When the Other Shoe Drops

Meeting planners just may be the most organized people on the planet. The good ones are so methodical that they make obsessive-compulsives look cavalier by comparison.

Why are they like this? They have to be. They’re in charge of details such as hotel reservations, audio-visual setups, seminars and workshops, ground transportation, and keynote speakers. If those things don’t happen smoothly, the whole meeting can fall apart. And unfortunately for the planners, every single one of those details hinges on all kinds of difficult-to-control factors, including people who are much less meticulous than they are.

“I struggle mostly with the kind of people who are very disorganized and have no idea what they are doing,” says Dawn Olson-Wallerus, convention services manager at The Depot, an event venue in Minneapolis. “This is because I’m a very organized person, and we just clash. I often have people say to me, ‘How can you remember all that stuff?’ I’m the type of person who anticipates the outcome before it happens, and it helps me to better prepared to avoid disasters.”

But disaster avoidance is a game that can never really be won. “I always kind of feel like there’s some shoe that is going to drop at some point with any meeting that I do, no matter how much time in advance I have or how much planning goes into it,” confesses Sue Weinacht, marketing communications coordinator at St. Jude Medical, a medical-device manufacturer based in Little Canada. “I always have the feeling of impending doom. Maybe I’m a masochist, I don’t know. But I’m never fully comfortable until the meeting is in place and running, and everybody is enjoying what they came for.”

Is she a masochist? Possibly. But realistic? Definitely. No matter how much checking and double-checking a meeting planner does, something will slip by. It may be human error or it may be a natural disaster, but it’s always possible. And when a detail falls through, it can undermine every aspect of the meeting.

Chad Olinger, meeting and events producer at StoneArch Creative, a Minneapolis-based marketing and event-planning firm, is lucky in that his company focuses primarily on the creative and production aspects of meetings. He and his colleagues don’t usually deal with the hotels, transportation, or food. But that leaves them vulnerable to distractions from outside forces.