Designing Interaction
Mary Boone coined the term “meeting design” in a seminal 2008 publication titled “The Four Elements of Strategic Value for Meetings and Events” that was published by the MPI Foundation. Her aim was to help people understand the difference between meeting planning (logistics) and meeting design (the purposeful shaping of the form and content of a meeting). She has spent hundreds of hours educating people in the meetings industry as well as corporate executives about meeting design and how critical it is to event effectiveness and to execution of corporate strategy. She applies innovative “design thinking” approaches by incorporating large group methods and cutting edge meeting technology.
Mary has been both designing and facilitating groups of 10 to 3,000 people in face-to-face, virtual, and hybrid meetings for over 30 years. Her skills as a meeting designer and communication expert uniquely position her to lead both small and large groups of people in highly interactive formats. Whether she is designing a small or a large-scale interactive experience, her ability to listen deeply, summarize succinctly, and keep groups on task is unsurpassed.
An example of a large-scale engagement she designed involved over 3000 people who were using a group decision support system in real time as well as visual cartography. Mary was the lead designer for this ground-breaking corporate event and she co-facilitated the event as well. The group used the technology and methodology she recommended to generate over 4000 ideas for cross-selling in a 3-hour time period. The event was so compelling that over 1000 people volunteered on the spot to work on the ideas that were generated from the exchange.