On new meeting formats.

I've been following this interesting discussion on Acronym about different meeting formats. As you may remember, Jeff de Cagna and I did a Pecha Kucha session at ASAE's annual meeting in San Diego. We were interviewed for the article in Associations Now which sparked the discussion.

As it happens, I just got the evaluation results today for our session, and I thought I'd share some of them. I have taken out anything specifically referring to Jeff and I since I didn't ask him if he minded me doing this (he's on a plane), but I think this is an interesting snapshot.

COMMENTS

You know, this was a great session. It started off a bit awkward. What organically happened in the rest of the session, though, was GREAT, I would have stayed another hour listening to what was reported back, I felt like I got a LOT of "takeaways" from this session.

Would have liked more information on Pecha Kucha. How it can be used, when it's successful and when it's not. When they got to the What did you learn, lots of people left the room. I never got a chance to participate because some people started asking questions and taking the session off track.

Worth trying again. But give others an assignment ahead of meeting and then present together at the end

While it is useful to review (both personally and through others' recollections), I'm not sure this was true learning rather than reviewing.

Waste of time. Left after first 10 minutes.

Very interesting strategy.

Very good session, great ideas shared throughout audience with a lot of good discussion. One thing that would have pushed it higher would have been some helpful hints on how to implement this type of learning

too much emphasis on social media, Best thing about this session was it gave me the opportunity to reflect and put on paper my key learning. I would have liked to learn more about the way to use pecha kucha in more ways. some other examples/techniques.

This is a great concept that could be used at committee meetings our association holds. It was beneficial to reflect on the entire experience of the meeting and what we each take home over and above session content.

The Pecha Kucha method is interesting but the group exercise was not interesting to me.

Loved the experience. Love that it was something new. Great that lots of people felt comfortable sharing.

I was hoping the session would be more about presenting in Pecha Kucha style. I left about 10-15 minutes into the presentation.

I walked out of this with a weird feeling. The session was kind of touchy feely, but upon reflecting on it, it helped shape my experience at this year's event and I realized that I probably took away more from this session as I told my peers back in the office about my experience.

Great program-- enabled me to identify what I had learned and what I could immediately implement for us

good reflection experience, but not sure i took much else away from it.

Experiential learning at its best!

Creative, fresh and fun.

A fun way to wrap up the conference! This session made me realize that I had learned more than I thought.


So I love that some people loved it and some people hated it. That is totally awesome to me. Who wants to be "meh"?

So I guess what I'm saying here is that while not everyone is ready for new meeting formats, many people are willing to try. In my opinion you really need to mix it up in a big conference especially, and try things to appeal to different tastes. I don't know if this is setting the bar too low, but if I leave a conference having been to ONE session that really got me motivated, and thinking about stuff, then I am happy. The rest is all about networking and meeting up with friends and all the other hallway stuff that makes a conference special.