Bizcast: The Trade Show Podcast – In Conversation with Elise Keith, Founder, Lucid Meetings 

Elise Keith, founder of Lucid Meetings, the New Rules for Work Labs, and the Meeting Innovation Community elevates meetings, decision-making, and team collaboration. With 20+ years dedicated to merging research with practice, Elise is the author of “Where the Action Is: The Meetings That Make or Break Your Organization”, and a frequent media guest and speaker. Renowned for making collaboration productive and enjoyable, clients describe her work as “deep,” “golden,” and “surprisingly fun!” 

• Spurred by media reports proclaiming that research had incontrovertibly concluded that “Zoom kills creativity”, Elise and her team, who are invested in the facilitation of team collaboration and promotion of successful business meetings, decided to do their research to find out if online meetings were effective at all or if the media-touted headlines were indeed correct. 
• Their findings were surprising at many levels. Firstly, the earlier research was a badly set up experiment that could hardly effectively measure creative collaboration in business settings. After several studies and huddles— online, in-person, and hybrid, Elise’s team concluded that in terms of creativity, there was no difference due to settings, although there was a minuscule, almost negligible difference in the volume of output. And for all desired business outcomes, what mattered most was intentionality. 
•  Another significant finding was that in today’s environment, it is extremely difficult to convince people to attend live, face-to-face events. And live events had to be canceled during the research because often there were not enough heads to fill the room. This in spite of the fact that great food and socializing were on offer. When the people did get together, however, the camaraderie and joie de vivre were prominently visible, even if the resulting outcomes hardly varied from online scenarios. 

Run time – 36:22 mins.