Plan Meet Repeat May/June 2020 PMR May.June | Page 6

How to Avoid Meetings in the era of COVID-19 Coronavirus
By Dr. Gleb Tsupursky
The meeting industry is reeling under the impact of the
COVID-19 coronavirus disruption, and many meeting
planners are making decisions that will lead to disasters.
On the one hand, many meeting planners are closing
their eyes and denying the possibility that their meetings
will be cancelled. I just spoke to the meeting planner for
a prominent financial firm on March 13, who denied any
possibility that their annual company-wide meeting in late
June might be cancelled. On the other hand, some meet-
ing planners are full of doom and gloom, thinking that all
meetings will now transition to online events.
This black-and-white thinking is typical of how our brains
respond to major disruptors, and neither is helpful in
the long term. Instead, you need to use effective neuro-
science-based techniques to maximize the likelihood of
meeting success.
During a recent training I conducted on how to plan better
meetings using neuroscience, Mark, one of the many as-
sociation executives there, shared a harrowing true story.
“Our last annual conference was a real disaster,” Mark said.
Mark is the Events Director of a 17,000-member associa-
tion that I won’t name. He clearly felt vulnerable but was
willing to share the situation for everyone to learn from.
As he explained, his team had followed their typical plan
for preparing for the annual conference: they got the usual
sponsors, booked a venue with a good reputation, secured
quality speakers, and marketed the conference to their
membership. And as he noted, small problems had hap-
pened in past years, but no major disruptions. As usual,
his on-site staff and volunteers addressed the minor issues.
Unfortunately, this time the conference did not go accord-
ing to plan.
This had all come up as we were talking about why fail-
ures happen — we hit blind spots, or dangerous judgment
errors, that cause us to assume that things will just keep
happening as they always have before. There are over 100
mental blind spots that cognitive neuroscientists and be-
havioral economists like myself call cognitive biases 1 , and
any one of them can cause us to make the kind of poor
decisions that lead to disasters. Mark’s understanding the
likelihood of something truly going wrong this time is a
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perfect example of normalcy bias 2 . Since planning past
events had only produced minor issues in the past, he and
his team were assuming that’s how it would go this time —
only that’s not what happened.
As Mark recounted, the first sign of real trouble dealt with
promotion: the new registration software smartphone app
was a breeze for the team — as professional meeting plan-
ners they were all used to such tools. They assumed every-
one would be fine navigating the new technology — an ex-
ample of another cognitive bias, the false consensus effect 3 ,
where we underestimate the extent to which other peo-
ple’s values, perspectives, and understanding differs from
our own. In reality, the software and app were extremely
confusing to older members, and they just chose to not
struggle with it. Attendance dropped by 20 percent. The
attendees who had installed the app couldn’t use it, which
cast a pall over their enthusiasm for the conference.
There were other problems as well: the venue, while
well-recommended, had several conferences happening at
once, which overburdened the staff and co promised their
ability to set up rooms on time. The menu lacked options.
The AV techs were harried. Then the keynote speaker got
laryngitis days before the event. Without time to find a re-
placement, Mark tapped the association’s own Executive
Director for the job. Unfair or not, attendees had the im-
pression that the whole event was ill-planned and a waste
of time.
It could have been worse, we all reasoned; no one had a
medical emergency. With hundreds of thousands of con-
ferences taking place in the US every year, perhaps it was
Mark’s turn for bad luck. But the disaster could have been
prevented, and Mark knew that. He just knew it in hind-
sight, and he hoped the conference hadn’t marked his ca-
reer before it was too late. “Next time,” he said, “if there is
one.” We all agreed we hoped there was.
Failure Proofing
Event planning is a highly competitive arena, but so are
countless other fields, and we’re all trying to avoid mis-
takes that could damage our careers. As the group I was
leading reassessed what Mark could have done to prevent
his meeting catastrophe, I introduced a fail-safe method
for avoiding disasters. This Failure-Proofing exercise 4 can
help ensure a major endeavor’s success. The strategy is