At the heart of their bestselling book, The Experience Economy, co-authors B. Joseph Pine and James Gilmore offer a practical approach for companies to script and stage compelling consumer experiences.

Scripting and staging compelling consumer experiences … isn't that what meeting planners do? It didn't seem like it would be a stretch to have Pine and Gilmore take the precepts from that book - and their newly published Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want - and apply them to meetings.

I got the two of them on the phone (in their separate offices) to share their thoughts about face-to-face meetings. The phone interview quickly turned into a brainstorming session around how to make meetings better. Consummate collaborators, Pine and Gilmore were off and running. They fed off each other's ideas, shared insights from their books, and offered nuggets from the annual event for business executives that they have produced for the past decade.

Here is how the conversation evolved.

Pine: Of course you can apply the concepts from The Experience Economy to meetings. Meetings are experiences. People shouldn't just view them as places to get information, just as event organizers shouldn't view the people who come to them as "attendees." We have no attendees to our event, thinkAbout. We have only participants.

Gilmore: We think language matters. Don't call them "delegates," don't call them "attendees," call them "participants" … by just using that as a mental model, you approach the event fundamentally differently.

Pine: Day 1 at our event, we impart new concepts. We often have an outside participant come in and talk, but this year we did it ourselves so we could walk through the concepts in the new book, Authenticity. Then in the afternoon, we go on what we call a "learning excursion" where we take people out and about in whatever city we're in and let them experience some of the best - and some of the worst - experiences there, so they can learn by doing, by experiencing it themselves.

On the morning of the second day we debrief, usually by Open Space technique. People determine what they want to talk about, how long they want to talk about it, with whom they want to talk. Then, in the afternoon we close with a top 10 list of experiences we suggest people take in during the course of the coming year. Each one of them is a provocation to generate an idea based on what that particular "experience stager" is doing … an idea for their own business that we have them write down on postcards. And then we extend the experience over the next 11 months as we mail out one of these postcards every month.

At the end we present our Experience Stager of the Year (EXPY) award for the one experience that we think stands heads and shoulders above everyone else.

We also present the Experience Management Achievement (EMA) award to one or more thinkAbout alumni judged as having made the most significant strides in advancing experience excellence in their own business or with clients.

Gilmore: We price the event high enough so that we can keep it intimate. We want to have between 100-120 people at the event. Since the invitations go out to people who have already encountered one or both of us as a speaker, our participants share an affinity to our ideas. It's sort of our "raving fans festival," if you will.

The participants could be the head of experiential marketing at a large company or president of a small design firm start-up. There are certain industries we tend to get - health care, architectural firms, design firms. It's a real eclectic group. I am always intrigued; it seems like every year there are a few people that I meet that I just become fascinated with the particular domain in which they are applying our ideas.

For example, last year we gave the EMA award to Jeff Clay. When I met him, he said, "Jim, I have a great job. My clients are small liberal arts colleges. I help them make the on-campus tour a better experience. Because that's everything, make or break, whether a student decides to come and matriculate at a certain college." He had taken all our ideas and applied them to that role.

I marvel at how far and wide the ideas have permeated. Another thinkAbout participant was Doug Johnson, head of all the events for General Growth Partners, a large mall developer. He has taken our ideas and created Fashion Camp, a month-long camp where people paid to go to camp in the mall. During the course of the camp, the attendees would design their own article of clothing and whoever had the best design deemed by the facilitators of the camp (Nordstrom buyers and designers) would get their actual garment to go into production and be sold at the Nordstrom in that mall.

What other events have you personally experienced that you consider to be innovative?

Pine: The TED conference, for sure. They make it very different from every other conference. I spoke there once and they gave me a 18-minute limit. Let me tell you, that's hard! But it keeps things moving and it keeps things energized. The real value behind that? The conversations that happen in the breaks after you have been provoked by the speakers.

Gilmore: Only a few events have really jumped out at me recently as being the most innovative experientially and from an authenticity standpoint.

One is Color Marketing Group. I was absolutely blown away by what I encountered. I was the only outside speaker at that event. This is the association responsible for inventing new colors - which they do at the event. The event has actual output. Not all input: learn, learn, learn, and then leave.

If color is an integral part of the design of your product - whether you're a carpet or a furniture manufacturer - you're there. As a member, you agree to bring your trend analysis to share with one another. People break up into teams. Trends roll up into what they call drivers. And then based on these drivers, they develop new colors. They name the color. I'll give you an example: There was a group that identified a driver they called "town house trash." Their icon was Paris Hilton. That led to the development of a pink shade called "hottie."

These are attendees who present to each other. If you walk around, you see huge storyboards where the trends are posted and then it moves to drivers. The three-day event culminates with each team presenting to each other: "Here are the five colors we have invented and here is the rationale." Then they do a longitudinal study of their members to see how many of them are still using those colors that have been invented in years past. They show the colors that are being most used by the most companies.

I was just blown away by that. It was the output that got me. You learn by producing output.

Pine: How many conferences actually have their people create output - whether it is for the industry overall as in this case or whether it is for themselves and their own company as part of the event?

What kind of changes would you recommend to meeting formats?

Gilmore: Imagine a three-day conference with general session speakers, with breakout concurrent sessions. What if you made that a two-day event and on the third day, have people get into groups and just present back to each other: "Here's what I learned this week."

Your closing speaker would not be the poor sap who gets hired to try to hold them to stay for the final lunchtime talk. Instead people would want to stay because they say, "We're presenting to ourselves this day, why wouldn't we stay for the culmination of this event? That's the reason we came here."

It seems to me that a lot of conferences still rely upon a hierarchical structure to develop content. Conference chair, track chair, educational chair, it is sort of divide and conquer. They should be talking about how to get more folks to collaborate on the design of the programming - including maybe making that a session itself at the event.

There should be more tours, more alternative kinds of programming. Have a session at a lounge, book a suite at the hotel - in a more café kind of lounge environment. Offer more alternative footprints.

Pine: The other thing conferences might do is provide space for the people to help each other with their issues. We did that at one thinkAbout with something we call "braindorming." We asked people to bring materials about their own company to explain it to other people and then we gave them these sheets that rolled down over their hotel room doors where they could write down the issues they need help with. Everybody went by everyone else's door as part of the event to write down ideas for them. Everybody was basically the consultant to everyone else.

Most of these ideas are low-tech, but if you want to use technology to generate the content ahead of time, you could use social networking to get people to co-develop the content. That's just like an open space session where people decide right then and there what they want to talk about and work on. You could do that online ahead of time to decide the meeting's agenda.

Gilmore: One of the ground rules for one of the events I spoke at was if you speak, you attend the entire event. What if you designed an event where all the speakers wanted to hear the other speakers? Let's make it that compelling. Why not do more interviewing rather than straight speaker presentations? Why don't you have people interview the speaker? That's different than panels. You need some experimentation.

Our friend Michael Schrage is fond of saying, "The more people meet electronically, the more important face-to-face interaction is." Yet when people gather for this interaction, it's still mediated!

Our model for one of our thinkAbout events was giant breaks, with occasional five-minute pieces of content or presentations. The real learning happens when the session is over and people gather in the halls to talk about it. So we said, "Let's make that time the main time." We themed each room. If you wanted to talk about subject X, that room would be available for the next nine hours. Instead of the speaker/talent owning the room and the audience showing up to hear it; the audience owned the room and the talent had to figure out how to get integrated into the conversation.

Of course, this is easier to do in a smaller context, but there's no reason you couldn't scale it up or at least have one track at a conference done that way. Take small steps, experiment. These are things that will make the event more real, which gets back to authenticity. If we just come face to face to do the kind of information exchanges that are possible remotely and technologically, why on earth are we coming? You have to invent a different kind of human interaction.

What kinds of meeting experiences speak to all generations?

Gilmore: I think adults are just big kids. The same principles apply for each generation. Edutainment is a good thing. The educational component of an experience becomes enhanced to the extent to which the experience is also entertaining, provides a sense of escape, and an aesthetic value to just hanging out and being there versus rushing out of the room.

The combination of any two realms suggests a way in which the experience can be enhanced. For example, there's the term "eduscapist" which is a field trip. "Escathetic" is very museum-like, beholding an exhibit.

What kind of objects should be arrayed at the event just for people to behold and learn from seeing the object? No meetings do that. There could be educational value in what you encounter in the hallway … even if it just draws people together for nothing more than conversation.

Pine: The last two chapters of The Experience Economy view the purpose of education not just as information exchange and learning, but as a transformation, which would require focusing in on each individual person at the meeting, understanding where they are today, and what they aspire to become as a result. And then design the program not just as a self-contained experience but a set of experiences that close the gap of where they are today and where those aspirations are. You make the change happen as part of the overall education experience.

Gilmore: Help people decide what sessions they should go to … even give them consultants who help them figure out what sessions are best for them, especially first timers.

Can you speak to the learning environment itself as part of the meeting experience?

Pine: Education is an active absorption. It's where you're involved in absorbing the information that is presented to you. If you're not actively involved, just passive, you're not going to learn anything. The immersive environment is the bottom half. Instead of absorption, it's immersion. And that's an aesthetic experience where you create an environment where people just want to be, they want to hang out and spend their time there.

Gilmore: You don't need to redesign the whole facility where the meeting is being held. The most powerful cue when someone walks into a room where the meeting is about to convene is the chairs. Chairs speak volumes. And most chairs at large group gatherings are designed for stackability and storage, not for comfort.

More powerful than anything else about the meeting is what people are going to sit in. We've set up rooms with posture balls, director's chairs with people's names embroidered on the back, pillows, an eclectic mix of furniture, loveseats, couches, stools, lazy boys, high chairs. You walk into the room and see that and you think, "Man, this is going to be a different kind of meeting."

Pine: The biggest thing we do about seating is we never have them sit in any one place for very long -at most, half a day.

Gilmore: Here's a measure of the session's success: As soon as it's officially over, do people bolt? If the setting had high aesthetic value, they would linger.

Pine: Audiovisual staff people are responsible for two senses: audio and visual. What about the other senses?

Gilmore: Yeah, who's responsible for touch, for smell, for taste? Pine: We need five-sense folks who design for the entire meeting, not just what people hear through the speaker system, but what they touch, including the chair they're on, the table they write on, the pens they write with.

Gilmore: Seldom in the last eight years since The Experience Economy was published has anyone asked me to provide my expertise in the theming of their event and the design of the event overall.

Bristol-Myers Squibb was an exception. The focus of its meeting was how to stage better patient experiences. I was asked to help theme the overall kick-off session, particularly the room setup. The fact that they were willing to take a risk was amazing to me.

We had nine different waiting rooms (like a doctor's office waiting room) set up throughout a big ballroom. And I was on the risers on stage. From a quality standpoint, there was a big gap between me and the audience. We never called attention to it, yet it made a powerful statement about the current state of what the patient goes through, their very first experience in medicine: waiting. Before I even spoke, people got it.

How do you create valuable memorabilia for events to extend the experience?

Pine: Take something that is an integral part of the experience into an item of cherished memorabilia. For hotels, how do you turn the packet that the key card comes in into memorabilia so it doesn't get thrown away? What is the equivalent of that at meetings? The agenda, the notepad, the pen. How do you make it so that everyone wants to keep those and talk to others about them?

Gilmore: We don't do nametags at thinkAbout. We call them admission passes and we try to have some sort of use printed on the back of them. If nametags get thrown away or recycled at the end of the meeting, to me that says failure. How can you create some kind of interaction with your admission pass that people wouldn't dare throw it away? We've put maps on the back on them or 12 questions to fill out so you make it a note-taking device.

At one thinkAbout, we had three semi-circles of director's chairs with every participant's last name embroidered on the back of them. It cost $10 to embroider the names. Without telling them, after it was over, we had them sent to their offices as a way to extend the event. So this big box showed up at their office weeks after the event. It cost us maybe $60 but had real lasting impact and value.

How can planners become better strategists?

Pine: No matter what the price point, no matter what the theme of the event, every organizer has to be intentional about every decision that they make so that it fits in with the overall theme of the event, what they are trying to accomplish, that it harmonizes with the event.

Gilmore: "Intentional" is the right word. "Logistics" is a "goods" word … it's all about the goods, moving stuff around, working with space - tangible stuff. "Strategic" might have emerged around event planning, around services, like: "Let's be strategic about what we do." But "intentional" would be the word around experiences. Planners have already embraced logistics and strategies, but now let's add intentional … and meaningful. People want meaningful.

Make someone in charge of the experience. Not the same person in charge of the logistics. Meetings need a director of experiences, someone who says, "Here are the experiential sensations that we are going to layer on top of everything we do." Give them the authority to be in charge of that.

They should also be assessing what just happened. If you can't monitor it live because you are so involved in the logistics, you could at least do an assessment after the fact. There's much to be learned after the session is over from the remnants of the room. Does stuff move around? Sometimes speakers modify the room to their liking and then that intelligence is cleaned up afterwards. Are we observing that? Are we capturing that and applying it to other parts of the program?

Pine: When you talk about learner outcomes, what you really should be talking about is transformation. Therefore, you should charge for the demonstrated outcome. What if you only got paid based on the experience that people had or based on the transformation that the event elicited in each person? What if your income was based on their outcome? That would be a catalyst for change.

Gilmore: It wouldn't be easy to actualize, but that's what makes it a good thing to pursue. If you could figure that out, boy you'd really have something there.

Could you get a subgroup of the total participants together that would agree to experience the event differently? Maybe a group size of 10. Wouldn't the entire event benefit from knowing how 10 people experience the event? You could blog the experience of 10 people who do some extra programming, some extra meetings, to capture the output of what they learn. And the entire group would learn from the documentation of those 10 … while they are there and after they got back to their offices.

Larry Keeley, from the strategic design firm, Doblin Group, has a wonderful model that he calls the five stages of a compelling experience. We so often only focus on the third step, which is "during." Here are his five steps: attracting, entering, during, exiting, extending. There are huge opportunities to learn while you're attracting and entering, and exiting and extending. Do you plant something "during" knowing that you will be doing a follow-up on it? Your most recent book is on the importance of authenticity. How can meetings be more "real"?

Pine: The easiest way to be perceived as phony is to represent things you are not. Meeting organizers do that all the time in what they say about the event and what they say about the presentations.

Gilmore: If it's going to be the most boring session ever, let's call it that. "This is the most boring session you'll ever have at the conference, however, this is an absolute subject matter expert and if you can forbear how boring it will be, then you'll come away with intensive knowledge." Make that the blurb for the session. Here's the fakeness of it: Every single blurb for every single session is packaged to look as attractive as possible with hyperbole and exaggeration. How about a little more texture and variety for the way those sessions are written up? Offer a boring but very practical track. How about trying this? Have eight sessions on Track B. Dedicate one room to that track. It could be designed so the speakers come in and speak only for 10 minutes - followed by an hour and 20 minutes of really wonderful hangout space and food and beverage. You tell your speaker, "Your whole job is to get the right questions into play for when they all break out and have chocolate-covered strawberries. And oh, by the way speaker, you hang out for the next hour and 20 minutes, too."

Elements of thinkAbout 2007

When: Sept. 26-27
Where: Nashville
Event highlights: Intentionally designed to be a "unique experience" where "creativity and spontaneity is valued over structure and stricture."

• A relaxed pre-event gives participants the opportunity to meet "fellow participants, make a few mental notes about who you want to spend more time with over the next couple of days and have a bit of fun before we hit the ground running."
• Day 1, AM: Where the learning begins. Pine and Gilmore provide their own thinking while encouraging participants to share theirs.
• Day 1, PM: "Provocation stations" are set up throughout the environs for participants to interact with people, objects, and activities.
• Day 2, AM: Rather than a simple recap and debrief of the previous day, participants themselves dictate the shape of the morning takeaways using a modified version of the facilitation approach called Open Space.
• Day 2, PM: In the homestretch, Pine and Gilmore present their annual Top 10 experiences that they recommend participants take in during the course of the coming year. The Experience Stager of the Year (EXPY) and Experience Management Achievement (EMA) awards are presented. 
• An optional post-event serves "to cement friendships, continue conversations, and just unwind from an intellectually challenging couple of days," held at a local watering hole.
• Paying Labor: Pine and Gilmore offer six Paying Labor positions at thinkAbout. Participants who sign on pay a premium to work as part of the event staff before, during, and after thinkAbout in order to gain access to Pine and Gilmore and observe "how they think, interact, and collaborate."

Pine & Gilmore's Rules to Meet By

• Don't call them "delegates." Don't call them "attendees," call them "participants" … by just using that as a mental model, you approach the event fundamentally differently.
• Impart new concepts. Give participants plenty of opportunities to explore them together. 
• Make your event produce output. Not all input: learn, learn, learn, and then the participants leave. 
• Change the format. Make your three-day conference a two-day event and set aside the third day for participants to present back to each other what they have learned.
• Provide space for participants to help each other with their issues. You can even theme a room around a particular challenge. Instead of the speaker/talent owning the room and the audience showing up to hear it; the audience owns the room and the talent has to figure out how to get integrated into the conversation.
• Be more collaborative in developing the meeting content. Use social networking to get people to co-develop the content ahead of time.
• Don't forget where people will be parking their behinds. The most powerful cue when someone walks into a room where the meeting is about to convene is the chairs. And most chairs at large group gatherings are designed for stackability and storage, not for comfort.
• You've got audiovisual covered, but don't forget your participants have five senses. Think about smell, touch, taste. ‰ Showcase objects at the event just for people to behold and learn from. They can serve as great conversation starters.
• Be intentional about every decision you make. Everything should relate back to the theme and overall objective of the meeting.
• Remember the five stages of a compelling experience: attracting, entering, during, exiting, extending. Too many meetings only focus on the "during."
• Be authentic. Don't represent the meeting as something it is not.