The average office worker spends several hours of every week preparing for or attending meetings. Most of these meetings involve the typical conference room setup: a phone, a screen, and maybe a whiteboard and some video conferencing capability. This setup doesn't change all that much for breakout sessions held at off-site meetings.
This configuration has hardly changed over the years and it has failed to keep pace with the increasing demands for collaboration in today's business. Display technology and computing power continue to improve, but most meeting rooms aren't that far removed from the days of Don Draper speaking over a slide carousel.
In the future, meeting spaces will be more immersive, interactive, and flexible. Content on individual devices such as your laptop or tablet will be shared amongst all attendees. Plugging in and sharing wirelessly both within one breakout room and across numerous rooms in a meeting facility will be seamless, allowing conversation, content, and collaboration to adapt as ideas flow in real time. "Death by presentation" will be a thing of the past.
Here are seven things your conference room will do in the future:
1. Captivate your audience
As large high-definition screens become cheaper, conference rooms will expand from having just one screen to having multiple screens, even screens spanning multiple walls. This will create a more immersive and interactive meeting and presentation environment that demands your audience sit up and take notice. Multiple screens allow for more impressive visuals and more space to spread out your work. Presenters will also be able to move and control their content using their phone, tablet, laptop, or even by gesturing using touch or with a remote wand.
2. Facilitate meeting flow
When you're tasked with moving a project forward, it's imperative that you and your team members work as easily across distance as you do from across the same room. Wireless technology is allowing cords to disappear, which makes it easier for meeting participants to share their content on a room's main screen. The conversation, content, and collaboration can adapt as new ideas are introduced in real time.
3. Create an elastic canvas for content and conversation
How much time is wasted in meetings swapping cables or presentation control between speakers and devices? Having multiple screens in the room gives the workspace and conversation the flexibility to grow and expand depending on the needs of the team. Sharing more content and visuals helps to keep the conversation moving and ensures that everyone remains engaged. For example, you can post the meeting agenda on one screen for everyone to view and discuss, and then have working documents and data up on the other screens so real collaboration and discussion can occur right then and there.
4. Connect your applications, participants, and locations
In almost every meeting, your documents, data, and video need to be shared, often by multiple people. Sure, web-based solutions let us view, and maybe collaboratively edit a document at the same time, but that's only a single document. What about all the other information and content we need to impress a customer, solve a problem, or make a decision?
New conferencing technology will allow multiple devices and locations to connect into a shared workspace. Everyone will review and compare urgent information pulled in from multiple platforms. For example, team members may pull in a cloud-based server application, an Excel spreadsheet, and real-time data from the web, all into a common digital workspace so they can discuss and review the information more efficiently. Even remote participants will be able to join in the session and simultaneously view all the content.
5. Improve your storytelling
Presentations are still largely created using PowerPoint. The content remains static and rigid, locked within a linear format that actively subverts interaction. But what if you could resize, layer, and move multiple pieces of content from multiple sources to help you tell your story more dynamically? What if you could access the content someone else put up on the screen, even if they're in a different location? New technology will allow presenters to do just that. Presentations will soon be more flexible and dynamic, which will help keep audiences engaged longer.
6. Help you make decisions faster
The main objective of almost any meeting is to share knowledge between people. When everyone and their devices are allowed to connect, data will be accessed quickly and information will appear in context and in real-time. Team members will be able to look at all their information side by side and compare data from a variety of sources, enabling the team to make more informed decisions faster.
7. Capture ideas in the moment
New conferencing technology, like Oblong's Mezzanine system, will automatically save all your content from the meeting into one place, allowing you to pick up next week's meeting right where you left off. Cameras in the room will capture images of notes written on the room's whiteboards. So if you can't quite recall what your team member noted in one of their slides, you can simply dive back into the meeting portfolio and pull up the document. No fuss. No hassle.
Technology is finally transforming the traditional meeting and presentation room from a static and stifling environment to a dynamic and immersive center of activity and innovation. The reign of the "bored room" will soon be at an end.
David Kung is vice president of business development at Oblong Industries, makers of Mezzanine, a next-generation conferencing and collaboration solution. Prior to Oblong, David served as vice president and creative director at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Online. At Creative Artists Agency, David specialized in emerging technology for clients including Coca-Cola, Sprint, and Hasbro. He holds degrees from MIT's School of Architecture and the MIT Media Lab.
This article appears in the May 2015 issue of Successful Meetings.