This is a post on conferences. But it applies to any meeting, not just conferences.
The layout of the room where people talk gets ignored, but it matters plenty.
Your boss wants cheap, the hotel wants easy. You want the easiest thing you can get with no one yelling at you. What do you get?
Rows of chairs and a bit of standing room between them. And then a speaker at the front, a podium and a PowerPoint.
A good layout doesn’t just happen, you have to work for it. It’s a little extra to rearrange things. It’s not much extra. So what does it take to make a good room?
Room Design Tells a Story
Every attendee asks this question the moment they walk into a room: what does this room remind me of?
A room with a clear design means people will know what to do in that room. The school cafeteria. Round tables ready for a chicken dinner. Endless rows of hotel chairs.
You walk in a room and you make a decision. Is this room a place where they usually say no to me? Then no it is. Rooms with happy, successful associations will get people listening.
People have their defaults, they have their “how I usually feel in a room” reflex. You can use that reflex or let it use you. Lay your room out oddly to wake people up (like a rock show) or it’ll unsettle them (a circle of chairs with no tables, they’ll feel naked). Up to you.
The lunch. What’s worse than a bad lunch? A bad lunch at round tables. Move everyone to a different room, and then talk if you want. Nobody’s changed by a speech after a bad lunch. Saved a little, wasted a lot.
Bad stories make for bad meetings.
If you have to do one thing only: Choose too small a room. If everyone can only stand, with an overflow crowd in the hallway, it’ll be a hot room. And you can’t make it any hotter than that.
Running a Presentation
When you’re running a presentation (not a discussion): stage it on the short side. In a 30×80 room, stage it on the 30-foot side. Deep and narrow.
Why the narrow format wins: You can see the speaker and the slides at the same time, you are all on the same plane. It’s imperative that people see both your slides and you.
iMag: Putting your speaker’s image up on the big screen. Pricey, but it’s nearly mandatory once you get over 500 people. Much more interesting: add a second camera for a handheld second shot, cutting from stage shot to handheld back to stage.
It’s cheaper than it used to be to rent big screens. The biggest screen you can get, and the brightest. Next to the speaker.
How many VGA cables should you have? All of them. Always have a switcher; they’re cheap. Biggest disaster: the speaker is fumbling to swap the laptop on stage. Better to have it all up front, not some tech in the back who cares less than you do.
Play intro music when each speaker comes up. Nothing slow or boring. Nothing that’s long. Purely for that Oscar feeling.
Marching bands. Inexpensive but no one likes them.
When they fill the room, what do they do? They grab the aisle seats. So you can’t have rows of forty or fifty seats. Have an aisle every ten chairs or so. Much faster in and out, and you don’t lose many seats at all.
Lights: audience dark, stage lit. Only rehearsal will get you good lighting, whatever the size of the group.
No Q&A with a big crowd. A speech is a speech, not a press conference. If you open the question you lose control, lose energy and you end with “well, if there are no more questions.” Instead, collect questions from key people ahead of time on index cards. Have someone with a mike work through a short list.
A Meeting of Two
The same thing goes for a two person meeting. But it’s just a meeting of two, so how does it make a difference? Don’t give a sales pitch in a noisy restaurant, crammed on a banquette with strangers on both sides. No need to take a bad setting.
Showing slides on a laptop in front of a few people: Use a big-screen laptop and a simple USB remote. Don’t connect to the Internet. The person who matters most has to see you and the screen. Can’t manage both? Forget the laptop.
It’s your meeting too if you’re the one traveling to it. Make a friend with the assistant, even from 1000 miles away. Make nice to the maitre d’. Work on the room the way you’d work on your slides. An awkward room is bad for both of you.
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