Conference regeneration

Tapping into brain research and emotional smarts can wrest the best for learning outcomes while attendees are at the conference — and well after it ends.
By: John Schofield

Talk about a tough crowd: Take 400 funeral directors. Insert them in a conference room. Against their will. Then rinse with copious amounts of information, and rotate from session-to-session. The result could be deadly for any planner. But accidental planner Vicki McCoy, professional competence officer with the Ontario Board of Funeral Services, the regulatory body for the province’s funeral industry, organizes just such a conference at Toronto’s Marriott Downtown Eaton Centre Hotel every spring.
Funeral directors are required to attend the professional development event once every five years as a condition of their licensing — and, no, they’re not thrilled about it, says McCoy who is a certified life coach by trade. How does she win them over? By using her head — and theirs. McCoy employs research-tested techniques to boost attendees’ brain power and improve learning. “It’s all about keeping them engaged,” she says.

Mind Over Matter
Welcome to the better, smarter, stronger conference. At a time when industry gurus say traditional meeting formats are failing, research into brain function and emotional intelligence is providing planners with new ways to design conferences that improve learning outcomes, both during the event and long after. Used effectively, the techniques could give planners an even more important role in boosting return on investment (ROI) for their client or company. And, best of all, they just might make conferences fun again.

A successful conference helps attendees incorporate what they’ve learned into their actual behaviour. And that success is built on three main pillars: the actual content, strategies to engage participants and, most importantly, the brain state of every person in the audience, says Terry Small, a Surrey, B.C.-based masters teacher and learning specialist who speaks frequently on learning and the brain. Here’s the good news: there’s a plethora of practical techniques that planners and speakers can use to optimize brain state and improve learning outcomes (see sidebars pages 35 and 37). “When people are in the right brain state,” Small says, “they will run through a brick wall to use the material they learn.”

Emotional Rescue
The emotional state of an audience can be just as critical in determining learning outcomes. Dr. June Donaldson, a Calgary-based author and consultant who speaks frequently on emotional intelligence, estimates that about 20 per cent of an audience at any given time is emotionally shut down and unable to absorb a speaker’s message. But Steven J. Stein, a Toronto-based clinical psychologist and a leading expert on psychological assessment and emotional intelligence, says certain techniques can be used at conferences to engage even those who are shut down or emotionally reserved by nature. “If your goal is learning,” he says, “you want engagement, involvement, and people doing things — and emotion is a big part of being engaged.”

Improv theatre is one way to get an audience emotionally involved, says Stein, who is also an author of several books and CEO of Multi-Health Systems. The actors typically start by asking audience members to describe a challenge they’ve faced at work. The improv group acts out a scenario and then changes it based on audience suggestions, often inviting conference attendees on stage. Even for people who are typically more reserved, improv can work wonders. “They really get into it and forget themselves,” says Stein. “You see them on stage yelling and screaming.”

Turning Knowledge Into Action
Conferences can become amazing experiences for learning when organizers tap into the collective brain power of their audience, says Ed Bernacki, director of The Idea Factory, an Ottawa-based innovation consulting firm, and the author of Seven Rules for Designing More Innovative Conferences. At one event, when another speaker unexpectedly finished early, Bernacki filled the time by asking audience members to create one idea that would make their company a better place to work. He ended up with 160 pages of suggestions. Those were distilled down to 40 unique ideas, ranging from building repairs to improving communication from the executives. The suggestions were presented to the CEO, who was impressed by their quality and thoughtfulness, and vowed to implement as many as he possibly could.

Planners would do well to position themselves as key partners who can increase ROI by turning knowledge into action, says Stein. Vicki McCoy at the Funeral Board knows the satisfaction of producing an event that truly changes lives—even if it’s only in a small way. In last year’s post-conference online survey, 70 per cent of respondents said they had changed their behaviour or thinking in some way as a result of the event. “I think what they like about our speakers is their simplicity, because they can actually take the information away and say, ‘I can do that,’” she says. “If one person takes one thing away, that means we’ve been a success.”

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