The end of meetings (Part 2) - the last process to be re-designed

[This is the second part of a series on changes in the meeting industry.  The first part appeared on this site on 31 december 2009.]

While organisations in the past decades have been re-engineering and improving nearly all business- and other processes one can think off, the one thing they really missed out on was the meeting and meeting venue. For ages most meetings have been taking place in drab, TL-lit meeting rooms with participants drinking lukewarm coffee, water or soda. And rarely we are satisfied with the results achieved in such meetings.

The premise is that we actually all hate meetings (and very often also the places where they take place). However, meetings are where everything important happens - deals are brokered, new strategies decided, information exchanged, business networks built. So we have to attend. And what do we do during meetings? We flip open our laptops and fire up our mobiles to read the latest mails, do status updates on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, etc. We all hate the traditional meeting, don’t we?

The credit crisis of 2009 has been a nasty wake-up call and the meeting industry has been hit hard. Corporates and other organisations have started frantically looking at ways to reduce meetings, improve them (introducing new meeting techniques for decision-making or brainstorming) or eliminate them altogether. In the US the industry even had to set up a ‘pro-meeting’ lobby (‘Keep America Meeting’[1] to fend off US politicians arguing that companies should stop spending so much money on meetings, travel (carbon footprint), etc. The current challenge of cancellations and "no travel / no meetings" policies will certainly shift as the economy improves. But meeting planners will need to ensure that something can be great without it having to be "over the top in expense". The golden days of the 80s and 90s will not return. So the meeting and meeting venue needs to be re-invented or re-engineered.