Organizing and Leading Great Panel Discussions with Your Celebrity Guests

Good morning, Live Better than a Billionaire-a-Holics!

I wanted to thank my wonderful wife, Carol, for reading my blog and employing my suggestions for creating a great Father's day for me. She knows how much I love following the New England Patriots and built a delightful theme day around the team. Gifts arrived with Patriots logos on them about every two hours throughout the day. I'll be the best dressed Patriots fan in front of the television when the preseason begins in a few weeks! Thanks, Carol.

Before leaving the subject of organizing a discussion-based annual activity to help you attract celebrities and learn fascinating information, I wanted to share a few thoughts about panel organization and leadership.

To give a great flavor to the panel, someone needs to select the right mix of people. A good way to begin is by asking people about their backgrounds and interests . . . plus what kind of panel they would like to appear on. If you are in doubt about the information you receive, give them a call and ask for some off-the-cuff comments on a few subjects. If possible, place people on panels they want to be on. Otherwise, their discomfort may steal a lot of the potential joy from everyone else.

Among your group, find a natural story-teller to be the panel leader. Someone with a sense of humor is best. The panel leader's job is to introduce the panel, keep people on schedule and organize the discussions. All of that organizing is best done at least a week ahead of time. You'll be surprised by how much effort people will put into their 2-5 minute comments.

I ran the investment outlook panels at Renaissance Weekends for many years, and it was not unusual for panel members to have had their research departments do special studies to back up comments. Since these people were often CEOs of major investment firms, the results were usually quite interesting.

I suggest organizing the sessions so that more than half the time is available for questions. The candid answers to bright peoples' questions are usually the best part of such discussions. If you aren't sure that you will have the right kind of questions, the panel leader can also ask a few attendees to come prepared to ask challenging questions that will be revealing to the group. In the absence of those prepared questioners, a good panel leader should always have 3 great questions that can be used to interrogate the panel should a lull occur from the attendees' questions.

The panel leader should encourage panel members to hang around a little while after the panel to handle other comments. This is when a lot of the social mixing takes place that adds wonderful chemistry to the group. Be sure everyone has a name tag of some sort so that people will find it easy to use one another's names.

Another good way to organize more informal discussions is to have meal tables that are assigned to one person whom many of the attendees would like to meet. Anyone else can sit at that table on a first-come, first-served basis. Usually such discussions will begin around the background of the assigned person. If she is an astronaut, you'll start with space . . . but you'll end up going many other interesting places as well. It's often the little known aspects of someone's high profile life that make them the most fascinating, but you have to allow time for those little known aspects to emerge naturally. I'll share an example with you of an unexpected experience my family had in that regard in an upcoming blog entry.

Donald W. Mitchell, Your Dream Concierge

Copyright 2005 Donald W. Mitchell

Be sure to check out my blog dated May 30, 2005 on Plan Your Best Fourth of July! To find that blog, keep clicking on the oldest blog entry you can find in the right hand column until you find the title "Plan Your Best Fourth of July."