True enough. We were going technology naked. The emperor would have no laptop.

Fortunately, a few creative types embraced the idea and their enthusiasm began to spread. Rumors of their ideas began to circulate. A prop? Sure! A costume? That could work! A poster? I remember those! The creative juices began to flow.

Meeting participants began taking a hard look at their topic areas. What does this mean? How can I depict this point? How can I find a metaphor for this? Fear became energy. And holy moly -- people were looking forward to the meeting!

Meeting Day

We assembled early, completing an "ice breaker" that was fun and got the interaction and energy moving early. By the 8:15 opening remarks, everyone was curious and on alert. Hey, there’s no projector in the room. No one is on the phone; everyone was present. Not worried about being near a microphone or web connections or harmonizing presentation fonts. The VP welcomed everyone and the facilitator provided the ground rules and agenda review. It was really important that we stayed on schedule; we had a lot of ground to cover. But, we were not going to sacrifice a good discussion for the clock.

The first presenter was raring to go. When the agenda was released and she knew she was first, she came to me and said, "We’re first. We need to set the stage and kick the meeting off. Here’s my idea." It was magic.

She and her partner put on aprons and chef’s hats. Their prop was a large onion (made from an exercise ball and tissue paper accompanied by a large knife made from cardboard and aluminum foil.) They talked about peeling away layers, as they removed sheets of brown paper from the outside of the "onion." On each sheet was written one important point. Everyone was engaged, interactive, amused, listening.

Another presenter had a huge key ring like a building superintendent may use. She threw it on the desk with a loud clamor. "This represents our security issues," she declared and proceeded to explain how we have a lot of security, but too dang many different keys. Right away we got it!

Another one explained architecture by showing a house plan and how you wouldn’t build a house two rooms at a time. The water main ends up in the wrong place, the structural beams don’t exist and you haven’t accounted for a second floor or a back door. From a technology standpoint, this was a great analogy to some of our "phased approach" syndrome that ends up costing us big bucks in re-architecting existing systems and solutions.

For my own discussion of digital archiving, I disemboweled a number of magnetic tapes and tangled them around me, hung CDs from a hat, stuffed my jacket to make me look big and bloated and then basically trailed trash around the room. "I am the archiving problem," is how I started my talk. I doubt they will ever forget me traipsing around like a digital Pig Pen from the Peanuts cartoon.

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