Circular thinking
“How meeting design can help the meetings industry avoid the sustainability trap opinion”
For years, sustainability has provided the mindset for responsible event management. It has served an excellent purpose, helping the meetings industry to reduce the environmental impact of meetings and events by creating many best practices: cut CO2 emissions, source food locally, reduce waste, print less, recycle more, etc. This has proven to be of great value.
However, as a framework it falls short in at least two ways. Firstly, it focuses on the material and operational characteristics of meetings. And secondly, it focuses on reducing harm. You may wonder: so, what? Isn’t it useful to push operations towards more environmentally friendly outcomes and reduce harm? It is. But it is not enough. The sustainability framework does not guarantee the long-term viability of meetings and events. It is flawed on the following points:
1. Responsible meeting management should not only focus on the operational side of meetings, but it should also focus on strategic and systemic change. For this, it must go beyond the temporary, single-event nature of meetings and look more broadly at industry-wide improvements and innovation.
2. Responsible meeting management should not only focus on reducing harm, it should focus on doing more good. It should focus on the value meetings create. Today much of the waste generated by meetings is not only material; much of the resources wasted are immaterial, human and cognitive.
The meetings industry needs a stronger framework, one that moves it one notch up from sustainability. The circular economy is such a framework.
“The sustainability framework does not guarantee the long-term viability of meetings and events.”
From operational to systemic
Working towards a sustainable future means working with the UN’s 17 SDGs. This is a great outline for policymaking but often quite distant from the day-to-day business reality. Some SDGs (such as 5: Gender Equality, or 13: Climate Action) are easy to connect with the operational circumstances in meetings and events, others (for instance, 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, or 14: Life Below Water) are evidently harder to implement.
Although there is a translation of all SDGs into practical action points, most of them are hard to apply. (Believe me: I have done the exercise…)
Nevertheless, the organisers of events apply the notions from sustainable economic activities as much as possible to their meetings and this has resulted in some of the best practices mentioned earlier. There is a snag, though: these best practices focus on reducing the negative environmental impact of meetings and events, per single event. There is little or no incentive for organisers to think beyond their own event and organisers have little connection between themselves. They work in different organisations, each with their own reasons for holding their events. Moreover, events inhabit a temporary world, which emerges and disappears with the event itself. The project is that of building up for the one-off moment after which everything rapidly dissolves. This fleeting nature of events is just as much an operational issue as an industry mindset.
Although suppliers often make attempts to bring in more sustainable solutions into events, the perception of many organisers is that this adds to the operational cost, and so there is actually a disincentive to becoming more sustainable. This is partly offset by sustainability reporting needs, especially for larger or more socially conscious organisations, but in practice, change is slow. Reporting on sustainability is an extra burden for organisers, involving data collection and the need to implement possible improvements in subsequent iterations of the event, which is often at least one year away, sometimes even longer. The reporting is easily seen as a chore, weighing down on organizers’ limited resources, especially for smaller organisations.
Instead, now let's have a look at the advantages of using circular economy thinking as a framework. At the core of circular economy is the idea of optimising the use of all resources rather than limiting the negative impact of resource use. This is best demonstrated by citing the EU's circular economy Action Plan - also known as 10R:
1. Refuse – avoid unnecessary products.
2. Rethink – design products/services differently.
3. Reduce – use fewer resources.
4. Reuse – use products again for the same purpose.
5. Repair – fix instead of discarding.
6. Refurbish – restore old products to good condition.
7. Remanufacture – rebuild products with reused parts.
8. Repurpose – use products for a new function.
9. Recycle – process materials into new ones.
10. Recover – extract energy or materials from waste.
The SDGs are conceptual, the 10R are action oriented. They open up opportunities for more strategic thinking, especially “re-think” and “re-purpose”. They invite us to redesign the entire value chain to create value and impact, instead of just reducing waste.
Moreover, the 10 verbs speak the language of business: to coming up with better ideas, of developing new business models that create win-win situations for the entire value chain. In fact, the value chain should develop into an ecosystem. Circularity means searching economically viable business models that create value. It means moving from: how can I re-cycle resources or materials? To: how can I redesign the value proposal so that the resource or the materials maintain their value? Of course, many operational sustainable solutions potentially do the same; the difference is that in a circular economy approach, the search for these new solutions should involve the entire value chain and, therefore, become systemic. We move from what we avoid to what we create. Instead of reporting back and communicating about doing less harm, innovations will centre around positive changes. And that means much better stories to tell.
“Default methods and formats result in a humongous waste of resources.”
Doing less harm to doing more good
The circular economy optimises the use of all resources. In other words, it propagates the need to create value for all organisers and participants. Here an even deeper change is required in the interest of the meetings and events industry’s future. It is true that sustainability thinking has given us the important movement for meetings and events to leave “legacies”: lasting positive impacts in the communities where events take place. However, it says little about the impact the events themselves should leave behind.
Most people in the meetings industry will have heard the slogan, “When we meet, we change the world.” Well, do meetings change the world? And how effective are they in doing so? How effective is their use of resources in creating change? Does anyone know?
Instinctively, we all know that events are a powerful tool to allow groups of people to create outcomes. But how many events create valuable outcomes? How valuable are these outcomes? And how do we know that similar outcomes could not have been achieved in some other way, deploying less resources? These are questions about meetings and events which I rarely hear anybody ask. It is not good enough to know instinctively. We need a framework of thinking about the value meetings and events create, thanks to the resources invested – value for communities, as in legacy, but also – and more importantly - value for organisers and participants
As a designer of meeting programmes, this is where my professional know-how about meetings and events as a communication tool adds the greatest value. And it is also where I observe the greatest shortcomings of the ways in which organisers use meetings. This is not the place to go into the reasons for that, but I do want to shed some light on these shortcomings. And on why circular economy thinking points us to a solution.
As a designer of meeting programmes, this is where my professional know-how about meetings and events as a communication tool adds the greatest value. And it is also where I observe the greatest shortcomings of the ways in which organisers use meetings. This is not the place to go into the reasons for that, but I do want to shed some light on these shortcomings. And on why circular economy thinking points us to a solution.
Few organisers measure the outcomes or the impact on learning and networking, the main reasons why they hold their events. If anything, they measure satisfaction, which – in all honesty – is “nice-to-know” but irrelevant. In the absence of verifiable data on outcomes, there is no incentive or motivation for organisers to conduct programmes more effectively. As a result, they keep proposing default methods and formats. And – and this is my main point – these default methods and formats result in a humongous waste of resources. The physical presence of participants who could interact and, together, create meaningful dialogue and significant outcomes, is constrained into listening to classroom-style lecturing and networking breaks that work only for a minority of participants. This is an unacceptable waste of human and cognitive resources – the resources attendees can bring to the table and which have hardly any part in the programme, in the dynamics, in the exchanges.
There is a cautious shift towards the introduction of different, more effective formats, combined with a greater role for process management thanks to professional moderators and facilitators. However, it is slow and unclear in its direction. This is because the meeting and events industry, and the people who run it, are essentially focused on logistics and traditional (unsustainable) outcomes such as hotel nights and numbers of delegates.
Adopting circular economy thinking would bring along the necessary foundational strategic shift. It would mean to stop thinking in terms of monetary results and to start thinking in terms of the value meetings and events should and can create, using the resources deployed in the best possible way. Material, as well as human resources. It is the task of leaders in the meetings industry to embrace and propagate this shift. It is not the task of event organisers whose work is essentially something else.
It is high time for the meetings industry to shed its hospitality mindset and to zoom in on what meetings should and indeed must be about: create change thanks to intense human connections – the kind of deep human relationships that can only spring up and flourish when human beings meet in-person and share relevant experiences. And to do this with the most effective use of resources conceivable. That is the positive impact meetings can have on the lives of people and on their activities together. And for that, we need a strong underpinning which circular economy thinking provides.
