Did just see this about a conf. banning “bad PowerPoint”: http://bit.ly/zMFVzS

And opening up a potential can o’ worms: if the CMP study courses and exam continue to test on the same stuff, how do we help planners (and facilities and AV providers, etc.) learn to think differently? Exposure to cool stuff and what?

@Joan – This event was a 1 day All-Employee Meeting covering Marketing, Manufacturing, R&D, Legal/Finance, etc. It included employees at all levels – executives and line workers. The room wasn’t as dark as it looked on film. It was actually quite bright and full of life.

Participation is a tricky thing. Not everyone will participate equally or in the same way. We knew that. So, we created little content nuggets and sprinkled them throughout the cafes – so even if you wanted to “hide” or “hang back” – you would still get connected with content. Here’s an example, in the innovation cafe – we covered the tables with images of the key inventions in the history of this company. So, even if you just wanted to sit down and talk with your buddies about fishing, there was still content nearby that was tied to the purpose of the event. Each element was very purposeful.

In terms of adaptation, yes – it can scale up and down for scope and budget. What’s most important is that it requires planners to think much differently about how they create the event and how and where they make compromises.

Thanks for the nice compliments and evangelizing!

Questions:
1) What was the time frame over which this was held?
2) What level of employees and executives participated?
3) How were people with disabilities accommodated? (It looked dark in the room but that may have been the perspective of looking at the video!)
4) Who “watched” to see if anyone was ‘hanging back’ unsure how to engage?
5) It was for internal employees only, yes, and not customers of contractors?

Adaptation:
1) This can’t have been cheap or on a limited budget. If you can share whether there was a budget and if this came in over or under .. or “at” — and what the parameters were.
2) Could we all, in this space, talk about adaptation for a) smaller events, b) external (like assn.) events, c) events on limited budgets, etc.? I see oodles of ways to do so and am ready to go out and evangelize it!

Thanks for doing good work and sharing it, Sam!