Seth Godin on Transforming Meetings

Seth Godin, the opening speaker of Skift Meetings Forum, has spent decades inspiring thousands of audiences to make change happen.

“If you want to make change happen, there’s no choice but to embrace the fact that you’re going to create tension. You are in the business going forward not of being convenient and inexpensive and reliable –because lots of people can do that. You’re in the business of creating tension. Effectively, usefully, intentionally creating tension.”

He encouraged the audience to push back when clients don’t agree with their suggested innovations. “The opportunity is not to fight to maintain the status quo, it’s to decide how we’re going to redefine it.”

He said the Covid pandemic has changed the mission of today’s meetings. A company with a workforce of 1,000 people who used to work together every year, day after day, might now only be bringing them together for three days a year.

“You’re planning to do roundtables and have some speakers, and then do some networking time. You completely missed the point,” he said. “No one is going to be changed by those three days. No one is going to want to go back to that meeting next year. No one will talking about it two months later.”

“What people need are the kinds of interactions they had when they would bump into someone in the hall at work. So how do you create that environment? What if we imagine that the conference doesn’t last 72 hours? What happens instead is that a month before it starts, you get a dossier of 12 people you need to meet while you are there. What happens is that instead of saying, ‘Please download our app,’ there’s a good reason to stay in it?”

Questioning the Status Quo

“Why do most meetings only last three days?” Godin asked the audience. “Why don’t meetings last 365 days, and for three of those days we come together?”

One solution from some of the best events he has been to: “Cancel three of the most mediocre speakers and use that time instead to put people in teams and give them a problem to solve together in one hour as a group. There will be some confusion and then it’s going to transform the people in the room.”

A question posed to the audience at the beginning of his session found that the biggest challenges in the audience were budget and burnout. “They’re related,” Godin said. “Burnout is working really hard to get something you’re not getting with the resources you don’t have. You need to think really hard about what you’re taking on.”

Look at who is hiring you to do their events, Godin advised the independent planners in the room. “Are they looking for a mediocre event on a tight budget? You don’t have to work with that because every time you do, you’re not working with someone who will challenge you to become the future of this industry.”

Will You Choose to Matter?

Godin ended with a story about an unforgettable meeting he had attended in the New Mexico desert. At an outdoor session one evening, the keynote speaker, astronaut Neil Armstrong, spoke under a huge, full moon that had just risen over the horizon. He never forgot that night, or when Armstrong pointed to the moon and told the audience: “I’ve been there.”

“The astronauts were able to get to space with computing power that’s the equivalent of the phones we carry in our pockets,” Godin said. He encouraged the audience to remember that when they are feeling overwhelmed by their jobs. “It’s not about whether you will be successful. You already are. It’s about, ‘Will you choose to matter?’

“Will you be the voice in the room who says, ‘We can push this one. We can make this thing special.'”

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