Many books detail how to lead a productive meeting with 8 to 12 people
in a room, or even 40 to 50. Virtuous Meetings: Technology +
Design for High Engagement in Large Groups, by Karl Danskin and
Lenny Lind, is the first book to show how to keep every individual active
and productive in meetings of 300 to 400—or even 3,000 to 4,000. The
days of one person standing up in front of a group and talking, while
the meeting “audience” passively listens, are over. Using technology,
meeting participants today are being given a radical new role in
generating group solutions.
“If an organization’s goal in gathering people together is to foster
collaboration, cross-pollinate for innovation, or quickly respond to
disruptive forces, offering the technology that enables people to have a
voice and contribute is essential,”say veteran meeting designers Danskin
and Lind.
How does a meeting become virtuous? By creating the best possible use of
every person’s time and creating outcomes that reflect the ideas,
feelings, and aspirations of all the participants. Danskin and Lind
bring 2 x 20 years of experience in interactive meeting design to bear
on the question of how large groups can operate in today’s environment
as high-performance teams. And in their first book together, they offer
a surprising conclusion: it’s the use of technology, when embedded in a
specific engagement process, that allows people in large meetings to
spend much of their time in productive, small-group conversations.
This new style of meeting design integrates personal communication
technologies that have arisen in the last few years. In Virtuous
Meetings, the authors offer example after example of how this
new kind of meeting process is being used around the world by large
organizations and international stakeholder forums.
Virtuous Meetings cuts through the “technology noise” that
now surrounds us—with myriad meeting apps, Twitter, and other tools
flooding the meeting market. "The latest technology won’t amount to
much, if all it means is that people will be watching a remote video
feed at the same time or will be able to ask questions of the speaker
over their smartphone,” declare Danskin and Lind. This is the first book
to deliver a clear, concise description of how to use technology to
enable participants in large meetings to spend most of their time in
face-to-face conversations.
In business, in government, in international forums, gaining consensus
and building solutions with a large group of people is critical. Around
the world, meeting designers are embracing the participant-centered
style for large meetings, where the participant’s voice is at the center
of the meeting experience. In 2014, it is unacceptable for the
participant to be a tiny member of a vast, silent “audience.” Virtuous
Meetings is a practical guide to understanding what the alternative
is and how it works.
Some of the topics explored in Virtuous Meetings include:
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An examination of the difference between front-of-the-room-centered
and participant-centered meeting design.
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A new model of thinking about large meetings: two levels of
participant experience—table group and whole group.
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Simple steps of the Virtuous Engagement Cycle to generate real
alignment and ownership in large groups by means of small group
discussion.
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The use of technological connectivity to enable “parallel processing”
activity that eliminates the need for time consuming “breakouts” and
repetitive “report outs.”
Virtuous Meetings shows readers how to implement available
technology wisely in meetings of any size. The authors speak from the
front lines, with “Case Story” features and “View from Inside the
Meeting” vignettes that share the most important lessons culled from
their years of experience pioneering the integration of technology into
large meeting design.
Contact the publicists:
Helena Brantley
Red Pencil PR
HelenaBrantley@RedPencilPR.com
510-316-3545
Melissa Connors
Publicity Manager
mconnors@wiley.com
201-748-6834