daftandbarmy
Army.ca Dinosaur
- Reaction score
- 26,581
- Points
- 1,160
Spaced Out
By Richard Eaton
https://www.berlineaton.com/people/richard-eaton
“When you have an ugly and bad meeting space, creativity and productivity are both likely casualties.” Martin Senn
We’ve all had the experience of attending a workshop intended to promote collaboration, innovation and team learning only to be stricken, lightly wounded, while navigating the sharp edged furniture cramming a dark, stuffy meeting room. Too often we are faced with making do with rooms that are too small, filled with useless artifacts, or arranged in a way that otherwise drives people crazy and inhibits the creativity we seek from human interaction during some types of meetings.
For example, amongst the ranks of those room layouts which tend to defeat truly interactive meetings is the well-known, and somewhat infamous, Hollow Square. A defensive infantry tactic designed, since antiquity, to physically arrange foot soldiers in a geometrical formation that will successfully defeat or deter attacking cavalry, the hollow square room layout can similarly defeat the flow of your meetings. Therefore unless you are planning to give a presentation, or another type of meeting that requires little audience interaction, the hollow square and its colleagues should be consigned to the battlefield.
I have been delivering workshops for over 20 years, engaging with groups of from 2 to 200 people in dynamic, creative and team based multi-day activities intended to help them work together to change the world for the better. In some cases, especially where my clients have not been given the permission or resources to book a suitable space, I have suffered in silence along with them as we ‘sucked it up’ and, like good soldiers, made the best of a bad situation. And fortunately, because numbers don’t lie, we can measure their dissatisfaction levels.
Like every good consultant, we survey our clients at the end of each session. We looked at surveys we collected from over 1000 participants in over 60 major workshops we have delivered over the past 4 years. On average, across all the criteria surveyed including session preparation and facilitator performance, overall client satisfaction is rated at 85.2%. That’s pretty much an ‘A Grade’ and we’re proud of that, of course. But when we break out the scores related to ‘meeting room and refreshments were acceptable’ that score drops to 84%: a difference of -1.2%. Although that doesn’t sound like much, I can assure you, the reason it’s not lower is because, in too many cases, we and our clients had to work like dogs to make up for the room deficiencies.
So what are the characteristics of the best meeting spaces, and what should you pay attention to when selecting and preparing meeting spaces for your innovation focused meetings?
Here are three keys to success that we’ve learned the hard way:
1. Be open
“Make an empty space in any corner of your mind, and creativity will instantly fill it.” Dee Hock
Creativity lives in the white spaces so the more room people have to work in, the more creative they will be. One simple but honest mistake we see people make all the time is to book the room that is available, not the one that’s big enough for your needs. One rule of thumb we use is to plan the room size based on an area of from 80 to 100 square feet per person.
How much room is that? Stand up and hold your arms straight out from your shoulders. Imagine that your arms are twice as long as they really are. Now mentally draw a circle around you encompassing that area; that’s about 80 square feet. You may think that’s a lot of space and it is, especially for meetings with more than 20 people. But, if the purpose of your meeting is to engage people in collaborative problem solving, you will need every single inch.
Oh, and you should also look for a space that has high ceilings. As noted by Dr. Sally Augustin, “We're more creative in spaces with higher ceilings. All else being equal, people are more innovative in places with 10 foot ceilings than they are when the ceiling hovers 8 feet above the floor.” There’s a commonly used phrase in the English language, with which you will be familiar, that echoes this observation: the sky’s the limit.
2. Range freely
“We see in order to move; we move in order to see.” William Gibson
If you want your audience to participate in group problem solving activity, you need to make sure that the group can physically ebb and flow in alignment with their thought processes. To make sure this can happen, you need to get rid of the barriers to physical movement in the room.
How many times have you been invited to a meeting that encourages discussion, collaboration and wants you to work in small teams, but a gigantic boardroom table occupies the center of the room? This is the business meeting’s equivalent of the Berlin Wall, of course, and the inter-personal impacts emerging from this kind of room setup can, coincidentally, wind up resembling that of immediate post-WW2 Europe.
The best type of room setup is, of course and thankfully, similar to that often seen in the classrooms of our children these days. Small tables with clusters of four or five chairs around them spread out in a way that promotes small to large group discussions and learning are the best layout for meetings trying to promote creative interactions. Quite apart from the physical and intellectual freedom this offers, it gives the introverts amongst us a safe ‘home base’ to head back to if they need to recharge their socialization batteries.
3. Seek enlightenment
“Sunlight is the best disinfectant”. Steve Kazee
Dark rooms are great for PowerPoint presentations. And sleeping.
If the goal of your meeting is to help people ‘think outside of the box’, it helps if you can make sure they can see outside of it first. Meeting satisfaction always tends to be improved where there is natural light available in meeting rooms. Although most of us would intuitively agree, this phenomena is backed up by some good research. During a recent University of Illinois study, “researchers found that high school students perform better on tests if the classroom has a view of a green landscape, rather than a windowless room, or a room with a view of another building or a parking lot.”
For me, on the list of ‘most important things to pay attention to’ during the meeting room booking process, this is the one that leaps to the top: always try to book a room with windows. Many of our clients have been defeated, however, by the prevalent design features of many modern buildings. Group meeting space tends to be seen as an ‘extra’ add on to the place where the ‘real work’ gets done: cubicles or small, dark, enclosed spaces with thick, solid doors that most people refer to as ‘offices’.
So how do you get around the problem of no natural light in our traditional meeting spaces? I would suggest that you consider using non-traditional meeting spaces for your interaction focused meetings. Cafeterias, large and spacious hallways or ante rooms, patios or balconies, or other outside spaces like local parks can be amazingly effective for your purposes. One of the best sessions we’ve ever delivered was held in a partially constructed building that was missing a couple of walls and therefore allowed lots of air and light into the space. So, when thinking about the right space for your meeting, think about using spaces that no one else would consider using for their meetings.
Ultimately, successful meetings are mainly about the planning phases. Selecting a meeting location is just one of the many steps you will take. However, unlike the agenda or the type of sandwiches, the physical space you’ve chosen is generally the most difficult part of the event to change at short notice, and it’s therefore critically important to make sure that you properly match the type of space to the purpose of your meeting.
As the sign on the farm in Saskatchewan said: ‘pick your ruts, you’ll be in them for the next 50 miles’. However, it’s equally important to make sure that your vehicle fits in the ruts you’ve picked.
By Richard Eaton
https://www.berlineaton.com/people/richard-eaton
“When you have an ugly and bad meeting space, creativity and productivity are both likely casualties.” Martin Senn
We’ve all had the experience of attending a workshop intended to promote collaboration, innovation and team learning only to be stricken, lightly wounded, while navigating the sharp edged furniture cramming a dark, stuffy meeting room. Too often we are faced with making do with rooms that are too small, filled with useless artifacts, or arranged in a way that otherwise drives people crazy and inhibits the creativity we seek from human interaction during some types of meetings.
For example, amongst the ranks of those room layouts which tend to defeat truly interactive meetings is the well-known, and somewhat infamous, Hollow Square. A defensive infantry tactic designed, since antiquity, to physically arrange foot soldiers in a geometrical formation that will successfully defeat or deter attacking cavalry, the hollow square room layout can similarly defeat the flow of your meetings. Therefore unless you are planning to give a presentation, or another type of meeting that requires little audience interaction, the hollow square and its colleagues should be consigned to the battlefield.
I have been delivering workshops for over 20 years, engaging with groups of from 2 to 200 people in dynamic, creative and team based multi-day activities intended to help them work together to change the world for the better. In some cases, especially where my clients have not been given the permission or resources to book a suitable space, I have suffered in silence along with them as we ‘sucked it up’ and, like good soldiers, made the best of a bad situation. And fortunately, because numbers don’t lie, we can measure their dissatisfaction levels.
Like every good consultant, we survey our clients at the end of each session. We looked at surveys we collected from over 1000 participants in over 60 major workshops we have delivered over the past 4 years. On average, across all the criteria surveyed including session preparation and facilitator performance, overall client satisfaction is rated at 85.2%. That’s pretty much an ‘A Grade’ and we’re proud of that, of course. But when we break out the scores related to ‘meeting room and refreshments were acceptable’ that score drops to 84%: a difference of -1.2%. Although that doesn’t sound like much, I can assure you, the reason it’s not lower is because, in too many cases, we and our clients had to work like dogs to make up for the room deficiencies.
So what are the characteristics of the best meeting spaces, and what should you pay attention to when selecting and preparing meeting spaces for your innovation focused meetings?
Here are three keys to success that we’ve learned the hard way:
1. Be open
“Make an empty space in any corner of your mind, and creativity will instantly fill it.” Dee Hock
Creativity lives in the white spaces so the more room people have to work in, the more creative they will be. One simple but honest mistake we see people make all the time is to book the room that is available, not the one that’s big enough for your needs. One rule of thumb we use is to plan the room size based on an area of from 80 to 100 square feet per person.
How much room is that? Stand up and hold your arms straight out from your shoulders. Imagine that your arms are twice as long as they really are. Now mentally draw a circle around you encompassing that area; that’s about 80 square feet. You may think that’s a lot of space and it is, especially for meetings with more than 20 people. But, if the purpose of your meeting is to engage people in collaborative problem solving, you will need every single inch.
Oh, and you should also look for a space that has high ceilings. As noted by Dr. Sally Augustin, “We're more creative in spaces with higher ceilings. All else being equal, people are more innovative in places with 10 foot ceilings than they are when the ceiling hovers 8 feet above the floor.” There’s a commonly used phrase in the English language, with which you will be familiar, that echoes this observation: the sky’s the limit.
2. Range freely
“We see in order to move; we move in order to see.” William Gibson
If you want your audience to participate in group problem solving activity, you need to make sure that the group can physically ebb and flow in alignment with their thought processes. To make sure this can happen, you need to get rid of the barriers to physical movement in the room.
How many times have you been invited to a meeting that encourages discussion, collaboration and wants you to work in small teams, but a gigantic boardroom table occupies the center of the room? This is the business meeting’s equivalent of the Berlin Wall, of course, and the inter-personal impacts emerging from this kind of room setup can, coincidentally, wind up resembling that of immediate post-WW2 Europe.
The best type of room setup is, of course and thankfully, similar to that often seen in the classrooms of our children these days. Small tables with clusters of four or five chairs around them spread out in a way that promotes small to large group discussions and learning are the best layout for meetings trying to promote creative interactions. Quite apart from the physical and intellectual freedom this offers, it gives the introverts amongst us a safe ‘home base’ to head back to if they need to recharge their socialization batteries.
3. Seek enlightenment
“Sunlight is the best disinfectant”. Steve Kazee
Dark rooms are great for PowerPoint presentations. And sleeping.
If the goal of your meeting is to help people ‘think outside of the box’, it helps if you can make sure they can see outside of it first. Meeting satisfaction always tends to be improved where there is natural light available in meeting rooms. Although most of us would intuitively agree, this phenomena is backed up by some good research. During a recent University of Illinois study, “researchers found that high school students perform better on tests if the classroom has a view of a green landscape, rather than a windowless room, or a room with a view of another building or a parking lot.”
For me, on the list of ‘most important things to pay attention to’ during the meeting room booking process, this is the one that leaps to the top: always try to book a room with windows. Many of our clients have been defeated, however, by the prevalent design features of many modern buildings. Group meeting space tends to be seen as an ‘extra’ add on to the place where the ‘real work’ gets done: cubicles or small, dark, enclosed spaces with thick, solid doors that most people refer to as ‘offices’.
So how do you get around the problem of no natural light in our traditional meeting spaces? I would suggest that you consider using non-traditional meeting spaces for your interaction focused meetings. Cafeterias, large and spacious hallways or ante rooms, patios or balconies, or other outside spaces like local parks can be amazingly effective for your purposes. One of the best sessions we’ve ever delivered was held in a partially constructed building that was missing a couple of walls and therefore allowed lots of air and light into the space. So, when thinking about the right space for your meeting, think about using spaces that no one else would consider using for their meetings.
Ultimately, successful meetings are mainly about the planning phases. Selecting a meeting location is just one of the many steps you will take. However, unlike the agenda or the type of sandwiches, the physical space you’ve chosen is generally the most difficult part of the event to change at short notice, and it’s therefore critically important to make sure that you properly match the type of space to the purpose of your meeting.
As the sign on the farm in Saskatchewan said: ‘pick your ruts, you’ll be in them for the next 50 miles’. However, it’s equally important to make sure that your vehicle fits in the ruts you’ve picked.
