BUSINESS

How Can You Make Sure Meetings Are Productive and Hugely Innovative?

Focus, intuition, and the right, small group of people

Yesterday, I had another fabulous meeting with my colleagues at Born Global. I love how these meetings have depth and focus all at the same time.

What is different from a meeting in my usual, rational business environment?

Normally, I’m utterly bored in meetings. Aren’t you? People just want to speak to say what I heard from them many times before. Their hobby horses. And a leader who wants to give everybody space but is also too busy trying to keep everything on course.

Meetings are always way too long. Too complicated. I go on autopilot because everyone is so rational. There’s no soul in those meetings at all. And afterward, I don’t have any new inspiration on what I can be doing next with what I heard.

A waste of my time, most meetings.

Well, that’s completely different within Born Global. In this story, I’ll describe the difference. And how you can have these kinds of mind-shifting, highly innovative, and focused meetings too.

“The master’s tools will never bring down the master’s house” — Andre Lorde.

I’m Born Global. Are you? Born Global is all about the 3E’s of Ecology, Education, and Employment. We work in 6 biomes now: Lebanon, South Africa, Costa Rica, France, Egypt, and Maine (USA).

I’m really proud to be a Born Global.

We are preparing a week now of biomimicry education during the scientific conference World Biodiversity Forum in Davos, Switzerland in June 2022.

The topic of yesterday’s meeting was designing a perfume for Davos with archetypical depth. Starting from the Mediterranean biome. What is a biome? It’s the combination of the ecosystem and the human culture.

We always design starting from the biome. It gives the best results for human economic prosperity and biodiversity both.

A triple bottom line: Planet, People, and Prosperity.

I just love designing systems and educational, heart-touching stories for women with women, because then really something changes. In the process. And in the outcome. The magic is really invited in.

The master’s house is changed with other tools than so far used to build the master’s house.

And that might give you clues for the new kind of meetings I’ll describe here. Meetings that keep me present and never bored. I come away from these meetings charged with new energy and life in my bones and mind.

What’s the difference with the old master’s house? Our meeting is very practical and to the point. No more time than we need. One hour mostly. We invite the magic in to create what we need at a certain moment.

Then we go our separate ways to grow our specific strand of the project further with what we heard and created during the meeting. Alone. Or with a partner from the group. And we meet again next week. Or next month. Depending.

Magic in a Meeting

How do we invite the magic into such a meeting? It’s all about holding space. Not only for the person who talks but also for the collective consciousness that seeps in between the words. So, there’s space in such a meeting. White noise between the words. Not just people talking.

How do we create that space? By adding 3 seconds of silence before adding to what the former speaker said. By raising our hand if we think we have something to add next. Not interrupting. By never saying BUT. Always AND. By respecting all people’s diversity.

There are many platforms nowadays where meetings like these are held. Conscious meetings where people exchange ideas. Talk together about changes needed in societies or economies or other systems.

But most of these meetings are too unfocused for me. People come together just to talk about change. No real goal. No clear purpose or what my role would be in such a meeting.

I never like to talk just for talking. I don’t have time for that. I also never like it when people try to heal their own feelings of victimhood during a work meeting.

So, for me, a lot of these meetings are too fluffy. Too unfocused. Too without a goal. I love the in-between. The focus combined with the depth and real progress.

Focus

So, another element of a successful meeting is focus. Full focus. Not only by the leader but by all participants. It helps when the group is small and has the right people in it. In yesterday’s meeting, we had a perfume designer specializing in natural fragrance and an archetype specialist working on the team of Joseph Campbell.

Within Born Global, I find the people (not only women, by the way) who can combine these elements of focus and let the magic in effortlessly. They use their strong intuition and groundedness to say what needs to be said and nothing more. They add to what another says. Respect full diversity.

And the result is that after one hour we all know what to do next with a depth of context that’s amazing!

Storytelling as a Tool for Change

Why is storytelling, story making, such a big part of the very practical, very employment creating projects of the Born Global Foundation? Stories change hearts. Bring the soul back into our systems. Senses, archetypes, translated to modern people’s lives are bringing alive a world that can be.

A future we’ll attract if we know it’s scientifically and rationally possible AND start believing in it. That’s why we will be present with performances, perfume, and many many rational projects that create employment at the World Biodiversity Forum.

We weave together rational, scientific topics like

• Energy
• Mobility
• Hydrogen storage vessels
• Citizens' science protocols on how to recognize healthy, living soil
• Ecological fish farming in aquaponic systems
• Etc

Within vision designs that will change hearts. Bring soul back into our world. Make us want to live in another way. Loving and caring about more than money and ego. Living in line with our planetary laws. Resilient, adaptive, flexible. Making life affordable again by breaking down walls between budgets and going back to the core.

It fits completely with what we design in our own think-and-do-tank Abundanism.

Storytelling, however, is always more than words. It’s context and visual design. It’s all senses, more than the eyes, including smell, taste, touch, and sound.

The extra sense, the sixth one, is not a weird one. It’s just the combination of all 5 senses and thinking with your whole body. It requires some training. But we have it all. A body. Senses. Live by them and your world becomes magical and easy.

You’ll know what to do next in your life because you’ll see the synchronicity signs.

Thanks, my colleagues at Born Global, for another wonderful meeting experience. I just love how our meetings always have a strong focus to get fast results AND bring the relaxation to invite magic, huge innovation, and shifting viewpoints in.

I take it with me and do what I have to do next. My job. Storytelling. Wild Writing. And explaining and attracting the new world.

Recapture

How can you create focused and mind-shifting meetings like this?

• Define one topic clearly
• Choose who needs to be present in the meeting. A diverse group with links to the topic. Small group
• Focus can be enhanced by a grounding start of the meeting. Let people feel their sitting bones. Let them land properly in the meeting. Ask them to focus their body and mind
• Be strict that people do not interrupt each other and are short and concise in what they say. No hobby horses. No speaking just for speaking. Ask them to be intuitive in when they speak and what they need to say to bring the meeting further
• Allow space in the meeting. White noise between the words. 3 Seconds between the former speaker and the next. It’s where the collective consciousness comes in and things can land in the people’s brains. It connects dots in brains so people see the relevance better and can absorb the context of what you’re doing during the meeting
• When the topic floats to another direction because people are for instance too interested in the archetype knowledge (it happened to us yesterday) bring the focus back softly and firmly to the topic at hand, the perfume itself and the possibilities of creation of the fragrance
• Keeping track of time isn’t difficult if you design your meeting like this. Focus in the beginning on one hour in your mind and you’ll see that it comes to a natural close after one hour. No strict, linear timekeeping is necessary
• It helps when there is homework done by a few people. In this meeting, Celine and Tia brought a short document linking the perfume thoughts to the archetypes and Greek Goddesses. During the meeting, the content of the document shifted with way more depth to what we really need to say in our storytelling in Davos. They will adapt the document for our next meeting
• Close the meeting by setting a date for the next meeting. We decided that we need 3 meetings for creating 3 fragrances. So, it is a set of 3 weeks, after which we have aligned what we are doing and how the storytelling around it will need to be structured to give the scientists their scientific flags. People always have to be explained why we’re doing what we’re doing. Otherwise, they don’t buy into why things are important for the huge shifts that are happening in the world right now
• Of course, these kinds of meetings are done best by people who have some experience in meeting like this. But train it with your team and your productivity enhances big time
• Keywords: focus on the purpose. All participants being grounded and intuitive. Use relaxation and faith to let the meeting flow wherever it needs to go

Happy meeting time!

Thank you, Mike, for adding your wise energy to my words on Abundanism. Systemic Design for a good future, and Wild Writing. © Désirée Driesenaar, 2022