The best meetings don't begin with the keynote speaker or end with the cap note speaker. When a meeting is designed as part of a continuum, it has impact long before people arrive and long after the last participant has left his seat.

A very innovative meeting held at the Asia Society in New York City in February of this year was part of such a continuum. The meeting was for the "Design with India" project whose purpose is to build an international community of design innovators and thought leaders to inspire sustainable innovation in and with India. Face-to-face strategy sessions are held in a variety of venues and book-ended by a lively and productive on-line discussion called DesignIndia.

The New York meeting created a real sense of dialogue in an amphitheater filled with over 200 people. Comments of on-stage presenters were limited to 15 minutes each. Twenty-one design experts (termed a "resource orchestra" by co-organizer Debra Johnson) were seated at the front of the room facing the stage, and their purpose was to challenge and augment the onstage panel. This interactive design led to lively discussions involving the on stage panel, the resource orchestra, and the local and remote participants. Many designers from India and the online DesignIndia dialogue participated in the New York meeting either in person or via the Microsoft LiveMeeting web session set up at the Asia Society site.

As content facilitator, I captured all of the dialogue from this meeting in a specialized piece of software called HyPerform that helps structure ideas and information. I captured not only comments by the key presenters, but also all of the participant comments (both face-to-face and virtual) in a document that had a clear, useful structure.

Why capture the content? Dialogues often lack structure—I put in a comment, you comment on that, the next person changes the subject, etc. And even though different threads of conversation may be established, the content tends to become diffuse instead of structured. The document I created contained an organized version of the in-person dialogue that participants could continue to evolve online after the meeting.

Sudhir Sharma, founder of Elephant Strategy + Design, Pune, India, and coordinator of DesignIndia, said that the online posting of the structured document generated significant interest and comments, particularly from people who had not been able to attend the New York conference. It also helped DesignIndia members contribute to India's newly released National Design Policy.

Here are three steps you can take to weave your meetings into a communications continuum:

Ask the host business leaders of your next meeting if any issues being addressed call for a continued, sustained dialogue within the organization.

Discuss the options for building a dialogue that starts before the meeting, continues with interactive elements at the meeting, and is sustained by appropriate technology after the meeting.

Keep your ear to the ground for key business issues that are of great importance to your CEO or other business leaders and then suggest a mixture of face-to-face and virtual meetings that could help improve your company's performance.

All too often, people use social media or collaborative technologies just to add novelty to a meeting or as an experiment. Quite often, these collaborative spaces become ghost towns of the virtual world because there is a disconnect between purpose and technological innovation. People hardly have time to read their e-mail, much less to participate in a barely relevant online conference that is someone else's experiment. Instead, with good design work, you can focus on valuable business outcomes and create lively online and face-to-face dialogues that will be part of a continuum that produces truly remarkable results.

Originally published June 01, 2007

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