Meeting planners are generally a very deductive, expeditious bunch. They can count coffee cups to perfection, concisely estimate appetizers without overage, deliver the right number of bodies to hotel rooms, and pull off a major convention without a hitch. But when it comes to elevating a meeting to the realm of the unforgettable, Roger Martin believes many planners could sharpen their skills. How?

"In order to design better meetings, planners need to attain a deeper and more broad understanding of the user," says the dean of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. Martin is at the helm of a business school that is fast becoming known for its philosophy of integrated design thinking - think "D"(design) school instead of "B" (business) school. Rotman partnered with PCMA to offer the PCMA Innovation By Design Executive Edge Program, held in January during PCMA's annual meeting. (See companion story on page 46.)

To assess a meeting's success and plan for the next one, planners usually rely on surveys. That's good, Martin says, but they also must dig beyond functionality and mine the hidden caches of emotion. "They are used to asking Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, has moved the school from 72nd to 24th place in the world of MBA business schools.  questions about deliverables, like what will make a binder better, or what an attendee's conclusions were, or if the data was transmitted correctly. But they need to be asking attendees, 'How do you want to feel during the conference? Excited? Taken to the edge? Out there? Comfy, warm, and secure?'"

Martin, who is 50, is from a small Mennonite community in Ontario. He graduated from Harvard Business School, and worked with a group of Harvard buddies at a very successful business consulting firm called Monitor Company in Massachusetts before joining the Rotman School of Management in 1998. Since he came on board, the school has moved from 72nd to 24th place in the world on the Financial Times' list of MBA-granting business schools. He introduced the school's signature integrative thinking teachings as a way to design solutions to complex problems and posits that businesses today must reward risktaking and encourage new ways of looking at products, services, and processes.

The problem most meeting planners have, according to Martin, is they are "too busy focusing on the technical, and they're missing out on the emotional, what makes attendees say 'Wow, that was fantastic,' on their way home." The way to achieve this, he said, is to design an overall experience once you know how they want to feel. This could range anywhere from attaining goals such as "receiving more knowledge, to getting out of the office, to feeding my mind, to having a social experience, or being able to show off in front of my colleagues," notes Martin.

Great design helps to create a feeling as well as deliver functional utility. For instance, Martin points out, "The iPod not only plays songs, it makes you feel like you're the one in control of your play list, your coolness, and your destiny. MP3 players don't make you feel that."

So, how would Martin go about designing a meeting of 1,000? First on his list would be to interview attendees, "to find out how they want to feel and function, and visualize a way to try it. I'd convince a half-dozen of them to work through a prototype of this visualization. It wouldn't be perfect, but I'd just get them in a room to try it. Or I'd find a conference that is similar to what I have in mind and have the people attend. Then I'd interview them and modify the plan. It doesn't need to be really risky, but just a little leap of faith."

When you design a prototype, failure is always a possibility, but Martin sees this as a positive. In a July 2006 BusinessWeek Online article titled "At the Crossroads of Design and Business," he explained, "Even failed experiments help convince customers that the company is aiming high, and the feedback will help them come up with newer, better approaches. In this operating environment, line managers will view customers as people with whom to proto-type and test new ideas, as colleagues in innovation, sitting on the same side of the table."

THE LOGIC OF WHAT MIGHT BE

 For success in any business venture, Martin said there must be a combination of inductive, deductive, and abductive logic or reasoning. Inductive logic relies on the "proof is in the pudding" formula - demonstrating through observation that something actually works. Deductive reasoning deduces that something must be, based on a set of existing principles. Abductive reasoning is the logic of what might be. Abductive logic is the dark horse for tried-andtrue corporate thinkers, as it doesn't rely on cold facts but on anecdotal evidence and intuition. By utilizing these three modes of logic, good designers, according to Martin, "don't take massive risks."

Research In Motion Ltd., the Waterloo, Ontario, company that launched the BlackBerry in 1998 is a shining example. The company worked with an unproven concept - that consumers would use a newly invented portable device that combined voice and e-mail functions. After much testing and evaluating, they decided they had a winner and went into production. With a current market capitalization of $24 billion, even "winner" becomes an understatement.

That combination of logic is crucial to great meetings, too. Meeting planners, Martin said, "are incredibly, logistically precise and use their left-brain skills. They should not give that up. It isn't a war between the left and the right. We were given both, and life is complicated, so we need both to solve problems and succeed."

Design thinking, he says in the BusinessWeek Online article, has been around for years and quotes a 1965 speech of Hugh DuPree, whose family turned Herman Miller from a failing residential furniture manufacturer to an American design leader: "Designing, then, is a basic activity. It comes to grips with the very essence of a problem and proceeds to develop a solution organically, from the inside out, as opposed to 'styling' which concerns itself largely with the distinctive mode of presentation or with the externals of a given solution. The design activity is based upon an understanding of the intrinsic principle of a given problem and its solution."

Martin expands on this by saying in the same article that in a "Design Thinking organization, a company must create a corporate environment in which it is the job of all managers to understand customer needs at a deep and sophisticated level and to understand what the firm's product means to the customer at not only a functional level, but also an emotional and psychological level. It must also create a culture in which line managers are not satisfied with merely serving customers, but insist on delighting them and making them feel the company is their partner, friend, and confidante."

To be a successful design thinker, you must ignore that nagging little voice that uses a negative "reality" to shut down creative solutions - for instance, a price point that is based on what is perceived as "reality." In a December 2006 article called "Is Reality the Enemy of Innovation?" in BusinessWeek. com, he uses toilet paper as an example, saying that if it is assumed consumers won't pay a premium for quality, then producers won't even try to provide more quality. If it is assumed shoppers won't pay more than 99 cents for a four-roll package of toilet paper, the focus is on price promotions that enable retailers to hit that 99-cent price point. Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as consumers wait for those promotions.

An effective way to combat viewing a situation as "reality" and therefore unchangeable, Martin suggests, is to use the thinking tools laid out in Tony Goldsby-Smith's book Rhetoric, in which he wrote, "… the object of endeavor is not the description of what is real but rather the reaction of something that does not currently exist; that must first be imagined." The book goes on to talk about Aristotle's division of the world into parts, the first in which things cannot be other than they are, and another in which things can be other than they are. Calling Aristotle the "original Design Thinker," Martin points out that the philosopher argued for "the power of collaborative conversation to generate new ideas," with an intention to invent something new, using inductive, deductive, and abductive reasoning.

NOT ONLY CONTENT, BUT DELIVERY

When you think you're faced with reality, Martin advises you pull back and see the situation as "just another model - one that is likely to be imperfect." If you do that, you can spring into the future by creating a new model and avoid the quagmire of the past.

Regarding the educational component of a meeting, Martin notes that it's important to think not only about the content of the curriculum, but the delivery. "How many of the most popular lecturers get paid only on the basis of content? The ones that get paid the biggest dollars leave listeners with a feeling. Bill Clinton inspires listeners, as do Tom Peters and Jim Collins. The most highly paid speakers who get a good buzz on content alone are few."

A curriculum needs to feed attendees content, as well as to nourish and inspire emotions and feelings. "You need to mix the two together. At a meeting you want them to be excited and then later to translate that excitement into action." 

You also want them to retain the information, which is difficult in a passive situation. "You have to get people to do something, get them to somehow engage and work with you or other members of the audience. Maybe it's by turning to the person beside them and discussing the lecture topic," suggests Martin.

In addition, sometimes a light and easy touch is appreciated, notes the educator. "Often, edutainment is just what you need after an intense day. It's a form of self-pampering, like going to see a movie, and it makes you feel good."

When asked about the best meetings he's attended, Martin pauses. "That's the trouble with meetings. Many of them are not memorable." After a bit more thought, he recalls a Fast Company magazine brainstorming gathering 10 years ago in Santa Fe. "It was called an advance, not a retreat, and it was fun. There were about 60 people staying at a funky adobe hotel and each evening we did interesting things, like going to a mineral hot springs, or a funky art gallery. It was a feast for the senses, mixed with intellectual interaction and we really got things done. There was lots of dialogue, and it was flexible, with a sense of looseness. A design experience can't be hardwired. You can't treat it like an algorithm. That won't produce what you want."

The worst meetings he's been at are ones where content is blasted in a one-way stream. The solution, he says, is to e-mail speeches ahead of time. "Then discuss it instead of wasting each other's time. The best meetings contain generative interaction."

In Martin's opinion, a top-notch meeting addresses what users really want - and how they want to feel - and then delivers the goods in an "elegant, efficient, and effective way."

INTEGRATIVE THINKING IS THE WAY TO SUCCESS

The key job of a leader in today's climate is to make valid, rather than reliable, choices out of messy, complex situations. Such decisions cannot be made from within narrowly defined functional or operational boundaries, and as a result, modern leadership necessitates the flexibility and creativity of Integrative Thinking.

Integrative thinkers build models rather than choose between them. Their models include consideration of numerous elements - customers, employees, competitors, capabilities, cost structures, industry evolution, and regulatory environment - not just a subset of the above. Their models capture the complicated, multifaceted and multidirectional causal relationships between the key variables in any problem. Integrative thinkers consider the problem as a whole, rather than breaking it down and farming out the parts. Finally, they creatively resolve tensions without making costly trade-offs, turning challenges into opportunities. - Rotman School of Management Web site, www.rotman.utoronto.ca.

THINK LIKE A DESIGNER: ROGER MARTIN'S POINTERS

•  Forget about permanent assignments. Your work will flow from project to project, and you'll organize your life around those projects.
•  Rewards come from "solving tough mysteries with elegant solutions."
•  There are no perfect solutions. Designers "try it, prototype it, improve it" and move it.
•  Don't wait until you can prove something to work. Use foresight and courage to act on what "might be."