Workshop Strategic Interaction Design

The Dubai Chambre of Commerce wanted to bring their events to a new level: fun, fresh and foremost effective. We provided them with a 2-day crash-course on Strategic Interaction Design.

In an excellent collaboration, trainers Jan-Jaap In der Maur (Masters in Moderation) and Eric de Groot (Orange Gibbons) quickly responded to a remarkable request. A smart and innovative organisation, the Dubai Chamber of Commerce, wants to take control of the quality of their strategic meetings. They worked 2 days with their event team, recalibrating four of their strategically important series of gatherings around the globe.

Meetings are often part of the communication mix organisations use to achieve their strategic goals. Getting to know clients, opening a market or gathering information, meetings can make it happen. If their objectives are so important, the meetings better be good! That realisation was the core of the Chambers request. Not a complete redesign, not a strategic revaluation but simply, will these meetings do what they are supposed to do? We called it recalibration.

Jay-Jay and Eric took a firm decision to not act as jury/survey team, but to give them a method they can use themselves. To achieve this, they had to combine various design and moderation instruments into a framework that was easy to use, logic and practical. The framework had to take all the main points of attention of modern strategic event planning into account, from the initial choice to actually use meetings to the choice of venue. From considerations to create interaction to the way the meetings need to be marketed. And they did. Without going into the details, these are the recalibration framework’s seven steps:

• recalibrate why meeting is the best means of communication, instead of plannig a meeting 'because we always do'.
• recalibrate why interaction is needed, instead of doing it just for the fun of it.
• recalibrate the behavioural objectives of the meeting
• recalibrate the preliminary program using the SICA approach
• recalibrate the meeting-process back bone
• recalibrate the venue message
• recalibrate the programs meeting formats

Interesting enough, this framework has a strong rational backbone, but the recalibration cannot be executed with only the ratio involved. Every now and then, the responsible people needed to take a step back to listen to their heart.

We can safely say the client was more than happy. This methodology is ready to be applied anywhere. So, if you are in a similar position, having a concept strategic roadmap in which meetings are pivotal, do not hesitate to contact us, if you want to control the quality of your meetings. We are happy to help.