Good meeting design is cheaper than special effects

good meeting designFar too much money is spent on meeting glitz at the expense of good meeting design. Seth Godin makes an analogous point in this post…

Good writing is cheaper than special effects

“In movies, that’s obvious. It costs far less to make The Big Lebowski than a Marvel movie.

But the metaphor applies to just about any sort of creative project.

We often err on the side of ‘special effects’. It’s easier to staff it up, to spend the money…

…But the race to spend more and more on special effects…it might be worth more to take the time and invest the effort to design something great instead.”
Seth Godin, Good writing is cheaper than special effects

“There’s no budget”

I’ve noticed over the years that every meeting has a budget for food and beverage (F&B). There’s usually a budget for decor and production—sometimes a big budget. There’s often a budget for a dramatic big-name speaker or two.

If you ask about a budget for event design, stakeholders think you’re talking about decor and drama. But “there’s no budget” for core event design, which is actually about designing great meeting process. Meeting conveners have a blind spot about the importance of meeting process design: what happens for stakeholders at their meeting.

Sadly, stakeholders are so conditioned to traditional ideas of what meetings should be—top-down, predetermined, sage-on-the-stage affairs—that they completely overlook that their meeting isn’t as effective as it could be if what happens is engaging and meets participants’ actual wants and needs.

Furthermore, it turns out that designing good process into your meeting is cheaper than paying for special effects. For the price of a coffee break, you can make an event fundamentally better by significantly improving the realization of its purpose and its impact on participants. Learn how to do this from my books, from the hundreds of articles on this blog, or get in touch!

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