Allison Kinsley recently sat down for a conversation with Sky Radio, the producers of talk show programming for some of the world’s largest airlines.  The five-minute interview covered a range of subjects.  What’s the value of face-to-face versus virtual meetings?  Is there a philosophical difference between a meeting planner and a meeting architect?

Click here to listen to the interview in its entirely online.

Here are a few excerpts:

Sky Radio:  What is the philosophical thinking that leads your company to think, not in terms of meeting planners, but meeting architects?

Allison:  We generally think of ourselves as planners in our industry, but in my office, we starting think about with it is that we really do.  Is it really about the number of chairs in a meeting room and whether you’re serving Danish at breakfast?  Or is there a bigger cause here.  Really, we like to think there’s a bigger answer.  I see the definition of architect as somebody who gives dimension to ideas to create an environment.  That is exactly what we do.  We build and design environments in which people meet.  We think that architect implies a certain level of education, training, expertise.  And it speaks to the ability to envision a larger whole, a larger structure…and then fill in the details afterwards.

Sky Radio: There does seem to be a move to teleconferencing and virtual meetings as a result of the changes in the travel economy.  Clearly you believe nothing is going to take the place of a little face time.  Why is that?

Allison: Because while electronic communication is going to save your travel budget, it is not going to capture people the way a face-to-face meeting will.  Virtual is great for shorter communications, but if you have a larger message to you need to put out there, getting people together face-to-face is really going to drive that message home.  We have a meeting that we’ve done for that past 10 years with software engineers from around the world.  They’re coming from Russia, from China, from the UK.  And fifty-one weeks out of the year, they communicate only electronically.  The amount of productivity and energy that comes from them actually being together for one week a year is to the point where they can’t bring everyone to the meeting anymore.  So people actually compete, very vigorously, to be able to attend the meeting and get that face-to-face time.

Sky Radio:  How important is it to work toward person-to-person meetings in the present environment?

Allison:  The present environment certainly has a fair amount of corporate uncertainty in it.  However, I’ve seen a study done by George P. Johnson that says that Fortune 1000 Chief Marketing Officers view meetings and events as having the highest ROI of any marketing channel available to them.  With that sort of endorsement, if you’re spending your money smart, you’re going to look at the possibility of pulling together a face-to-face meeting.  We all know that a lot of the stuff that goes on that’s really productive in a meeting doesn’t take place in the classroom setting.  It takes place in the hallways.  It takes place over a cup of coffee.  And from that, some exciting things can come out.

Click here to listen to the interview in its entirely online.