When managing an expo with thousands of exhibitors or an annual meeting with tens of thousands of attendees, it's only natural to be consumed by the details. But the underlying purpose of meetings is fairly fundamental: Connect individuals to the community and relevant content so that they can be more successful and feel appropriately supported.

We often build our internal systems around the myriad of meeting details that demand attention without focusing enough attention on this simple core purpose. Being able to hold onto that simple essence can be as difficult as seeing the "hidden" image in one of those crazy 3D pictures populated by seemingly random dots. When I need to regain perspective and clarity on my efforts, one book always seems to help.

A Simpler Way, the pioneering work by Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers, challenges us to no longer look at the world as a machine, and most importantly, human beings as machines. In discarding much of our mechanistic view of life, we are asked to take a biological perspective on individuals and organizations (and maybe even conferences). This perspective is based less on control, order, and structure, and more on exploration, growth, and life.

Discarding a mechanistic perspective means becoming comfortable with some new beliefs about people and organizations. Here are a few key belief systems Wheatley and Kellner-Rogers ask us to adopt.

Living systems learn constantly.
This being the case, what is true today might not be tomorrow. Our planning efforts must become less rigid and more like tinkering ... trying lots of things to learn what works best. The plans we develop don't have to be right; they just have to work.

Living systems are self-organizing.
People in organizations, just like other biological forms of life, will self-organize into temporary working structures as needed. We can spend less time on master designs for organizational structures or hierarchies. People can organize themselves as the work requires. Meetings using Open Space technology or World Café formats honor this principle.

Life is attracted to order, but it uses messes to get there.
We needlessly seek simple and clean solutions to complex problems. We need to become comfortable with fuzzy, ambiguous attempts to approach an issue. Further, such approaches may often be happening simultaneously at different points or places in our organization. Life isn't neat; progress isn't neat and orderly either.

Because we are living systems, most people are intelligent, creative, adaptive, and self-organizing.
As Wheatley and Kellner-Rogers write, "We want to learn, to do high-quality work, to contribute, to find meaning. We do not need to impose these attributes on one another. We merely need to learn how to evoke them."

Over time, the essence of the learning experience often becomes encumbered by the logistics used to support it, sometimes gaining a chokehold on the original purpose of the gathering. It is worthwhile to strip away the details and reconnect with the very essence of your meeting's identity.

We need to periodically focus more of our energies and talents on engaging members of our organizations in meaningful discussions about who we are, what we believe, what we do, and how we can do it better. Otherwise we turn our meetings into spectacles and our engaged participants into passive spectators, draining the passion out of our gatherings.

Yes, there are speakers to book, sessions to select, menus to plan, and room sets to determine, but those are merely mechanistic activities. Meetings need to be seen as living organisms, as ecologies where living beings come together to connect, to grow, to learn, to contribute, and to create.

Organizing meetings requires a focus on myriad details. But it is worthwhile to strip away the details and reconnect with the very essence of your meeting's identity. Ask these key questions:

1. How does your conference evoke and support your participants' desire to find and create meaning with each other?

2. How might your schedule, format, and meeting design impede or actually prevent participants from creating the community they seek or finding the content they need? How can that be changed?

Jeffrey Cufaude is a former higher education administrator, meeting planner, and association executive. He currently writes, speaks, and facilitates on a variety of individual and organizational leadership issues. Learn more about his work at www.ideaarchitects.org. To submit topic ideas and feedback on the Leading Learning column, e-mail jeffrey@idea architects.org.

Leading Learning is sponsored by Freeman, www.freemanco.com.