Stuffing the suitcase: Why the shelf life of your gathering is short-lived

Jennifer, the Chief of Staff at Gelly, a Public Relations and Marketing agency, was in for another long night. Only a few weeks remained before the start of Gelly’s inaugural global leadership gathering. Eighty leaders from across the company and across the world would gather virtually where many would have their first opportunity to meet their peers. Around a Zoom call on a Thursday evening sat Jennifer, her CEO, executive assistant, and head of Human Resources. Since they had last met, the gathering agenda had ballooned from a manageable four to a massive nine pages. With each passing day more was happening in the business to necessitate additional sessions, Jennifer explained. An initial call for presenters resulted in a double-sided spreadsheet. Scheduled lunch breaks were quickly shortened to accommodate the growing list of departments who wanted air time. And as the conference call clocked on, the group wondered how to dfo more with less.

Across the country at logistics consulting firm Mindframe, training specialist Henry faced a similar challenge. “We need 30 minutes!” read one marked-urgent email. “It’s important they know this on Day 1” read another. Though the New Hire Orientation he was in charge of was already packed to the brim, he felt mounting pressure to add more. Torn between jeopardizing the success of his program or the relationships he was just beginning to build, Henry searched for more space, or a way to say ‘no’.

Jennifer and Henry’s gatherings highlight a common challenge and an even more common temptation - the temptation to overpack. This temptation extends beyond our travel habits and into the way we bring people together whether in person or virtually. It’s all too easy to stuff the suitcase. 

Is more better? When we view information as the main lever to shift people from A to B, we assume it is. When content is king, we pile our gatherings with it. The prevailing notion is one of efficiency. As long as everyone is in one place, it’s best to give them as much information as we can, we think. Let’s not waste a minute of our time, we say. 

These gatherings quickly become laundry lists of sessions and disparate topics where the information is the star and the predetermined solution. And especially in high stakes gatherings like Jennifer and Henrys with multiple stakeholders and opinions, agendas naturally pile up. The more people, the more content. The more clothes, the bigger the suitcase. When we view the only deterrent as more space, we add more.

Sure, we can buy a bigger suitcase. But that doesn’t solve the core issue. We know this doesn’t scale. 

Why this temptation? One reason is the implicit belief that one’s information signals one’s involvement and a fear of missing out if not included. Another is our history. 

“What information should we push out?”. Though well-intentioned, we’ve mistakenly started with this question for decades. In the old days, or even as recent as the pre-internet 1980s, information was scarce and therefore more valuable. Because of this, we often came together to hear information we couldn’t get anywhere else. Today, information is everywhere. And I mean, everywhere. We don't need to gather for it.

Still, many of us have only experienced one end of the gathering spectrum: information overload. We know the formula: sit, wait, listen, someone talks. This familiarity stretches back to childhood and its educational institutions where many of us grew up with the classroom as the primary gathering experience during our formative years. We were instructed to sit quietly and listen to the information. 

This predominant paradigm created a widespread expectation; the role of a participant is to learn by being a consumer of information. And, no matter the occasion or the intention, this is often still the default. Because this is what we tend to experience most, we understandably assume it’s ripe for replication. Slides. Content. Words. And a lot of it. So much in fact it can get in the way of others absorbing our message. We risk not just a heavy suitcase but a heavy cognitive load. 

Cognitive load refers to the amount of information that our working memory can hold at one time. According to the Cognitive Load Theory developed by John Sweller, the way we share information can either aid or obstruct that working memory. Our brains can only hold so much. When too much information is shared at once, we become overwhelmed and much of the information is lost. This is especially true if the content is complex or not directly relevant. 

Before we blame it all on the brain we can consider another truth. Much of this information we can in fact just as easily consume on our own and on our own time. “Can you just send me the slides?” is a phrase we often utter or wish we could. Gatherings like Gelly’s and Mindframes balloon when we forget that people may be gathering for other reasons besides information.  

So, if we aren’t gathering for information, then why are we still creating them this way? It’s not just about the material. The world has changed. The scarcest resource is no longer information--it’s our attention. “There are a million people that tell jokes”, notes New York comedian and 18-time Moth Story-Slam champion, Adam Wade. “The jokes are just the gateway, not the star. My work is about creating a connection that sticks, even if we only meet once”. 

When it comes to gathering, the skills of the future encourage community and collaboration instead of simply consumption. Success now depends more and more not only on our ability to share information but to forge a lasting connection between our ideas and those we wish to reach.

That’s why when we’re a part of a gathering that transforms us, it’s rarely just because of the content we consume, it’s how we connect to it. Still, we often place our investment on the information without understanding how or if others will, in fact, connect to it. 

Many of Henry’s stakeholders were focused inward. They wanted to share what was important to them instead of what might be important to their audience, especially on their first day. Instead of pushing information, we can pull on something for people to take up as their own. We can measure success in how much space, time, or how many slides we take up. Or, we can measure our ability to bring people along with us. It’s not about what’s in the suitcase. It’s about where it allows us to go. 

This emphasis on information is one of the reasons for the disconnect between what we know gatherings are capable of and our typical experience of them. Another is our over-reliance on the tool of gathering itself.

Just as we assume information is the place to begin, we often presume a gathering is the most efficient solution to use. In our perpetual search for the quickest route from A to B, few among us want the scenic route, especially when we are often rewarded for efficiency and speed.

Gatherings give us the opportunity to reach a large number of people at once and the presumed certainty and security that while change may seem amorphous or ambiguous, gatherings are tangible and controllable. This is one reason why training is such a popular go-to solution in the corporate world. One can hear both the hope and fear of managing change expressed in these statements: 

• Let’s pull people in a room, I’ll tell them a message and then they’ll be bought in
• If I don’t pull people in a room, how will I guarantee they heard it?

It’s one thing to share information. It’s another for it to be heard, internalized, and acted upon. One reason: the people we’ve gathered have hopes and fears as well. Ignoring these often keep our gatherings from being as efficient as we think they are. 

When we are too wired for efficiency we are quick to pick the tool and over-index on the message versus the masses we have gathered. Our gatherings may be efficient. But are they effective? Focusing too much on the former can be the difference between a tick-the-box gathering and one that transforms. 

Beginning with the tool (gathering) first is akin to a carpenter who attempts to increase business by starting with the tools they will use (nails, hammer, saw) instead of what he or she is creating and the outcome they and the customer wants (a table that doesn’t break, a new closet, a bookshelf for your child’s room). Everyone has the same tools - but they can create drastically different outcomes depending on how they’re used. The same goes for our gatherings. 

Instead of leading with the tool or making choices based solely on content we want to share, we can make choices based on the outcomes we want our gathering to have. Then, like a carpenter, we can measure success based on the outcome instead. Here are a few questions to clarify your ideal outcome:

• What do you want to be different after “X”? 
• What do you need from the people you’re trying to affect? Why is that important?
• How would you know we’ve succeeded? Can you tell me a before and after story?
• What would this change mean for the business? Or the larger whole?

These questions remind us that underneath the request for a gathering is a request for change, for something to be new or different. Just like underneath a request for surgery at a doctor’s office is the desire for a healed leg. What do we want to be different? We will likely ask if the surgery went well, but ultimately, success is measured in whether or not our leg was healed. Even if we lead with the tool it’s the outcome we’re ultimately after. 

“What do we want to be different?” is a powerful question. People don’t just want a hammer. They want to use it for some specific purpose. In the same way, we desire to solve a specific problem, not just to share content or have a gathering. And if we’re not clear on what this need is and why it matters, those we’ve gathered won’t be clear either.

Gelly’s agenda ballooned in part because the call for participation lacked clarity. Henry found himself inundated with requests for extra sessions when every department assumed they needed to take part. When we don’t know where we’re headed, our suitcase will quickly fill to the brim. 

We mean well when we invite everyone. We want to be inclusive, or we want to fill the time, we want to share as much as we can, or make it as relevant as possible to a wide group of people. Naturally, we pack more in. Like a game of whack-a-mole, we aim to hit ‘em all - a session from finance, HR, marketing, the list goes on. A success metric based on quantity is how gatherings get muddled and diluted instead of crystal clear. It is this clarity that drives not only efficiency but effectiveness.  

Just as the gatherer has a specific goal or need, so do those we’ve gathered. It might be different than ours. What do they care about? What are they motivated by? One way to match the message with the moment is to match the motivation and needs of those in the room. Pressed to decide, the most important need for Henry’s new hires did not include a session on sales strategy. 

These questions aren’t simple. They’re not meant to be. They ask us to think about more than the solution we want and the content we’ll share. They also gently remind us that information alone isn’t enough to change behavior. Still, taking people out of content questions and into outcome questions can feel jarring and different. Conversations about content are often more comfortable. This might seem like a diversion off course when all we want to do is get to our destination as fast as we can. We’ve got the car and a suitcase, let’s go! But many gatherings I’ve been a part of don’t know what their destination is - they just want to go somewhere and fast. This is why we throw everything in the suitcase. 

Gatherings, like any change effort, are meant to help us get from A to B. From one place to another. This is the essence of change. Without this clarity on where we’re headed, our car stays parked, or worse, we circle the block and end up right back where we started from. 

So, what are we gathering for? Many of our corporate gatherings hesitate to get clear on this most crucial question. 

There’s often a disconnect in the outcomes organizations want, what the attendees expect, and the methods they choose. These questions reveal this truth. They also may reveal that the way we are approaching our gathering mirrors how we are approaching our change effort in general. 

Combined, these answers lead us towards content curation and help Jennifer and Henry more efficiently determine what to pack. They help us to turn our attention outwards from the information we want to share to the people we are sharing it with. When we turn our attention outwards we gain a head start in bringing people not only closer to our message, but to us.