It's time to wear a different hat, to think less like a planner and more like a designer. The second phase of the ADDIE model - Analysis-Design-Development-Implementation-Evaluation - helps meeting professionals focus on four steps crucial to designing meeting and learning environments and to shaping the overall event experience:

1. Create learning objectives.
2. Craft learner outcomes.
3. Create a content outline (topics and themes).
4. Design the learning environment.

Here, we'll focus on the first two steps. Next month, we'll address the third and fourth steps.

Create Learning Objectives
In our last article, we explored business and program objectives. You begin the design phase by creating learning (or instructional) objectives, which build on business and program objectives. Learning objectives are written from the perspectives of your speakers, facilitators, and subject-matter experts. They encapsulate what your presenters intend to communicate in their workshops, breakouts, keynotes, and panel discussions. If they're written correctly, they also provide direction in planning content and offer instructor guidance.

Here are two examples of clear, concise learning objectives from the facilitator perspective:

1. Present 15 marketing principles to increase attendance at educational programs.
2. Lead a discussion on the characteristics of the lifelong learner, as applied to planning an educational program.

What makes these strong objectives? They both state what the facilitator will cover and establish the framework for the educational activity.

Craft Learner Outcomes
Of course, what the presenters will present is only half of it. Even more important is what the learners will learn - i.e., learner outcomes. The primary reason to establish learner outcomes is to foster communication, which occurs on many levels. Well-crafted learner outcomes produce results. They:

• cause careful thinking around what is to be accomplished through a meeting program.
• force presenters and speakers to think carefully about what is important.
• communicate to members, staff, and other participants what the meeting is about.
• help attendees make decisions about prioritizing concurrent sessions.
• define a contract between speakers and audience members with explicit expectations and outcomes.
• make presentations more directed and organized.
• provide feedback to learners as objectives are accomplished.
• aid in program evaluation.

Writing viable learner outcomes takes practice. Strive to keep your outcomes SMART - specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. Some other tips:

1. Describe the end (product) or the learner outcome.
2. Write a separate statement for each outcome.
3. Write a statement that reflects different levels of skill attainment.
4. Begin each statement with a concrete action verb - such as identify, name, or describe. Words or phrases such as know, think, appreciate, realize, learn, comprehend, remember, understand, and familiarize aren't measurable and should be avoided. (For more examples of verbs that are effective in helping build learner outcomes, see box at left.)

Another useful tool for writing strong learner outcomes is the ABCD method, in which A is for "audience," B is for "behavior," C is for "conditions," and D is for "degree of mastery needed." Using this tool, you can create learning outcomes by filling in the blanks in the following format: "[Audience] will be able to [action verb or behavior] [condition] [degree]." The "who," "what," "how," and "how much" parts of each statement are color coded below:

Wearing Several Hats
Meeting planners should draw on other skill sets and disciplines when designing a remix of their meetings - and take on other roles, including the following:

Designer - This is someone who considers not only how something will look but also how it will be used and how it will be made (see sidebar on p. 78).

Social psychologist - According to Linda Ginzel, professor at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, "Meeting planners can act as social psychologists by creating the right learning environments that affect the behavior not of individual people but the entire group." Likewise, more than 80 years ago, in his 1925 book How to Plan a Convention, P.G.B. Morriss attributed a disappointing conference in part to "a lack of understanding of mob psychology."

Project manager - After a career as a corporate meeting planner at Motorola, Louise Olson earned a certificate in project management. Today, as an independent meeting planner, she values the project-manager skill set - including establishing timelines, identifying resources, and assessing and controlling risk. "The meeting planning profession is often misunderstood and undervalued, but project managers are recognized for their skills," Olson says. "My project-management training enables me to speak to other professionals in 'their' language, and fit meeting planning tasks into a project plan that they can understand."

As with social psychology, project management was recognized as an integral part of meeting planning decades before it was a formal discipline. "[The convention manager shall lead] all committees in their work," P.G.B. Morriss wrote, "inspiring them to greater effort, coordinating their work, following them up so that there may be no slip-up of any kind when the time comes, and assuming a large amount of responsibility in general throughout the entire affair."

Together, these three roles allow you to better focus on the learner - who, of course, is the ultimate user of the meetings you design. 

Design and Conquer
When we talk about design, we're talking about more than making something look nice. Design is not about style; it's about use. Within the context of a meeting, it's about how participants interact with each other, the presenters, and the content.

Here are six design principles to abide by when putting together your meeting.

Design Principle 1: Design meetings that facilitate instead of lecture. The word "facilitate" is derived from the Latin word facilitas, which means easiness. The ideal speaker eases the audience into learning; a speaker who facilitates knows that:

• participation is important.
• teams generally perform better than individuals; therefore, input is desired.
• everyone in the room can learn - the speaker as well as the audience.

Create learning objectives that focus on facilitation, not speaking or presenting of information. Select speakers who can convey expertise and also facilitate knowledge transfer, not an information dump. "When there is an overabundance of information, the brain orients toward what is most immediately relevant," notes Andrea Sullivan, an organizational psychologist and the president of BrainStrength Systems. "For individuals, this means when we're hungry, we notice food. For organizations, it means that people pay attention to and remember information that is connected to real, vital issues grounded in meaningful business context. Meeting planners must design environments that facilitate participants absorbing and integrating information so that it becomes effective, actionable knowledge."

Design Principle 2: Seek alignment and consistent communication. As organizations become increasingly complex and collaborative, it becomes more important to align - and effectively communicate - information throughout the entire enterprise. Meetings support the organization's alignment of goals, objectives, and values.

Design Principle 3: Create information agility. With overabundant information available in every industry and via every media, quality meetings display "information agility." In the past, change was somewhat predictable: Business increased or decreased in a linear pattern, competitors entered or exited the market in a logical fashion. Today, simultaneous economic, technological, and societal forces bring unpredictable change. Organizations that exhibit information agility - managing, sharing, and using information effectively - react well to dynamic change.

Well-designed meetings facilitate information agility in four ways:

1. Participants understand what information is most significant. This can only happen when meetings focus participants on mission-critical information.
2. Participants are given opportunities to exchange tacit knowledge - with each other - in informal learning environments.
3. Participants are able to place learning in context, to understand how to use the information to execute intelligent business decisions.
4. Information is placed within the context of what to do next. Inherent in all learning environments is a call to action. Strong calls to action are included and reinforced throughout the meeting and in follow-up efforts after the meeting.

If learners don't use information effectively, they're unable to face the competitive pressures of changing markets, shrinking margins, and increasing competition found outside the organization.

Design Principle 4: Shift the focus of knowledge/ competencies. Organizations are more permeable and dynamic than ever before. While industry, products, and organizational structures once defined companies, today strategic alliances, supply-chain management, and partnerships have changed the traditional boundaries of business. And multidisciplinary advances in technology, medicine, and other areas are blurring the categories. For example, is Apple in the computer, entertainment, or consumer-products business?

Your meeting agenda must acknowledge that experts can come from outside your organization, including suppliers, vendors, partners, alliances, unrelated industries, participants, and even competitors.

Design Principle 5: Create sticky content. In Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, authors and brothers Chip and Dan Heath discuss six ways to cement ideas in people's minds, including adding the element of unexpectedness and storytelling. By introducing the unexpected in a meeting setting, you surprise learners (capturing their attention) and spark their interest (maintaining their attention) - even among the most jaded.

The element of surprise can be interjected into content, formats, marketing - every aspect of meetings and learning environments. For example, at Iconosphere, a client learning and networking event run by the consumer-analyst firm Iconoculture Inc., attendees receive "artifacts," tangible objects intended to bring ideas to life. In a session on multicultural consumers, as Iconoculture Executive Vice President Mary Meehan recently told Corporate EVENT magazine, meeting organizers distributed local maps that pinpointed hotspots where attendees could experience a new culture firsthand. Brainstorm to create similarly offbeat ways to surprise and delight your participants.

Stories are also effective teaching tools. When you're listening to a story, the same area of your brain that is associated with physical activity is stimulated. This active mental stimulation encourages problem solving and builds skills. Stories also contain an emotional component that draws an audience in. The Heath brothers write: "Story's power, then, is twofold: It provides stimulation (knowledge of how to act) and inspiration (motivation to act)."

Independent planner Angie Silberhorn recalls an International Special Events Society (ISES) annual conference in Montreal where Mark Tewksbury, the Canadian swimmer who upset several highly favored Americans to win a gold medal at the 1992 Summer Olympics, presented the keynote. "Mark did a remarkable job of weaving his story into his comments about leadership and achieving optimal results," Silberhorn says. "To accompany his remarks, we included the Canadian National Anthem and video of Mark's race. While he was telling his story about swimming for the gold medal, he had everyone in the audience standing on their feet and cheering. Although he was recounting an event from 1992, the audience was truly reliving the moment in 2007. Many were touched by his inspirational story and continue to talk about the session to this day. It was his honest and dynamic delivery of his personal story that allowed him to connect so well with the audience, and made his speech so effective."

Design Principle 6: Design within context. Of course, your organizational and participants' culture must be taken into account when considering innovative approaches to your meeting. Your organization's willingness to experiment, collaborate, operate in real time, and shift control to the participants must be factored into the way you design your events. But part of your job should be to try to push the envelope. In fact, in addition to designer, social psychologist, and project manager, you might want to add "change agent" to your list of roles.

Say What You Mean
crafting viable learner outcomes requires choosing the right words: The more concrete action verbs, the better. For a list of action verbs tailored to different meetings and desired outcomes (e.g., financial, creative, research), go to www.pcma.org/documents/actionverbs.pdf.

Also Known As
A number of terms often are used as synonyms for learner outcomes:

• Enabling objectives
• Educational objectives
• Curriculum objectives
• Performance objectives
• Operational objectives
• Instructional objectives
• Intents
• Aims
• Competencies
• Outcomes

Intelligent Design
Structures. The design phase establishes the structural framework on which future work can be based. Meeting planners attack the design in a number of ways, including:

• task-centered, such as developing a timeline and checklist for the myriad tasks necessary for a large meeting to unfold without a hitch.
• sequencing of information so that knowledge builds.
• topic-centered, such as educational content for a meeting that revolves around a specific theme.
•  problem-centered, which may develop into a training program within an organization to solve specific job-related issues or concerns.

The first approach - task-centered - is the most traditional for meeting management, but it's the other three approaches that truly allow you to help adult learners learn now.

Learning. Learning is demonstrated by what people know, think, and do. Your meeting design must consider specific domains of learning:

• Cognitive or knowledge: What is it that you want the learner to know?
• Affective or attitudes: What is it that you want the learner to feel?
• Psychomotor or skills: What is it that you want the learner to do?

Outcomes. Perhaps the most essential component of the design phase is the creation of learner outcomes. These are your final products. They are the messages and resources that learners take away from your meetings, and they feed the evaluative part of the process.

Blueprint. At the end of the design phase, you create a blueprint for the event that combines education with logistics. Every meeting planner uses such a blueprint. It may be called by a different name, but one does (or should) exist for each event.

Sue Tinnish is principal, SEAL Inc., which focuses on improving the content of meetings for associations and corporations. She has recently been named director of the Accepted Practice Exchange (APEX) program.

Glen C. Ramsborg, Ph.D., is senior director, education, PCMA.

The How Adults Learn, Now series is sponsored by the Hiltons of Chicago, www.hiltonfamilychicago.com.

The How Adults Learn, Now series is funded through a generous grant from the PCMA Education Foundation.