Retooled meetings and events are a good business solution for adaptive leaders to integrate into their new business model. By Susan Radojevic, Sept/Oct 2009

In my next life, I hope to be gifted with artistic talent. My inability to carry a tune or sketch a picture doesn’t make me less appreciative of music and art. In fact, adopting a different perspective increases my love of the arts.

Adopting a different perspective also applies to the economy, which is in an adaptive recovery mode and things are not returning to normal. According to Harvard Business Review, it’s a brand-new world and an ‘adaptive leadership’ style is emerging. Adaptive leaders explore new business models and make investments in plans that will help them thrive in ‘today’s mix of urgency, high stakes and continued uncertainty.’

Adaptive leaders don’t take a wait-and-see position, implement band-aid fixes or address challenges by reverting to old methods and traditional solutions. They have eliminated the illusion that the traditional ‘command and control’ leadership style— and the executive team, on its own — can manage operations and create a new organization roadmap in a state of permanent flux. Retooled meetings and events are not only a ‘relevant investment,’ but a good business solution for adaptive leaders to integrate into their new model.

Leveraging the use of meetings and events as marketing, communication and leadership tools can reduce fears and anxieties, create interactive cultures, develop new practices, navigate through conflict and confusion in a productive way, manage ongoing change and improve organizational results. These are just some opportunities and issues facing adaptive leaders in their quest to build and store intellectual capital, the raw material from which organizations create their wealth in a Knowledge Age.

In the new economy, empowered and motivated employees are critical to an organization’s success.

Without a means in place to tap into the collective mindset of its people, vendors, consumers and clients’ intellectual capital will remain buried (or worse walk out the door) when employees leave. Meetings and events are all about creating an interactive open environment, where information is exchanged and innovation is born.

They are a powerful tool when used effectively to connect and start a two-way conversation with employees, customers and organization leadership.

The Industrial Age is over! However, many organizations continue to operate using legacy infrastructure.

Plans are being forged to transition infrastructures to better meet present organizational needs.

A project of this magnitude requires an enormous amount of order and work, and meetings and events can be an effective tool. Devising an enterprise-wide plan where work is done before, during and after the meeting and event will garner optimal organizational results. Integrating collaborative technologies to store the data and ideas generated during the meeting or event will build a knowledge base that can be used to better align the organization’s products and services with the changing buying behaviour of post-recession consumers and clients. According to Trajectory, a consumer trends forecasting consultancy in the U.K., leisure and extreme experiences like unwarranted recreational air travel are out of favour.

There are many opportunities for meetings and events to play a key role in helping organizations build new models to increase business effectiveness, competitiveness and profitability. Adopting a different perspective to make meetings and events a ‘relevant investment,’ and integrating it, enables organizations to adapt and thrive during this post-recession and beyond.

The channel is open.

— Susan Radojevic, president of Toronto-based The Peregrine Agency Ltd., is a leading authority on strategic event alignment.