Meetings are intended to help drive innovation and move work forward. Good meetings inspire teams to perform at their best and, ultimately, propels businesses ahead of the competition. Nearly all good meetings demonstrate the same vital elements, including preparation, focus, and engagement. The latter is often enabled by the sharing of relevant or thought-provoking content.
It’s tougher to push for innovation and improvement when content, especially visual content, is not easily shareable in meetings. Failing to share visual content can lead to lower interest, decreased retention, and slower decision making. Below, we’ll discuss how visual content contributes to productive meetings and why you should be working to integrate it into every meeting.
Visual content travels faster
Words are not innate to humans. Language processing is an acquired non-native skill. Visual processing, however, is a fundamental skill for which all humans are hard-wired. Infants understand the image of their parents long before they can begin to comprehend words used to describe them. We’re built to process visual information much more efficiently than written or spoken information.
Our minds are more accustomed to processing images than words. As much as ninety percent of the information our brains receive is visual. We’re geared to absorb information visually. It only takes thirteen milliseconds for our brains to process an image.
Visuals stick in our long-term memory
Our long-term memory stores information in chunks. Using visuals is an excellent way to pair important concepts with meaningful images and make that knowledge easier to store. One study found that individuals retained only 10-20% of spoken information three days after they were presented with it. Conversely, those presented with visual information could recall around 65% of what they learned.
Whatever information you share during a meeting is likely something you want attendees to retain. If so, then you’ll be best served by relying on visuals to help cement that information into your audience’s long-term memory.
Visual cues trigger emotions
Anybody who has tried to sell something knows that appealing to someone’s feelings is the best way to convince them of the validity of what you’re selling. The same idea applies when you’re trying to sell your audience on the importance of the information you’re communicating.
When you trigger meeting participants’ emotions, you encourage them to engage with the content and retain information. Our visual memory is encoded in the medial temporal lobe of our brains –the very same place that our emotions are processed. Research has shown that encoding for long-term memory storage is highly reliant on semantic encoding (encoding based on meaning and emotion).
Bringing it all together
Good meetings are designed to bring the right people together to discuss an issue, brainstorm ideas, develop solutions, or make decisions in a clear, concise manner. Good meetings don’t just happen. They take time and preparation and, most of all, the right content to drive outcomes. In fact, visual content has been shown to shorten meetings by 24% while producing 22% better results in 13% less time.
To drive the most efficient meetings that also drive real change in your organization, it’s paramount that visual content is at the heart of your meeting materials. Moreover, using a tool that enables easy content sharing is critical to ensuring the flow of the meeting and interaction isn’t disrupted. Our wireless content sharing platform, Solstice, allows any number of users to share any amount of content quickly and easily to the in-room display.
