Hailed as the World’s Leading Business Strategist, award-winning professional speaker, management consultant and business strategist Scott Steinberg is the creator of “What’s the Future of…?” — a new series of board games that can teach anyone to be more creative, innovative and resilient. Among today’s best-known trends experts and futurists, he’s been a strategic adviser to over 2000 brands, and is the bestselling author of “The New Rules of Business Development,” “Think Like a Futurist” and “Make Change Work for You.” He is also the president and CEO of BIZDEV: The International Association for Business Development and Strategic Partnerships™, his website is FuturistsSpeakers.com.

It’s a good time to be a MICE industry leader, as both in-person and hybrid events continue to remain on the rise. Organizations increasingly welcome team members back to the office and work to equip them with the skills that they need to thrive in fast-changing business environments. But with attendees’ attention spans continuing to shrink in a growingly frenetic and volatile business world, event organizers must rethink event programs and formats to be more attention-grabbing and engaging to match.

As a futurist and keynote speaker who trains thousands of executives to adapt to change and emerging trends, I’ve noticed things moving in a counterintuitive direction lately. Case in point: We’re being booked to give longer and longer programs with each passing month, with most sessions averaging 90-180 minutes in length these days (vs. 30- to 60-minute programs in the pre-pandemic era).

In What’s the Future of? — a new series of board games and training activities for events — much of this disconnect seems to do with trying to balance the need for greater learning and insight with rigid content formats.

In other words: Well-meaning meeting planners typically want to provide attendees as much training and education as possible in the time alotted. However, they’re often beholden to fit educational programs into traditional content tracks, such as keynote speeches, breakouts and training workshops — and assume more time to present leads to greater knowledge transfer.

But as our teaching and training system POP FUTURE (free to download and designed to make business topics and trends easier to discuss and digest) reminds, the key to boosting learning and retention has never been to expound at greater length on topics. Rather, it’s always been to find new and novel ways to make subjects more relatable to attendees … and to boost audience interest and engagement.

Noting this, if you want to better connect with your target audience when designing event content programs, the key is to think about how you can get to the point faster — and tweak each session to be more exciting, impactful and interactive.

Following, you’ll find half a dozen inventive approaches to redesigning and crafting meeting and conference sessions that can help your programs and sessions be more interactive and hands-on, and can better stand out from the pack. Note: They’re just a few of many ways that meeting and events pros can get more creative while still coloring within the lines when it comes to reimagining common event formats.

Micro-Tracks and Mini-Conferences: Consider carving out time during a conference or event to run a concurrent track (or series of concurrent tracks) of one to three hours of time in length filled with bite-sized learning sessions (think 15- to 20-minute talks) that are hyper-focused on a trending topic, i.e. cybersecurity, blockchain or the future of finance. You can even build in badges, certificates or awards to reward audience members for attendance, and allow them to hop between these mini-conference tracks to personalize learning paths and build specialization.

Peer Review Panels: Don’t underestimate the power of gamification (game-based learning) to help boost audience participation and involvement. Case in point: One simple way to make events more engaging is to ask groups of attendees to present ideas, design new concepts, and/or solve real-world problems as part of an entrepreneurial competition that comes with small prizes and awards attached. But rather than just stop there, you’ll also want to invite either (a) colleagues from throughout the organization (b) industry thought leaders or (c) folks from other fields, such as the world of startups or academia, to critique, vote for winners and give participants feedback.

Randomized Expert Talks: Who says what you see on the meeting agenda has to be what you get — especially if you have the opportunity to add an extra surprise guest, or can play pass-the-microphone from time to time? A great way to quickly source multiple perspectives on a topic is to start a discussion or presentation on a subject hosted by one commentator then drawing names randomly (whether from pre-selected individuals or any of your audience members) every 5-10 minutes and inviting those selected to come up to pick up the conversation thread where it left off.

Variable Subjects: Another fun way to randomize discussions while maximizing impact is to structure a talk around a specific, broad topic (i.e. the future of work, diversity and inclusion, etc.). Afterwards, you’ll want to set a timer for, say, 10 or 15 minutes. Each time the buzzer goes off, the speaker must vary the subject of their presentation while still sticking to the broader theme. For example, in the case of the future of work, conversation might flow from how to adapt to variable working schedules to how to redesign your workplace to accommodate hybrid operations, to how to connect with customers when most interactions now happen virtually.

Quick-Hit Innovation Programs: Give meeting participants a problem to solve that’s grounded in real-world challenges your business faces, allotting them no more than 90 minutes to rise to the challenge. Groups of attendees should be broken into tables for the exercise and assigned a facilitator who can ask smart questions and keep conversation flowing. Facilitators can also be swapped every 20 to 30 minutes to keep things more interesting. Want to really spice things up? You can also pop in every so often and announce a new challenge (i.e. a new COVID variant has delayed your return to office, rising geopolitical volatility just put the squeeze on your supply chain, etc.) that participants have to adapt to.

Turning the Tables Challenges: Divide meeting participants into teams and ask them: If you were a competitor, what would you do to outperform, outmaneuver and outcompete our business? Then switch things back around and ask contributors: What can we do to keep rivals from applying these strategies to our detriment? Putting yourselves in a rivals’ shoes can be a hugely powerful way to see where your organization’s strengths and weaknesses currently lie.

As you can see, there are many ways to rethink traditional event formats to be more interactive. Likewise, there are just as many ways to make content more engaging to your attendees just by repackaging and representing it in new formats. Long story short: A little imagination can go a long way towards helping you craft more memorable programs, and helping get any messages or insights that you’d like to share across. C&IT