Allison Graham

Fascinate or Fail
Capturing attention these days is a matter of pulling the right triggers
By Allison Graham

What do sexual attraction and flirtation have to do with planning meetings? On the surface, one would think not much. Usually sex is not a priority consideration for most organizers, but when it comes to planning conferences and wowing audiences, the very primitive functions that drive human flirtations can be adapted to ensure satisfaction for a wide range of appetites. Imagine creating an environment that will fascinate your participants.
For conferences to be considered memorable, attendees need to think, feel or believe something differently than when they walked into the room. This is not an easy task for organizers to achieve.
According to Sally Hogshead, author of Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation, it is possible to craft more persuasive events.If planners and the speakers who serve them want to stand out, they need to fascinate participants. Using the triggers, Hogshead shares insights into what makes people tick. Before speaking at a conference, she has the entire group complete a three-minute, F-Score survey to give organizers (and herself) an understanding of the audience dynamics. Plans can then be tilted to ensure wide-spread satisfaction.  ‘The seven triggers force people to think creatively to generate maximum fascination.’ Once you know the triggers, and assuming thereÕs a mix of all seven, here are some hints to accommodate accordingly.

Lust
This trigger is about creating warmth in humanity and attraction. Great presentations make people feel passionate about the topic; they don’t just provide rational information. One needs to heighten all five senses so people can interact with the material.

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Cheryl Cran

Multi-Generational Audiences
How demographics are shaping learning and meetings
By Cheryl Cran, CSP

CC    Thanks for taking the time for this interview. I read your book, Boom, Bust & Echo, when it first came out, and it has impacted my business in a big way. How do you see demographics affecting the meetings industry?

DF    Before I answer that question, let’s be clear on how I define the age groups. Baby Boomers are in their late 40s 50s and early 60s (45-64) and this age group comprises the senior managers.
In my book, I call the generation after the Baby Boomers the Bust Generation, which I feel are incorrectly referred to as Gen X. They are born in the late 60s and 70s (31-44) and are your middle managers.
After the Bust Generation is the 20-somethings Echo, otherwise known as Gen Y’s. The Y stands for youth (late teens to 31) these are your newer hires.
Rather than focus on generations specifically, I think we need to focus on who is in the audience as far as roles in the company. You need to look for the relevance of what they do within the organization. When giving a presentation, the meeting planner needs to inform the speaker so that they know whether they are speaking to senior management or to the whole of the workplace, where you will have all three generations. Attendance is going to determine the nature of the presentation.
There is research that shows there are multiple learning styles attached to each generation. A small percentage looks for mathematics, some absorb information verbally and about 75 per cent learn conceptually or visually. I find that the use of videos and visuals are more of a personality preference versus a generations approach.

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David Gouthro

The Courage to Break the Mold
Taking a chance on the untested and unproven
By David Gouthro, CSP

Why would someone want to break a mold? Why take a chance on something that has been untested or unproven? The only answer that makes sense is because it is in the best interests of your client and the outcomes they’re looking for. And, by extension, it is in your best interests, too. However, breaking the mold requires courage.
What is courage? Everyone has acted with courage at least once and most people do so on a regular basis. In fact, there are lots of opportunities for each of us to act with courage on a much more frequent and conscious basis. Let’s examine the notion of courage and identify opportunities for meeting planners to exercise it. The following is a non-dictionary definition of courage that I offer for your consideration:
Courage is an inner quality that becomes evident whenever one takes action where each of the following three criteria are met:

A.    There is an uncertain or unpredictable outcome;
B.    An emotion or feeling is present that ranges somewhere between mild concern and     terror (based on the perceived     consequences of failure) and;
C.    A positive value or belief consciously or unconsciously dictates the ‘right’ action to take.

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Mary Breunig

Adventure Training
Is experiential learning extremely effective or just extreme?
By Mary Breunig, PhD

Experiential learning and experiential education have become buzzwords within corporations and organizations and across university campuses. Alongside this trend, environmental issues and environmental sustainability, per se, are currently being debated at dinner tables, in popular and documentary films, in newspapers, books and magazines, in boardrooms and classrooms and within all levels of government. Two recent books that seem to have caught the public’s imagination, Last Child in the Woods and The Nature Principle, describe the consequences of “nature deficit disorder” including: children’s declining contact with nature and the simple, experiential pleasure of having dirty hands and wet feet. Additionally, recognition of global environmental degradation is on the rise and changes in the environment and its natural systems have emerged as a matter of increasingly urgent concern around the world. Experiential learning may be one form of pedagogy and philosophy to help allay this concern and provide clients and participants with a meaningful experience.

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