Thinking about your thinking

Some thoughts based on a presentation by Jeff Hurt, Empowered Epiphanies, at the Event Innovation Lab at IMEX America, Las Vegas

Think differently about your brain and your participants.

Repeating an event year after year is a recipe for disaster. The brain is kept alive if fed with new challenges, it dies if everything is just on repeat mode. Therefore there is a need to think to create change, and thus create learning. If events do not continue to evolve and improve, they will inevitably stagnate and decline.

The meetings profession is in dire need of leadershift, not necessarily leadership: an ability and willingness to make changes that will positively enhance participants’ personal, professional and organisational growth.

Individuals want to evolve, grow and develop professionally – that makes that person a leader in the meetings/ event space. Leadershift by its nature challenges out of date ideas, it challenges the status quo, it challenges the focus on logistics, details, schedules etc.

Growth is the only guarantee that tomorrow will be better than today. If you shoot for goals you’ll achieve your goals but you may not grow. If you shoot for growth you’ll grow and you will achieve your goals.

Question: What weighs 3 lbs, has more than 1000 trillion connections and controls conferences, events and meetings? Answer: The brain of each of your participants.

Dr. Sandra Bard Chapman, Neuroscience Researcher, UTD’s Center for BrainHealth, commented “if your events are the same as before, you are damaging someone’s brain.”

It is human nature to desire improvement and resist change simultaneously. It is the way the brain is built biologically. It is built to avoid thinking. Thinking, and thus learning, is work.

So what is learning? Learning is a biological, chemical and electrical process that takes place in your brain, involving four steps

1. Receiving information

2. Connecting it

3. Making sense of it

4. Acting on it

If learning is the goal, what do these four steps mean for your events?

The biggest challenge is to design event experiences that engage the participants’ executive functions of their brains. Meeting professionals/ PCOs have become very adept and skilled at planning surprises, unique and wow experiences. However, wow experiences involve the limbic system and shut down the prefrontal cortex of the brain. The brain cannot operate out of the limbic system (emotional) and the executive (decision making) functions simultaneously. We feel before we think.

Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health – Las Vegas

For learning and change to occur, participants’ brains must be involved in thinking during the session. Rather than shiny wow experiences, there is a need to create transformational event experiences that will shift people’s thinking. There is a need to plan and design event experiences that engage the executive functions of the brain. A need to create change, a need for leadershift.