics that was discussed was the return on investment (ROI) of meetings and events. How can we keep spending corporate money and not show the value of what we do? We will be looked upon as a pure cost that can be cut whenever someone needs to, if we can not prove the link between cost and income. Between meeting or event budget and the companies successes.
After the meetings and as is appropriate in this industry, we had a standing reception with some wonderful finger food. And than it happened. Standing at one of the tables, the discussion kept going and in the presence of a corporate planner from Daikin Air-conditioning, a man from an event agency said "We only make sure the event runs smoothly. It is not our job to get the message across or generate Return On Investment." I was stunned. How can he say that? So bluntly and in the presence of a corporate planner. For me one + one = two. If one is not interested in the financial result of an event, in the effect it creates, one should not be doing any. And of course I'm not talking about the survey that asks about how good people found the event or meeting. That is the lowest level (1) of measuring results.

ROI evaluation levels
If we have any interest in this industry we at least must know the 5 levels of ROI measurement by hart. Based on The European Event ROI Institute, and Jack Philipse's 4measuring methodology, there are 5 levels of measuring. Knowing those and accepting those as true may be one of the most powerful influences on this industry in the next decade.

1
SATISFACTION
The lowest level of measuring that most meeting and event planners will do. Asking the basic question about how good people found the event. Was it impressive? Was it professional? did we have good food? Did you like the key note speaker? Etc. In short, are you satisfied with the event.
2
LEARNING
The second level is a bit more chalanging to measure. It is however the next step. Without this step you can not go to the next one. In order to be succesfull, people need to go away with some new knowledge. As far as I'm concerned this can be pure knowledge, but also having met new people that are potential clients, suppliers or peers with whom I will do business or improve my network.
3
APPLICATION
The third level of measuring is all about applying what came out of the meeting. Do participants use the techniques, use communicate the knowledge, work differently etc. Do they work or communicate with the people thy met.
4
IMPACT
Once a participant applies what he learned, there must be an impact. Is sales growing as a result? Do we increase our quality? Do we have better inter departmental collaboration? Are we getting a higher succesrate? Do we have less fallout?
5
ROI
The last step one can measure is financial. Every impact on sales or other matters, must have a financial impact. Generating more income or saving cost.When I heard this for the first time in 2004 at MPI's one day track on ROI with Jack Philips in Denver Colorado I was thinking this was impossible. Like me, many may think it is impossible to do and yes, it is difficult. Not impossible, but difficult, and at a cost. If you want to learn more about ROI, I can recommend, as a first and practical book, the MPI book on ROI "Proving the Value of Meetings and Events" (Edited by Jack J. Phillips).
But in short, we can measure ROI in any event, but we should only do it ones in a while and for the most important events we organise.

Figure 3 The five levels to measure ROI in meetings

In short I see these levels of measuring as a flow: We must have happy (level 1) participants in order to make them open to learning (Level 2) so that after the meeting they can apply what they learned (3) and thus have an impact (4) on the business that ultimately generates more income or decreases cost (5). We can not have Impact without the step before; Application. And We can not aptly anything without the step before; Learning. All steps need to be taken, in that sequence. Skipping one step is going to decrease any potential ROI. In that sense it is not just 5 levels of measuring, it is also a chain of action in the participant population, to be observed ore even impacted, influenced. Especially the satisfaction (Motivation) and the learning are area's in which we can increase influence a lot at meetings. This is a open opportunity.

Roi all the way?
Today the industry is stretching itself to prove ROI and in doing so create counter arguments to the cost cutting movement. Especially 911 demonstrated the vulnerability of this industry. Large companies in the meeting industry saw their annual turnover decrease with 30%, 40% and more.

This crisis made ROI appear and no one will dispute its value. If organising an event does not generate more money that is put into it, one should take a closer look. If an incentive only cost money and does not have any financial impact, one should consider investing the money elsewhere; in something that generates better (financial) results.
Calculating ROI and proving it convincingly is a complicated and time consuming matter that most meeting planners and meeting owners will leave to others.
My question in Denver at the end of the day was, "Should we not focus on step two, not just to measure it, but to improve and increase education? Make this industry better and more influential in the learning at the second level, before going all the way op to (just) measuring level 3, 4 and 5?"
The answer I got was the sense of urgency the industry felt to measure ROI and not time to waste.
ROI driving improvement
Today, I believe ROI measuring methodology is the best thing that happened in a long time. It is one of the key drivers that will steer this industry to its next level.
How will that happen?
Let's assume a meeting owner or meeting planner is able to convincingly prove ROI to his board of directors.
What will the CFO ask?
As an alternative to cutting the budget with 10%, the Financial people now have an alternative: they can now ask the meeting planners to increase the ROI! That is the kind of change many meeting planners can only dream of. In stead of decreasing budgets, they now can ask for more money, just by showing that this will generate more ROI. Meetings suddenly have become profit centres in corporations. Not just a cost that can be cut in any crisis but a real opportunity to invest and a strategically important vehicle for corporate success.

Once that change has established itself, the meeting owner or planner now is faced with the challenge to increase ROI. To increase ROI, one needs to enlarge the impact (4) that is based on the application (3) of what participants learned (2) because they were in the right mood (1)

From measuring to action
If we take a closer look at the 5 levels of measuring ROI, there are actually a few levels where meeting professionals can increase their impact. Making the participant more satisfied (1) and making the learning (2) better are things we can do, not just measure. And that is obviously the next thing that will have to happen.

1
SATISFACTION
DIRECT IMPACT BY THE MEETING ORGANISER
actionable
2
LEARNING

3
APPLICATION
SECONDARY IMPACT

4
IMPACT
NO IMPACT

measurable
5
ROI

Simply put: More satisfied participants will learn more so will be able to apply more and have more impact so generate more ROI.

Level one and two are actionable: we can impact those in many ways at meetings and events. There are hundreds of things one can do to improve the learning at conferences. And if asked, groups of meeting planners will say that learning, in all it's forms and shapes, is the number one reason for organising meetings.

Measuring ROI is good.
Increasing ROI is great.

One level up

The MICE 5 industry can move from being a cost into a profit centre of strategic relevance. As an industry, it needs to make some bold and strategic decisions. It needs to open up its horizon and move for some radical innovation. It will require some out of the box thinking and some drastic innovation. Moving the industry one level up from where it resides today will require a mind shift in thousands of individuals, a paradigm shift in many established institutions.
The conferences in the meeting industry itself should not just educate about planning meetings but educate about improving education in meetings. In short a conference about conferences, that educates about education. Magazines should not just have an article on how I can better network at meetings but also on how I can help all participants in a meeting to get more effective networking. Meeting planners should be able to design and execute elements in meetings that establish exactly that specific kind of networking that this meeting needs.
MICE events should not just have an award on the marketing used for an event but also an award on how events support the marketing objectives of a meeting owner, of an organisation.

Based on this industry's current strength in hospitality, it will require the hospitality players to support and maybe even drive that process which will ultimately improve the industry as a whole.
Comwell, A hotel chain in Denmark is a pioneer in that field. Lotte Marie Roesgaard is the Comwell HR manager and she is one of the driving forces. She spoke at MPI's PEC-Europe in 2007 and is quoted in the MPI White paper "Mappig the future of on site learning." Comwell currently trains it staff in meeting design and wants them to understand and be involved in the design side of meetings.

Comwell Meeting Designer is a trademark they use and the goal is to make teach their conference managers how to approach meetings and meeting planning differently. Rather than only executing what a meeting planner asks they will now also ask questions on the content side and offer different solutions in designing the meeting for their clients. Hotel conference managers have always been service minded people that tend to say yes to every request of clients, no questions asked. The internal course helps the hotel conference managers to reach a level of confidence so these professionals now dear to ask some important questions about the purpose of the meeting. Rather than only focussing on the logistical support a hotel can give, they now try to help by looking at, learning about and offering help for what happens inside meetings. The Internal Comwell courses teach about facilitation, meeting formats like open space and the Learning Meeting. They keep Comwell conference coordinators up to speed on the newest tools and methods that can be answers to a customer's question on how to activate the participants. Scandinavian countries have always had a strong sense of democracy and the younger generation wants more of that in meetings as well. Comwell staff will offer guidance to customers and bases a lot of its knowledge on school education. Concepts like physical activity to support education is based on research from schools
In the early stages it was somewhat challenging to approach customer with that concept. Many found these questions awkward and strange. But with the development of flowcharts for phone conversations and other tools, they managed to find the approach that leads to success. The main result is that clients come back and their numbers show a growth in a time that the market was declining. Lotte Marrie sais "
"In 2006 our turnover in Sweden went up with 4% on a marked that in general was going down. Our Swedish hotelmanagers contributes this to our MeetingDesigner concept. In Denmark it is not so easy to contribute progress primarily to the concept. However we see that our costumer reviews have improved and costumers regularly comment on how we have helped them improve their meetings..."

Visit denmark, project on training meeting sta Lars Bligga Hanssen
Via Roger kellerman : "Swedish meetings" (naast Danish Meetings from Lars Blicher-Hansen lbh@visitdenmark.com) is a marketing organisation and they have many formats for meetings involving the content side.
Nordic hotels with concept called Nordic meetings Nordiclighthotels.com or .se
Danish comwell group. Comwell hotels HR manager, Rosegard did MV meet her at PEC-E? ...

CONCLUSION about the MICE industry
The meeting industry today is in a very natural way emerged in, developed by and controlled by the tourism industry. This travel and hospitality side of meeting industry (aka the shell) is professional, global, well organised and has a number of large multinational players. This is a good thing and its strength allows the current industry to choose to take ownership of meeting content too (aka the substance) and develop the industry further. This second leg is clearly important to meeting owners but also under developed and not organised. With the potential of completing the meeting industry with its second leg, it can make the industry run to its thriving future. Rather than just measuring ROI, the meeting professionals objective should be about driving, creating, increast-ing ROI: This takes us to the real core of the business: learning and motivation.
This is probably the biggest opportunity this industry faces since many years.

Give us your comments and ideas on the wiki : http://meetingarchitecture.pbwiki.com
Check out the blog for more and up to date information http://meetingarchitecture.blogspot.com
E-mail the author at maarten.vanneste@abbit.eu

5. Meeting Content
Definition
Meeting content is everything that happens at a meeting based on the meeting's objectives.
Meeting content is not only the educational content of presentations it is much more! The presentation content based on the experts knowledge is part of the conference main topic and as such is certainly part of meeting content. Selecting the topics and speakers is a task that meeting planners and in some cases professional development (PD) specialists are covering. Meeting content however covers a much wider range of things, in educational goals, but also in networking goals and in motivational goals. Meeting content is based on a well analyzed list of potential meeting objectives for any meeting. (Everything that supports those objectives is meeting support, be it formats, processes, concepts, methods, techniques, activities, tools, technology etc.)
In that sense, meeting content is the raison d'être of meetings. Meeting content is why meetings are organised in the first place so meeting content is critical to the meeting industry; without meeting content, there is no need for meetings. No logistics necessary, no venues needed, no travel to go to a destination and therefore no ground for a meeting industry to exist. Lucky for all of us these reasons of existence are present, at least in the minds of a number of people that keep organising meetings... It would seem logical to get a grip on the reasons of existence of an industry to understand, improve or even just protect it. It's like the oil industry and the car industry: no need for oil if cars don't use it. Cars are the reason of existence of the oil industry. It is safe to say that the oil industry is well connected to the car industry and in that way has more influence on its own existence. In the same way, the meeting hospitality industry would be smart to get well connected to the meeting content industry. The challenge is that there is no such industry. The opportunity is that we can create it.

Why meetings
When asking meeting planners what they consider the key objectives of meetings, I pose this simple question: Why do you or your clients organise meetings? These are the kind of words we get:

Brainstorming, Education, learning, refresh knowledge, training, Communicate message, Product launch, Planning, change behaviour, Information gathering, crisis solving, create new strategy, promotion, advocacy, publishing procedures, problem solving, strategy development, innovate. Networking, visibility, exchange ideas, meet new clients, Meet new suppliers, make industry friends, complete my network of partners, interact, Fun, celebrate, incentive, award, motivation, involve people, team building, team spirit, sense of community, experience, ...
At the moment I have gathered about 200 distinct words that meeting planners consider key objectives for their clients that organise meetings. Many of those words mean the same or something similar. Some are broad and some very specific. It's a list, a long one, and it demonstrates the wealth of good reasons to organise meetings or conferences. Interestingly enough almost never any hospitality is given as a reason. Nobody says they organises meetings so they can travel, although travelling is unavoidable for international conferences. Nobody says they organise meetings to be able to organise nice lunches and dinners for a group, although we all know these things are fundamental.
After gathering the real reasons behind meetings a few times, with the similar groups of planners, we started to see that there are actually three distinct groups in the list. Groups that I would call 'terrains of action'. Each terrain needs our distinct attention and allows for a different set of actions a meeting organiser could deploy in order to reach his objectives.
These three terrains are Learning, Networking and Motivation. And when we sort the earlier list of words, the list of key objectives, all of them should fit at least one of these terrains. Some have an overlap and some partially fit in each but every meeting objective fits at least in one.
1. Learning
Brainstorming, Education, learning, refresh knowledge, training, exchange ideas communicate message, Product launch, Planning, information gathering, crisis solving, create new strategy, promotion, advocacy, publishing procedures, problem solving, strategy development, innovate.
2. Networking
meet new clients, Meet new suppliers, make industry friends, start a network, visibility, complete my network of partners, interact,
3. Motivation
Fun, celebrate, incentive, award, motivation, involve people, team building, team spirit, change behaviour, sense of community, experience, ...
These three cover everything and are the first step in a holistic approach to meeting content management. Some organisations or individuals will focus on learning and include networking as a way of learning. I think that learning is the most important part but it is not the whole picture.
Some books and speakers will defend Networking as the unique aspect of meetings and a agree, but again this is not the only thing. Other companies will emphasise totally on the wow experience which fits the Motivational terrain, and again, spending all our money and attention there is in most cases a mistake. When motivation is the key objective, a wow experience clearly is a good thing.
Paying attention to all three and finding the right balance for our conference is what is crucial.

Learning, Networking and Motivation connected to ROI methodology:
If we look back to the 5 levels in measuring ROI we see some similarities. The motivation as in motivational is the level one: Satisfaction. Satisfaction is a state of mind. It is a rather dry way of saying that people are in a good mood. Motivation is more result oriented. Being motivated to be open to the content of the presentation, but also leaving the conference motivated for action, for change in behaviour, etc. So that is our level one, but here it is a terrain of activities, a part of the meeting to focus on.
The level two is clear: Education is learning = level two. This is in meetings and conferences clearly the most important objective and the one where we are able gain the most impact since it is such an underdeveloped terrain.

In between the two levels from the ROI measuring model, Motivation and Learning, we added networking. Networking clearly appeared as the number two key objective in meetings and conferences. Networking is a distinct terrain where different tools and methods apply, where meeting organisers could invest in specific networking support. Networking also fits very nicely in between Motivation and Education because is influences both and overlaps with both motivation and education. For example learning from and sharing with other participants (Peer to peer learning) as a way of netwrking that is fun (roi level 1) and educational (roi level 2)

From the ROI measuring model
Three action terrains in meetings.
ROI level 2

Learning
Inserted terrain
?
Networking
ROI level 1

Motivation
Figure 4: The list of meeting objectives (P34) indicates that Networking like Motivation and Learning is an action terrain for meetings.
In this chapter, these three groups of key objectives will be further developed, analysed and finally result in a basic tool for analysing meeting content called the Meeting Content Matrix (r). This is useful material for anyone that is involved in analysing the goals and objectives for meetings. It provides a simple structure and an comprehensive checklist that brings guidance and clearness in an otherwise chaotic and incomplete process.
Learning:
The first thing that comes to mind when we talk about learning at meetings are presentations. Many conferences are built around experts that present their knowledge. This of course is important but there is so much more in learning. In 'the learning conference' a book from Ib Ravn, you will find that such presentations are part of any meeting, but in many cases should be shorter and create space for more reflection, discussion and interaction around the presented topic. Presentations should be short, to the point and provide discussion material. Ib's research shows that meeting participants learn so much more from each other when given the opportunity. This gives us two learning dimensions: Learning from the expert and learning from other participants. Top down and horizontal education. I would ad a third learning dimension: bottom up education. This is when the organisation, the company learns from their conference participants. The book Wisdom of crowds from James Surowiecky talks about the power and the importance of groups and how smart and surprisingly accurate predictors that groups of individuals can be. This book was advised to me by Elling Hamsö a dear friend I met through MPI. It is a 'must read' for any one involved in organising meetings. The book uses different old and contemporary stories, cases and research to demonstrate something that is very applicable in meetings. Some exciting stories about how a group of people could pin point a sunken submarine in the vast ocean, and how not harvesting the wisdom of crowds made the challenger explode upon its return into the earth's atmosphere. Learning as a group or as an organisation from the meeting participants is in most meetings an untapped resource. It is a simple and fun thing to do and when done well can provide information that can mean the difference between good and great for organisations.
Think, a meeting always brings together all experts in one area, what an immense concentration of knowledge in one room... How powerful would it be if we could connect all those brains into one physical network. Connected with cables that downloads, sorts, analyses, summarises and shares the knowledge of all participants. If we imagine a user software group, how valuable would it be if we could quickly and efficiently get all the comments, good and bad, listed and sorted in one session at our meeting... This is possible. It is just not done a lot and most meeting organisers don't know the methods to apply, the tools or technology to use or the companies and facilitators that do that for a living. Many meeting organisers do not even consider it, because they have never heard of it. They don't look for it, because don't know what they don't know.

The third bottom up dimension makes the educational scope complete:

FULL CIRCLE EDUCATION
Top down education

Lecture, presentation from an expert or panel of experts to the audience.
The classic format. Every conference has a lot of that. Most conferences have just that.
Horizontal education

Also peer to peer education. Participant learning from each other, sharing best practices etc.
In most meetings this is just a short Q&A and the rest happens during random networking at coffee or lunch breaks.
Bottom Up education

collecting the participants ideas, comments for the group or the organiser
This is probably the most powerful educational stream but almost no-one uses it accept for voting systems (ARS) that don't provide rich, text based information.
Table 4 Full circle Education at meetings enables for a rich and full educational experience keeping adults awake and involved.
These are different learning directions that can take place on their own, but we combine all in one learning experience, this is also the good order:
First have an expert speak on new or controversial issues
Secondly have the group discuss amongst themselves
Thirdly collect the feedback from the group
We add a repeat of the horizontal before going to the next presentation to complete the circle.

Figure 5 The 360° learning cycle starts with presentation (top down) than group discussions (Peer to Peer) followed by feedback (bottom up) etc.
About education, more specifically adult education and even more specifically adult education at meetings and conferences, a lot of books have been published. One on meetings and learner objectives is "Objectives to Outcomes: Your Contract With the Learner" (Glen C. Ramsborg, 1995) certainly a book worth reading. Similar books can be found in the on line knowledge base from the Meeting Support Institute (See page 59).The Meeting Support Institute

One of the bigger challenges in learning and meetings is that we have a hard time to remember where we learned something, where we heard it for the first time. In other words it is difficult to demonstrate the connection between one individual going to conferences, a session or the learning moment and his knowledge acquired there. In some cases it only thanks to getting the same information repeated, maybe at different conferences, that makes it sink in, stick and ultimately change behaviour. Much easier is it to remember e few impressive visual moments we connect to a destination or a hotel and the conference. Of course I do remember the palm tree swinging madly during a hurricane in Miami at the last MPI conference there. I even remember one or two people I was standing at the bar with drinking a cocktail. I have no recollection whatsoever about what sessions I went to at that conference let alone about what I learned there. However lot of information and even things I do today are learned at that conference. I just can not tell you what they are. That is a big challenge for the industry and measuring level two (learning) and three (applying) in the ROI measurement method (See Return on investment on Page 29) will help us to understand the educational results.
I do remember some sessions I went to and I do remember some of the learning from these sessions and even apply them. I remember the speaker, the topic, what I learned there, but I can't tell you at which conference this was.
I remember for example a session with Robin Lokerman from MCI about a window/mirror metaphor. He explained in a session about working with staff that credit for successes needs to be shared, through the window, with the team and failure needs to be seen as the leader's own doing; looking in the mirror. I'm trying to remember where this session was, but I can't decide which of the 15 potential conferences it was. The good thing is I do remember this was a session at a conference, the sad thing is that I don't have recollection of the source of a lot of other things I know and do. There for I can not make a good estimation of the educational value of all those conferences I once went to.
Research in that field and a method to examine and demonstrate the educational output in individual participants would clearly be a leveraged for the meeting industry.

Even if we don't measure or don't know the exact educational impact of conferences, we know that education is a steppingstone to ROI, so improving it, will improve ROI. And there is a lot we can do to improve education at conferences or even before and after. Some concepts and ideas are just free of charge or you could rent services from companies that for example provide computers, software and facilitation to really impact the horizontal and bottom up learning. There are a few hundred little and big things we could apply to our conference in order to make participants learn more, share more, remember more.
Besides the Down, horizontal and upwards education, there is also the activity differentiation: Passive, Reactive, Active, Interactive, Collaborative, Co-creative. Since a few years the interactive buzz has been a round. Most of us will understand what this means. Interactivity in meetings is hot mainly because most meetings are boring. As a solution, interactivity just sounds right. Most meeting owners are in favour of more interactivity and any solution will do, as long as the audience does not fall asleep anymore. A lot of interactivity is generated by including a Q&A (Question and answer) moment of a few minutes after each presentation. But is Q&A really interactivity? I would argue it is clearly not passive; a question from the audience is at least a reaction to the presentation. And since there is an answer from the speaker, we may call it active too. Interactive however is for many of the Q&A's an overstatement. Interactivity in meetings would mean to me that both the audience and the speaker or panel get involved in reflection, and discussion. The same with voting systems which are a great tool, but I would prefer to call them reactive: the audience reacts to a question by clicking a button on their keypads. Voting systems generate a lot of valuable information for the speaker and the meeting owner and it clearly involves the audience or even gives it some decision power depending on the kind of questions. If applied for example to decide where the next meeting will take place or who the audience prefers as the next key note speaker, than it obviously becomes an interactive tool. In most cases meeting owners don't go that far so it remains more a reactive model.
The new Buzz words are co-creation and collaboration. This is about working with the group of participants to create something new at the meeting. In this way the participants learn from each other, and the organisation also learns form the group. This is based on the current success of Blogs and wikki's where many individuals create one result via online communities. I would like to call a meeting that focuses totally on this aspect of co-creation a Wikkimeeting. A Wikkimeeting could start on line with a selection of the participants using on line using software like Synthetron (SYNTHETRON, 2007) to create a list of topics for the conference. During the meeting, open space as described in the book Open Space Technology (Harrison, 1977) could be the format to use for co-creation and a wikki or an online community could be used to keep the co-creation going after the meeting.
Networking
Call DR Emsens
A large medical conference of about 8.000 participants takes place in South Africa. A whole group of participants becomes sick and since it is contagious, they have to stay in their hotel rooms. The conference goers are stuck for a few days but two of them accidentally meet in the lobby and start talking; a random encounter. They never met before, but they seem to be interested in the same topic and the conversation continues in the elevator where they decide to have a drink in the room of one of them.
The medical field they work on is the same, but their disciplines and skills seem complementary. They end up lunching and dining in each others rooms and spending the whole conference sharing ideas and discussing, just the two of them. Back home they stay in touch and soon start a scientific research project together. This project's results are now published widely and recognised as one of the biggest and most important studies in the field of Diabetes ever. About 50 other research projects have started based on their research.
Remember, two individuals only met because they were both sick and both stayed in the same hotel.
They spend some intense and long networking time together because they had nothing else to do. A lot of unplanned things created this connection that today influences or even saves the lives of thousands. I call that the power of random encounters. This is one of the most powerful results of conferences and that is precisely why meetings will never be replaced by video conferencing or virtual meetings.
With videoconferencing, we will usually have small groups of people that know each other so the chance of a random encounter is limited. Building a trusting relation takes more than seeing a face on a screen and hearing a voice. It needs some bonding practices lake sharing food and sets of a neurological process that generates a powerful substances in the old part of the brain, making the bonding process stronger.
I also believe that people meeting people and especially specialists meeting specialists always lies on the basis of any innovation. Einstein would never have developed his relativity theory without having met other scientists that understood, challenged and fueled every steppingstone Einstein took to get to his E= M C². Einstein met Marie currie at this conference in Brussles, organised by Solvay in 1946 FOTO???
Of course they spoke and had lunch or dinner together and who knows what learning and motivation took place during that conference we will never know, but it is safe to say some of it made the young Einstein's Brain move forward. With a little fantasy we can even see a tired Einstein being coached by the much older Marie Curie and put back on track in stead of giving up and signing for the job of store manager in his home town...

What ever happened there precisely is not important. What is important is the assumption that progress in this world mainly occurs because one individual meets diverse people with similar interests at meetings and conferences.

If we understands the value and importance of networking and we accepts the potential huge impact of random encounters or accidental meetings, how about spending some attention to it at our conferences. How about trying to organise real networking moments rather than just hoping for some networking to take place during lunch? How about even structuring the networking, so we make sure the high potential mix of people actually happens? Or even put people together based on an automated system that matches people base on high value networking potential.

We could also use techniques or technology to facilitate the networking. Allowing participants to select their targets themselves based on available information and radar based (existing) pocket technology that warns them when they are close, showing a picture to help finding each other.

The middle positition
The fact that networking is positioned between Learning and motivation is not a coincidence. ( see p. 36) The networking actually has a connection with both learning and motivation. When you network with your peers, you learn a lot form them. Some formats include lots of discussion for peer to peer learning and call it networking. If you meet new people, you have access to new knowledge. In many cases, building a network of people is building a resource for future information. Networking is also very motivational since you make friends, you share, you meet people with the same professional issues etc. this is why networking is positioned between learning and Motivation, because it does both.

The fact that it is seen as a separate terrain, is because there are a lot of potential actions that will stimulate the networking during the conference, actoin different from educational ones. Networking needs a separate focus, it needs time and attention from the meeting organising team to function optimally. There are separate tools like Spotme, N-Tag, Badge to match and many more that purely focus on introducing people to each other based on information.
There are so many different kinds of networking and networking goals that it forms a separate matrix:

NETWORKING
random
stimulated
organised
Social

Peer to Peer

Business

Table 5 This Table lists the main categories of networking at meetings. These and more should be discussed and analysed in order to get the full scope of needed , desired and nice to have networking.
ELABORATE

Motivation
The Motivational aspect of the meeting is the final group of objectives. It is an area most participants will not mention as a reason to go to a conference, but from the organisers perspective we can see this is an important aspect of any conference. A participant will not say it is a way to stay motivated to keep going in his job. Nor will anyone mention the fact of being allowed to go to a conference as a reward for their performance in their company. One conference organiser once mentioned to me that their annual conference was "therapy" for the participants. This conference is the ASAP conference: the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals Conference. Strategic alliance professionals have a job nobody knows. They are alone in most cases and feel neglected and not recognised in their respective companies. Participating in their ASAP conference where they meet peers and can discuss and share their common issues, is a powerful medication for their professional loneliness. At the conference, they feel part of a group, which again is a very old and basic human need.
Making a powerful opening video, getting a professional set and good AV with some real technicians, makes them feel that someone is taking good care of them. Obviously there also is the motivational connection to the hospitality side of the conference. A nice trip to a attractive destination and a stay in a good hotel with wonderful meals also creates that positive and motivational feeling. This travel and hospitality side is, as mentioned before, the side that is well established and therefore not addressed in this book. The kind of motivation we feel needs to be addressed and increased in meetings is the part that fits the content side, the key objectives of a meeting or conference. Being treated well on accommodation and meals is important, I would even say fundamental, but on the other hand it is easy success. It is a matter of spending enough on the right venue and we will get happy participants. Great meals are taken care of by qualified and experienced chefs and their teams so not a lot to worry about. We can even test them during a site inspection and we can tell in advance exactly what we will get during the conference. Not so with the content side. That is always new and different. It takes a lot of preparing by the organiser, and we can not predict if it will be successful or not.

Nobody asks to be motivated.
When we ask meeting organisers why they organise a meeting many answers are about motivation. When we ask a meeting participant, almost no one will tell us they come to get motivated.
At the end of a conference many will say they feel their batteries are recharged, they feel energised. But no-one comes to a conference because they feel they need to be recharged. This may be a hidden attractor hat creates conference junkies and obviously, spending a few days out of the office to return with charged batteries that may last a year sounds like a good investment.

The three terrain formula

(Learning + Networking ) x motivation = meeting result
Taking the three terrains where meeting organisers can have an impact,
LOOK FOR THE TABLE FORM LEARNING TO TEACHING in learner objectives book.
understand
Repeat
Analyse
Reassemble
Teach

Fulfilling the intellectual needs of a group of people at meetings is much more challenging than fulfilling their bodily needs like eating, drinking, sleeping... There is no industry, tradeshow, conference or regular education focussing on that.
There are hundreds of places we can go for a good or great meal in every capital, but where do we find someone to prepare a wonderful meal to satisfy the intellectual hunger? There are dozens of hotel chains we can rely on to perform up to standards and make the hospitality side run like a train, but where do we look for the meeting focussed team that will facilitate the networking? The specialist that will combine all the right creative and technical and technological ingredients into a wonderful buffet that meets the pre set conference objectives. Most chefs now all existing and available ingredients to work with but wow many people know all potential ingredients to create motivation during the meeting? There a are no global brands to choose from, no major chains to relay on.

key categories in Motivation at meetings are PERFECT(r):
Category
examples
Results in
PROFESSIONALISM
Getting the basics right on the content side of meetings is in many cases a challenge. E.g. If the meeting rooms not have a technician, which still happens a lot, speakers are alone to start their presentation, and an already nervous speaker's performance does not get any better if a session starts with technical problems. With professionally developed and supported presentations the participant feels taken care of as an intellectual individual.
Pride, sense of belonging, retention
EXPERTISE
Credibility of speakers, innovation,
market leadership, positive news,
Examination, testing, certification
Learning, believing, application, advocacy, teaching
RESPECT FOR PARTICIPANT
Allowing every participant to contribute and to express opinion is respecting them as knowledgeable individuals. Video interviews for the closing video, voting systems, and many more make the participant feel respected.
Respect back, more open and giving atmosphere, co-creation.
FUN
Creative meeting concepts, variation, games, quizzes, technology, etc all contribute to a level of fun. Using drama, actors, entertainment during presentations helps to create a fun experience. Wow effects. Organised networking, games, ...
Better collaboration, interaction sharing
EVALUATION
Test, examine, reflection, survey
More attention, more learning, higher retention,
CONTINUATION
Keep the meeting and its messages going after the meeting. Repeat, remind,
More learning, higher appreciation, more attention for the next meeting
TIE
Connect this meeting to the previous one and the next meeting to this one. Make sure people see that annual meetings connect and build on. If possible create a long term goal for meeting series.
More credibility, sense of importance, mandate.
Table 6 The Motivation table is PERFECT: the 7 main categories in the motivational arena at meetings.
Meeting Content Matrix (r)
The Meeting Content Matrix(r) is a simple one page document that helps in the first phase of developing a good meeting. It shows the three terrains of key objectives and lists all potential objectives for meetings. It helps teams of people that are organising a meeting to discuss and brainstorm in an organised way and helps them see possibilities that were not seen before. It is all about analysing the key objectives before starting with designing the meeting.
If an organisation allows a professional to help in that phase, some out of the box thinking will occur and the potential of the meeting will be explored and expanded.
Many meetings are organised based on a limited list of objectives or even just one objective. Spending time one analyzing the objectives with a multidisciplinary team is valuable and should be part of the process of planning any meeting. If a person spends a quarter of a million Euro or dollar of the companies money on a meeting and takes 100 individuals out of their professional jobs for 3 days, it should be standard procedure. In most cases, Meeting owners that initiate a meeting only do so once a year. They certainly are not professionals in analysing the objectives and the help from a method to do so will be useful and appreciated. Besides the standard single big objective like we have to launch this product, a meeting owner will also have the feeling there is a need for let's say interactivity. If someone in his environment will tell him about that company that has a voting system, that's usually where it will end. Interactivity however is much more complicated and has much more facets than first assumed. There are all kinds of and levels of interactivity and in many cases what happens, even with a voting system is reactivity or activity, not interactivity. Maybe the real need for this conference is collaboration, or team building, or departmental cross pollination... It takes some real thorough thinking and a long checklist to get that ball rolling and to really understand the needs and the potential of any conference.

the simplified model of the Meeting Content Matrix (r):

List all objectives for the meeting
Learning

Networking

Motivation
The holistic approach
One of the key needs for the Meeting and conference industry is to approach the content side in a holistic way. Are we not forgetting anything? Did we look at and do we know all potential objectives for meetings? Do we really understand all the reasons why we organise this meeting? Are we focusing our attention and resources to the most important objectives? In most meetings these key questions are not addressed or in the best cases only partial. We find it normal and necessary to have real complete and detailed plans and a thorough procedure when investing in a new production line or a new warehouse. A lot of time is spent by a lot of people in analysing and designing such an investment. Not so with a meeting, even though the meeting may cost as much as a new warehouse. Should we not address a meeting in the same way? And again, a lot of time is spent by professional meeting planners on the hospitality side and inviting and registering the participants, organising all the logistics like travel, transfers, accommodation, breaks and lunches and off- site dinners. That is an important and time consuming job that need skilled and highly stress resistant people. But that is not what we are talking about here. In some cases meeting planners also book the AV but that is only one of the later steps, at this moment we are only analysing the meeting content and usually the meeting owner is on his own to do that. In some cases they will be assisted by marketing people or a communication agency yet most communication agencies or departments have no meeting specialised staff. If we will ask them how many collaboration systems for meetings they know or what the five levels to measure ROI are, we probably will be met with silence. To approach meeting content and analyze the meeting objectives, there is a need for specialized people with a complete knowledge of all there is to know. Today there is nobody I know that meets that condition.
All the knowledge is spread out over different industries, scientific disciplines and professions. Some people know a lot about adult education, some about facilitation, some about networking, and some about motivation. Some companies are great at producing a highly motivational opening show, but have no interest whatsoever in what happens in the educational session. Some companies have a voting system and will never advise a meeting organiser to use a zero cost pen and paper solution, even if that would be better for that specific conference.
The holistic approach is the only way to go. It will require some people to re-start and spend some long and hard reading, studying and training time. There is so much out there, it just needs to be brought together in a structured way, so meeting organisers can find what they need, not because a friend of a friend knows this company with one solution. The result even may be a new profession. A person specialising in the content side of meetings can best be a full time and specialised professional.
The effort will be significant, but the turnout for the industry even bigger.

The meeting owner, the meeting planner and the meeting content manager
The meeting owner is a professional in marketing, sales, product knowledge etc. He will not easily be the one that knows all there is to know about meeting content. The meeting planning as we know it today is a busy profession, a specialised position in creating good logistics and a perfect environment in which the meeting will take place. The skills needed to do that are varied, but the main ones I see are good planning skills (organised, deadline, project management, ...) and a passion for travel and hospitality. The meeting planner needs a fine sense of what a group will need to feel comfortable and welcomed. Taking good care of a group is not an easy job, especially with experienced and spoiled professionals. Working with VIP's on one side and also comforting a participant that is mad about not getting the right meal for his gluten allergy. Staying a calm under all circumstances, even if the waiter speaks the local Portuguese dialect only and we need that gluten free meal urgently. A meeting planner has a natural tendency toward the travel industry, hotels, leisure, the entertainment and incentive side of meetings. It takes passion and a warm, welcoming mind-set to build a closing dinner that has a wow effect. Those skills are what I would call hart oriented skills. Friendliness, warmth, spoiling others, an eye for beauty and style and a welcoming attitude; in one word hospitality.

Working on the content side requires a different skill set. Many meeting planners don't want to get involved. One small anecdote is of a professional meeting planner in one of the largest event companies, that was confronted with the possibility of a voting system for his meeting replied with "Please don't go there. If we give those speakers a voting system, they will be asking a lot of questions and I have no time." In this way, the meeting remained stuck at a minimal AV level and did not develop into an advanced and innovative learning event. Many meetings don't see the potential because most time and attention goes to the hospitality and no one is confronted with new possibilities. As long as nobody asks, there is no need for new solutions and as a result the meeting uses only a microphone and an LCD projector, nothing else... Another anecdote is of two meeting planners at a tradeshow. I asked them if they were involved in the content side of meetings and they replied with a "no thanks!" Of course there are other meeting planners that do get involved in the content side and are even capable of combining both the shell and the substance, the meeting environment and the meeting content. Some of them like the combination and some would prefer to specialise in one direction. Meeting content (the analyzing, designing and executing) requires skills like teaching, science, analytics, creativity, group dynamics. They will tend more towards the industry of education, communication, writing, business objectives, metaphors, creative , technical and technology.
Ménage a trois?
Although there must be a few people out there with the skills, passion and drive to do both the hospitality and the content side, I doubt there are many that would really pass the test for both.
The skill sets are very different, staying informed on both sides is challenging and just working both will require so much time that physically I believe it just can not be done by one person. I would suggest meeting departments of large organisations and PCO's or other independent meeting planner agencies start to hire specialised staff for both professions. Using marketing ot HR or Communication people that only once a year do a meeting for meeting content management is not the best solution. The specialised meeting content manager will in many cases have a background in one of these professions, but should specialise in meeting content.
Professional development (PD) specialist that we see in associations are obviously also candidates to take on board the whole load of meeting content. Where today they specialise in selecting the right topics and speakers and supporting them with AV and other practical matters, tomorrow, they could also take on board all the other educational issues but also the networking and motivational activities.
This holistic approach will also make sure that budgets on the content side are spent in a balanced way. The right amount in the opening show, more or les in the educational support, more or less in the networking efforts.
In the next chapter on meeting support we will look into more practical things that could land on the meeting content manager's desk. For meeting organisers that mean business and want the best results from their investments, it will be clear that a separate professional will have a lot to work on. For now we call it a meeting content manager but, as we will develop that profession further in this book, Meeting Architect ultimately could be a better job title.

Brain side

Focus on the Substance

Analyse Design, execute & measure meeting objectives in learning, networking, motivation.
Body side

Focus on the shell

Creates appropriate travel and hospitality.
Manages quality and safety for group and individual well being.Organisational chart 1: The basic cell: one meeting owner supported by 2 specialists that each focuses in their specialised domain
CONCLUSION Meeting Content :
Meeting content is much more than the content of the presentations. A holistic approach is needed for educational objectives, networking and motivational goals. Each of those three areas is so complicated, so many possibilities to cover that a method for analysing the needs for a meeting is essential. The Meeting Content Matrix (r) is be the start of such a method. Meeting organisers that spend significant resources should utilise an standard operating procedure to analyse meeting content, to make sure the money is well spent. Professional help will be necessary because the meeting organiser has other priorities and will not have the necessary skills nore experience. Such a professional can be a specialised consultant, besides that of meeting planner. As the meeting planner specialises in the creation of the environment or the hospitality side of meetings (the shell), this meeting content manager concentrates on all the learning, networking and motivational aspects of the meeting (the substance). Give us your comments and ideas on the wiki : http://meetingarchitecture.pbwiki.com
Check out the blog for more and up to date information http://meetingarchitecture.blogspot.com
E-mail the author at maarten.vanneste@abbit.eu

6. Meeting Content Support

Once we understand meeting content is all about the objectives in learning, networking and motivation of participants, the substance of which meetings themselves are built. Knowing those objectives is the crucial first step. After understanding why we organise this meeting, we must address the "What can we do?" questions. How to design and execute the meeting with all the right ingredients like concepts, people, tools and services that can help us drive the meeting towards it's objectives?
Turning objectives into actions, that is what this chapter is about.
Definition
Meeting support short for meeting content support is everything that can be done at meetings to support the learning, networking and motivational goals at meetings. These supporting activities can be creative, technical or technological application, methods, concepts, tools or services that are deployed before, during or after the meeting.
Meeting support does not include the hospitality aspects of a meeting but realising they are of utmost importance and have a fundamental motivational impact, collaboration with the meeting planner on overlapping aspects is a must.
Meeting support is also not involved in the analysis of the meeting objectives or the design of the meeting, it focuses on the execution and offers the meeting owner, or meeting designer as much support (tools and services) as possible. In the metaphor of the construction industry, meeting support is the construction itself, the construction company. A meeting support manager would be the construction site leader.
analyse
design
exeute
Measure
Meeting owner
Meeting Content Matrix (r)
Meeting support Matrix
Meeting support
Meeting support manager
3T model
Terrains
As was proposed in the previous chapter there are Terrains in which meetings have an impact on its participants:
1. Learning
2. Networking
3. Motivation

In the definition of meeting support we can find two other key aspects of Meeting Support: the Tools and the Time element. Together with Terrains, these form the three T words that make up the 3T model.

Tools
Definition: meeting support tools are what we can apply to support and improve the terrains: the learning, networking and motivational objectives at meetings:
Intangible tools or soft tools like concepts, methods, meeting formats, room layouts,
Tangible tools like AV, specialty tools etc. there must be more than a thousand different tools and to make sure we look in all directions we have defined three areas to look for tools:
1. Creative,
2. Technical
3. Technological
Creative tools are mostly intangible tools. Meeting formats, video production, creative opening show production, , meeting room lay out, etc. and also people like actors, facilitation, etc
Technical tools are tangible tools that are not computer related. Thins like AV, set and staging, flipcharts, pen and paper, signage, Lego, etc.
Technology tools are all tools that are computer based like web applications, cybercafé, collaboration systems, networking technology etc.

Fixation on technology
One of the challenges in the meeting industry is its current fixation on technology. About seven years ago the industry started to pick up on technology and started to see its value. Today we see technology appear in all magazines and tradeshows. Most of it is about using technology to replace the paper processes for meeting logistic management. The use of software and the internet for venue booking, event management, registration, etc. These are ale great progresses and create lots of efficiencies, but the industry fails to see beyond that scope and most technology we will see appear is based on the internet and hospitality.
The technology that can be used for improving learning, networking and motivation is hardly an issue. This is the part of technology that can improve the turnout, improve the results of the meeting, based on the meeting objectives and therefore the kind of technology that really matters to the meeting or conference's reason of existence. Technology like electronic networking tools, table top groupware, online brainstorming etc. is going to be our focus in this book.

Also, technology is just an enabler. It is like new fabrics: If you don't have the skilled designer and craftsmen, it is just a fabric. Looking at the beautiful fabric can be enjoyable while nothing much happens, but in the hands of the right people it can become a beautiful dress.
If we focus on technology, we may forget the good old equipment like flipcharts, and pen and paper. An open mind for technology and all the other tools (see TEACH) is what we need; not one or the other but a holistic approach.

Time: Before during and after
After Terrains and Tools the third T-word it Time.
In Meeting Support, Time addresses what we can do before and after a meeting to support or drive the objectives in Learning, networking and motivation. How do we get people thinking about the meeting's content weeks before the conference? Can we make them contribute or select speakers or even influence the meeting format? Most meetings are working with a selected audience of specialists so to the meeting organiser it is probably important to capture their attention as much as possible as long as possible in as many ways as possible.
What can we do to prolong the lifecycle of a meeting? Can we get some participants to form a community? Can we stimulate the networking after the meeting? What can we send them after the meeting as a souvenir with content?

The three T's for Terrains, Tools and time provides us with a three dimensional matrix of 3 by 3 by 3. Each of the 27 resulting combinations have potential tools that fit them.

Figure 6: Terrains, Tools and Time form the three axes for the 3T model.
A few examples:
A CD sent to the participants with all the presentations Is Educational (Terrain) based on technology (Tool) after the conference (Time).
An on line anonymous brainstorm to define the key topics for the upcoming meeting is Educational (Terrain) using Technology / the internet (Tool) before the conference (Time)
Speed dating is a meeting format for Networking (Terrain) using a creative concept (tool) during the meeting (Time)
The only thing this 3T model does is give a framework to think about content for meeting planning teams.

Get the basics right
Besides a technology fixation, a large portion of the current meetings are challenged to get the basics right still. Many meeting are caught in the AV trap. These meetings have a minimal spending culture on AV. They book sound and an LCD projector in the meeting venue. A technician sets it up the night before and that's it. Cheaper you can't go and without proper support, rather than aid the meeting it will get in the way of good presentations, stress out speakers and irritate participants. Not being able to understand a speaker, disturbing sound effects, not being able to see the speaker or read the slides: this is not obviously acceptable, but still happens a lot. All these basic things should be right. Anyone that participates in such a meeting should protest or get up and leave.
It is like getting cold coffee and melted ice-cream or a half hour wait between starter and the main dish at lunch: nobody accepts that in a five star hotel.

It seems almost normal, it is at least partially accepted that AV will cause problems. That should not be the case meeting planners should be as strict towards AV quality as they are towards the quality of dinner.
With a number of speakers and without a technician, there is probably going to be an issue. Soma planners conclude that AV is unreliable and complicated and therefore will not try anything innovative. They reason: ' If even such a simple set of equipment causes problems, it would be mad to go for more complicated stuff'. This is the AV trap and these meetings never even seem to move beyond the very basics.

To get out of that trap, it just takes the right approach and the appropriate resources. A good technician is certainly part of that. Getting the basics right, preferably with the same suppliers will create a stable and safe situation, that will allow meetings to start to experiment with specialty meeting content supporting tools. And that is when meetings start to become what they should be: the pristine and most intense moment in a year for learning, networking and motivation of groups or communities.
There is a trend towards an audience that, at home and at work, has all the tools for the most intense experiences: High Definition TV, surround sound, always on-line, mood lights, etc. This upcoming generation, kids, born with mobile phones and laptops, will be less and less tolerant for such basic technical flaws and meetings that don't get the basics right will loose participants. The Digital Natives as they are called will simply need real innovative, creative and specialty tools as participants, just to stay awake...
Meeting Support Matrix (r)

The Meeting Support Matrix (r) is a one page document with a 3x3 table. It allows teams that organise meetings to work on the meeting support. What tools or concepts or techniques could we use for supporting the Meeting objectives that were defined based on the Meeting Content Matrix (r). The vertical axis of the Meeting Support Matrix(r) shows action terrains: Learning, networking and motivation. The horizontal one shows the Time ZONES/ before, during and after the meeting.
In the nine resulting cells the meeting designing team notes down all possible ideas and tools they could eventually deploy to support the meeting's key objectives.
If the most important objectives are networking related, these three cells should be full of ideas as well in the before as in the 'during' and 'after' cell.
This is the starting phase in designing the meeting that helps to think in a structured way.

Before
During
After
Learning

Networking

Motivation

Table 7 The Meeting Support Matrix shows nine cells to be used as a note pad during meeting design brainstorms
Meeting support tools: CHATTY tools
When we say tools, we mean "anything we can do for or bring to" the meeting to influence the content side of it (learning, networking, motivation). These tools can be concepts, people, creative, technical or technological tools.

Five large groups of tools are CHATTY tools:
Concepts: - formats, techniques, methods, processes
- theme, slogan, communication
Human: - stage facilitators, speakers, actors,
- backstage technicians, ...
Art: creative, look&feel, design, photography, video
Technical: Equipment AV, set, flipcharts, pen & paper, post-it notes
TechnologY: - computer related / specialty tools
- internet related / on line activities
When using the word tools, many will see gadgets. There certainly are gadget-like things but tools in meeting support are much more than gadgets or technology. Tools can be simple or very complex, some tools were made for daily use and are applied to meetings, other tools were specially designed for meetings and some even especially made, just for this one meeting. Some tools we can hold in our hands some are intangible. Some are easy to use and some require technical assistance, and yet other requires specialists like facilitators. Some are very exciting and create a big wow effect others are very plain but still can score a lasting effect. Some tools are conceptual, some impact the meeting format, some change the room layout. Some require long preparation time others have a quick and easy benefit. Some need artistic or creative input, other are technically challenging.
Let me give some examples of what different categories of tools we are talking about.
Simple or complex tools
A simple tool is pen and paper, or a flipchart and post it notes. These are usually low cost and can be the perfect tool to support a certain objective. Most simple tools are know by every one, but in some cases nobody thinks of them as having a high potential at the next meeting or conference. There must be dozens of tools that can be deployed in hundreds of ways.
A simple and zero cost tool can be a game: there is "The big book of meeting games" (Caroselli, 2002) on games that can be played at meetings.
Daily use tools or purposely made tools
Some tools were made for daily use and are also applied to meetings, other tools were especially designed for meetings and some even made just for one meeting.
Music was not composed for meetings, but some songs can support a certain message or create a desired atmosphere.
The post-it notes were made for every day office use. When combined with a flipchart, they can become a powerful aid in brainstorm sessions at meetings or for meta-plans.
Spot-Me and N-Tag were developed with meetings or events in mind. Both devices are used at meetings for mainly finding or connecting to other people. They also are able to vote, show the meeting program and much more.
An opening video for a meeting can only be used once, at that meeting. It is made to measure for just one meeting.

Tangible and intangible tools
Some tools we can hold in our hands some are intangible.
A digital pen, a microphone, an evaluation form and a certificate are all tangible tools. A meeting format like 'open space', a creative idea and an online video report are all intangible.

Tools with or without assistance
Some tools are easy to use and some require technical assistance, and yet other requires specialist facilitators. An LCD projector in a small break-our meeting room is easy to use, for a widescreen presentation with 3 or 4 projectors, technical assistance is a must and for a special computer based groupware system like Crystal interactive, we best take the experienced facilitators to make it really work. Crystal Interactive is a UK based company that provides a service to facilitate collaboration, co-creation and peer-to-peer and bottom up education. They combine technology and people. The technology is based on small portable and fully wireless laptop computers. The facilitators have a lot of experience in working with groups at meetings and make them work together and share ideas and knowledge. The combination of both results in a strong group dynamic of discussion, brainstorming and inputting of information in the system. The input can be seen by all and commented or completed. A bit like a Wiki but than very intense and concentrated in this moment at the meeting plus all participants work together simultaneously.

Tools with a high or a low wow factor
Some tools are very exciting and create a big wow effect others are very plain but still can score a lasting effect.
A big opening show with themed video productions, a VIP speaker, a great act and pyrotechnic and the lot, generates a big wow moment but a simple but genuine testimonial from a blind teacher that teaches blind students to work with a computer can also have a lasting impact on many participants.

Strategic or operational tools
Some tools are strategic: BIG and conceptual, impacting the whole meeting. Some impact in a more tactical way the meeting format or operational and change the room layout.
Concepts like the "wisdom of crowds" meetings come with a theme that in this example is based on the book "Wisdom of crowds" (Surowiecky, 2004) with the same name and implement one or more ways of harvesting the wisdom of the 'crowd'. The Learning meeting (Ravn, 2007) influences first of all the meeting format by shortening the presentations and creating more time for reflection, discussion and interaction amongst participants. Other concepts like open space technology (Harrison, 1977) are held in a very unorthodox room lay out of circles of chairs. The one I have participated in was at the MPI WEC in 2006 where about 20 chairs per circle were used. Lisa Heft has been presenting open space few times now with MPI and she makes it clear that choosing for open space is a clear and strategic choice for a meetings direction.

Long or short preparation tools
Some tools require long preparation time others have the quick effect benefit. Good preparation takes lots of time and that is probably the first challenge for making all this work (budget on a good second). Delivering a DVD with recorded presentations and the closing video to all participants during the closing dinner takes a lot of preparation, just like screening and adapting all the presentations the day before the conference. This last activity almost never happens, but I think it is crucial for any meeting or conference, especially corporate ones. A quick effect can be added last minute by deciding to go for a closing video; a nice 3 minute report edited on some music.

Arty or techy tools
Some tools need artistic or creative input, other are technically or logistically challenging.
Adding some drama to a conference by hiring an actor to do a fake speech can be very powerful but the right actor and the perfect script is needed. Doing an open air projection during a beach dinner is technically challenging. Using the equipment from the meeting to be cost effective makes it an additional logistical endeavour. Using software to match people and organising one on one meeting or dinners with table topics also can be a logistical challenge. This may require additional staff and on site printing facilities to provide participants with an 'itinerary'

As described above, there are many kinds of tools and many ways to look at tools to support specific objectives in meetings. In 2007 there is no centralised, complete list or bible of meeting support tools yet. There must be hundreds and thousands of tools that have a small existence or still need to be discovered by the meeting industry. The meeting support institute is building a knowledge base of all the tools that exist so your input is welcome on www.meetingsupport.org.

Specialty tools
I am sure that currently very few people know even 5% of all existing tools available today in this world. Just reading Vision, the Future Lab's magazine on technology in (school) education was about 7 times an Eye opener. The most recent member of the Meeting support institute has smart RF based badges that have only a fraction of the N-Tag badge functionality but can cater for another kind of clientele and add real networking value for them.

An internet based brainstorm software like Synthetron uses an anonymous method for sharing ideas and commenting on them. A great way to get a group of opinion leaders to generate idea's and give frank comments on others. The result could be a change in the topics for the next conference or other relevant changes like the conference format, place, timing, dates etc..

I probably did not mention a few categories of tools but it should be clear that a meeting that just uses a microphone and PowerPoint is not exploiting its real potential for learning, networking or motivation..

Meeting Support Company
Abbit Meeting Support in Belgium is the worlds premier company that has put meeting support as defined above in its name in 1999, put it on the map through presentations, publishing, advertising, and tradeshow presence and made meeting support it's single mission as a company. Many companies do a part of meeting support and don't have a focus on meetings. Many companies for example provide all necessary AV for a meeting but not the specialty services for education and networking and motivation. Some will also work for exhibitions or concerts not giving them the right focus on meetings. Some companies have a meeting focus, but only service a part of the meeting support scope. They specialise for example in meeting presentations but don't provide all the other services. A meeting support specialist will provide every service or tool that can be used for the content side of meetings.

From AV company to Meeting support Company
The AV company that makes the decision to become a meeting support company has a long way of innovation, training, hiring and change ahead of it. It takes some nerve to do it but it can provide great value. Obviously the main invome for such a company will remain in the AV, but with an increased emphasis on all other services for meetings this share may become smaller and the dependence on it less. This may help to cope with some of the new competition in the AV branch, where the LCD projector have become a no-brainer, real cheap and very portable. An AV company has to be of a sertain size to be able to manage all meeting support aspects and be home to all the different skills needed for the full range meeting support. IT certainly plays a major role in meeting support for offices, registration area, cybercafé, presentations etc.. Design for conference logo's and signage. Aesthetics and construction skills for set building and staging. Multi media skills like for producing a DVD, CD-rom, on-line presentations, etc. These and many more skills may need to be hired and are much more diverse than the sound technician, the light technician and the projection technician of today's generalist AV-company.
Many service need to be provided from in house. Not like an agency that subcontracts all suppliers but a strong internal horizontal integration, creating speed, consistency and cost efficiencies.
The sales person needs to be trained as well. The diversity of services becomes so vast it takes a lot of internal training and communication to make that work. With Abbit Meeting Support, the counter of different services is around 500 and every year 7 selected innovations are presented so the complexity increases and the staff hired needs to be of a higher level and supported with extensive and permanent training.
Just one example. A company says they want a video conference for their meeting. It takes some good understanding of all the twenty something services one could qualify as video conferencing to be able to ask the right questions and finally offer the right solution. A meeting support company should be able to provide most services from in house. All but a few special, expensive or rarely used services. The most expensive would be a HD Satelite multipoint bidirectional video conference. For such extreme solutions, the meeting support company knows suppliers. Most other solution like AV, Design, Presentation, ICT, etc should be in-house services.
To stay with the video conference request, it could also be just a remote presentation. This could a two way sound only phone connection, combined with a PowerPoint operated in the meeting room. The presenter can be in his office or home using a mobile phone to connect to the meeting room with voice only. A very reliable two way connection that uses a piece of equipment to get all microphones and loudspeakers in the conference room connected to a phone line. This costs 5% or less of a real video conference and may be the perfect solution for this meeting. Between those extremes, there are at least one dozen of other options and a meeting support team must be ale to help the client to select the best one. Also will the professionalism of AV-company have to grow. Today, in my view, many small AV companies are poorly structured and have no real planning or procedures implemented. One of the first things an AV-company has to do when it focuses on Meetings is become project management based. Stopping with the dry hire, the small rentals without a technician, is a first step. If they are really serious, the AV company also needs to sop doing Sales. Selling and installing equipment is a different business model with different service needs and is not compatible with project based meeting support.

The vast number tools and concepts and the endless variation of applications makes a meeting support company a valuable concept. It provides a multidisciplinary team of coordinated individuals that, combined in briefings and brainstorms can come up with the best solution for any meeting objective.

AV companies may be great candidates to become meeting Support Companies, that does not exclude others from joining in. An IT company could become one too or one may even imagine e meeting support agency evolving from a production company, having all the knowledge, but working with subcontractors for the execution.

In house av
AV people that understood the meetings industry saw good business in organising the I house AV for hotels. Some of these companies have become large in the US. OF course it is understandable that the venue wants to be able to offer this service and in many cases that is a good solution. Tha the venue doe not invest, but gets an implant of a larg AV company makes sense to and if the venue gets a cut-back or commission, every one is happy. However... I believe a meeting or conference disserves better than this kind of service. Meetings a re far to important to leave them to ever changing in house teams. A meeting owner must look for continuity and build on a trusting relation with a travelling partner. In house technicians are not really interested: every day anew client; today it's company X and tomorrow association Y. A boring lopende band factory situation; No relation, no connection, no engagement.
The companies that organise AV in Hotels are howling with the wolves as we would say it. They choose to go with the flow, and they don't do this industry a service. They clearly reply to a need and in doing so the get the easy buck, the quick money.
Companies that choose to travel around in a long term partnership with their clients have more difficulty to grow: they do not standardise, they work with individuals not with major brands, and they build a relationship not a standard contract.
If venues that puts an exclusivity clause for AV services in their contracts, obviously don't help the industry nor themselves.
It is bad for the industry since meeting owners is prohibited by that venue to build a relation with a vendor and therefore these meetings never grow out of a basic AV level, making the meeting less productive and the industry more vulnerable.
These venues themselves because meting organisers that have a high level relation with their vendor will not break that safe and stable relation but rather choose another venue. A survey in MPI Belgium, helt in 2004 shows that ...
The eindwerk van ...

Figure 7: how exclusive clauses hurt the industry
Meeting Support technician
Just like we all expect enough waiters to make the seated lunch take no longer than an hour, we need enough technicians to get the basics right, a few more to create a professional meeting and even a few more to create perfect presentation support or full-scale meeting support.
Not just a technician to set up the night before, but also to operate, to intervene in case of problems and to support the speaker with whatever he wants to accomplish.
Technicians and AV companies must be aware of the fact that meeting planners are irritated when they see technicians doing nothing, playing on their laptop or reading a book or even a newspaper. And rightly so. Technicians are paid to work and that's what they should do. Technicians should be making pictures of the meeting, recording the session, or do whatever ads value to the meeting. There are many things to fill that gap. Technicans that don't want to perform multiple tasks and learn new skills to do so, are not in the right industry. They even are a threat for their own AV industry because meeting planners say they are not doing anything, so next time I don't book them anymore. Another Catch 22 that hinders this industry to grow into higher and more professional levels.

A good meeting technician is a meeting specialist. Not a rock and roll sound guy that also does the occasional conference to fill his calendar.
A meeting technician is multi functional and covers sound , projection, PowerPoint and much, much more. This is especially important for smaller (50 to 100) or low budget meetings or in meetings with parallel sessions in breakout rooms. A multifunctional meeting support technician can be the sound specialist in the plenary room and cover all technical aspects in one of the break out rooms. This is cost efficient and also makes the technician work for his money, rather than spending most of the time doing nothing.

A meeting technician speaks fluent English. This is an absolute must for international meetings or meetings with international speakers.

A meeting technician has experience with meetings and understands and takes away the stress from speakers rather than causing it.
Meetings, in contrast with events and concerts have a lot of down time. As soon as a presentation has started technicians have nothing much more to do. This is why we also ask them, is the smaller meetings) be multi tasking to make pictures, record sound, deliver a CD-rom at the end of a meeting with all presentations etc. this keeps them busy and makes them add real value, for no or very limited cost.

The value of good, trained and specialised meeting technicians reaches me almost daily. It is rewarding to see how happy meeting planners get when they work with a motivated and skilled meeting technician. It is as if they have never had one that was...

Having stability in Meeting technicians results in a lot of good things. First of all there is consistency, stability, and predictability in the service level of that person. Secondly you have the opportunity to build rapport and create reliability, not to mention the security of having someone you know rolling in big flight cases cases with who-knows-what inside them. Finally the stability of cost can be an issue for budget prediction.
Definition of meeting support technician
A Meeting support technician is a technician with a clear focus on meetings. It is a multi lingual (min. English) speaking technician that performs multiple tasks: combined sound, light, ict, voting ... The MT understands the basic processes at meetings including stress handling with speakers.
In the construction site metaphor he would be the bricklayer, plumber, electrician, carpenter or preferably all of the above.

If you have a lot of technicians at a larger or more complicated meeting, and you want it all planned ahead, you may consider to work with a team leader we call the Meeting Support Manager.

Meeting Support manager
The job of meeting support manager was a logic name for a project manager at Abbit Meeting support. The meeting support manager is an individual that is the one contact person that plays the role of liaison between the meeting organiser and the meeting support company. This person plans and executes all meeting support services for a meeting. This means a meeting organiser can get him on board during the Meeting support matrix(r) meeting or maybe even the team meetings around the Meeting Content Matrix (r). He will be giving ideas and line out potential challenges and cost factors in those early stages of designing the meeting.
In a later phase he or she can generate RFP's, analyse and propose suppliers and manage purchasing when needed. Than he can be part of designing the meeting theme and the meeting logo. Based on those he can work with his team on powerpoint template, video production, set design etc.
With the IT supplier, office and cybercafé equipment is booked, the photographer is booked etc.

On site the Meeting Support Manager makes everything happen. He works with his team of technicians, and the equipment that was ordered. The Meeting Support Manager's core objective on site is to get the best out of the available people and equipment is the most efficient way. He works with the meeting owner or meeting planner. He joins in the pre-con meetings, presents a speaker briefing, makes sure technicians are on time, and during the meeting gives the queues, takes the role of stage manager, and a problem solver. The Meeting Support manager remains calm when every one else gets nervous and calls the local supplier on his mobile on Sunday for help when the CMO has another change of mind.
And if theorganiser or planner likes the meeting support manager, they can start planning right after this conference for the next one. The meeting Support Manager becomes part of a cange and improvement process.
Meeting support manager
A meeting support company needs project managers. If possible certified project managers (by PMI). The meeting Support Manager is such a Project manager. In the construction metaphor, he is the construction site leader. As said before, this Meeting Support Manager will not, or only partly be involved in the hospitality side of the meeting. That hospitality field is a profession and specialise in its own and can not be combined, unless in small projects. The meeting support manager works for or besides a meeting owner or planner, and some times, for or besides a production company. Depending on the importance the meeting owner lends to the support on the content side of the meeting, he or she may decide to work with two individuals, with a clear split between the meeting hospitality managed by the meeting planner and the meeting content side, in this case managed by the meeting owner, supported by the meeting support manager.
A meeting support manager needs to be a mature person with a specific skill set. A background in production or AV is good, but planning skills, communication skills, leadership and creativity all need to be characteristics. The meeting support manager gets on board right after or even better during the design phase.

Construction site leader.
Definition of Meeting Support Manager
The meeting support manager is the project manager for meeting support. He is part of the meeting organising team and focuses on the combines production, AV, ICT and other content oriented services. The Meeting Support Manager plans and leads tools and people for meeting support. On site the Meeting Support Manager maximises the impact of available people and tools. He is the one contact person for all content oriented matters.
In the construction metaphor he would be the construction site leader.

Analysing
Designing
Exetuting
Measuring
Strategically
Tactical
Operational

Meeting owner
Meeting support manager
Meeting support manager

Meeting Content Matrix (r)
Meeting support Matrix
Meeting support

6 months before
6 to 2 months before
1 month before, during and the months after
The day after until the next meeting

The meeting support manager helps the meeting owner planning and leading the execution of all solutions for any meeting objective. In the design phase he will provides ideas for the tactics and operations to support the strategy.
For example

Lets say I'm a company called VITRA and my strategic objective is to make sure every employee knows the whole range of design chairs we produce and the 5 crucial details about them. An 80% score on an exam for all employees and 90% for sales staff is the goal.
A meeting support manager could offer the tactic of providing study material before during and after the meeting and as operational ideas a logo and slogan for that campaign, a pre-event wiki, an on site poster session, an on-site or post event certificate for those that passed successfully and a post event online version of the poster session.
The Meeting Support Manager is also the person that will plan the whole technical and creative package for the conference. A Meeting Support Manager needs a few months (and some times gets only a few weeks) before the conference, to plan everything including floor plans, shipping, booking crew, briefings, call sheets, etc. The phase before the conference or meeting is crucial. This is when choices are made and decisions are taken that determine the meetings success and it's level of ROI. Spending enough time with the meeting support manager '(and the team behind the Meeting Support Manager) and remaining dedicated to the meetings objectives, will not necessarily cost a lot, but may innovate the meeting in a way that even saves money and increases value. The meeting support manager books equipment and people and makes scripts, scenario's and cue lists that combine both. Once that planning phase is gone, he goes on site at the time of the meeting and is the leader for the meeting support team and the one contact point for the client.
The Meeting Support Manager leads the unloading, commands the set-up, manages client onsite changes, liaises to the Hotel Staff, contacts the local suppliers, makes sure every one works efficiently, clean and safe and maximise the effect of time team and tools by using that one spare LCD projector to add exposure for the main sponsor.
He translates client remarks like 'what is that strange sound' into "check wireless 6 and equalise it around the 600hz"
He is present at the Pre-Con meeting, Does technical a speaker briefing, shows speakers the stage and tools, may even act as a stage manager in medium size project. After the conference he makes sure the room is cleared of an confidential information, everything gets packed and loaded for shipping the recordings get copied for back-up etc. etc.
The list if things to do can be enormous and combine creative and technical matters.

Focus on meetings
A Meeting Support Manager must have a clear focus on meetings. Just as for the meeting support company, a Meeting Support Manager needs to know all the specific services and tools for meetings. Obviously as stated earlier in this book, a meeting also has event elements, for let's say the opening session. The focus on meetings is however crucial. Dealing with speakers, knowing what educational efforts are set in motion, specific AV support, etc. make the value of a Meeting Support Manager for meetings somewhat higher than a production professional that 'also' does meetings but actually prefers to do theatre. Theatre however is closer to meetings than let's say R&R concerts or parties. The focus on meetings will generate hundreds of little areas where specific knowledge is needed. Let's say speaker timing; this is not really necessary for parties, but a good and automatic countdown system for speakers can be crucial in conferences. When installed on a PC, the natural reflex of a Meeting Support Manager is to wire that same PC up as a back-up for the PowerPoint PC.
Meeting Support Knowledge
The Meeting Support Manager is above all a planner and a leader. The technical and practical knowledge is the next crucial factor. A meeting support manager does not need to know how to equalise an AKG 4000 wireless head worn DPS microphone with a Yamaha O1V, but it helps. He has to know that a good sound technician is able to do that and has to do it before the meeting starts. A Meeting Support Manager needs to know the different types of microphones and maybe even brands and types. Besides a good AV knowledge, a good Meeting Support Manager also knows a great deal about production, staging, presentation technology, and the specialty services like voting, collaboration technology, networking technology, ICT, etc. This package of knowledge is massive and requires permanent updating. At Abbit Meeting Support once a year a Techno Demo is organised to share the latest innovations. Being on the mailing list of the Meeting Support Institute (see p 64 ) and going to tradeshows can help to stay ahead. The big challenge is to find a real comprehensive overview of everything that exists. The Meeting Support Institute knowledge base on www.meetingsupport.org is the biggest resources with a holistic approach.

Long term collaboration
When working with a different team every year, the conference will every year have a lot of work to get the basics right. The quality will go up and down and there is no chance for introducing real valuable new tools or services. A long term collaboration with a meeting support manager and preferably his team, makes the process of managing the content side of meetings professional, easy, predictable and financially stable.
If a conference or meeting starts to investigate, test and use tools and services that support it's strategic goals, it becomes crucial to have a trusting relation with the Meeting Support Manager. The question of what can we change this year or how can we improve on the objectives, is now posed to the right person. The growing complexity and the increased use of technology make stability and continuity a must. A solid relationship with a Meeting Support Manager delivers stability in execution and an the Meeting Support Manager takes part in an improvement process that allows for true innovation.
When to use a Meeting Support Manager?
Once we understand such a Meeting Support Manager exists, we may decide to work with one.
Secondly is probably the importance the meeting owner puts on the Meeting Support Manager's function that may trigger the need for one. Some meeting owners will feel threatened at first because someone is entering their professional space. But once discovered, it is hard to imagine how to do a professional job without one. For some smaller projects where we only have one room with a simple AV only set-up and two technicians, it probably is not wise to use one, but if we take 50 sales managers out of the office for 4 days or spend over 100.000 on a meeting it may be a good idea to get a Meeting Support Manager on board.
Alternatives are working with a Meeting Support company, having the preparations done well and appointing one technician as a chief technician who combines his job as a, let's say, projection technician with leading the team etc..
The traditional reflex of asking the meeting planner to book AV is ok for small meetings; The Meeting Planner would than usually book local or in-house AV and for small and simple projects that can be okay. That may, even for reasonably small projects change when the meeting owner understands how much more he can get out of the meeting and taking the 2000,- € budget for AV and transforming it into a 20.000€ meeting support budget.
One also needs some real Meeting Support when one gets nervous thinking about the next conference AV and technology, knowing that last year again a lot of things went wrong. To those who are still struggling to get the basics right: it's time for an improvement process.

Some meeting planners may resist some of that thinking because it enters their professional space and may split of some of their responsibilities, but if we keep on reading, it will become clear the meeting planners, like the whole industry only can benefit from such an approach.

Who is not a meeting support manager yet. Marketing AE, medical writer,

A trend we see is that clients that understand the complexity of the meeting support often involve the Meeting Support Manager earlier in the process. AV companies sometimes get involved only one week before the meeting. In that early process sometimes a client will have the Meeting Support Manager join in the site inspection so the meeting support needs are compared to what a venue offers. The selection of a meeting venue is more and more based on the Meeting Support Manager's input. A Meeting Support Manager is interested in room height, obstructing chandeliers, loading dock, backstage facilities, rigging points and electric power. This is now more and more put into the balance to make crucial selection decisions. Building new meeting space can benefit tremendously from a Meeting Support Manager as consultant in the construction team.

The Meeting Support Institute
Starting as an AV company and slowly growing into a Meeting Support company, than defining Meeting Support was a long process taking about ten years. At that time I felt alone in the meetings industry even though I had chosen it as my industry. It's probably the warmth of the meeting industry and the friendships with its members that kept me going. I started to realise that something should change in order to give my ideas the chance to grow. The market was not focussed on what we were doing and it took us lots of explaining and convincing to make every individual new customer see the potential. I started to look for a bigger, more global approach. I knew there were other companies in the same position, a love-hate relation with an industry that did not understand what to us seemed so obvious. I could see that I was too small on my own to make the market change so I started to think about an association for those companies. I had seen a few, but was convinced there must be hundreds. The idea of the Meeting support institute was born. Than in 2003, when I was doing my CMM with MPI in the Dolce Conference hotel in Paris, I realised that I was ready to put the plan on paper. For my CMM, (Certification in Meeting Management) which is focussing on strategic thinking, we needed to do a Business plan. Mine was titled: The Meeting Support Institute. I got my CMM in 2004, started some experimenting in 2005 and officially opened for membership in 2006.
Goals, Mission
The Meeting Industry currently is losing innovative products to the Marketing industry. The EIBTM award winner is one (see INNOVATION P 4-28) , an other company based on the USA's east coast, says the same: we can't seem to find decision making clients in this industry. They did a full demo of their product, a powerful collaboration and co-learning technology (groupware), at a large conference and soon after shifted their commercial focus towards the marketing industry; away from the meeting industry.
Every year, more potentially groundbreaking and innovative companies do the same: They come into the meeting industry, have a bizarre experience of non connecting and leave. This is because meeting planners are mostly focussed on hospitality and leave the content side to the meeting owner. The question for the meeting industry is if and how we want to stop that.
The big challenge however is that meeting owner is not a profession and will probably never be. The most meeting owners have a job in marketing or HR and only occasionally become meeting owners. The international marketing manager organises a marketing meeting and is only at that moment a temp meeting owner. The CEO organises the annual stakeholder meeting and is once a year a meeting owner. The Product manager organises the annual Scientist focus group and becomes temporary meeting owner when doing so.
There is no association of meeting owners. Each of the above may be member of a marketing association, a CEO club or other. Not an association of meeting owners. They would not even have the time or the motivation to spend a day in a course for meeting owners because they only organise one meeting or conference a year. This again shows there is currently no place where these innovative newcomer companies can go to. If they focus on the CEO's they will need to fight for a part of the attention. If they focus on the marketing industry, they probably have the best chances, but still are competing with media, internet, and many other marketing tools that want the marketing manager's attention and money.

Expanding on limited knowledge and limited choice
The other side is that the meeting owner only faces a limited offering of services. The people that assist the meeting owner are marketing or communication people and their knowledge of meeting support and the tools that could be is limited. If they accidentally bump into a collaboration system, this may be experiences as a big innovation and contracted to impress the participants. This meeting may be better off with Crystal Interactive from the UK, but if they have no place to find these different suppliers, comparing is not an option.
The choice is not big enough and the information is limited, finding a company like that a lucky shot. I think the meeting support institute therefore has a good reason of existence to make the connection between meeting support products and companies and a complex market. The Meeting Architect in the next chapter may become instrumental in really making it happen.

The goals of the Meeting Support Institute are diverse. The Meeting Support Institute operates on a global scale and wants to bridge the gap between meeting content management and meeting support on one side and the hospitality industry, meeting planning and meeting owners on the other. The Meeting Support Institute has members that all provide some kind of service, knowledge of value and thirdly there is the target audience of meeting planners and meeting owners.
The first level members are companies with a product or service that fits the 3T model: products that impact the Learning, Networking or Motivation before, at or after a conference or meeting.
Than there is the intermediates like production companies or PCO's that use the Meeting Support products for their clients.
Than the consultants, Individuals like meeting designers, creative meeting directors, facilitators, ROI specialists, trainers, etc.

Besides these commercial products and services, there is also the academic angle. There is useful knowledge in the learning lab Denmark, in the Future Lab UK, the HR faculty of St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa and thousands more.
The professors , scientists and academics, form all kind of departments at universities can help us with great data and knowledge that can be used in meeting design and in meeting processes.

On the receiving end we have meeting planners and meeting owners. They are the end users of meeting support and meeting content management services.
The second receiving group is the Universities and other educational institutions that may want to start a course in Meeting Support management or Meeting Architecture.

In between we have the connectors like Media, tradeshow, meeting association conferences and other 'transmitters' to take the message across.

Figure 8: The meeting support institute want to gather and translate relevant input from companies and non profit for improving the learning, networking and motivation of participants at meeting.

The website www.meetingsupport.org is open to anyone and has an increasingly important knowledge base where you can find information like books, bits of knowledge, articles, white papers and more. These are all relevant if we are working on the content side of meetings and will be helpful to improve the Learning, Networking and Motivational objectives for your participants at your meetings. The member list provides you with the details of companies that can provide services or tools that work in the same areas.

The activities that the Meeting Support Institute organises are aimed at promoting and educating about the use of meeting support techniques and tools that improve the results of meetings. The Meeting Support Institute organises stands at tradeshows, presentations and other educational formats. A regular newsletter informs briefly about the new relevant information that has become available.
The annual Meeting Content Conference is organised to learn more and meet other meeting professionals that have a strong interest in meeting content.

The holistic approach

Meeting support is the holistic approach to supporting meeting objectives. It aims at providing and applying all existing knowledge, techniques, methods, formats, tools and services that have an impact on meeting content or meeting objectives. It is not just technology. Meeting support is also not just about AV or facilitation. It is about all of the above and more.
Meeting content support is not just about the presented content but about all learning, networking and motivational aspects in meetings.
One of the challenges in our industry is the divers but not integrated offer of suppliers. Some focus on the production side and bring great creative 'wow' experiences. Some suppliers totally focus on participant interaction through a voting system. Other have developed groupware (software for use in groups) to increase interaction and each believes they have the holy grail for meetings. These are all good and even great service, we need these kind of tools, more and more, but they are only part of the whole scope of things we can do. The meeting owner or the meeting planner needs professionals that can inform him about all or at leas a lot of options for each meeting objective. What currently happens is random or unsystematic. A meeting owner or a colleague or assistant happens to know a company that provides a service and that is already exceptional so a 'WOW, let's do this' attitude kicks in and innovation takes place for innovation's sake, change for changes sake. With good meeting support managers, a few alternatives should result a more efficient spending and optimal meeting results. As complex, challenging and diverse the objectives of meetings can be, as divers, flexible and versatile meeting support should be. A real good meeting support service only is provided if the choice between a low cost flipchart based format and an expensive computer based system can be made with only the results for this meeting in mind, not the maximising of sales of one single supplier. This is what takes us to the next chapter where we introduce the concept of meeting architecture and how a meeting architect could be the missing link.

CONCLUSION meeting support :
Meeting support is a concept and a business model. It approaches the services at meetings from the meeting objectives perspective: the learning, networking or motivational goals. Meeting Support consists of all tools: Conceptual, Human Art, Technical and TechnologY (CHATTY) no cost, low cost and high cost tools and services. It requires a total focus on meetings and a holistic approach so all available tools can be considered to drive the meeting's objectives in the most efficient way. The meeting support Technician, the Meeting support Manager, The meeting Support Company are all to be considered for long term relations so the required improvement process can kick in.Give us your comments and ideas on the wiki : http://meetingarchitecture.pbwiki.com
Check out the blog for more and up to date information http://meetingarchitecture.blogspot.com
E-mail the author at maarten.vanneste@abbit.eu

A product or format consultant
Than we have the Lego Serious play (www.seriousplay.com)certified consultants and the Open Space consultants (www.openspaceworld.com). And a hundreds of other ones we haven't even heard of.

All of the above companies and consultants bring some serious value to the meeting table, however, none of the above has the holistic approach that a meeting owner needs. They all approach the meeting content from their specialised and limited angle and use only a particular section of the potential services and tools. That is what will differentiate the meeting architect from the specialist above: he or she will know all the above professions, individuals and companies, and he will call upon them when needed, based on the meeting objectives. Not accidentally, but based on thorough analysis and complete knowledge.
The meeting owner happens to know one or two supplier and is excited to work with them, not knowing what he doesn't know: all the other options. The meeting owner needs a meeting architect. The meeting architect will be an interface, translating the expressed and non-expressed needs from a meeting owner into design elements and building blocks for that meeting.

Building that missing profession
There is a lot of work to be done, to build the knowledge base for meeting architecture. We need to get all the existing disciplines, professions, knowledge and tools into one big knowledge base. Based on that, books have to be written, courses designed and curricula for university degrees assembled. I am convinced that graduating in a master degree in meeting architecture will take two, maybe three years. And it will need a continuous education format to stay up-to-date with the latest scientific findings and technological development.

I don't think Meeting Architects will take over form the specialist I mentioned above. There are two things that may happen: These specialists will decide they remain specialists and the meeting architect population will guide them to clients that really need theme and probably even more clients than before.
The other option is that a specialist, let's say the facilitator, decides to become a meeting architect. Studying, reading, taking courses will develop and widen the knowledge of such an individual up to a point where he would become a (certified?) meeting architect.
Agencies like PCO's, Communication Agencies will hire a meeting architect or work with one as a consultant. They will be happy with the help of such a meeting architect because they now get the holistic approach and the ideas and advise they never could get from a single individual.

CASE: A Dutch agency called DDG worked with Abbit Meeting Support for the first time a while ago for a London based IT company. Abbit today, communicates about and works with the Meeting Content Matrix (r) and the Meeting support matrix. Excitement and expectations arise quickly but Abbit is still growing towards meeting architecture. Although we do not communicate meeting architecture yet, clients happily seem to take an arm when we reach them a hand. In this case, for the user conference in Monaco expectations needed to be managed and tasks to be defined. Our meeting support manager expected the communication agency to come with design elements and theme-ing and the agency expected us to take the lead. A meeting support manager is not a meeting architect, but already creates high expectations in clients. This only confirms to me that we need to keep progressing into the direction of meeting architecture. Some of Abbit's current meeting support managers may become meeting architects, if they wish and take on the enormous effort of studying that will take.
It will not be a five day course and a certificate to make a good meeting architect.
It will not be a master degree in Meeting architecture either.
It will take years of practice, as a meeting planner an meeting support account manager or maybe meeting support manager. A junior meeting architect, straight from the university will need a few years to become a full meeting architect or even senior meeting architect.

CASE: The most recent and most ideal case so far, is the Abbott Cardiovascular example. Abbit was involved early on with, the account executive, the meeting support manager and myself in the role of meeting architect.
We approached the project with what I would call the meeting architecture methodology. We had a few long meetings where first we inspired, secondly analysed, than designed the meeting before going into the implementation phase. As I write this, the meeting actually takes place in Berlin and good response is fed back.
During the first meeting we introduced the concepts, the methodology and the matrix. The second meeting the real work started. 6 people in total spent 3 hours or more on analysing the goals and objectives.
As in an ideal world, Abbot had lined up the Meeting owner, the meeting planner and the meeting content manager. A unique situation with the triangular team (see illustration on page 5-48) that shows that some companies really are working in that direction. We used the Meeting Content Matrix (r), so we looked at learning, networking and motivational goals. That we used the Meeting Support Matrix(r) and listed all we could do to drive those objectives forward; before, during and after the meeting. In total with those meetings alone we spent about 70 man hours (totalling the client and Abbit), before we started to produce even a PowerPoint template. That is how it always should go, especially with meetings of a certain budget. That this doesn't always happen that way has three reasons:
One: you don't miss what you don't know exists. So "it was never done before".
Two: If I do understand the need for such a process "there is no time or budget".
Three: If I do understand has the time: "there is no-one to take us through that process".
the creation of the profession of meeting architect will be an answer to the se objections.

Designing a house is done in detail with the help of a specialist, an architect, because a house costs a lot and so many specialists and building blocks need to be coordinated. Same thing with Meetings; only we need to create our architects still. Not in the least because meetings can cost as much as a few villa's.

What's in a name...
Meeting Architect (meeting designer, meeting content manager, ...) If we start using it, it will become meaningful, just like the word meeting planner that also is unclear when you first hear it. The average meeting planner does not really plan the meeting but the environment, the shell in which it takes place. The term "meeting support" has the same challenge: if we hear it for the first time, it has no real meaning or definition. We may think meeting support is helping the meeting planner in creating the environment, or if we hear it from a foreigner, offering it as a service, we may think it's DMC work: the on site support for meeting logistics. And as we know by now, meeting support actually looks at the content side of the meeting and aims at offering all potential services to the meeting owner or whoever needs it. The new profession that starts to appear on that terrain is the Meeting Support Manager who is like the chief of a construction site, working for the builder, the owner of the building.

Let's not use 'meeting designer', because designing is only one of the four ADEM phases (see table 6-61) . Designing also sounds to artificial for some and to artistic for others. Of course if someone wants to limit himself to the designing only, that is an option too; some meeting architects will maybe use meeting designers because they need more creativity and some meeting owners maybe will put a meeting designer to work based on their own perfect analysis a and briefing. The meeting owner may than pass the design on to a meeting support manager for executing it and finally get an ROI specialist in for measuring. Even if the meeting designer knows all there is to know about meeting design, he nor the Meeting Support Manager or the ROI specialist are a meeting architect.

Let's not use 'meeting content manager' although it sounds interesting when you put 'meeting logistic manager' (the meeting planner) and 'meeting content manager' next to each other. The downside of the title "meeting content manager" is that meeting owners will think "I don't need that, I know all about the content", meaning the meeting topic and the content of the presentations, the expertise.
Schools and universities may be tempted: when they have a meeting management degree, this may be the moment to think about transforming it into a Meeting Logistic Management degree and a Meeting Content Management degree.

Meeting Architect just says it all, everyone can relate to it and it is not disliked by anyone.

Here are a few titles that are relevant:

Aka
Description (also see definitions in this book)
Construction / Building metaphor
Meeting owner
Meeting holder
Initiates the meeting, knows the subject, the objectives and target audience.
The landlord
Meeting planner
meeting hospitality manager
Specialist in travel, logistics and hospitality for meetings
Finding and preparing right piece of land and preparing it for construction. Making the house liveable providing a road, electricity, water, cable etc.
Meeting architect
meeting content manager
Specialist in content analysis, designing meetings around objectives, constructing and steering the meeting towards it objectives, measuring the results.
The architect
Meeting support manager

Specialist in the executing, technical side of the meeting, managing av, ICT, and much more
The construction site leader
meeting support technician

Specialist technician that is multifunctional, multi lingual, and can handle speaker stress; even takes it away.
Bricklayer, plumber, electrician
meeting specialty services

All other specialised professionals like facilitators, moderators, designers, creative directors, producers, communication or human processes specialists, specialty tool providers, etc etc
Suppliers of building blocks: bricks, pipes, cables, switches, wood etc.... comes out of a name
What's in a name may come out of an name.

To create meeting architecture, we need a vocabulary and a methodology. See chapter I WORD LIST (use CIC?) on p 12-114
The mere act of establishing the title meeting architect will result in a paradigm shift in the meeting world.
As long as there is no established name for anyone that may be doing that work, the work will not exist. No one will ask for something that does not exist. And just like the meeting planner had to fight for years (and still is) to be recognised, so too will the meeting architect have to be patient to get acknowledged. However if the meeting architect is how it is defined in this book, and knows what is sketched out in the curriculum, the meeting architect will be recognised soon and talk to the CEO before we know it. He will be the one that understands and translates the companies' mission to the companies' meetings, the one that optimises spend and report on results.
Like an architect holds responsibility of construction flaws fro 10 years (in Belgium) the meeting architect may be the responsible for ROI and long term effects of meetings. The strategic responsibility over meetings could be his.
The word architect in meeting architect rings more than a bell. Almost any adult has a good understanding about what an architect does and can translate that to meetings. Most people respect an architect as a specialist and a professional that is essential to constructional design and quality.

Depending on the ambition of the meeting architect and the size of a project, the meeting architect could decide to be the meeting support manager . In the construction world this also happens, like an architect that directly works with a plumber, a bricklayer or two, a carpenter, an electrician etc. Or the architect could works with a construction site leader or even a construction company that has most of these workers and machinery in house. All these situations are different constructions for different needs.

Organisational chart 2 In a simple organisational chart this meeting architect's position could look like this

In a more sophisticated situation or a larger organisation the meeting architect could end up leading a department and leading projects. A senior meeting planner could grow into that position and the organisational chart could look like this:

Organisational chart 3 This senior (sr) meeting architect is part of the strategic marketing team or reports to procurement.

Many more organisational structures can and will exist. Just like no organisational chart of any company looks like the next one, just so will the meeting architect fill many different voids and find himself in many different positions. The level of sophistication and strategic impact of the profession as I envision it is of such kind it has true potential of getting that so awaited seat at the table for the meetings industry. The industry should evaluate its quest for a seat at the table. Are we not frustrating too many meeting planners by indirectly telling them they are failing if they don't get that seat at the table? A meeting architect could of course be a senior meeting planner and a position pretty close to the table could eventually look like this:

Organisational chart 4 A senior meeting architect could take a position closer to the boardroom

The four Phases of a meeting's yearly life cycle
In the lifecycle of meetings there are four crucial cyclical phases. Exactly like in the work of an architect that is working on a house.
1) An architect will talk to the family (his client) first and see who they are, how many they are, what they do for a living and as hobbies, what they say they need, how much land they have, what the budget may look like, etc. The architect gathers information, the architect analyses the needs. The better the architect, the more time will be spent on that phase.
2) The second phase is the design phase. The architect draws sketches and plans. These plans are discussed, adapted, weighed against the budget and finally result in a model. In the same design phase, colours, doors, textures, tiles, wood, wallpaper, fixtures, cranes, switches, domotica etc. is presented and selected. Budget gets finalised.
3) The third phase is the construction phase. The house gets built, the constructors and technicians build and the architect leads the works, with a construction site chef, based on his plans and monitoring the budget.
4) The final Fourth Phase is the measuring: The final result, are the walls and windows as planned? Is the plumbing and paintwork up to specs, is the building as expected?

ADEM
Analyse
Design
Execute
Measure
phase
Strategic
Tactical
Operational
Reporting
who
Meeting owner
Meeting architect
Meeting owner
Procurement
Meeting architect
Meeting planner
Meeting support manager
Creative producer
ROI specilist
Meeting Owner
Meeting support manager
Meeting support technicians
Meeting architect Meeting owner
ROI specialist

tools
Meeting Content Matrix (r) methodology
Meeting Support Matrix(r) methodology
Meeting support suppliers, technology, creative and technical tools, (AV, etc.)
ROI methodology
output
A list of objectives and a strategy for the meeting
A format, a schedule,
a meeting identity (a theme a logo, a slogan, a theme song)
floorplans, set design
A list of tools and services
A budget
Professional flow and execution of all designed elements, before during and after. Participants walk away with the maximum of learning, networking and motivation as set out.
Knowledge on the results of the meeting. And suggestions for improvement.
when
6 months before
6 to 2 months before
2 months before, mostly during and a few months after. As soon as design is ready.
The day after until the next meeting
Supplier
Meeting architect company
Meeting support company
AV company
Exactly the same four phase's take place is the lifecycle of a meeting and could be managed by the meeting architect. Only the meeting client orders a new "house" every year so an improvement process is established, results will improve quickly.

Figure 9 The repeating life cycle of annual meetings allow an improvement process and innovation through a meeting architect.
The long term lifecycle
The lifecycle of an annual meeting is different from the lifecycle of a product. A product life cicle starts with growth over a few years up to a certain level and from than onwards it gently goes down over years or in some cases decades. It is a curve one long wave and the higher a product gets in it's initial years the longer its life will last.
The lifecycle of an annual meeting is a continuous wave that goes up and down. In the past a meeting would generate one big peek a year with not much happening in between, let alone connections to the next meeting. A peek, a flat line a peek, etc.
graph 1 The old life cycle of annual meetings
The objective of a meeting architect would be to connect these peeks with intermediate activity to keep the effect of the meeting going. The repetition of the messages, a continued support of the networking etc.

graph 2 the future lifecycle of annual meetings
The management process for the meeting architect is based on a repeating analysis, design, execution and measurement. The tools at the service of the meeting must also be deployed for the before and after of each meeting. This will result in more excitement and better results.
Phase I: Analyse
The first time a meeting is planned or a meeting architect gets involved, the analysis is the most important phase. On page 5-36 we address the 'Why' Question and we get a lot of answers. Many meeting owners however have a hard time to really address that question thoroughly and answer in a structured and complete fashion.
It takes a lot of time, a thousand questions and a lot of thinking to come up with a complete list of all objectives that need to be addressed for the meeting. The meeting owner has a good idea on what needs to be done, but usually will not see all that could be accomplished. A meeting can influence and impact so many things that a detailed checklist as part of a methodology is a must.
When a meeting owner starts with one or two major objectives, the result of a thorough analysis may show five or more key objectives or even dozens of sub objectives. Each of those sub objectives may result in a few action points, suggested in the design phase and implemented in the execution. Most meeting owners have a hard time in coming up with a good briefing so the meeting architect needs to get all the information out by asking questions. Getting enough people around the table and getting the right people around the table is one of the challenges. In the hierarchy of organisations, in the current situation, an AV company or even a meetingsupport company sits with a meeting planner and tries to come up with a plan. That plan than needs to be approved by the meeting owner, let's say a product manager that was not present during the meetings and still one level up in the hierarchy, the marketing manager controls the budget and has a final say, based on what he hears from someone that heard from someone how thing could be done. Many good ideas and innovations never even reach the design phase because the right people were not present when they were discussed or presented. A meeting architects first task is to analyse the hierarchy and penetrate deep into the decision making chain. The very fact that "the architect is coming" may attract some attention from the higher level decision makers. Jus like the future owner of a house does not have anything to say to the crane operator, but gets highly involved and excited when the architect comes. The title alone may be what many have missed in the past to get to the right people. If one aims at improving the results of meetings, a direct line of contact with all involved, up to the highest level is a must.
The meeting architect could also play a role in all meetings of one organisation and be part of the strategic marketing team. Or in case of a big corporation, a department meeting architecture or a team of meeting architects could be lead by a senior meeting architect. All different positions from which the analysis will be done differently.
The analysing phase is the strategic phase. This is where the meeting is linked to the corporate strategy and the strategy of the meeting is developed.
The Meeting Content Matrix (r) is used in order to get a detailed and structured overview of the meeting objectives.
In order to give this and the following phases the time they need, analysing should start six months before the meeting.

Phase II: Design
Form follows function.
Once we establish a list of objectives, preferably more than one list if there are more groups of stake holders, we can start thinking of designing the meeting, not before. Many creative producers or directors and some meeting designers must start of with an incomplete briefing an therefore a limited understanding of what the meeting is all about and move right into the creative process. That is not smart and causes all sorts of waist of time and inefficient spending.
Form always must follow function, not the other way around so design (form) should only start when the objectives (function) are clearly defined. A creative person should maybe stay out of the process until the analysts really have a complete and precise briefing. Some meeting owners just want a big wow effect end just take the most exiting idea not really connecting it to the objectives. The WOW factor in meetings can be a hazard to it's ROI. The wow in the opening show is like the catering: easy success. Easy in an intellectual way but not necessarily cheap . It is 'easy' to impress a crowd by throwing 300.000 dollar or Euro to a big show with a famous singer, half cirque du Soleil and a live two headed unicorn with three midget orcs on its back and fireworks coming out of its nostrils.

There should be some wow in every good meeting, but many opening sessions I have seen have a huge wow and than almost nothing is done for the breakout sessions or any of the learning, networking and alternative motivational terrains. In the design phase we manage, this balance between what we defined as key objectives and where we spend the budget. That requires standard operating procedures and obviously is a lot more work for the meeting owner, than selecting the best looking offer for a spectacular opening session and spending all the money there. It needs a lot of designing to get all the objectives supported. It is a lot more knowledge and work from the organising team and a meeting architect to build precise and targeted wows in every little area of importance. It is like carpet bombing versus precision bombing. Carpet bombing is much more spectacular but is not necessarily as (cost) effective as precision bombing, based on intelligence.

Obviously if we have a meeting of 5.000 participants with "celebration" high on our list of key objectives and a budget of 2 million, it may be right to spend 300.000 on the opening and closing night show. Not so if we defined education or networking as the number one key objective and only have 500.000 to spend.

Designing a meeting is about timing, format, guidance, tools, techniques, consultancy, methodology, technology etc. and most importantly all must be based on the objectives. It is about finding the right building blocks to construct the designed house, like you need the right ingredients for a desired meal.
Some of these ingredients can be and should be tested, unless we know the chef's reputation. In the meeting design phase, the meeting architect will present or demonstrate a number of tools to choose from. Just like an architect that is working on a hotel will select and present different mood boards with the fabrics, wood samples furniture designs and paint colours for each space in the hotel. Some techniques are new and some technology untested. Maybe it will work, maybe not. Some risk shall be taken but a step by step incremental adaptation of the meeting design is to be advised in most cases. Some meetings may take a radical change to save them from extinction but an improvement process of analysing and re-analysing, designing and redesigning is a great thing.
A good meeting architect will constantly be looking for new formats, new techniques and new technology and new knowledge to ad to his tool box.

The design phase is the tactical phase where we develop the tactics and select the operational elements to support the strategy.

In the designing phase, besides the meeting owner, Meeting Architec and meeting planner, also the meeting support manager and the creative director could be part of the design team. They would represent the provider side, and bring creative ideas and tools to the table.
In the design phase we use the meeting support matrix(r) and its methodology.
The completed meeting support matrix(r) should be on the table and a final meeting design should include a signed meeting support matrix (r). A list of final activities and tools to be deployed has to be in place together with a budget that is close to final. Like the plans of a house are signed by the Architect, owner and a construction company so too could the meeting support matrix be signed by the parties involved.
Together with the Meeting Content Matrix (r), this forms the plan, now we just need to execute it, build that meeting.
This should happen about four to 2 months before the meeting.

Phase III: Execute
The building starts a few months and in worst case a few weeks before the meeting. The building (Phase III) process is based on the design (phase II) that was based on the objectives that were defined during the analysis (phase III). If the analysing and designing takes 75 man hours, the actual building including activities before, the meeting itself and the post meeting activities can easily take up to 10 to 20 times more hours. This is when creative designers and IT technicians start to prepare, planners book equipment and crew, floor plans are getting technical details, facilitators and speaker briefings take place, images are selected, video's edited, sets designed, voting questions prepared, the specialty suppliers are booked and briefed for their educational, networking or motivational input etc.
On line activities and communities are activated, a wikki is set-up presentations are tested, texts are written. The meeting architect is a very busy person and could be intensely assisted by a meeting support manager and his team.

This is the operational phase, where things move from the drawing board into action. From theory into practice.
This is the moment where the Meeting support manager gets really active. Equipment is booked, a team is assembled scripts are written. The execution starts before and reaches a climax during the meeting with all technology, facilitation, recording, etc.
The completed (and signed) Meeting Support Matrix (r) is used to check on how all meeting support tools that were selected in the design phase are deployed.
The output is all the activities that are executed (III) based on the design(II) and supporting or driving the objectives as defined in the analysing phase (I).
Meeting Support activity starts as soon as design has reached maturity. It starts before the meeting with teasers, theme introduction, online brainstorm on the topics, SMS (text messages) based activities etc. This can be developed a month or two before the meeting and start building up to the meeting at about the same time. Speaker briefings with a PowerPoint template and advise on the meeting format should arrive at the speakers desk at least a month before and the opening video also needs a few weeks to get developed. The most intense moment obviously ids during the meeting, and meeting supports continues after the meeting with on line presentations, follow up mailings, answering unaddressed questions, photo albums and other reminders up to a month or two after the meeting.

Phase VI: Report
Reporting may be the task of an ROI specialist or could as well be the meeting architects job. How did the meeting go. Was it as planned, did every thing work? How did participants react? What did they learn? Are they using what they learned and what is the impact of that change? And finally, looking at what it all has cost, what is the financial return on investment? Like an architect looks at the house he helped building and checks on the results, so too has the meeting architect a responsibility in the final result of the meeting. If the objectives were a, b and c, how did we score on these set objectives. It is obvious that the way this is measured, can best be part of the designing phase. If the survey questions are built together with the design of the meeting, a clear and logic connection is embedded. More difficult it gets when an ROI specialist gets involved after the meeting and he too has to get totally immerged in the meeting objectives before he can start developing the measuring tools. The measuring also can start during the meeting by testing participants before and after sessions. That not only measures; testing also increases recollection and so improves learning. (as shown by an recent study in psychology)
The connection to the next meeting (continuation and tying as the T in PERFECT) and the fine tuning of its objectives is best done by one and the same person. This continuity is of utmost importance. Even if the meeting owner is replaced, the meeting architect brings continuity and improvement to the table. The participants remain largely the same and the new meeting owner should move forward on last years meeting rather then start all over again or do a less good job. The ROI report and other feedback from last years meeting is the best foundation for this years meeting so the meeting architect goes full circle by doing the measurement too.
The reporting phase is the measuring and feedback phase that connects to the next years meeting as a bas for improvement.
The meeting architect, in some cases assisted by an ROI specialist, reports to the meeting owner.
We use the existing ROI methodology. Many books have been written like 'Proving The Value of Meetings & Events' (Monica Myhill and James B. McDonough, 2006)
An ROI report, general feedback and suggestions for improvement.
Reporting is designed during the design phase and starts activities before the meeting. Depending on the level of ROI the meeting owner wants to measure (level one to five) it can take until the next meeting starts.

Let's get some science in
The Hollywood effect, WOW/YUK
Currently the part of the meeting and conference industry with the bigger budgets has a strong connection to production. A lot of attention is given to the WOW effect. Meeting owners get a kick, above and beyond the kick their audience gets. It is a moment of fame and a moment where one feels like a holywood film director. The meeting architect will support such large productions as long as it fit's the objectives and does not take away the budget from other essential objectives. The meeting architect aims at using the budget in balanced way, based on those objectives. The kick of loud and big productions is literally a hormonal kick that is the same kind of rush people had when under attack of a roaring lion. This old hormonal rush was designed to make us run or fight. In big and spectacular productions it makes us feel on a high. This little bit of neurology brings us to the scientific area a meeting support manager will need to study. Much scientific evidence (old and new) can be applied to meetings in order to improve the meetings results on all it's objectives be it educational, networking or motivational objectives. The challenge again lies in building a knowledge base that is relevant and applicable. Filtering the right pieces out of a range of different scientific areas will be a task for many individuals from outside of the industry. And once that is done that knowledge needs to be translated for meetings and be integrated in the curriculum for the degree in meeting architecture.

Neurology obviously has a lot to teach us about how our meeting participants learn or forget. The memory, the effect of testing, eating, alcohol and sleeping, the amount of knowledge that an average participant can absorb, the different senses etc.

Psychology may even have more to offer. Especially in the terrain of motivation. What is the effect of a specific activity on the population of meeting participants? When do we lose the participant's engagement to learn? Concepts like priming, subliminal messages, chunking, mnemonics, social loafing, Lewin's freeze phases, etc; are all applicable to meetings. Books like 'the wisdom of crows' sites many psychology research projects. The Stimulus- response relationship from behavioural psychology as part of 'Objectives to outcomes' (Glen C. Ramsborg, 1995).

Sociology is clearly impacting the networking and helps us understand about group dynamics like group talk etc.

Marketing and Communication also have lots to contribute about branding, messaging etc in meetings.

Biology confidently has dozens of areas that connect to meetings. Things like food, sleep and others.
The influence of the gender of teachers on the results of pupils have been demonstrated. Boys score lower grades with female teachers and girls score lower with male teachers. What is the impact of that effect on meetings?
New portable technology in the shape of a hat, allows brains to be scanned of individuals in action. Can we imagine research being done on how many participants lose their connection to a presentation and are thinking about something completely different? Can we imagine a room full of participants connected to a brain meter that shows how awake the audience is during a particular presentation?
How long can anpresentation keep the brain in the Alfa state in stead of the Beat sleep state.

Than there is Dr. Monica Forret, Professor Networking St. Ambrose University Davenport, IA , USA that specialises in corporate networking. Is that becoming a science too? We must ask Professor Forret to spend some of her resources on meetings and conferences. If she could write a chapter or a book or have a student produce a thesis on networking at conferences, that would be a major stepping stone. Today we can reed books on networking in general, most of the time there is not even a chapter on the networking at meetings. Networking at meetings is however very specific and has a few powerful options and writing a few valuable books on that topic should not be a problem.
Most books on networking speak to the individual and how to be more successful in networking at events or on the web. What the meeting architect needs however is information on how the he and the meeting owner can influence, improve and drive the networking at meetings and conferences. What tools, methods, services can be deployed to reach the networking objectives of a specific meeting and help all the participants to be more successful?

A lot of research has been done, is being done and much more needs to be done. Inviting these different scientific arenas into our industry will generate a wealth of knowledge to improve what we do today. Bringing it all together in the meeting architect's mind would be an amazing step forward. Today that is the missing link. The missing link between all these industries and ours. All the knowledge is there for the taking and somebody just has to bring it all together. It is available but fragmented and there is no industry called the meeting content industry or the meeting architecture industry that attracts or gathers all of the above. Clearly a task for academics and universities.

Let's Get some other sectors and industries in
Industries that are real and existing can also be a source of knowledge and inspiration.
Marketing and communication
I assume that some communication agencies or even some conference specialist in medical communication agencies must be thinking of putting the title of meeting architect on their business card. I would agree that they are great candidates for such a title, and what they do today is certainly part of it. Communication clearly is a crucial element in the scope of the meeting architect and the communication industry and its knowledge base are part of what any meeting architect should know. The Communication industry has probably many thousands of people that do a meeting once in a while and maybe a few thousand that specialise in meetings. They however would typically concentrate on the message, the theme, the printed deliverables, invitation, things like an opening video and maybe some speaker support. That is clearly important and part of the work so we need to read this industries books and magazines. The challenge is that the future meeting architect need's someone that selects the relevant and applicable communication knowledge for meetings, out of all the articles and books and compiles it all into a new and practical book. And currently the question is if there is anyone out there doing that? Filtering what is good for our industry requires a certain knowledge and understanding of our industry and of the needs to improve the learning, networking and motivation of our participants.
The marketing industry may be interested in taking ownership of the meeting content industry or of meeting architecture as a profession. The challenges however would be the lack of knowledge of how the meeting industry works today and within marketing, meeting are only part of the package and communication is only a part of the scope of things that take place at meetings. Large marketing companies will probably hire meeting architects for their event department.

HR / The employee involvement association
HR is an industry as well, again with its own education, tradeshows, magazines, associations etc.
This industry like the marketing industry is very much involved in meetings. HR also knows a lot about training and that closely relates to what happens at meetings and conferences. HR people get a lot of Psycology and sociology during their education so in many ways they are emerged in parts of what a meeting architect must know.

HR and marketing are not only industries; they also are departments in companies and as such, in many cases the meeting owners. Or even the home of the meeting & conference planning department.
In that sense they are a double stake holder, as a provider of knowledge and as a client, a user of meeting architecture. (George P. Johnson?)

AV and production industry
Av companies and Production companies are a similar industry. Many producers of events, many AV specialists are a potential source of knowledge for the meeting architect. The Meeting Architect needs to understand the difference between a hand held and lavaliere microphone. He needs to know when to use a line array versus loudspeakers on a stand. The meeting architect must be able to estimate cost of a certain package of lighting and know when to go for back projection or front projection. The AV industry probably has about 500 bolds and nuts that should be part of the meeting architect's knowledge.

Training industry
Looking at the education side of meetings, the training industry certainly is an inspiration source for the meeting architect. This is a big industry with its own magazines, tradeshows, course (train the trainer) and books. The ROI methodology in the meeting industry is derived from the training industry and there surely must be interesting steppingstones towards analysing, designing and execution of meetings and conferences. If the measuring (ROI) methodology can be translated form trainings to meetings and conferences, these other phases in the life cycle of meetings are at least worth looking at.

(Adult) education industry
The education industry is probably bigger that any other industry. The schools and universities are factories of education and the schooling system takes the biggest part of our government's budget. That fact shows the importance of education, and therefore the importance of adult education and therefore the importance of meetings and conference.
The educational industry is gigantic and hundreds of studies on its effectiveness and when to use what support to be effective are taking place permanently. Adult education is an industry on its own and again the knowledge that resides there has great value for our industry. Then there are institutions like universities of education; educational institution that work on education. The Danish university of education is a large institution with about XXXXX amployees... IB, please send me a few more facts. And inside that university there is the Learning Lab that focuses on learning in the adult professional world. One project of the learning lab is 'The Learning Meeting' that has done a lot of research already and published a book called 'Learning Meetings and Conferences in Practice'. There is a great example of a real meeting focussed output form an existing industry, in this case the education industry.

Facilitation world
Professional Facilitators, I think are very much underestimated and in many cases not even considered. I would suggest to corporate boards that any meeting spending above a certain amount must apoint a professional facilitator. The processes amongst people at meetings are so crucial that good facilitation can prevent meetings from failing at certain crucial areas. Facititation is really a core competency in meeting architecture and some facilitators may become meeting architects while most meeting architects probably would hire facilitators for their meetings.
A facilitator is to a meeting what the web is to a wiki: an enabler of processes amongst groups of people.
Less of an industry, or at least not of the size of Marketing or education, the facilitation industry is an industry too. They have an association, called AIF the International Association of Facilitators with a lot of information on their website www.iaf-world.org www.iaf-Methods.org: john Jenkins.

There are a few books that a meeting architect should read.
'The IAF handbook of group facilitation' with a definition and a Code of practice and more recently 'Creating a culture of collaboration'.
Some universities (the Kenfield management school in the UK and one in Chicago) are experimenting with degree programs. Eg: Hansa university of applied science is working on a Degree in international communication and facilitation.

IAF has the CPF Certification for Professional Facilitators with world wide 350 certified professionals (2007). The biggest thing in the facilitation world is the conference by ASTD (American Society on Training and Development) This annual conference attract about 8 to 10.000 people of the Training industry. They see facilitation as on of the tools to use in training.

Virtual meetings industry
There is a part of the AV (equipment manufacturing) industry that is all about equipment for video conferencing and other type of virtual meeting. Wainhouse research is a company of consultants in this field that organises annually a conference in the US and one in Europe.
This Industry is clearly rich in technology and innovation: Text to speech and speech to text, recording of sessions and making them available for others in a rich-media and searchable manner, etc.
This industry is sometimes portrayed as enemy of the face to face meetings. Face to face meaning the meeting where people actually go to the same venue and are able to look each other in the face. Virtual meeting however also are face to face in the way that technology is now evolving and faces become very real and very present even if the owner if a thousand miles away. I think today most people are relaxing about the impact of virtual meetings on our industry. The office meeting is more likely to be impacted. One person can participate remotely in a 4 person meeting. Or all four can be at different locations and still hold their weekly meetings.
Meetings of 200 that have en incentive element like travelling and an event element like opening show closing dinner will never be replaced. The experience if far too powerful and people can shake hands, pad shoulders, and kiss and hug in a real meeting. Some non verbal non visual but truly inter human bonding and connection actions. These will never be replaced by virtual handshakes and psychology probably has some interesting proof in their shelve. Neurology probably is able to clarify the mechanics of friendly human touch. And both can probably link touch (end smell?) between humans to their learning, networking and motivation at meetings and conferences.
'Face to face meetings' does not differentiate what we do any more since everyone now has video over the internet. We should just call it real meetings and conferences as opposed to virtual meetings.

This being said, real meeting needs to welcome virtual meeting technology and become in many cases hybrid meetings where a real meeting is supplemented with virtual presentations and virtual participation. These virtual, or remote participations and remote presentations are very powerful tools from the virtual meeting world that the real meeting world should embrace. If a VIP speaker can not be present, why not have a remote presence? And the same for participation. Why not create remote participation for a few VIP panalists or even participants that can't make it? Even for just one or two sessions.

Technology is evolving and the meeting architect should be aware of all the technological building blocks that are available in this area. So he can make use of them when a meeting's objectives call for it.

Drama
Drama or theatre and actors may not be considered as an industry, it still is part of the toolbox of a meeting architect. Using an actor to deliver a message, using a virtual character of the screen during the opening session are yet another way of influencing the learning and motivational processes at meetings. In he learning lab in Denmark, a doctorate on Drama in Meetings is on its way. (IB, please infrome on some details, facts, timing etc.)
Let us assume that actors and facilitators are playing in the same playing field, they still are very different building blocks to be used by a meeting architect whenever the meeting design lists them. Actors and how to use them in meetings and conferences is again more material to be studied and absorbed by the meeting architect.

Books to read
There are a few books out here that clearly fit into the world of meeting architecture. This list is certainly not complete but these books are off the kind that I would consider a recommended read for meeting architects.

a. Open Space Technology: A User's Guide (Harrison, 1977)
b. Meetings with a beat
c. Objectives to outcomes: your contract with the learner (Glen C. Ramsborg, 1995).
d. Learning Meetings and Conferences in Practice (Ravn, 2007)
e. Wisdom of crowds. (Surowiecky, 2004)
f. The Big Book of presentation games (Scannell, 1997)
g. The Big Book of team building games (Newstrom, 1998)
h. The Big Book of ice breakers (West, 1999 )
i. The Big Book of meeting games (Caroselli, 2002)
j. The IAF handbook of group facilitation
k. Creating a culture of collaboration
l. Proving the value of meetings and events (Monica Myhill and James B. McDonough, 2006)

Some of these books are an easy read and others like the IAF handbook of group facilitation are big; almost like the bible in their field.

Lets take a closer look at the bibliography of one on book: 'Objectives to outcomes: your contract with the learner' (Glen C. Ramsborg, 1995). This one alone contains more than 70 (!) books on adult education, evaluation, behavioural psychology, etc. There are clearly more than enough books to choose from and building a curriculum should not be a challenge because of a lack of books, but because there are so many to choose from. I doubt however that in the area of networking and motivation there will be as much choice but composing a sound curriculum for meeting architectures is clearly doable.

Many books, text books or study books still need to be written. See Bibliography (chapter 11 on page 11-106)
Some will be "selections from" psychology, sociology, communication, etc; Different existing elements relevant for meetings that are brought together resulting in a new book focussing on meetings and conferences.
Many books on meeting focussed topics like motivation at meetings etc. need to be written just as some practical books like a work book on analysing meeting content and a methodology. Just a few ideas on books that need to be written can be seen in Books to be written on page 11-111
The total list of books clearly can be massive and reading those is an option for a multiple year course.

Magazines to sign up for
Psychology: local genaralised
Meeting Support Institute newsletter

associations to join
Once meeting architects will hit the market, there is going to be an absolute need for an association that caters to their specific needs. For a meeting architect there are so many fields in which they should join an association that it would be a fulltime job to o to all the conferences. Their own community will have form and their own associations and conference will take shape over the years.
Continued education
The meeting architect will visit different tradeshows, register for different conferences and read different magazines than the ones a meeting planner does today. Some MICE tradeshows, conferences and magazines will include some of the popular meeting architecture topics, for their population of meeting planners took keep their readers up to date. Some meeting architects will also connect to these media but they will also read 'Psychology', and register to one of the 'technology in education' conferences. This again makes it clear that it will be hard to be both, meeting planner and meeting architect. The number of tradeshows, associations and magazines a meeting planner has on his plate are so overwhelming that adding a whole slate of other ones is probably turning 'staying up-to-date' into a half time job.

Like a Medical Doctor, a lawyer and an architect, so too must a meeting architect follow continuous education to stay informed. A few weeks ago an architect who is close to 70 was discussing an extension to our offices. We discussed the possibilities and challenges of expanding an old factory building in a way that would aesthetically be prudent. One of the options we discussed was a transparent glass box, leaving the view to the old façade as open as possible. Lou Janssen, the architect, said "four weeks ago a new kind of glass construction method came on the market" and that would have potential for our needs.
That is exactly what a meeting owner wants to hear from a meeting architect; the latest and up to date innovations for improving the effect and the increasing the results at the next meeting. Not just in large and High Resolution screens for spectacular shows, but also in creative concepts for higher involvement, the latest in smart technology for better networking or scientific research that change the timing of the program. In the medical arena the professionals have to collect a umber of CME's or Continued medical Education points to stay accredited. Accreditation for Meeting architects could be supported by a similar system we could call MACE points or Meeting Architecture Continued Education points.
This will represent a continuous effort for both the providers of education and the meeting architects, the receivers of education. Conferences, courses, tradeshows, etc. will all grow as the population of meeting architects grows.
The architect styles
Meeting architects will have different backgrounds. Some meeting planners will grow into meeting architecture, some PCO's will expand into meeting architecture some facilitators or producers will become meeting architects etc.
Some will start at 18 and graduate at 20 or 22 years of age. In the same way there are different incoming types, the graduating meeting architects will be different too.
Every architect will have his or her preferences and put different accents. For some meeting architects, it will be mostly about the communication; others will have a more artistic approach and put emphasis on the creativity and originality of ideas. Some meeting architects will create a stylish look and feel and behave more like the designer of an experience. Others will be the engineer type and technology may get more attention and yet another type will the produce type and will be more inclined to have a big and spectacular opening show.

Like when an individual is going to build a house, here too the selection of an architect will become relevant. When building a house, all architects have to include heating or cooling, windows and doors, power plugs and storage space. Still they will vary in style and have totally different results, but the toilet is part of every house.
In the same way that houses have walls and a roof, meetings have a number of standard necessities that any meeting architect has to include and manage. The material used to build the walls, the position of the walls the finishing and colour of the walls may vary, but every house has walls and all the other basic elements. Therefore a meeting architect has to be universal, multifunctional and an engineer on one side and he must be creative and ad his accents on the other. A meeting architect that systematically excludes technology is not a good architect. A meeting architect that systematically puts 80% of the budget in a spectacular opening show is probably not a good meeting architect. A good meeting architect has to know all the options, all the building blocks and be willing and able to use them depending on the core objectives of a meeting.

The meeting architect professional choices
Like with architects in the construction world, there will be different job formats for meeting architects to pick from. Some architects will be a one man company and others will be in a team or a proup of architects. Some agencies that call themselves event agencies or meeting planners or PCO's, may start using the terminology and methodology meeting architecture and hire Meeting Architects as thy graduate.
A third format would be meeting architects working at a corporate and part of the meeting or conference department. And a last example is a meeting architect that works in an audiovisual company or a meeting support company. This is like architects that work in a construction company.
All of these formats have their advantages and limitations. Depending on the kind of meeting or a personal preference a meeting owner could decide to work with one or another.
The meeting planner and the meeting architect
Whenever I speak to meeting planners about this idea of meeting architecture and the meeting architect as a new profession, I get very different reactions. Some like it, some don't. Some say "that is exactly what we need" and some are reluctant or hesitant. Recently I spoke to a planner that does 20 meeting a year and she asked me, "How many can I do if I need to do all that stuff?" and the answer is 'less than today'. Let's say we find the time to become a meeting architect and we have the time to stay informed, if we want to do a good job in all four phase of the meetings we plan, it would probably be take twice the time. I think it would be a challenging to do 10 per year, in her case. Al depends on the kind and size of meetings, but it is clear that analysing, designing, executing and measuring will be at least the same amount of work as planning all the hospitality and logistics.
And that again demonstrates the major challenge this industry has. Meeting planners are since many years under increasing job pressure. They do more meetings in less time and with than ever before. Their job stress is high and to adding more tasks may be fatal. On the other hand will it be necessary to spend more time on meeting architecture under pressure of ROI, procurement, CSR (corporate social responsibility), sustainability, and just good business practice and common sense. Meetings will have to demonstrate value or be cancelled. Improving their result and thus their value will be essential the chief of improvement will be the meeting architect. But if the meeting planner has more than enough work with the logistics, who will do it? The idea of adding a second person just for the meeting architecture is for some meeting planners a big change. They feel they will have to share some of their influence, some of their responsibilities and budgets and that may be true. On the other hand we have meeting planners that are positive because they will be able to focus on what they like, the tourism and hospitality side of the job. Some seasoned planners see an opportunity since they prefer the meeting content side and would hire someone new for the hospitality work.
The marriage
I am truly convinced it is impossible to be a real professional in both, meeting planning (hospitality) and meeting architecture (meeting content). Just staying up do date by being a member of an association, reading different magazines, doing courses, visiting tradeshows, researching the market, screening suppliers is a challenge in each of those separate areas. If we would need to do both, staying up to date would be a half time job on its own. Also the complexity of any meeting will be so gigantic that on single brain will have a hard time to manage. On top if the challenge in time and sheer volume of work, the skills needed for both professions are quite different. The hospitality person will be 'of a different make' than the meeting architect. They will have different and complementary skills. Hospitality is more about the welcoming, warm and patient attitude. Are we all happy and did we not loose anyone? Taking good care of people, and catering to the individual whims of clients. A passion for travel, accommodation, catering, etc. Leading a group as a guide from point A to B. Those skills are quite different from the meeting architect that operates in the background, works with learning processes, networking psychology, all kinds of science and technology. This person needs more technical, analytical, statistical and scientifical skills.
CMM CASE OF Patric delainy. The red and yellow vs the blue and green brains
The Honey moon?
For one individual it may be a challenge, but in a team, a company, an association or an agency it may represent an opportunity. By having two specialised professions in stead of one, the result of meetings will improve. First of all because now a professional will be called upon to address the reasons why a meeting is organised. Today, many meeting owners in, let's say a large corporation are assisted by a professional in hospitality, the shell in which the meeting takes place. The meeting owner alone focuses on the real important stuff, the substance in that shell. A lot of team's attention during the planning meetings go's to travel, venue, accommodation, meals etc. and for the content the meeting planner is at best supported by a communication specialist, a show producer or an AV company. The meeting architect would ad real value here. Imagine triangular relation between the Meeting owner and two specialists both as a one-stop-shop and one-contact. The meeting owner could have meetings with each of these specialists and jointly focus on the overlapping areas.
The reverse case:
In January winter of 2007 at an MPI conference in New Orleans, I met Dorcy Bowman Rose. She is an independent meeting planner that went through a 'reverse development' as I would call it.
A few years ago she worked in a large corporation where she was involved in the organising and executing of meetings. She was involved in the content side; the analysing, designing and executing of mainly the educational side of this companies' meetings. She loved her job and when she became independent, she called herself a meeting planner because she felt she planned the meeting. Dorcey even owns the internet name meetingplanner.com. She soon discovered that she was hired to help with the logistics and the hospitality side of meetings. "It is a challenge to find the kind of work I was looking for" she said. Is it the title 'meeting planner' that makes people think logistics?
It is clear have a long way to go and it will be an evolution that takes 10 or 20 years. No-ones job will change overnight because 'meeting architect' is put on a business card. It will be a gradual process of learning, experimenting and constant improvement. Although changing the title may have an impact, it will take a lot off advocacy to make the decision makers change policies in companies, associations and the meeting industry's professional bodies and educational system. A clear signal like the start of a master degree in meeting architecture and the use of the new title may be the essential kick-off and boost to that effect.
A divorce?
An industry friend and someone I truly respect is Robin Lokerman from MCI. When we were talking about the
Meeting Support Institute he asked me why I want to split the meeting content management away from the hospitality management. I think it is safe to say that it is not about separation, but about making it part of the industry: bringing together. Look at the tradeshows, look at the magazines, look at the associations. As long as 98,5% of advertising and tradeshow floor space is about the hospitality side, there is nothing to be taken away. Once IMEX and EIBTM and other Meeting industry tradeshows are 75% venue/destination and 25% meeting content, than we will be part of the industry. Once the advertising in the Magazines are 10% bout the content side, it will be. Today meeting content is not, it does not exist as a part of the meetings industry. It may be one of the things PCO's and association management companies do up to a certain level, but it is not really out there. What the Meeting Support Institute and this book want to do is get some attention for the content side of meetings, to make it visible.
The goal is to inform, to motivate and to support the development. That becomes clear if we look at the Meeting Support Institute knowledge base that is open to any one. It's objective is to create a resource for anyone that is working in the content side. We look for new speakers on the content side, and want to bring them into the industry. We encourage people that have never considered the meeting industry, but have some relevant knowledge to look at it and maybe focus part of their resources towards it. The goal is to create, to co-create. Not separating, but joining. We only create attention by putting it in the spotlight, create visibility by concentration it and create clarity by organising and focus by avoiding distraction from what is already so evidently established.
It is not about a divorce, since there is simply no couple in marriage yet.
And yes it is right to look at it as a different profession. The meeting architect will be a separate profession for the reasons I mentioned above. It has to be a separate degree as I will address in the next chapter. I believe it is just not possible for one person to be both, to be involved in both, to learn both, to stay informed on both.
It is my experience that meetings just become better when both areas get equal attention form the meeting owner. Conference objectives get reached more if meeting owners are equally supported by specialised professionals. Better and more productive meetings can ultimately only be good for the meetings industry.
the gender balance
A side effect I am predicting is a return of the gender balance. Today, association like MPI is 74% female. And of the male population, a large portion clearly has a strong female side. This to some also demonstrates that the meeting industry today is fully focussed on the hospitality which is the more female, motherly arena. If the meeting industry will welcome and support the development of the content arena, the diversity in the industry will increase. I believe more men will become part of the industry and the gender balance we be somewhat restored. Not that that is a goal, it may just be an additional benefit, and more diversity can only be good. The relation between the meeting planner, the meeting owner and the meeting architect will differ a lot and in some cases will be challenging. The competition for resources will be part of it but the end result can only be better meetings and a more respected industry of higher strategic importance.
the meeting planner in the construction metaphor
As briefly mentioned in the table under What's in a name... on page 7-73 the role of the meeting planner in the metaphor is the role of finding the right piece of land and providing all the fundamentals to make the construction feasible. The quality of the land, health issues, legal and building regulations, local regulations and politics, governmental planning, ground water levels and quality en a million other things to make sure the future owner can confidently invest in the land and later in the house he will build on it. As described in chapter 4 and 5, the job of meeting planner is far more complicated and sophisticated than this sounds. And nobody will stop a meeting planner that wants to move into meeting architecture like construction companies that move into project development.

The holistic approach
The meeting architect embodies the true holistic approach to meeting content. A meeting architect has to study all there is to know about the content side of meetings: the learning, the networking and the motivation of participants. A meeting architect should be open to the latest without forgetting the good old flipchart and all its possible applications. A meeting architect is involved from A to Z, from analysing needs to measuring results.
I A meeting architect knows all the potential objectives of meetings and conferences and helps the meeting owner to see the objectives he did not realise were possible.
II A meeting architect knows all the building blocks to construct a meeting and will consider all of them in the design phase. These building blocks can e techniques based on scientific knowledge, formats based on sociological experiments, services like facilitation, technology for networking, collaboration technology for cross departmental team building, new presentation techniques or a light show to impress the audience. All the knowledge that today is fragmented and spread out or kept as little secrets to commercial companies, will be united, unified and linked in meeting architecture
III Meeting architecture brings it all together in the production phase and may be involved in al actions before, during and after the meeting. He could be directing the video production or he could just check the scenario before the production starts.
IV After the meeting the Meeting Architect qill be able to deploy all existing techniques to measure the meetings effect.

Conclusions meeting architecture:
Meeting architecture is a new title and profession that may be stepping stone for the meeting industry into its second stage of development. When meeting architecture becomes an accepted practice and an conventional part of an organisational chart, the meeting industry will move from its current, challenged position to a strategic level. Meeting architecture way hep change the perception of meetings as a cost centre to a strategic leverage or even a revenue generator.
Today, there is no-one that can claim the title meeting architect as defined here. There is no place we can go to become one, no book or magazine, no resource accept from the one Meeting Support Institute has only just started. This represents a great opportunity for meetings and conferences industry to develop that profession and become 'owner' of it. For magazines, for tradeshows, for associations in the meetings industry it creates growth potential, career chance, new markets, new resources and revenue.
The challenge will be to get the ball rolling. It will require some real and long-term support from the big players in the industry. Not just the universities that may venture into a new (master) degree for meeting architecture. Whether all big players are open to this evolution remains to be seen but without their support nothing much will happen. It will require a vision above and beyond short term benefits. It will be about engagement to the industry by giving back and investing in it's innovation and progress for the benefit of all.

Give us your comments and ideas on the wiki : http://meetingarchitecture.pbwiki.com
Check out the blog for more and up to date information http://meetingarchitecture.blogspot.com
E-mail the author at maarten.vanneste@abbit.eu

8. A degree in Meeting Architecture
Why?
A 2 or 3 year master degree in Meeting architecture may be a long way away but I believe we need to aim for that because there is a place for it, there will be students and the industry will soon start screaming for more once the first masters hit the streets. It will, in a simple way, drive the industry forward. And so the least we should do is start the process and start a summer course.
Too much for one individual?
It's positive influence on the meetings market is one reason to start a degree in meeting architecture but an other important one is the complexity and the sheer size of the knowledge base. I believe it is a step forward to add hours to current meeting management curricula but I also believe this will soon lead to a separate curriculum for an additional year and than a separate masters degree taking. It will simply be too much for one student to study the relevant curriculum for both current meeting management (manly hospitality) and meeting architecture. That is how serious I think this profession is and how large the curriculum will be.
Current master degree in meeting management.
The current degrees and high school education in meeting management LOOK LIKE THIS: find source via >ROB DAVIDSON
How?
Getting other faculties on board
An interesting thing to discover is how easy it may be for some universities to start a degree in Meeting Architecture. Look at the list of all postgraduate degrees of the University of Westminster. I looked at this University because I know Rob Davidson, the Senior Lecturer in Business Travel and Tourism. Professor Davidson is very enthusiastic about the potential of meeting architecture and he is one of the academic supporters that are helping to look for ways to get this on track. I was looking for the curriculum of the MA Conference Management when I stumbled over the list of postgraduate degrees. And scanning through this list, looking for the Meeting Management course it al over sudden became clear: This list contains a lot of the ingredients for a course in Meeting architecture! More than half of these degrees (30 out of 57) enclose some of the knowledge that could or should be part of the curriculum.

Postgraduate degrees in the Westminster University, London (2006)
1. Architecture
2. Art and Design
3. Asian, Chinese, Cultural and International Studies
4. Biosciences
5. Business and Management (central London, Marylebone)
6. Business and Management (north west London, Harrow)
7. Communication and Creative Industries
8. Complementary Therapies
9. Computer Science (central London, Cavendish)
10. Computer Science (north west London, Harrow)
11. Conference Management
12. Construction and Surveying
13. Diplomatic Studies
14. E-Business/Commerce
15. Electronic Engineering
16. English Literature
17. Estate Management
18. European Studies
19. Fashion
20. Film
21. Finance
22. General Management
23. Geography
24. Health Care Management
25. Health, Community
26. and Social Care
27. History
28. Housing Management
29. Humanities
30. Human Resources and Personnel
31. Information Management and Business
32. IT
33. International Relations
34. Interpreting
35. Journalism and Mass Communication
36. Languages
37. Law
38. Leadership
39. Marketing and Marketing Communications
40. Mathematics
41. Media
42. Music
43. Photography and Imaging science
44. Planning
45. Politics
46. Property
47. Psychology
48. Public Health
49. Social Sciences
50. Sociology
51. Technology and Design
52. Tourism
53. Translation
54. Transport Studies and Logistics
55. Urban Design
56. Urban Regeneration
57. Visual Culture

The Curriculum

When we are thinking of such an endeavor as a new profession and a new master degree, we obviously get to the point where someone drops the word 'curriculum'. A curriculum is the set of courses /topics that a school or university would teach for a degree in meeting architecture. It took one conversation with Janet Sperstad, CMP to get that ball rolling. Janet is Lead Instructor in the Meeting and Event Management Program from the Madison Area Technical College. As an MPI member, Janet was the president of MPI's Professional Development Strategy Group in 06-07 of which I was a member. She put me in contact with Sue Tinnish, a consultant and speaker on meeting related topics.
Sue Tinnish spontaneously sent a list of about 300 topics plus a few etc.'s. You will probably think of another 5 or 10.
This demonstrates that there are likeminded people and it's good some start to connect. It also shows that the course will be extensive and it will take probably one or maybe even two years full-time to complete.

It is also clear that when we look at both lists above and below they match close to 100%. The proposed topics for the degree in meeting architecture, are almost all part of a course or degree taught at the Westminster University. Al Professor Davidson has to do is get the right people around the table and start the degree. If everyone can be convinced, it is probably only a matter of finding the right sponsors. There probably are hundreds of universities worldwide that can do this exercise and with existing staff, faculty and facilities can start a course in a year or so. If two professors from all 28 relevant departments teach an average of 16 hours per year, we have a new course. It sounds doable to me, and I look forward to see how the process will flow. Starting a university master course is not my cup of tea, and it is probably not as simple as I can envision it.

Outline of Curriculum Elements by Sue Tinnish

1) How People Think and Learn
a) Brain & Biology (neurobiology)
i) Right Brain/Left Brain/Whole Brain thinking
ii) Generational Differences (fMRI studies)
iii) Gender Differences (fMRI studies)
b) Learning Models
(1) Andragogy (Malcolm Knowles)
(2) Others
(3) Experiential learning
c) Principles of Adult Learning
d) Emotional Components

2) Writing Learner Outcomes
a) Common vocabulary: Goals, Objectives, Strategies, Mission, Outcomes
b) Difference between objectives and outcomes
c) Writing good learning outcomes
d) Challenges
i) Stakeholders without firm grasp on desired results
ii) Etc.

3) Needs Assessments

4) Meeting Skills beyond Listening for Participants
a) Reflecting
b) Action Planning
c) Networking
i) Maximizing Social Capital
d) Improvising
e) Collaborating
f) Innovating
g) Teambuilding

5) How Meeting Logistics Affect Learning
a) Food & Beverage
b) Breaks
c) Room Sets
d) Room
i) Natural light/lighting
ii) Color
iii) Comfort
iv) Temperature

6) How Agenda Items Affect Learning
a) Theory and Guidelines
i) Flow & Timing
ii) Energy
iii) Pareto's Principle
b) Lecture/PowerPoint
c) Entertainment
d) Interactive Formats
e) Etc. other meeting elements

7) Environment (Coleman Finkel 8 types of meeting environments)
a) Physical Environment
b) Psychological Environment - the overall feeling in the room
c) Influencing the Environment
i) Physical format affects tone, communication, mood
ii) Formats - the agenda and the way it is constructed
iii) Emotional state of participants - a person's physical and emotional well-being are closely linked to their ability to think and to learn effectively
d) Factors/Tools
i) Travel stress to/from meeting
ii) Humor
iii) Relaxation/Recreation
iv) Teambuilding
v) Multisensory environments


8) Group Process
a) Brainstorming
b) Groupthink
c) Decision Making Models
i) Decision Trees
ii) SWOT Analysis
iii) Critical Path Analysis
iv) Attribute Listing
v) Storyboards
vi) Unconscious Dwelling
vii) Etc.
d) Mind Mapping
e) Facilitation
f) Graphic Facilitation
g) Voting
i) Electronic Surveys
ii) Index Card Polling
iii) Dots
iv) Multi-voting
h) Social Networking Tools


9) Formats to Liven up Meetings
a) Structured Introductions
b) Best Practices Exchange
c) Poster Learning
d) Learning Lounge
e) Charitable teambuilding
f) Panel Discussion
g) Debates
h) Break-out Sessions
i) Case Studies
j) Structured Questions
Roundtable
k) Colloquium
l) Hands on Demonstrations.
m) Workshop
n) Buzz Groups
o) World Café format
p) Open Space Technology (Harrison Owen)
q) Peer-to-Peer Learning

10) Visual Aids
a) Advantages to using visual aids
b) Criteria for good visual aids
c) Examples
i) Computer slide presentation
ii) Handouts
iii) Flipchart
iv) Slides
v) Film/video clips
vi) Video and audio presentations
vii) Book marks or wallet cards
viii) Charts
ix) Demonstrations
x) Displays/exhibits
xi) Graphs
xii) Maps
xiii) Newsletters
xiv) Objects or models
xv) Photographs
xvi) Posters
xvii) Sketches
xviii) Storyboards
xix) Tip sheets
xx) Word charts
xxi) Whiteboards
xxii) Workbooks
xxiii) Combinations such as a word chart with a sketch or map
d) Designing better visual aids
i) Handouts
ii) Others


11) Meeting Roles
a) Review of roles
b) Use of outside facilitators
c) Models
i) Six Hat Thinking (Edward De Bono)
ii) Etc.


12) Coaching Speakers for Success
a) Speaker Prep
b) Speaker Guidelines

13) Fostering Creativity and Innovation

14) Extending the Meeting
a) Daily conference reports
b) Newsletters
c) Report
d) On site summary reports
e) Translation
f) Reports following the meeting
g) Audio Archives
h) Learning Content Management systems


15) Ethics/Legal Issues
a) Copyright laws
b) Intellectual Property
c) ADA (only for US meetings)


16) Technology
a) Podcasts
b) Wikis
c) Blogs
d) Audio archives

17) Evaluation
a) Closing the loop
b) Benefits of evaluation
i) Determine success
ii) Identify strengths and weaknesses
iii) Compare meeting costs to the benefits
iv) Decide who should participate in future meetings
v) Identify which participants were best suited for the meeting content
vi) Reinforce major points of the presentation
vii) Gather data for future meetings
viii) Determine if the meeting was the appropriate solution for the need
c) Chain of Impact
i) Level 0 - Statistics
ii) Level 1-Reaction,
iii) Level 2-Learning,
iv) Level 3-Application,
v) Level 4-Business Impact,
vi) Level 5-Return on Investment
d) Evaluation Steps
e) Evaluation Tools/Methods


18) The Future
a) Technology
b) Demand for Customized Content

Table 8: The above curriculum for a meeting architecture degree, assembled by Sue Tinnish early 2007 is a good start. More study elements need to be added on the scientific, the Networking and motivational areas.
Suggested framework for a Meeting Architecture Curriculum

Learning (down p2p up)
Networking (Business Peer, social)
Motivation (Professional, Expertise, Respect, Fun, evaluation, continuation, tie)
ELABORATE IN PREVIOUS ON PERFECT
Science
Psychology Sociology

Neurology Biology

Marketing and Communication

Meeting architecture

Tools Conceptual
formats

Themes design

Tools Human, people
before
Meeting architect

During
actor

facilitator

After

coach
Tools creative
Before
Communication

During

format

After
Survey
Networking poster
Certificate of attendance
Tools Technical
Before
Mailing, Lego serious play

During
Presentation techniques

After

Tools Technological
Before
Wiki

During
groupware
Spotme / N-Tag
voting

After
presentations On-line

Table 9 This is a suggested framework for a meeting architecture curriculum with some examples in grey in the cells

Degrees
A masters degree is the best that could happen to this concept of meeting architecture. It will generate an army of front soldiers, missionaries and scouts that will guide the industry forward in untamed terrain.
The need for education will however be much wider than a fulltime course. Many of the current senior meeting planners would be interested in part time course or a certification, graduating students in meeting management may prefer to do a summer course, other schools may add some crucial elements to enrich their existing course in Meeting Management. Meeting owners could benefit from a one day course, hotel conference managers from a five day course or one year online education. There must be a potential of hundreds of consultants that would go for a Certificate in Meeting Architecture. People that are today meeting designers, or marketing people with a tendency towards meetings, PCO's, DMC's and many others would improve their position by attain such a certificate. All kinds of course formats need to be created to cater for all these different needs.
Whatever the course will be called and whatever format it will have, a continued educational program will be necessary. The technology evolves, new formats become available, new research is made public.
A master degree or PhD's will also generate the much needed research for this side of the industry. A thesis on the quantification and qualification of networking at conferences to name jus one. Every student will generate more information making the profession grow. And PhD's will act as resources for literature and more education in many shapes and forms.

The Students
The students that would take such courses would be very different. Varying from high school students to senior meeting planners. Their needs would be different too. This list just gives a few ideas but obviously once the curriculum is establish and work books made and existing books selected, a course can be created for any group of students.
institution
Format
students
Length and method
Associations or private organisations
Certification
senior meeting professionals ( planners, PCO's, conference managers in Hotels, consultants)
5 days + books + exsam
universities
summer class
graduates in meeting management
2 or 3 weeks

post graduate course

universities and high schools
part of degree in meeting management
student that start
Selectable as an optional package
universities
master in meeting architecture

graduates in meeting management
Summer course

As an additional year

senior meeting professionals,
As a one or two year evening course or an online course with some residential work.
Table 10 Potential educational formats and their length with possible institutions to organise them and potential students for these courses.
CIC/ How many students enter a course in meetingmanagement or event or conference management each year?
How many meeting planners are there globally. Corporate, Association, independent?

Continuing education Staying up to date
Universities that organise a degree in meeting architecture will have a lot of work too, to stay up to date. They probably better organise taskforce that collects the valuable novelties in Science and technology so they all can use the same source to adapt their curricula annually. This may be a role for an institute that operates on a global scale where universities underwrite a participation.

The effect of the Title Meeting architect
The mere fact that a degree or certification in Meeting Architecture will exist is going to be an eye opener for many meeting organisers, marketing managers and the corporate C level. Today every one looks in different directions to find different things that help them with the content side of their meetings. Today there is no term for what a meeting architect implies. Some meeting organisers think they can do it, some will tell their marketing department to get on board, others will work with their communication company or a production company or a designer. Because most meeting organisers have a different idea of what it is they need to make the meeting work, they all look in different direction. Once they understand there is a profession called meeting architect they probably will look for one. Once they have worked with one, they may understand that this specialist has everything he was looking for and more. The meeting architect will, based on his title alone, be accepted into the analysing and designing phase. It will sound logic for a meeting architect to ask questions and know all about building a good meeting. This is much more difficult for an AV person or a creative director or a PCO: these are all perceived as operational. Not so with an architect: a meeting architect obviously must know much more about these things so his advice will more acceptable ...

The job market
The test of the pudding is in the eating so we will have to see, based on the first students if the corporate world is open to the idea of meeting architecture. I guess that when they look at the budgets they spend on meetings today, it makes a lot of sense for them to hire meeting architects. Corporate meeting or conference departments, will be hiring one to start with and when successful, may hire one for each meeting planner they have so they can team up in pairs of two for each meeting over a certain budget. PD (professional Development) managers in Associations are the perfect job opening for meeting architects. In many cases there will be someone with association background or meeting background only and PD will benefit greatly for meeting architect skills and knowledge. Like we see the CMP (Certification for Meeting Professionals) today in the US, many meeting planner vacancies are requesting for a CMP candidate or list it as a plus for candidates. Similarly in the coming decade or two, the master degree or certificate in meeting architecture may in time become crucial for the relevant positions.

CONCLUSION a degree in Meeting architecture:
The chicken and the egg: will a degree in meeting architecture create the profession? Or is the profession so much needed the degree is just a matter of filling the hole?
Whatever it is, a degree or any form or shape of official education will create the profession and therefore help the industry forward. Of the teachers and professors that have read this far, I imagine some will be able to picture a successful new postgraduate course for their school or university.
Looking at the potential curriculum, a one year full time full time course seems like the minimum.
Shorter, part-time and summer courses are all welcome initiatives as stepping stones in the process.

Check out the blog for more and up to date information http://meetingarchitecture.blogspot.com
Give us your comments and ideas on the wiki : http://meetingarchitecture.pbwiki.com password March
E-mail the author at maarten.vanneste@meetingsupport.org

the effect on associations
Since real meetings and conferences are one of the association's clearest member benefits, improving them is key to associations existence. Without real meetings, an association may be 'degraded' to an online community. Improving the core reason of existence for conferences through professional meeting architecture is therefore of strategic importance.
Many tools that are currently not known or not used provide branding opportunities that will enable associations to attract more sponsor revenue.
The association meeting planner may be doing both, but hiring a freelance Meeting Architect is an option for larger meetings. Large associations my decide to hire a meeting architect and find a balance between professionals focussing on the logistics and other professionals that focus on the content side. The Professional development managers in associations today have a pure focus on learning and they are perfectly positioned to grow into meeting architects designing the meeting for networking and motivation, on top of the learning.
Better meetings will be more successful for participants so they will increase retention and generate more membership.

the effect on agencies
PCO's, event agencies and independent meeting planners all will increase their value towards clients when applying meeting architecture in their work. Today, most of these agencies have a limited capacity in the content area and largely generate business on the hospitality side. Hiring a production company for staging the opening show remains a valuable option but doing that in a larger framework of meeting architecture will result in higher client satisfaction.
Marketing agencies may decide to start a meeting architecture department. The situation today is that marketing consultants are commissioned to help clients with their meeting or event and they don't have a lot of baggage in that area. They focus on messaging, presentations, design and printed matters but have limited knowledge about all other areas of meeting support. Sending them through a certification in Meeting Architecture or a post graduate course in Meeting Architecture will advance their skills and increase a marketing agencies value in the area of meetings.
New Meeting Architect agencies may start to appear and can be hired by the more general agencies or by the meeting owners.
Depending on the amount of meeting work, any agency may de choose for diversification or specialisation. The split of event/meeting departments into a logistic and content department makes a lot of sense and hiring of staff can be done with these two specialisations in mind.

companies with meeting support tools
Companies with meeting support tools will be part of the curriculum of meeting architecture. They will have great advocates in Meeting Architects. The meeting architect will be able to non-commercially promote the use of tools and services for supporting certain objectives from their client, the meeting owner. Talking to a meeting architect in an company or agency will be much more rewarding than to a meeting planner or even to a meeting owner. The meeting architect will understand the value and be able to match it to a clients meeting objectives.

The effect on individuals
Effect on Meeting Owners
For meeting owners, working with a meeting architect will be like a dream comes true. The meeting owner today has very few people to go to for help. Some meeting planners are advanced in analysing and designing meetings, but most are not able to help them with that. The help they get from marketing department or communication agencies is also limited and in a meeting architect they will find a soul mate. The meeting architect asks the right questions and has all the answers to challenges that were never even addressed. The meeting owner will be much more successful in creating an appropriate program and deploying the right and novel systems and tools to make the effect of the meeting stronger and lasting.
Effects on Meeting planners
Meeting planners get the choice to specialise. If a seasoned meeting planner wants to become a meeting architect, that should be an option. If a meeting planner loves the tourism and hospitality side of the work, having a meeting architect to focus on the content side enables the planner to specialise in that area. It is taking away some of the stress and burden form the work overload in meeting planning departments. The meeting planner can now fully focus on all the challenges and new developments in meeting planning, without also having to cope with the content side of meetings.
Meeting planners may also choose to do both. I would doubt that many are able to cope with both jobs in a professional way as explained before, but up to a certain level, it could be a third option.
In any case meeting architecture will clarify some of the mix and confusion of today and a career move for meeting planners with strategic ambitions becomes valid.
Tourism Industry
The estimated economic impact for the local economies as can be seen in the cited EIS (CIC, 2005) numbers around $ 128 bilion. Total direct tax impact in the us is estimated to be $21.4 Bilion
One of the major opportunities we have is the connection from meetings with the tourism industry. The classic connection on the logistics side with venues and destinations makes a lot of sense, and growing from there by cultivating and nurturing meeting architecture makes a lot of sense. Some people will argue there is not a lot of connection between tourism and meeting content, but I would argue it is the best place to call home since it is the only place where the meetings industry resides. In marketing, which has the largest group of meeting owners, we will not see large players in meetings or find tradeshows about meetings. Marketing people are only part time involved in meetings and therefore will not be willing or able to drive this process.
In HR there is a connection too, since many conferences are organised from HR departments, but again, meetings are just a tool for HR, not a core part of their activities.
Since meetings and conferences for many players in the tourism industry are an crucial part of their revenue the tourism industry has a stake in improving meetings and thus securing the meetings industry. Meeting architecture will do just that, by professionalising the content side of meetings. Having meeting architects in organisations beside the current meeting planners will serve as a life line when economy goes down. Rather than cutting the budgets, Corporations with meeting architects may invest since they see the value of meetings much clearer.

Travel industry
Since over 13% of airline revenue in the US comes from meetings, the travel industry too has a stake in improving and securing meetings. The unstable turnover, influenced by economy and security issues can be stabilised by making meetings more strategically relevant; a similar stake as for the tourism and hospitality industry.

Hospitality industry
$ 36.8 Bilion is 32.4% of the total revenue for Hotels in the US is generated by the MICE industry. This can only grow if meetings become more professional, more strategically anchored. The fluctuations with economic and security may be flattened when meetings demonstrate ROI and their ability to increase ROI.
Also the impact of online meetings, wikis blogs, social networks and other challenges will be countered by an increasing demonstration of professionalism and results, not just in the logistics but also in the content side.
The hotel chains in this world are amongst the biggest entities in the industry. Their decision to co-create this profession as a lifeline for the future or look upon it as competition will be crucial for the speed of success.
Hotels can not only support this movement, they can be part of it. If you remember the above story about Lotte Marie Roesgaard from Comwell Denmark, this shows one example of how hotels or venues in general can benefit from a new focus on the content side.
With the financial possibilities they have, hotel chains can decide to diversify their investments into the content side and integrate both the hospitality and meeting architecture in their services.
Some caution however is needed. The people working in the 'Meeting industry' are a special breed. They sleep, eat and breathe hospitality, they are hospitality! For managing the content side of meetings we may need to look at skill sets and these may be rather different.
Case of left and right brain
An other caution to those that dream of a one stop shop where all services have to be taken in an exclusivity contract tying all meeting support services to the use of the venue... this will be counter productive. Many meeting planners that work professionally partner with suppliers and travel with them. The freedom of choice needs to be guaranteed, and tying is legally regulated in Europe.
Obviously offering of meeting support by venues, direct or with local partners, remains a viable option. Many meetings will still be travelling without a partner and a meeting architect working in in a large meeting venue may make a lot of sense.
The meeting industry associations
Association for meeting planners and associations will attract new kinds of members. The diversity will grow and the gender balance may return.
The educational offerings at association conferences will increase in number and diversity and the knowledge base will increase. Networking at conferences will become more varied for planners.
Associations of meeting planners and their suppliers may consider a future program to attract the new players like meeting architects and meeting support companies. These will at first be less easy to convince and retain so supporting their membership may be necessary. Associations may also decide to socus on the hospitality side and leave the meeting content side to others.
Also see tradeshows.
The meeting industry tradeshows
It is clear that meeting architects will be looking for a different set of exhibitors than today's meeting planner. Tradeshows are already moving in the right direction. IMEX has the meeting support area and EIBTM the MPI Technology area and the event services area. The meeting support institute has the sympathy of most tradeshows and tries to get as many meeting support products exhibiting.
The tradeshows see technology companies with software and online products in the logistical arena re-appear since a number of years now. The online booking, registration, event or conference management software are products that are of interest to the current visitors. It is more challenging to get the meeting content oriented companies to come and keep them coming. Some of them are technology companies, but many more have non technological products and services in the learning, networking and motivational areas. The interest from the meeting planners is currently limited so growing that group will take a sustained effort. More and more diverse offering on the tradeshow floor will clearly improve the service of these tradeshows to the industry but it may take a few years and the strong support of the tradeshows, to enable these meeting support companies and the interest of the audience to grow into real potential.
The challenge may be that the audience for meeting support will be different from the current audience for venues and destinations. Meeting architects will likely be les interested in the hospitality and tourism exhibitors and the meeting planners may remain less interested in the meeting support companies.
Starting a new small tradeshow in 5 to 10 years could therefore be an option.

The media
The media in the meetings industry today are 98% venue and destination oriented, both editorial content and advertising. This can only become more diverse. As companies with meeting support services and products will grow, so will their marketing budgets. New advertisers will appear and new editorial topics will appear with them.
Again, like the planner and the corporation and the agency, the media can choose to mix both or decide to start a separate magazine. I assume this latter will happen in due time. Once enough advertising can be gathered to support a magazine, some will decide to create two specialised magazines. I for one can't wait to see the first magazine appear that focuses on meeting content.

Meeting management education
Universities and other educational institutes the opportunity to create a new degree besides their meeting management or event management degrees. Meeting architecture can be a added to of the current curriculum for meeting management or as a summer course for current students in meeting management. A more ambitious programme would be an additional specialist year in meeting architecture after a course in meeting management. However, in my opinion, and that should be clear after reading this book, a separate two year course resulting in a master degree would be appropriate. The curriculum is so vast and the work so focussed that anything less than a master degree can only be a partial course; a stepping stone towards the master degree. This industry can only hope that some universities will show leadership in developing such a course and be successful in recruiting students. The support from many individuals and institutes will be necessary to make it happen and I hope this book may be instrumental in that. I consider the master degree in meeting Architecture the ultimate start of meeting architecture as a profession and a paradigm shift in the industry. The first students that will graduate as meeting architects will certainly be welcomed by me and if this industry keeps growing as it does, I'm sure that most graduates will be hired before they finish their thesis. I certainly will be looking to hire some.

The production companies
A production company that hires a Meeting Architect will do much more than the opening show. They will create the educational experience, the networking moments or systems and motivational activities in the content side of meetings in an array much wider than the big staging. Their influence will increase and their added value will surpass what any current production company will offer.
Their challenge may be that the kings in their realm; the creative directors or producers will start competing for space. Big ego's of the producer and meeting architect may clash even though they are very different in what they do and have different specialties. On the other hand, a bit of competition has never hurt anyone and usually improves performance...

Give us your comments and ideas on our wiki : http://meetingarchitecture.pbwiki.com password MARCH
Check out the blog for up to date information or add your input on http://meetingarchitecture.blogspot.com
E-mail the author at maarten.vanneste@abbit.eu

10. Conclusions

Meeting industry is wonderful but handicapped: it has one leg on the logistics side and needs to grow the second leg the content side. The idea being that on one leg you hump and on two you can walk or even run.
Content means Learning (down, p2p and up), Networking (business or p2p / random, stimulated, structured) and motivation must be PERFECT (professional, expertise, respect, fun, evaluated, continued, tied).
Meeting Support is what you can do to improve the meeting content.
The tools for Meeting Support are CHATTY (Conceptual, Human, Art, Technical, Technology)
There are more than 1.000 tools
There are no degrees
The scientific knowledge does exist spread out in many different places (Psychology, Sociology, musicology, anthropology, Biology, Neurology, ...)
The complexity is vast so a degree in meeting architect will be appropriate
Companies in Meeting Support are small and dispersed
There are no tradeshows or organisations focussing on the content side.
A meeting Architect Analyses the meeting objectives, designs the content side of the meeting, helps to execute and measures the results of the meeting.
The holistic approach will make sure all possible solutions are presented to the meeting owner.
You don't know what you don't know: No one asks for a Meeting Architect because it does not exist.
For all players in the meeting industry, both buyers and suppliers the creation of a degree in meeting architecture will present choice, opportunity, career options, growth, improvement, more ROI, more influence, strategic importance, etc.
Only if the hospitality industry embraces, helps to organises and fully supports the development of the profession of meeting architecture, the creation of meeting architecture will be possible.
With Meeting Architecture included, the industry will righteously call itself the meeting industry and become of global strategic importance.

11. Bibliography
CIC. (2005). The Economic Impact of Meetings, Conventions, Exhibitions, and Incentive Travel. McLean, VA: Convention Industry Council.
Edited by Jack J. Phillips, M. M. Proving the value of Meetings and Events. Dallas: MPI.
Glen C. Ramsborg, P. (1995). Objectives to Outcomes: Your Contract With the Learner. Birmingham.
Harrison, O. (1977). Open SpaceTechnology. Berrett-Koehler.
SYNTHETRON. (2007). www.synthetron.be.

Existing books
ROI

MPI

Ib Ravn
the Learning Meeting

James Surowiecky
the wisdom of crowds

objectives to outcomes: your contract with the learner
Glenn C. Ramsborg, CRNA, PhD

PCMA
Meeting Games

Training with a beat
Lenn Millbower

The Mozart Effect

The IAF handbook of group facilitation

IAF
Creating a culture of collaboration

IAFBooks to be written
1. Meeting content analysis
a methodology / SOP for analysing the big spend meeting's objectives.

2. Meeting Design a comprehensive overview of all formats and tools to design meetings differently.

3. Meeting architecture II
the Curiculum: A comprehensive overview of what a Meeting architect should know.

4. Meeting support for Learning at meetings: What meeting organisers can do to improve the learning by participants at their meeting

5. Meeting support for Networking at meeting: What meeting organisers can do to improve the networking amongst participants at their meeting

6. Meeting support for Motivation at meetings: What meeting organisers can do to improve the motivation of participants at their meeting

7. The great book of Meeting support: What meeting planners can do to improve the learning, networking and motivation in the participant population.

8. Psychology in meetings
An overview of applicable psychology for learning , networking and motivation for participants in meetings and conferences.

9. Neurology and Biology for meetings
An overview of neurology and biology knowledge with an impact on the Learning, Networking and motivation of participants at meetings.

10. Turnout Meetings.
The result focus methodology to make a good meetings great.

11. Wiki workshop
about meetings focussed on co-creation and collaboration
Co-creation of collaborative conferences

12. Hybrid meetings
where virtual meeting meets real meetings.

13. Ceck four doubles:
14. Psychology for meetings and conferences
15. Sociology for Meetings and Conferences
16. Neurology and Biology for meetings and conferences
17. Music, Drama and other arts for Meetings
18. the Meeting Content Matrix (r)
19. the meeting support matrix(r)
20. all known tools and services hat are generic or non commercial
21. all known tools and services form commercial companies
22. all know meeting formats including the learning meeting, Open space etc
23.

12. I WORD LIST
Some new vocabulary
Meeting Content
Meeting Content Matrix (r)
Meeting Support
Meeting Support Matrix (r)
Meeting Support Manager
Meeting Support Company
Meeting architecture
Meeting Architect

Some crucial accronims and words for outsiders
Meeting Planners
Meeting Owner
MICE
MPI
PCO
Production company
ROI
SME
VAT

For many more words see http://www.conventionindustry.org/

14. Table of figures
Organisational charts
Organisational chart 1: The basic cell: one meeting owner supported by 2 specialists that each focuses in their specialised domain 5-51
Organisational chart 2 In a simple organisational chart this meeting architect's position could look like this 7-75
Organisational chart 3 This senior (sr) meeting architect is part of the strategic marketing team or reports to procurement. 7-76
Organisational chart 4 A senior meeting architect could take a position closer to the boardroom 7-76

Figures

Figure 1: "The tourism catch 22" that chains the meeting industry to the tourism industry 4-24
Figure 2: The balance between the two crucial sides of meetings must be addressed in order to get productive meetings. 4-28
Figure 3 The five levels to measure ROI in meetings 4-35
Figure 4: The list of meeting objectives (P34) indicates that Networking like Motivation and Learning is an action terrain for meetings. 5-41
Figure 5 The 360° learning cycle starts with presentation (top down) than group discussions (Peer to Peer) followed by feedback (bottom up) etc. 5-42
Figure 6: Terrains, Tools and Time form the three axes for the 3T model. 6-55
Figure 7: how exclusive clauses hurt the industry 6-61
Figure 8: The meeting support institute want to gather and translate relevant input from companies and non profit for improving the learning, networking and motivation of participants at meeting. 6-69
Figure 9 The repeating life cycle of annual meetings allow an improvement process and innovation through a meeting architect. 7-78

Tables
Table 1 This Table shows the natural leading position of Travel / Tourism / hospitality entities in CVB's. 4-25
Table 2 Annual spending by a corporate meeting department shows a 10% spending on the content side and 90% on logistics/hospitality. 4-32
Table 3 This is an example of a real budget from an existing organisation. 4-33
Table 4 Full circle Education at meetings enables for a rich and full educational experience keeping adults awake and involved. 5-42
Table 5 This Table lists the main categories of networking at meetings. These and more should be discussed and analysed in order to get the full scope of needed , desired and nice to have networking. 5-45
Table 6 The Motivation table is PERFECT: the 7 main categories in the motivational arena at meetings. 5-48
Table 7 The Meeting Support Matrix shows nine cells to be used as a note pad during meeting design brainstorms 6-56
Table 8: The above curriculum for a meeting architecture degree, assembled by Sue Tinnish early 2007 is a good start. More study elements need to be added on the scientific, the Networking and motivational areas. 8-102
Table 9 This is a suggested framework for a meeting architecture curriculum with some examples in grey in the cells 8-103
Table 10 Potential educational formats and their length with possible institutions to organise them and potential students for these courses. 8-104

Graphs
graph 1 The old life cycle of annual meetings 7-78
graph 2 the future lifecycle of annual meetings 7-79