Your meetings are stale, remote, and awkward conversations. You know you rock, but not everyone in your meetings is rocking to the same tune. Sometimes you aren't even sure you are in the same rock band anymore. After having one too many unproductive (and occasionally sleepy) meetings, Happy Cog reinvented it's approach to meeting design around interactive activities, informed conversation, and collaborative design exercises. Happy Cog’s Experience Director Kevin M. Hoffman will review the key ideas from the history of meeting design and good facilitiation, then explore approaches for meetings that have proven engaging and successful to Happy Cog clients. This talk will cover business strategy and project definition activities, conflict resolution processes, big group/small group conversation management, simple research engagements, deliverable presentations, and finally, post mortems. Many expamples will be pulled from Happy Cog's meeting approaches for clients like ecommerce (Zappos, Groupon), tourism (VisitPhilly.com), higher education (Georgetown University, MICA), and museums (the National Holocaust Museum).
Kevin has been building experiences on the web since 1995. At Happy Cog, he has been the lead user experience strategist and information architect for clients ranging from top higher education institutions to Fortune 100 companies, including Georgetown University, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Thomson Reuters.
Prior to joining Happy Cog, Kevin built websites, developing online strategies, and leading projects for colleges, universities, and non-profits in Baltimore, MD. He has been a consistent voice for intelligent communication strategies and an expert consensus builder in environments where vastly differing, passionate opinions were the norm. He studied sociology and public policy at Duquesne University, toured the world as a lead guitarist, and has seen several hundred faces and rocked at least 93% of them.
