Plan Meet Repeat May/June 2020 PMR May.June | Page 4

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Learn the recently-discovered decision-making strategies
that will enable you and your followers to make the most
profitable decisions and adapt them into your toolkit
Develop processes that empower everyone in your team
and organization to make the wisest decisions for your bot-
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PMR: What are some tips you’d offer to meeting planners
that would improve audience retention?
GT: You should know that I frequently do consulting engage-
ments with associations to help them improve audience engage-
ment, and have written numerous articles for meeting planner
media venues on these topics. So I come from a place of ex-
tensive experience when I say that the most important thing
you can do to improve audience retention is to influence their
stories about the event. In other words, audience engagement -
whether audience retention or recruitment - is much less about
the reality of the kind of meeting experience you provide than
about their perceptions and expectations.
The biggest error I see for meeting planners is failing to plan for
the story of the event. What is the story that you think meeting
attendees might have in their heads about the event before they
come to it? What story do you want them to have in their heads
as they’re engaging in the event itself? What about when they
leave it? You need to have a thorough and clear story-telling
plan in order to shape these perceptions and expectations, with
specific story-telling elements for the before, during, and after
portions of the event. All elements of the event must be consis-
tent with the story. The vast majority of meeting planners don’t
even have a clear story, not to mention making the elements
of the event consistent with the story. No wonder that attend-
ees perceive so many events as inauthentic: meeting planners
are competing with excellent digital media storytellers, and the
meeting planners are coming up short.
To reiterate, develop a clear story-telling plan for all elements
of your event, and make sure all elements of the event are con-
sistent with it. For extra points, focus in particular on the end
of the event, as neuroscience research shows we remember the
end of the experience better than we remember all other parts
of the experience.
PMR: Can you share a success story with us?
GT: You probably heard the business advice of “failing to plan
is planning to fail.” That phrase is a misleading myth at best and
actively dangerous at worst. Making plans is important, but our
gut reaction is to plan for the best-case outcomes, ignoring the
high likelihood that things will go wrong. A much better phrase
is “failing to plan for problems is planning to fail.” To address
the very high likelihood that problems will crop up, you need to
plan for contingencies. When was the last time you saw a meet-
ing or another major planned project suffer from a cost over-
run? For example, a 2014 study of large IT projects found that
only 16.2% succeeded in meeting the original planned resource
expenditure. What explains cost overruns? They largely stem
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from the planning fallacy, our intuitive belief that everything
will go according to plan. The planning fallacy is one of many
dangerous judgment errors, which are mental blindspots result-
ing from how our brain is wired that scholars in cognitive neu-
roscience and behavioral economics call cognitive biases.
First, break down each project into component parts. A meet-
ing planning firm struggled with a pattern of taking on projects
that ended up with much lower profit margins than anticipated,
sometimes even losing money. In a consulting engagement for
them, I evaluated the specific component parts of the projects
that had cost overruns, and found that the biggest unanticipated
money drain came from permitting the client to make too many
changes at the final stages of planning the event. As a result, the
firm changed their process to minimize any changes at the tail
end of the project, resulting in much higher profit margins.
Second, use your past experience with similar projects to in-
form your estimates for future projects. An IT company had a
systemic struggle with underestimating meeting planning costs.
In one example, a project that was estimated to cost $2 million
ended up costing $3 million. I suggested making it a require-
ment for project managers to use past project costs to inform
future projections. Doing so resulted in much more accurate
project cost estimates.
Third, for projects with which you have little past experience,
use an external perspective from a trusted and objective source.
A financial services firm whose CEO I coached wanted to move
its headquarters after it outgrew its current building. I connect-
ed the CEO with a couple of other CEO clients who recently
moved and expressed a willingness to share their experience.
This experience helped the financial services CEO anticipate
contingencies he didn’t previously consider, ranging from ad-
ditional marketing expenses to print new collateral with the
updated address to lost employee productivity due to changing
schedules as a result of a different commute.
If you take away one message from this story, remember that
the key to addressing cost overruns is to remember that “failing
to plan for problems is planning to fail.” Use this phrase as your
guide to prevent cost overruns and avoid falling prey to the dan-
gerous judgment error of planning fallacy.