 My meeting planner friends, this post is for you. I had the great privilege of sitting down with Anthony Bade of FMAB and he is talking all things event design and hybrid events. And in a time where we are heading into a season full of hybrid events and pivoting events, this information is critical for you as you go through the planning process. He's going to share with you the difference between event design and event planning, how the two come together, and of course the questions you should ask to ensure that you have a successful hybrid event. So stick around for Anthony Bade. Welcome to today's Facebook chat. I have been waiting for this day for such a long time. I am absolutely thrilled and honored to be speaking with Anthony Bade today, who is one of our countries and one of the world's leading authorities when it comes to event design and in particular hybrid events. And wouldn't you know it, we are heading into a season where it's all the rage and there's lots of questions swirling around about what hybrid events look like. So we are going to talk to Anthony today about his experience as an event designer and some of his background around hybrid events and of course his expertise passed on to you about the questions you should be asking. But first I'd like to introduce you to Anthony if you haven't had the great opportunity to meet him before. Anthony was actually born and raised in Australia but now calls Toronto Canada his home. He's proudly known as an instigator, creator and change agent. And for over 20 years he's helped events stakeholders create meaningful and memorable connections with attendees. He continues to push experience design boundaries in his role as an experienced architect over at FM AV. His consultative and a collaborative approach to customer engagement has resulted in thousands of successful events traversing four continents and his work has just started as we head into a very, very busy hybrid event year and season. I'm going to turn it over to Anthony. First off Anthony, I'd love to ask you just a little bit about your office space and some of the things that you have going on behind you. It's incredibly inspiring and I just, I love what you've done with your space. What can you tell us about what you're doing behind you there? Oh yeah, there's all sorts of stuff going on here but before I dig into that Leanna, I want to thank you for inviting me to this and I want to say kudos to you on this amazing series that you have and the podcast and everything. I'm a long-time listener viewer, first-time caller so I'm really happy to be here. Thank you for that generous introduction. This is my design dungeon. It's in the basement of my place in Toronto and I'm going to do a full tour for people. I've been promising it for a long time but I'll do a virtual tour for you soon I promise before the end of the year. The way I have it laid out at the moment has a lot of usable space for note-taking, obviously the event canvas methodology pieces here and I've divided the space into analog and digital. So right now in front of me are all of my monitors and it's a bit overboard as you'll see when I do the tour but everything in this section is highly digital and highly sort of technical and interactive. Whereas everything behind me in this half of the room here is all analog and it's all about markers and colours and sticky notes and all that great design thinking stuff and I like to jump between the two modes of thinking and the two ways of interacting in order to unlock some convergent thinking and some divergent thinking because as I jump between the different modes different mental modes I find it unlocks a lot of things. So rather than just making notes in the computer I may do that but I will also jump around and scribble it on the wall so that when I turn around I see that thing and I go, ah, that thing. Let's not forget that. Let's make sure I revisit that later on today. Well I think why I find your room so inspiring is it actually looks a lot like my room which I won't show you because it's a disaster. Now I haven't hung my boards up on the wall but I have kitchen cabinets with a very, very long countertop and my whiteboards are laying on the counter and it's Post-it Note Mayhem and I have, I post-it note party everything. Even down to I'm going to host a party so I'm going to post it note party about a party and all the things that need to happen for it to come together so that's why I'm so inspired about your room and now I'm getting some ideas. I'm getting a little bit off track so I'm going to bring it back because today why I really wanted to corner you, no pun intended, is hybrid events is hitting us upside the head like a bulldozer and there's a lot of us, myself included, who don't exactly know the right questions to ask our venues about hybrid events and how these are going to play out when it's the convergence of a virtual and a live in-person event. Now before we dig into some of those specific questions, I would love for you to explain a little bit for our audience about what your role as event, an event designer is and how that might differ from maybe a conventional meeting or event planners role. Great question and one of my favorites when I get asked it. As many as many of the viewers out there will know there's been a lot of conversation around design in events in general over the last five to ten years and a lot of that comes from the emergence of this concept of experience design and it came out of, experience design was kind of birthed, I mean it's been around forever, we just never had a word for it but it came from this thing because we started to design experiences in devices and we needed to understand if the human experience and how they interact with the smartphone, the tablet, whatever that is, if that aligned the technology with the human mind and the human experience and so as the tech world started developing experience design methodologies and ways of thinking the events industry started to wake up to this because we're fairly closely linked as many of you will know and especially now and a few people around the world started going, hang on, events are experiences. Now you can have an experience without an event but you can't really have an event and not have it be experiential, you have to experience it. So we started to recognize that if we apply design methodology to the experiences we have with devices then we must absolutely apply some design strategy to how we create the events that we create. Now the trick in understanding design and the problem we have as an industry is we say the word design and everybody falls into the aesthetics. We go oh you mean like centerpieces and chair covers and the event branding and the logos on the screens and yeah that's absolutely one piece of the design but when we talk about experience design we are really honing in on that human experience and being human centered in what we create and you ask the question distinction between design and traditional planning roles is planning is very heavily logistics coordination financial management it's kind of like the air traffic controller other planes flying are they going to crash into each other let's make sure that doesn't happen and mitigate risk maximize benefits all those good things from execution. Design comes before that design is setting up an understanding who this is for why you're doing it what you're going to do which elements need to be in place and then we transition from that solid foundational platform of a design and we transition that into execution and we then plan the execution of that design so that's a bit foreign to some event planners out there in the market who have been very logistics focused and very bookkeeping focused as well a lot of them and keep doing it that's still a very very vital offering in the industry but we're recognizing that more and more event planners are getting more pressure from from their clients to have some of these design element conversations and to talk about the humans and how they're associated with their event and how they're going to change the behaviors of those human beings in positive ways through these event experiences that we create so it's kind of I've seen this thing grow and blossom and it's it's really starting to hit critical mass now and organizations like the event design collective were created to help support the industry and educate planners that are interested in moving or expanding out of that logistics coordination air traffic controller stuff and get a bit more into the into the strategic and human centered design sort of areas to help guide customers to more iterative repeatable success over a longer time period so that brings up another question if you don't mind because we're it sounds like we're talking about right brain skill sets versus left brain skill sets and most corporate event planners and meeting planners they have that right brain skill sets down down to a T like they're crossing T's and dotting eyes and and getting all the operational things done but they can learn event design or or can they can they switch gears into a left brain skill set first thing on that is one of my one of my things left brain right brain myth total myth what actually happens what actually happens here's the thing no there are areas of activity when when when when they've done the MRIs and they've done the CAT scans and where the activity is happening and what you're processing things do initiate from one part of the brain but what they've discovered is actually neural pathways are going left right left right left right left right all the time they might start on the left but they generally head to the other side as well so like I mentioned earlier where I have my analog and my digital in separating those two experiences and switching between the two you're actually encouraging those neural pathways within your brain to to connect more and when we have more connections we get better results in our thinking so what design for the planning focused individuals the power that can give them is to unlock those neural pathways and allow them to both understand their convergent thinking because most logistics planners people who like their spreadsheets they love their you know where's my schedule here they tend to be fairly convergent minds they want all the ideas to come to that singular point they want everybody to join them towards that point whereas creatives tend to be divergent thinkers so they they're the ones who make the meeting go off the rails and they make they come up with a wild amazing ideas that nobody thought would even be viable and and so you get this conflict that happens when you have those two mindsets you have the you have the convergent and the divergent and this in this conflict as long as the conflict remains constructive conflict and in this conflict you you unlock discovery so what a designer does and why we need methodologies behind design is it manages the conflict between the convergent and the divergent thinking so if if someone out there in in in the planning world wants to better understand the the impact and better communicate with the perhaps divergent thinkers they can use a process and a methodology in order to align those different mindsets towards the common goal so what we do as event designers and what the event design collective is champions for is one allowing planners to to intentionally design their events with intention and purpose and shout out to great Canadians to hear her book intentional event design plug it every every chance to get yeah i'm sure lianne's got one there too what it allows them to do is to put intention into the into what they're designing it allows them to create a story or a narrative that kind of becomes the north star it's it's where the event needs to go and it's some direction that everybody can head towards and it allows them to align their team towards that that narrative and that goal so that it doesn't matter if they're a convergent thinker or a divergent thinker you will share that same mission value and purpose behind what you're creating through that design process and so we can do all that messy creative convergent divergent thinking collaboration in that design phase and it sets up a more solid foundation that the event can be built upon and ideally if it's done correctly it alleviates more of the work that needs that usually happens in the planning because you have less distractions you have more you have more clarity on where you're heading and the ideas that come out of left field can be either adopted fast or they can be disqualified and and and put off to another year or another time or another event so it is really that first point before planning but there is there is that foundation nature that if it's done correctly and done collaboratively with the rights with the right players and the right stakeholders involved it will transition you into planning and hopefully smooth out some of the messiness that occurs in planning events. So what I love about everything you just said including the biology lesson thank you for that is for those who potentially considered themselves the right brain operational thinkers you've now actually created a road map for creativity and and and you're right maybe and to hear his book does address those things as well so thank you for bringing up Tahira and her great work but you've now actually created a roadmap so that someone like me can feel the I guess the white space and the the flexibility to create something before putting it into motion. Now for those of the planners that might be watching this video who are not quite well versed in the event design as they are in the operations of a meeting what can you tell me about this trend of hybrid events and and what you see for meeting planners heading into 2021? So the biggest challenge that we've seen this year uh in in virtual and hybrid because they're very similar obviously in in terms of you know the modes of delivery and the way that things go the the biggest challenge most are facing is how do we connect people through these modes like we we're very confident about delivering information and and what we aim and when we go through the event design we talk about knowledge sharing and understanding the knowledge and understanding how people learn the information so that it becomes knowledge because you can put information and the internet is full of this you can put as much information as you want out into the world it doesn't guarantee that anybody's going to learn it and it's going to transition from being knowledge into being sorry information transitioning into being knowledge so what so what we're seeing is one early on we were just putting all the content out there and hoping that it was adopted and turned into knowledge and what we're going to see come out of this as we move into hybrid and even the virtual stuff that sticks around is we're going to need to better understand and measure was that information adopted into knowledge and then can we take the next step where we take that knowledge and transition it into a skill where it's retrievable repeatable and a capability rather than just access to information so we're going to start designing these new virtual and hybrid experiences that try to unlock some of that skill set development we do knowledge and skills really well as an industry and we have for many years we just got thrown a new tool to do it with that we haven't given much attention to and now we kind of have to understand how those two things align in in delivering that the other thing we've struggled with in virtual and and hybrid is is the other two levers of change that we talk about in our design methodology which is attitude and people for those of you who are cheating and looking on the wall behind me and attitudes very much around okay how do we understand how these participants how these stakeholders feel about the the subject matter and feel about the businesses they work for the associations their members of their area of expertise and how do we manage the negative attitudes and the destructive attitudes and how do we encourage the positive attitudes so that we can create that positive behavior change and get them to to buy in and contribute to the other mentioned bits the knowledge and the skills as well and this one keeps coming up and and it's been a hot topic and there's about a million blogs out there at the moment the magical word of engagement yes and that's where the people come in behind me because because we need to design experiences that are people-centric and that are about connecting communities together empowering and allowing giving permission for communities to have real and meaningful conversations around the knowledge skill and attitude stuff that that we've been working on and so we start talking about this whole integrated experience at that point where where where we are creating these these hybrid and virtual experiences that that reinforce those forms of instructional design and the challenge is going to be in hybrid in particular that we're back in room and we know that in room feeling we love it it's the warm of fuzzies it's the I'll give you a hug even though you're six feet away from me and we we know what that does to help those things happen what we haven't done a great job at and there's everyone keeps asking me what's the magic platform out there I haven't found it yet maybe one day how do we connect that in room experience with that remote attendee without that word remote coming into play how do we make sure that those two are interacting having similar experiences or different experiences that's that that reinforce and enhance each other so that we can get all of those requirements to be achieved on both sides of the camera and both sides of the screen well and that's why people are working with you is to try and figure that out I'm assuming yeah and and we're talking as well a lot about about what this strategy is going to be over time because change is very scary and change is very hard for everybody not just the planners not just the designers and and and in particularly the participants and the people at home attending these virtual and hybrid events it's it's it can be alienating it could be intimidating and so what we look at now is we go okay we need to create change we have these modes of delivery at our disposal what is the adoption rate that we need how do we nurture the different stakeholders through the process because you you know this is go big or go home most people will go home and turn off the computer yes so instead how can we incrementally create these changes over over a longer period multiple events perhaps an event stretched time warped over a longer period rather than trying to get these big seismic revolutionary moments how do we create evolution not revolution so i'm i'm taking notes as we're talking and i'm running out of room i'm gonna have to get another flip chart pad um i love nurturing stakeholders i think there could be some watching this video who are still trying to identify who those stakeholders might be and how they have changed from live events to virtual and hybrid events so i love hearing that a we still need to identify our stakeholders but b take them on a path as well and take them on a journey throughout this process so that's my hugest takeaway from that i would love to start diving into the logistics the operations of a hybrid event as many are still fuzzy and myself included about now that i've gone through this design phase and i've done this i've done my post at no party and there is there's highlighters everywhere my office is messier than your office and now it's time to turn it into action and bring in some of those partners those partners being a host hotel and maybe their in-house av firm or an external av firm what do i need to ask them what do i need to communicate to them about this great vision that you've helped me get to all right not a lot's changed you know as we mentioned before we went on the i've been giving this topic at industry events for for 10 years now so a lot of these what do you need to do to set yourself self-up success hasn't changed terribly much in the last 10 years and the first thing that i always recommend everybody get clear on is the it infrastructure that exists in the space that you're going into so we're talking about bandwidth here we've all heard that word a million times now you've all seen your zoom meetings lag and sputter and not work but that's about understanding okay what is the bandwidth allocation how much speed do i get and how much do i get in two directions upload and download okay a lot of the time and you'll see this with your home plan now i recommend everybody go and look at your for the canadian's your bell your canada your rogers whatever you have uh look at that and look at your speeds and do your speed test on your own machine and and get your head around this upload and download like the idea suggests the bandwidth that download is is the information coming off of the internet the speed at which it can get into your computer so that you can so that it updates the video it updates the the content the upload is the other side of things it's how fast my computer is is processing this camera right here sending it through in my case fiber optics some people might have copper and then the speed that that signal can go to the world as well so you need to have ideally a good quantity of bandwidth both up and down okay and quite often we miss the up someone will go oh i've got uh i've got a hundred megabits per second of download but they've only got one megabit per second of upload and that's when you get your lagging your latency so have conversations with your venue about the about the infrastructure and the bandwidth allocation upload and download and then the next question that was thwarting us for years is firewall so what firewall does is like the name suggests it stops things catching on fire no not literally digitally so your security it's that security fence that the that those possible threats the cyber security threats are stopped by but they often shut down the communication channels that we have in our webcasting technology as well so we need to create permissions within that firewall infrastructure to say hey this event over here that's running in ballroom a from from nine to five you're allowed to use these pieces of this infrastructure and not be shut down by them because they may see you as a security threat good news on both bandwidth upload download and firewall is this change that's happened this shift to digital and digital first in many respects has forced venues and in-house av supplies to address these things and fix a lot of the shortcomings that did exist i'm lucky i'm part of the psav family of companies and so i've been involved with their digital infrastructure team and they've been going through all the venues around the world and the massive portfolio as you know and and and doing appraisals of okay what is the infrastructure and where do we need to invest more where do we bring clarity on on on on consistent service levels consistent products consistency in security settings and things like that so that we can help the customers be be better set up for whatever that that technical infrastructure requirement may be so you need to have those questions though with the venue and and this expands out your question to okay who manages the it infrastructure in the venue is it internal do you have your own engineering department is it the av company that's in-house there is it an external third party company and when it goes right or when it goes wrong who's accountable to whom for dealing with the challenge you have with that infrastructure and what is the communication to address those challenges when they come up is the support from any one of those i've seen in the past where an external company manages the it infrastructure yet it is serviced in-house by the av company so what happens when you hit that that that block that the av company can no longer fix the problem it has to go to that external third party what does that look like so start that conversation with your providers and your partners who are who are delivering the technology and say okay is are you managing this is the third party managing this what are the communications channels if things do go wrong i like to say you know plan for the worst and hope for the best and and it's very important that you have that clear transparent conversation around around those levels of our responsibility and what the expected response time is if challenges do come up oh i like that response time yeah because you know as you can understand already if the venue is managing managing it but managing it through a third party you're going to go to your maitre d who's then going to go to the head of engineering who's then going to send an email make a ticket with company b that's based in brazil ouch okay you know that could all of a sudden for for a 30 minute event it could take you 45 minutes to solve the problem yeah but of course rehearsal practice all those things so that we can avoid some of those things for sure is is a good way to go as well anthony can we go back to the uploaded download speeds you mentioned download of 100 megabytes per second being is that would that be a good measure 100 what would you consider a good download speed most webcasts need at least at least five megabits per second up and down oh as a as a very baseline entry point you do anything less than that you're going to have a bad time but obviously the more bandwidth we get the better so i would always challenge just keep keep racking up if your hybrid portion is important to you and i would argue it is more important than it's ever been in your entire career so don't pretend it isn't yeah if that's important then invest the money in getting the right bandwidth in place in both directions okay now i don't know a lot about bandwidth you certainly know heads and tails more than me but from what i understand download and upload will look different in a facility even with upgrades uh what's the balance uh as far as you the download is 100 and is is the upload at 10 or 20 is that going to to be sufficient or does it even matter are the two to the two talk to each other at all no uh but it depends on what that interactivity with that with the virtual world is if it's a two-way dialogue where the remote attendees are coming on camera and they're talking or there's a remote presenter that's presenting then you need to have that download speed because you will be downloading content that then gets pushed into the room if it is a one if it is one directional and it's just the hybrids happening and we will send it out and perhaps there's text-based chat but there's no video there's no networking stuff that doesn't require uh you can get away with having more upload as you send as you send the webcast up into the internet you can get away with having more of that and less of the download but in the best case scenario it is symmetrical it's the same up and it's the same down just to get that consistency in that what we call balance okay okay good very good to know and friends don't forget to drop questions in the facebook comments uh if you have any questions for anthony in addition i am taking notes feverishly and i am going to try and detail them in a blog post maybe even a checklist for you to use this checklist and blog post will be run by anthony to make sure of its accuracy so when this does go out as a permanent piece on youtube and in the blog those pieces will also be attached to it so if you haven't been able to take copious notes not to worry i've i've got some detailed for you here anthony uh the other question i want to ask is psav let's and we're going to use psav for an example because they're one they're they are the most prevalent firm i think in the hotel network and they have a lot of experience with this they're probably going to want to garner some information from the event planner as well to advise advise them correctly on what needs to be done what kinds of questions can event planners expect from an av professional yeah that's a great question and maybe we'll break it down into the two modes of delivery so let's look at you know what the virtual questions are versus what the in-person questions are if that's a an appropriate way to go about so the first question you're going to get from every provider psav included is how many remote attendees are attending this thing and the reason they ask that question is multiple but but it's around okay what can the platform handle uh what and every platforms slightly different in that respect but they but they want to they want to gauge what the load will be on the server okay you got very technical there but the idea being that we send this webcast out to the internet it gets uploaded in real time that gets fed into a remote server depending on which which platform or technology you're using that could be anywhere in the world now if you're canadian and you're within a canadian association that server should be based in canada and you should have that conversation as well because a lot of this a lot of the time sending this data to another country can present a bit of a excuse me a bit of a privacy risk right especially for government organizations associations nonprofits and those kinds of things so be aware of that okay but what they're trying to understand is if the service here we've uploaded to the server how many people are now logging into that server trying to access that information and what's the load going to be on that server because it's a similar thing that server think of it like a hotel ballroom if it's designed to allow 500 people in it and you try to jam 2000 into it it's not going to be a good time for any of those 2000 people in there and in fact the platform may crash so most AV providers will ask you the question how many people are going to attend you'll tell them we think 500 maybe a thousand they will generally then recommend to you let's do one for 1500 people to give us some buffer and some room because the thing people forget you say I normally have 500 attendees but now in the virtual space you have 500 attendees and a good chunk of those people may also connect with their phone or their tablet and have the computer screen going and the tablet going and that's another user so you could for someone like me I might even log into a virtual event on my computer my iphone my ipad and have there's three people from one I'm guilty too yeah that's a great great point okay so yeah talk about how many people are going to attend and then and then in the virtual space I also we talk a lot about user experience so there's two terms that I've been chatting with the industry about since March and their tech terms from the tech industry it comes from that experience design stuff that I was talking about earlier they in in the tech world they talk about UI and UX you'll hear these things constantly UI stands for user interface it's the buttons it's the knobs it's the it's it's the way that it's the tools that enable you to interact with with the virtual event it's very functional very pragmatic user UX is user experience which is the opposite to that it is how you as the human being experience that virtual event how you flow through it what your entry point is how you navigate through the UI into the different portions of that of that virtual experience that that's been created so as we're going through the design process and as you talk with your platform providers your av companies or whoever they are you want to start to have conversations around okay what is the user experience going to be like and how does the user interface support that user experience and what you start to do is you have these kinds of conversations and and and when they go through my method we actually map the experience journey so what will the experience journey be like for those individuals as they go through it and that starts to reveal where you may have challenges within the platforms that you pick because they don't have the user interface to support that experience that you want but if you can get this stuff down on paper and extract it from the brains from your brain and ideally your design team's brain because it's not all on you plan as I keep saying stop thinking that the world's on your shoulders and leverage the people around you to help you create this stuff but if you can communicate that to the to the tech provider to the av company this is what we would like our user experience to be it gives them something to then craft the production and the platform around to say okay we can turn on this module I suggest on Monday morning we have this kind of session that we have this piece of the platform to support roundtable q&a whatever it might be that will then help you guarantee that that your attendees in person or remote are having a similar journey through that experience with the interface this is incredible information I stop taking notes because I just don't even know how to to tie this all together so I'm going to re watch this entire video and and start to connect the dots but what I do like is I think you have connected the dots I just I ran out of paper to actually do it and look I'm not going anywhere I'm going to be around this industry for a long time hopefully so we can always continue talking about this after this and anybody can reach out to me anytime and I can I can talk more about it I'm very open to that well and that was my next question Anthony if somebody wants to get a hold of you and pick your big brain about this incredible topic how can they do that so I mean the best the best way initially would be to reach out to me on on social media channels I I'm regularly posting stuff on there and you'll see that there's some some links there to book time to have to have a quick chat with me I find that these things work best when we when we have a dialogue and we have some face-to-face even if it is virtual so at AV Connecting is my is my social handles on pretty much every platform out there including TikTok which I haven't done anything on and my wife laughs at me about are you dancing she says to me I'm like no no one wants to see that you are a braver person than I am there is no way no way I'm getting on the TikTok yeah but yeah so you can reach out to me on social certainly visit the event design collective edco.global if you want to learn more about the methodologies and then of course your fmav you can come in through our website there's a bunch of blog posts in there that can help explain some of the stuff that I've talked about as well if you want some additional content but yeah perfect and and I have all of those details everyone it's going to be posted in not only the blog posts in the youtube description but when this video goes live on to the facebook page I will get in the comment section and put Anthony's information in there as well Anthony thank you so much for your time like I said I I have learned so much in our short time together and I'm hopeful that I can now do it justice and put together a written piece to accompany this video so that people have something that they can follow in order to get them from the design phase into the operation phase which includes that relationship with their hotel and their av firm is there anything you'd like to add before I let you go to educate more industry individuals look let's do this again let's do this again soon because we didn't even touch on some of the in-person safety protocols and practices meat-safe guidelines cleaning sanitation what your technician should and shouldn't do in the room in the in-person side of things I got a ton of stuff on that as well that I would love to bring up and have and have the industry talk about in general because we are going through an interesting phase here it is really a make or break time for the event industry we can choose to go about the next steps and our next transition responsibly and safely or we can have outbreaks occur that is going to set us back a lot so as we move in back into in-person we're going to need to really collaborate around okay how do we do that safely how do we accelerate our chance of doing it and that that's going to take us all collaborating around this idea okay what really is safety and who are the players and how do we interface with them in in in a real sense to make sure that when we do get back and when we do bring about the rebirth of our industry that it is sustainable a long time so consider it done you put the offer on the table I'm going to tell you after we hang up here we will book another time to do this and create a bit of a hybrid series to arm our industry heading into 2021 and beyond and thank you so very much for your time I'm I'm a very lucky person to have witnessed this genius live and I'm excited to get this information into the hands of the industry enjoy your celebration today Anthony has a big celebration coming up in a very short time so congratulations on your Alt MBA enjoy your celebration and I will be in touch with you very soon thank you very much thank you everyone bye for now