The Pure Joy of Stuffing Envelopes

How the Off-Site Changes Everything

Never did I imagine that one day, I would find joy in stuffing envelopes. As the Marie Kondo experience ripples across our culture, I found that “spark of joy” in the envelope. But it is not the envelope, but what it would do to change lives, and lead to excited reactions like this from our client’s Chief Marketing Officer:

“What a journey we’ve been on. Thanks to you, we are truly helping transform this company! The sessions at the theater were AWESOME! So many people were having really deep and meaningful conversations! Thanks again to team Exember!”

The Packing Party

One set of participant instructions. Ten activity cards. Six copies of the new value definitions. Six two-sided Sharpies. A squishy 2-inch “values cube”.

Next, I make sure to pack everything neatly into a clear vinyl envelope with an "Open To Begin Activity" label on it. 

Finally, I stick the envelope in the cardboard box.

Repeat.

That was my life for four hours a few weeks ago. With my seven colleagues, we were responsible for packing materials at our client’s headquarters for their “Global Launch” event, that was happening in a couple weeks. 

Once the envelopes were packed, they were shipped to 30+ cities around the world for an experience where the CEO revealed via broadcast, the output from a year-long effort to refresh and re-energize the company’s culture and values.

What could it possibly be about this packing party that I enjoyed so much?

The Event

The all-company broadcast started with the CMO setting the stage for why this event was so important. Then, the CEO shared the culture and values definitions. Finally, the CHRO shared the ongoing work to make sure this wasn’t a “one and done” effort. It was a Hollywood-quality production with client videos peppered throughout and the executives speaking in front of a live audience in front of five screens, and a mechanically operated “jib camera” hovering in front of their faces.

My firm’s role was to design an experience immediately following the broadcast, after the live feed shut off. 3000 employees in 500 teams broke off into assigned breakout rooms and simultaneously engaged face-to-face in small group discussions, shared personal stories, and did (in my very biased opinion) some creative yet simple activities to start the process of owning the brand-new culture and value definitions. 

Everyone was using Bonfyre, a “Facebook for company events” mobile app that created a connected experience for employees around the world. 

And, every team had a clear, neatly packed, plastic envelope with all the materials they needed to do the activity without a facilitator. Yes, these were the same envelopes I was assembling and packing a couple weeks prior at headquarters.

They had thousands of conversations and posted thousands of pictures. The buzz and energy were felt around the world. It was a step forward in the company’s effort to do something really hard. Inspire skeptics. Shift mindsets. Influence behaviors. 

You Do What Again?

My retired mother still can’t describe what I do to her friends. I’m pretty sure she wishes I were a lawyer, doctor, architect, or some other well-known job purely for the “brag ease” when out for dinner or playing golf with her friends.

Here's what I do. I design and facilitate experiences like this for a living. It’s not consulting. It’s not executive coaching. It’s not strategy execution. Those things often happen in a client engagement, but at the end of the day it’s really about what’s possible when you bring people together to interact in a meaningful way. 

It’s in some ways a career calling I fell into through a mix of luck, having a non-traditional career/life vision, and over a decade of post-MBA work in the “fuzzy intersection between strategy and people stuff."

Sometimes, it’s a small, intimate, executive meeting. There are only 6-15 people, but the stakes are high.  When that’s the “job to be done”, we interview the executive team to understand both the content and the people dynamics. Then, we work with the lead executive to fine-tune and facilitate a meeting that can range from a Chief Marketing Officer creating a high-performing leadership team, to a Chief Product Officer preparing a strategy to convince the board that he’s got the right plan to bring the company back to growth.

Sometimes, it’s a 50-person off-site. When that’s the “job to be done”, we work with a small design committee to dial into the major messages the leadership team needs to align the participants around. The design committee then plays a major role from sounding board to co-owners of an inspirational, mobilization experience. For these off-sites, my role can range wildly from being on stage to being completely behind the scenes. 

And sometimes, it’s a REALLY big event. In my experience, you’re in this ballpark when you have over 150 attendees. There’s something about going above that number that makes it really tough to have real conversations and for the content to feel relevant to everyone. It can also feel near-impossible to do anything to “grease the skids” of execution around real business topics. 

When we’re designing an event with more than 150 participants, we often find ourselves part of a larger team of communications coaches, production crews, logistics coordinators, superstar speakers, and company executives that all have to come together to create an experience that is a mix of entertainment, “wow factor”, human connection, marching orders, training, and inspiration for hundreds or thousands of people at once.

For most companies, these meetings are a mix of presentations, presentations, presentations, food, alcohol, and presentations. What’s often lacking is any sort of interaction. 

To address this gap, companies will sometimes bring in pure entertainment (e.g. the Young MC “Bust a Move” scene from “Up in The Air”) or “outsource” a 3-hour block to a book author or subject matter expert who, if you’re lucky, has a decently engaging activity to go with their presentation. 

I have a weird perk to my job. I get to see presentations by movie stars, authors, professional athletes, and CEOs all the time. For example, I got to see Ellen DeGeneres speak last month. But what comes next? How do you close the knowing-doing gap? What’s still needed is getting people into a conversation about how their message relates to your company, your strategy, your priorities, and your nuanced expectations. That's where I and my firm come in.

Keys To Designing Two-Way Interactions At Big Events

So… what does it take? What are the keys to success when you’re designing an event that engages a large (>150) number of participants in real business conversations. I believe there are three keys to designing an “in-house” experience that aligns, inspires, and mobilizes your people at large events.

First, it must be shaped by the executive team. There is no way around this. It has to be executive-informed. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be time-consuming. You can get this guidance through 6-8 interviews and a smart synthesis to shape your design. But you have to do it. You have to understand what the executive team needs from its people given everything they know about the company strategy, growth targets, culture, and “hot topic” issues that are relevant now.

Second, you have to get the tone right. If you are tone deaf to how people are feeling, the event can fall flat. Are participants hopeful about the new CEO? Are they nervous about their jobs? Have they lost faith in their leadership team? Do they think they have a better answer? Do they want the answer to magically come from above? If you don’t have a feel for the audience’s hopes, fears, and assumptions, you run the risk of walking into a disaster. A session that could be a home run for one audience could make another squirm uncomfortably in their seats. Or even worse, it can flood them with frustration that management just wasted their time. “You flew us all to San Francisco for… THIS?” Yes, that can happen. And yes, I know that from experience.

Third, you have to create a two-way experience. When you’re paying hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars, for the flights, hotels, meals, entertainment, and production crews to bring hundreds of people together for a few precious days, it becomes mandatory to design two-way interaction. For large events, this can mean investing hundreds of man-hours to create a 1-2 hour experience. It may feel like a lot but in my experience it’s worth it. There are dozens of different approaches to choose from. With the right EQ and IQ, you can create an experience that nails what people need “right now”, feels “just right”, and unleashes hundreds of simultaneous conversations, debates, and insights that shift the tectonic plates for you in a positive way.

What Gets Me Out Of Bed In The Morning

The strange thing about my “day of” experience in a multi-location off-site for thousands of participants is that there is often nothing I can do to influence it once it starts. Really.

The last moment I had to really influence this experience was at the materials “packing party” a couple weeks before, making sure the envelopes were carefully packed, and that the boxes were labelled correctly with the right quantities before they were taped up and shipped across North America, Europe, and, Asia.  You know what? There was something incredibly satisfying about rolling up my sleeves, physically being with the final materials, and seeing it all come together. I loved it.

Many of my friends are successful. Their peak career moments range from IPOs, massive growth, and funding rounds to launching cool products, achieving physical feats, political leadership positions, and getting on magazine covers. 

That’s all amazing stuff, but my moments are a bit different. If I’m working on a large event, my peak moment is often at the “packing party”. I’m with the team. I’m seeing the fruits of our labor. I’m thinking about all the prototypes we tested to get to this point. I’m grateful for the diversity of thought and breakthroughs that led to a simple, elegant design.

All while carefully stuffing envelopes.

About the Authors

Eric Wong is a co-founder and partner at Exember, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Daniel Levitt is the CEO of Exember.