Megan Henshall: Meetings Innovator

October 31st, 2024 at 10:05 AM EDT

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Skift Take

Rehumanizing corporate life is the new mission of Google Xi. Its founder, Megan Henshall, is Skift Meeting's first-ever Meetings Innovator.

Megan Henshall (she/her) joined Google in April 2019 and serves as the Global Events, Strategic Lead. She partners across Google to understand how events drive business, build communities and promote cultural continuity, informing strategy for a global team of amazing event professionals. She co-leads an internal/external research and innovation effort called the Google Experience Institute (Xi), focused on the future of human-centered experience design in enterprise contexts. Henshall also founded and serves as Executive Director for The Neu Project, a non-profit organization focused on neurodiversity education and neuro-inclusive experience design and practice-building.

What does innovation mean to you?

Innovation is one of those words that has been used so much and in reference to so many things, it’s lost meaning. But innovation is not just invention. It’s not just introducing new things into the mix and bolting on more and more and more. It can look like reclaiming things that have been lost or that are underappreciated. It can also look like remixing and repurposing things that already exist.

When we come and talk about innovation, some meeting and event professionals immediately assume that that’s going to be expensive and that is going to create a lot of additional work and resource suck for me and my team. And that’s not necessarily true. So, I always like to anchor to this idea that innovation can look a million different ways. It can cost no money. It’s just intention, thought, and care about how you approach it.

In our four-year journey building Xi and our approach to innovation there, we’ve learned that it requires structure and deep intention. But you can also over-engineer it, and we’ve learned the most from the experiments where we showed up in a really playful way and were unattached to any particular outcomes. 

You have to really kick bias in the ass when you’re experimenting and testing. You’re trying to get to a place where you can approach a pilot or prototype and experiment with a new way of designing with a ‘let’s see what happens’ frame of mind and really observe how this resonates with other people. Those are the moments when we’ve learned the absolute most and developed things that matter and want to scale.

Why do we need innovators?

We always have to be learning and evolving and growing because we’re in a human centered business. We’re designing for people who are always changing, so we have to keep a finger on the pulse of what is relevant. 

I’m from the toddlers and tiaras part of South Carolina. I grew up in a very small town. I’m not Ivy League educated. My background looks very different from many of the other ‘innovators at Google.’ On paper, I have no business leading an effort like this [Xi] or doing this work, but I’m pretty fearless when it comes to failure. And I think some of that started with feeling like I had a lot to prove, but now it very much comes from a place of wanting to make us all better, and there’s so much opportunity. I can see it now.

So yes, I think innovation is always necessary. Sometimes, innovation can come from the most unlikely of places, which is why diversity of thought is really important and why it’s a core principle of the XI work and the community that we built.

How do you get the buy-in needed to innovate?

A big part of enabling even having that conversation with stakeholders and leaders is calling out the inherent bias. We have so much bias around. For example, return on investment (ROI), what that means, and what it looks like. I’ve had this conversation a number of times, but I would like to set ROI on fire and develop a new language and understanding of what that can mean. There is bias in this idea of ‘we’re afraid to try because we don’t know what the outcome will be.’ But we’re never going to know what the outcome is unless we try it. 

So it’s having that conversation and listening. It’s a drip campaign. It’s a long game. It took me a really long time to have some of these conversations with select leaders. Some leaders are going to get it right away because they’re more interested in improving and learning and legacy work. Some leaders are very loss and risk-averse, so that conversation has to happen. It’s about being a mirror and calling out how objectively silly it is to be afraid to test an experiment when you have a problem to solve.

It’s also about anchoring experimentation and innovation to real problems for their audience. It’s anchoring it in meaning, intention and purpose, but calling out that we will never know how to solve for this unless we try a couple of different ways and we define our craft and our application of solution. That has to happen, but it will be slower for some leaders versus others, which is why it’s really important to find those allies and stakeholders who can advocate for you who do get it. That’s been a huge part of my process.

When do you feel you became an innovator?

I’m an event professional who has personally, largely, always hated attending events. 

Did I always have this awareness? No. But I can look back now and know that that is my truth. I’ve always wanted to figure out why and fix that for myself and for other people who feel the same way because a lot of people do. But, I don’t think it was until I joined Google — and was in an environment steeped in innovation — that not only encouraged the voicing of those questions. Those truths that I had kept mainly to myself my entire career, I got really emboldened to pursue this work in a meaningful way. So when I started my own secret weird research journey with Xi back in 2020, I started to meet all these other people who were asking the very same questions, who had the very same experiences and who were really doing work to create solutions for it. 

I think it [becoming an innovator] looks different for different people. But personally, I needed permission to ask to voice the questions and to say, ‘this doesn’t feel right’ or ‘this doesn’t feel good’ or ‘we could really do better here,’ and I needed allies. I needed friends in this work, and I think once I had those two things, my entire professional purpose and mission changed. That’s when I knew I wanted to push the boundaries and break down the walls, and that was the work I intended to do.

Did you intentionally look outside the meetings industry?

I started with the meeting and events industry, looking at the standards that existed and the different innovation arms of associations or existing communities that existed. While all those human beings are lovely, and I know all of those things exist for good reason, I was very unsatisfied with what I found. It didn’t feel like it was speaking to the problems I was experiencing personally, with my lived experience at events and much of what I was hearing from other people, Googlers and folks outside of Google. 

That’s when I started tapping other industries and trying to build an interdisciplinary coalition around some of these problems. However, I did start with my own industry and felt like there was a real opportunity to bring in more diversity of thought, and there might be better answers somewhere else.

What areas of the meetings industry are most in need of innovation?

One of the big opportunities in the meeting and events industry is our propensity to compete versus collaborate. And I think this ranges from agencies to associations to communities across meetings and events. I have had this conversation a lot. When we create silos in service of being able to monetize things and landgrab, we limit our ability actually to solve systemic problems because we’re not collaborating effectively. Other industries, in so many ways, are getting this better than we are. 

As someone who was a planner and had a lot of rigor and rigidity around that craft, that mindset has limited our ability to be adaptable, provide the audience agency and allow for serendipity and real magic in the context of the events that we plan. There has to be a happy medium between organization structure and rigor and creating with our audience in a way that just gives them the space to make their own meaning and find their own purpose inside of the things that we design.

I don’t have a firm answer for what that balance is, but I do see a lot of people struggling and looking at me like I have three heads when I talk about curating choices and agency and autonomy for audiences. We’ve seen it done well, but it’s very hard to code-switch between the way we typically operate as event professionals and what our audience really needs from us, even if they don’t know they need it. Those are two things that I would love to continue to see people explore and play with.

Which companies do you see genuinely innovating?

On the agency side, Robotproof, Storycraft Lab and Hello are three agencies that are walking the walk when it comes to collaboration and co-creation. They care less about their margin than they do about creating an exceptional experience, and I love working with those folks.

As it relates to this balance of creating the right structure for attendees while also allowing them to do their own meaning-making, there’s an organization called Intelligent Mischief that we actually brought to IMEX. They started as an advocacy group for social justice issues, and now they’re using experience design as a mechanism to empower people to become transformational in the world. It’s not about a transformational experience; it’s about empowering people, and I think they’re doing it beautifully.

The World Experience Organization has some really interesting content they provide if you’re looking to just find those allies out in the world and finding new ideas, definitely check them out. Lastly, The College of Extraordinary Experiences walks a really interesting edge around structure and agency for audiences. I would encourage people to reach out to them or follow along on their journey because they’re doing some cool stuff.

What did the innovation journey of creating Google Xi look like?

I had no idea what it would become, so I can’t take credit for what it is now. But it was just me by myself for a while bumping around into things and people, but it took the coalition to define it and shape it into what it is today. But getting it started and getting the buy-in to make it a real thing. I’m very, very proud of that.

When I started it, I thought I was looking for answers and research. I was driving myself crazy. I was looking for the right people to ask the questions with me and some of the answers didn’t exist, and I think you can drive yourself insane. If you’re asking a really new question or a question that is just new at this particular moment, the answer may not exist in the world. You may have to figure it out, and having friends to do that with you and going on that journey with you, makes it a hell of a lot easier, for sure.

So often want to anticipate what people’s questions will be or we want to organize in a way that will give them the answers before we even understand the questions, that we’re missing that opportunity to have them ask it and to run around together looking for the answer.

How has focusing on innovation changed how you think about events?

Night and day. I’ve done a complete 180, and I guess Xi Days is probably the best example of how we tried to bring all of these different ideas into practice at an event. I had never done anything that insane in my career previously. that was a bunch of different formats smushed together. We completely trusted the audience, having no idea if they’d even show up, or how they would navigate what we had designed for them. It was a very, very different approach but people still talk about it and we’re considering bringing back that format in a more interdisciplinary way in the future. I think having that space to really just try things and experiment was really powerful, not just for us, but for the audience and we learned a ton from that.

I used to have a very specific playbook for how I planned; I had a process, and it was a science. And now, I have no formula. I really look at the people I’m bringing together, I assess, I ask questions of them, I co-create with them and so every event could look wildly different. There is no prescribed playbook or process, which is very different and one would assume it would be harder, but it makes my job so much easier.

We have proven that co-creation and curating choices works. It can look a million different ways, which is why we don’t have a playbook on how to do it. It depends on your work style, your, preferences for how you do your job and also very much depends on who you’re designing for your audience, the community, your membership, whatever it might be. But taking those approaches and co-creating and having choices works, and I would highly recommend it.

What part of Google Xi are you most proud of? 

Xi is now not just an innovation incubator, which is my side project, but a real team around workplace experience. We’re focused on partnership strategy and engagement as it relates to an experience that is really hard for a lot of people, which is work. So I’m most proud that this work has meant enough to people across different dimensions of human experience that we’re getting to really lean in and fix a part of the experience that is maybe most broken and a part of our lives where we spend an incredible amount of time and energy and resource.

The work has resonated, the approach has resonated and now we have a new and very different platform for applying that work and all the partnerships are coming with us, all the relationships and the coalitions are coming with us. I’m really proud of that because it obviously matters and this is a real checkbox moment for us. Even though we were stumbling around in the dark for what felt like two years, it was the right way to approach innovation, and it was an approach that collected us a lot of stakeholder buy-in and a lot of really cool friends that are gonna help us solve systemic problems.

New Mission: Rehumanizing Corporate Life

Ryan (Howard) and I have talked a lot about how we want to make this work. We would like to use this work to rehumanize corporate life. Business events are a portion of that but what we’ve learned through using what we’ve historically focused on, which is meeting events and experience design as a testing ground for a lot of these ideas and concepts, it that they translate into a lot of other places and actually have much broader applications.

So I get this question of, “How did you get where you are?” and “How did you get your job?” And “how should I be thinking about my career development?” My answer now is a resounding — and I have proof to point to — the skill sets we have as event professionals and the ways we think about holistic design, curation and craft are so transferable to other places, and this is proof positive of that. We’re focused on workplace experience now and are part of a new workplace and user experience team at Google.

Who’s inspired you most to become a meetings innovator?

There are too many people to name but I think, back to the point about needing permission and friends, my leaders David Dvorak and Michiel Bakker, they were the leaders who gave me that permission? “Yeah, we don’t really know what you’re doing over there, but we trust that something good is going to come of it.” That was critical to the process. 

Then the partners and Ryan Howard, who’s my co-lead for Xi, and all of the folks, who when I reached out to them, like a crazy person on LinkedIn or slid into their DMs on Instagram and said, “hey, do you want to have a conversation?” Those people have absolutely planted new ideas and inspired me to think differently along the way, so there are a million people within the community. 

But I think that the inspiration comes from the audience and users. That’s what motivates me and inspires me. Listening to people and hearing their needs, their challenges, and their aspirations, whether it be their events, their day, or their own experience. Connecting that to what I might be able to do to solve their problems or offer them something better or more resonant, that’s where the inspiration comes for me. Just like an artist is inspired by getting it communicating their own inspiration or creativity, for me that’s other people. That’s the difference between art and design. When you’re designing, you’re designing for others and it’s about function and it’s about resonance. That piece is the thing that gets me out of bed in the morning,

Who are your mentors?

I have so many. Right now the two people that give me the most clarity and when I spend time with them are Derek DelGaudio, who’s an interdisciplinary artist. He created the show In & Of Itself. He is from a completely different world, but we care about the same thing, which is the real magic that can happen when you bring people together and create the right containers for them. 

Then there’s this amazing man Enrique Enriquez, who is a poet and a philosopher. Again completely different planet, and a completely different way of being, but those two folks have such stage wisdom and completely different ways than I do, and so they’re the folks I enjoy spending time with the most right now.

What would you like your legacy to be?

I think I would want people to say she was really present, and when I was with her I felt like she was fully with me. I’d love for people to think that I was fearless to fail, because when I mentor other people that is something I always try to encourage. Don’t be afraid of failure if it means learning something. So I hope to model that.

I really hope that people say or think that in my work I designed from a place of love for other people. I always want to embody love; I don’t think there’s enough of that going around. It can exist in our work, and realizing that I think has reshaped the way I approach work and the way I think about my work in the world. I hope that that translates and that people see that.

What’s your advice for aspiring innovators?

Just start. If you have an idea or if you have questions that you won’t answer to, just start, In whatever way makes sense for you to put one foot in front of the other and start.

I would encourage anyone looking to innovate to look outside of our industry for ideas and inspiration. And that’s not a slight on our industry, but I just think being insular will slow down the process. There’s a lot of good work happening out in the world that we can bring back to make us all better in the meetings and events industry. Look at nonprofits, look at environmental design, look at interior design, look at art. Go out into the world for inspiration because you will find signals and you will find symbols and you will find ideas that will create a spark that will expedite the journey for sure.

Also, whether you realize it or not, you are creative. The work that you’re doing in the world is incredibly creative because you have to figure out how to plan and design for human beings who are ridiculously complex, and that is a creative process and it is an art and it is a science and you are doing all of those things. You don’t have limiting beliefs about how your work can matter in the world.

My career started In a technology company where I was just getting hung up on all day. That translated into business development, meetings and events where I was literally just copy pasting meetings all day, and now I’m doing this work. So, just lean into the parts that feel most creative and let it grow from there because you’re already doing it and the capabilities are already there. Maybe it’s just about giving yourself permission.

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