Season 5, Episode 6: New Options for Meetings and Travel with Josh Gutwill and Sue Allen
image credit | Sigmund
Season 5, Episode 6: New Options for Meetings & Travel with Josh Gutwill & Sue Allen
As the end of the year and traditional holiday travel calls, many also consider the social and environmental impacts of traveling. One area where people can have control over required travel is in the structure of business and academic meetings. Thomas and Panu spoke with Josh Gutwill & Sue Allen of the Clean Conferencing Institute about new, positive trends in virtual and hybrid meetings. Many lessons have been learned since the rapid, sometimes awkward transition online during the COVID era. Beyond the environmental benefits, one clear finding is that using up-to-date online platforms makes it easier for a wider range of people to participate and contribute who might otherwise face barriers in traditional meeting settings.
Links
Priya Parker 2018 The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters
Guetter et al 2022 In-person vs. virtual conferences: Lessons learned and how to take advantage of the best of both worlds. American Journal of Surgery
Rocio Joo et al 2022 Ten simple rules to host an inclusive conference. PLOS Computational Biology
Richard Parncutt 2025 The global multi-hub conference: Inclusion, sustainability, and academic politics. Sustainable Futures.
Transcript
Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.
[music: “CC&H theme music”]
Introduction: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness (CC&H), an international podcast that explores the personal side of climate change. Your feelings, what the crisis means to you, and how to cope and thrive. And now, your hosts, Thomas Doherty and Panu Pihkala.
Thomas Doherty: Well hello, I’m Thomas Doherty.
Panu Pihkala: And I am Panu Pihkala.
Thomas: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness. This is our podcast. This is a show for people around the world who are thinking and feeling deeply about climate change and other environmental issues in the state of the world and how they can be their best self. we talk about what that means for us in our personal lives and our professional lives. And one of the things we've had on this podcast either formally or in the background, quite a number of times is travel and our sense of our own carbon footprint and how our lifestyles and behaviors weigh on the planet and what are the ethics of this. I know this is something listeners you all think about in many many ways and one of the ways that comes up is in travel and going to meetings and business meetings or professional or personal things and so we're going to get into that today with some specialists that we know that work around creative ways for people to get together in the world. So that's our focus today. We're not going to solve this. These are big systemic problems. not going to solve them, but we're going to get into some kind of interesting and some of the rare kind of optimistic and interesting parts of this conversation. So to that end, I'm really proud to have two special guests with us.
Sue: I'm Sue Allen and I'm coming to you from the beautiful state of Maine and I'm a co-director of the Clean Conferencing Institute.
Josh: Hello, my name is Josh and I'm coming from Berkeley, California and I am the other co-director of the Clean Conferencing Institute and it's a pleasure to be with you today.
Thomas: Yes, and I've got a chance to meet and present with Josh and meet Sue and, you know, as a someone who goes to academic conferences, I've been really personally pushing on the American Psychological Association, specifically one of my home organizations to think about their carbon footprint. And, you know, it's a massive kind of missing area and a lot of big academic conferences. So it's an area of kind of activism for me, but it's also there's a lot of neat technology and there's a lot of neat ways to work this. So we're going to talk to Sue and Josh about their work and their backgrounds today. Panu, do you want to get us started?
Panu: Warm welcome to you and also on my behalf. Lovely to meet you and working in academia. This is a topic that has been increasingly present, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly. It may not be easy for academic institutions to really honestly take a look at travel systems and their environmental impact and so on. But before going into that, it would be very interesting to hear something about your journeys towards being so much involved with these kinds of matters. So would you like to share something about that, perhaps starting from Sue again?
Sue: Yeah, thank you. So I started out as a physicist and got into education pretty early in my career. And I fell in love with the Exploratorium in San Francisco, a wonderful hands-on science museum started by Frank Oppenheimer. And his approach was always he and his brother, of course, were very involved in the development of the atomic bomb. And they became very concerned that the fate of the world rested in the hands of the public and the public's understanding of science in particular. So they really tried to further that goal and so created this very, at the time, innovative place where the public could come in and learn science in a really hands-on interactive way. And so I've spent the rest of my life doing science education and science education research with the goal of trying to help the public be less afraid of science, less intimidated and really engaged in ways that they feel they can understand and make good decisions.
Josh: Yeah, and I had kind of a similar path. and we actually met in graduate school where we were learning to be educational researchers and cognitive scientists, sort of applying scientific approaches and ideas to the study of learning. Soon after, Sue went to the Exploratorium. She was a little ahead of me in school, and then I graduated, and I, a few years later, joined her at the Exploratorium and spent a 25-year career there studying how people learn science outside of school. And there, most of the learning that happens at the Exploratorium is interactive with exhibits. So groups are trying to use an exhibit to try to figure something out, to do a little bit of science themselves. And it turns out that the design of those exhibits is key to that process. Thinking about the user interface and the user experience is very important for people to be able to walk up to a new exhibit that they've never seen before and just start getting going and engage in a scientific inquiry process where they figure something out for themselves. And I think that work that both Sue and I did for many years in thinking about how do we foster a social learning experience where people can interact with each other and maybe with something else, in this case an exhibit at the museum, how do we set that up in a way that just sort of frees people to engage their own creativity and their own thought process? I think that has really helped us in shifting over into virtual conferencing and helping people interact with each other in a social, professional learning environment like a conference.
Thomas: That's fascinating and I think it's yeah, number of directions will go today but I think, you know, one of the my big learnings and as a psychologist was interacting with people who work in museums and zoos and aquaria and realizing all the work that happens in those public learning spaces that are just kind of taken for granted. But it's very, very, very mindful. And I know we'll jump to the clean conferencing. I think we all know it was done because of ethics and sustainability and various things. But let's actually go back first, Often we talk about people's early experiences. So I wonder if either you have early experiences in your family or childhood or where you grew up or in younger life, that kind of predisposed you to kind of be interested in all of this sort of stuff. This idea of environmental identity we talk about a lot in our eco timeline. So when you think back on your life timelines, are there precursors that that kind of you know indicated that you might be heading along this path as an adult?
Sue: Well, one of the things that happened for me in my childhood, I was lucky enough to grow up in Sydney in Australia and I spent a lot of my young years in the back garden with a butterfly net collecting insects and discovering the incredible diversity of living things and just falling in love with that world. And a few years later, another pivotal experience I remember was being in science class and looking at
Thomas: Hmm.
Sue: A textbook that had a graph of the population of the world and it was going up pretty much exponentially at that time. This was some years ago, of course it's leveled somewhat, but I remember thinking, oh, this is not good. So that combination of the sheer joy and the concern, I think started very young.
Thomas: Mm-hmm.
Josh: I think for me it probably came a little bit later, the early experience, I think, for me was around snow. So I grew up in Massachusetts and my mother got us involved in cross-country skiing very early. And I remember the blizzard of 1978 where I think we got like four or five feet in a few days and school was closed for two weeks and we had to ski everywhere. And it was just magic. I mean, it was just incredible. It was such an amazing experience. we dug tunnels in the front yard, inside the snow and all that. And then as I got older and particularly came out to California and by then had learned to downhill ski and was really into skiing and snowboarding.
Just seeing how many years were going by in California where there was a drought or it was raining in the Tahoe area in the mountains instead of snowing because the temperatures were too high. And just really feeling the loss of that, just feeling like, we're not, this activity is going away. We may not be able to do this anymore. I was also really inspired by my sister-in-law, her name is Carla Wise, and she became a real climate activist about 20 years ago and dedicated herself to it full-time and actually wrote a book called Awake on Earth about facing climate change and how to live with it. And so just lots of conversations with her and became really inspired to get involved in this work somehow if I could.
Thomas: Yeah, lots of neat background as always. Panu, what are you thinking over there? I mean, when you're hearing some of this stuff and how does this Sue and Josh's experience jive with your experience and what you've been learning about people?
Panu: Thanks for sharing, very interesting to hear. After working quite a lot with environmental education and psychology, there's lots of elements in what you say which are influential for people, having a chance to do something directly with the modern human world, whether it's butterflies or some other elements and connection with the seasons and having outdoor hobbies for recreation and also I hear you testify to how environmental change affects these kinds of activities and that's for many people, a growing number of people a pathway to climate matters. And for example in Finland there's lots of winter sports people participating in Protect Our Winters movements which is related to to climate change and emissions. As a Finn, I of course love the image of somebody skiing to the school. So that's what the generation of my parents still did in many places. Not in Helsinki, but in many places. This is also related to the topic of habits. That's course something which is very influential for people's behavior. And that might form a bridge to the topic of online conferencing because the way I see it, it was just a very
Thomas: Mm-hmm.
Panu: strong habits in academia also to have meetings in person and only when COVID-19 came people then realized sometimes relatively quickly that hey actually there's a lot of meetings which can be very easily done online but we just hadn't been doing that but would you like to share something about how did you then end up on this field and what did you start to do?
Josh: Yeah, sure. Back in 2016, actually, before COVID, I was flying across the country from California to Florida for a conference, and I was reading a climate change book all about what's happening to our climate and how things are shifting. And part of the book was asking about what we can all do. And I was thinking, well, what do I do that emits a lot of carbon dioxide? And realizing I go to conferences four or five times a year. And I kind of resolved on that flight to see if there was something I could do differently. And when I landed, and this is a large conference, but I sought out the president of a small association that I also attend every year whose conference I also attend and asked her about the idea of could we zoom people in to that in-person conference? And I didn't know the term hybrid conference, and maybe I don't even know how much people were using that term back in 2016, but we started talking about how it would be so good for the association to get more people to come to the conference. And I think because of my experience at the Exploratorium and all the work I've been doing on social learning, I said to her, I really want to focus on the networking parts of it. Like it seems really easy to zoom people in to hear a talk, but how do we get people at home to interact with the people at the conference? What can we do? And she said, this sounds great. Why don't you join the board of this small but mighty association and start a team to do this. And so I did and we started the Green Team and for several years and Sue joined the Green Team and for several years, we and I don't know, maybe half a dozen others before COVID worked on bringing people into the conference from home. And we had folks, we weren't selling this product or anything. We were just prototyping inviting people to try with us and see what happened. And we did crazy things that didn't work at all, know, having people join the coffee break from home and you know, there's this buzzing, loud coffee break going on and we would wave people over to the iPad and say, talk to someone at home, you know, and try to that, have people interact that way. But it got us really thinking hard about it.
Thomas: Hmm.
Josh: How do you get people to interact with each other in a networking kind of environment, virtually? We were pretty well positioned when the pandemic hit to pivot at that association to a virtual conference that would not just be an endless series of webinars, know, of talks, just one after another, deadly, dull.
Thomas: Hmm.
Josh: but would have these interactive sessions as well where people could mix and mingle.
Thomas: Mm.
Sue: So I think people were actually traumatized by COVID. Of course, in many ways, the pandemic was traumatizing. But one of the ways that it was traumatizing, we run into when we talk to people and they say, what do you do at the Clean Conferencing Institute? And we say, well, we're trying to make virtual conferencing so great that people don't really want to travel because the experience is wonderful. And they kind of look at us in a slightly odd way. And then they say they have to go and get something to drink and they disappear. So that's when we realized that
Thomas: Hmm.
Sue: People have a sort of misconception about virtual conferencing in the sense that they think it's going to be this horrible thing like Josh said of webinars one after the other and lots of Zoom fatigue and eight hours of sitting in your chair. And actually none of those things need to be true. The technology has come a really long way and how we think about it has come a really long way and the research has moved so that virtual conferencing can be much more engaging, fun and socially interactive.
Thomas: Yeah, this is great. Yeah, it is really great stuff. mean, I think a lot of us can identify with the. Well, I mean, Zoom was both a savior and online stuff was a savior during COVID and tons of innovation happened. But yeah, it was fatiguing because the because the technology itself is fatiguing. so. But I, Yeah, there's a number of precursors. I think Josh, like you said, people were doing interesting things even before COVID.
I did an online, there's an online facilitation format called the World Cafe, which is kind of a group facilitation. And I did a training with someone who did online World Cafe years ago that was super fun. They used music, they used art, they shared imagery and photographs. just a little bit of creativity makes meetings much more alive. I know when I do when I do my online trainings with therapists, I've had people come in from all around the world and just small things like each in the first meeting, everyone shares a picture of themselves, something they love about nature and a thing they're concerned. And then we just share each of those pictures. People talk about them. It really it's fun. It works really well. And it isn't that hard to do if you just play around with the technology. That's even just on Zoom. But I know there are many other interesting formats too. So I think a takeaway for the listeners is just, you know, most people aren't aware of this stuff. I mean, I wasn't aware of it until I actually saw it. So there's a lot more fun stuff out there than you might, you might realize. But yeah, go ahead.
Sue: I also think that's a very, I just think that's a really nice activity that you just mentioned because it does many things at once. That example, it's something that everyone can contribute to, a photo, a concern, a love. It provides a sense of quick trust where people can start to build relationships in a short period of time without having to know each other for years. And it's a really nice segue into the content of what you're doing because you're going to be talking about environmental issues.
Sue: It's really great if all of those things can come together so people feel like they're bringing their whole selves, their personal selves, their history, their situation, as well as their minds.
Thomas: Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly. that's exactly how it works. So it's very and then of course, it's a great icebreaker. And then you can refer back to those images, the whole rest of the group, you know, people sharing images of their family or images of them hiking somewhere beautiful or something in their neighborhood.
Yeah, there's a lot to it. People, I'll tell you one interesting tidbit is that most people when they share something they love, they share something personal like one of their own pictures, but when they share something that's concerning to them, then they often share something they pick out off the news. So it's really, and it gets into this whole conversation about how do we see the world and how do we make our reality. So we can go deep, as you know, in all these kinds of things also. But that's the whole facilitation museum interpretation piece, right? Which is fascinating. yes, let's keep going. Sue, you talked about superpowers earlier in our pre-conversation. And I think it, what do you mean by that? And how is that working in your work with Clean Conferencing?
Sue: Well, people often feel helpless. certainly do a lot of the time feel helpless in the face of this climate change. But one of the things we realized during this work is that people have more power than they think in this area. And so even in relation to virtual conferencing, people will say, well, what can I do? Actually, there's a lot you can do. If you are in the fortunate position of being a board member of a professional association or an organizer, of a conference for a professional association, then you have a very special opportunity to really make a huge difference to the planet. Every virtual conference that you hold is a big deal in terms of the number of people that are now not getting into planes and emitting a whole bunch of carbon and in terms of accessibility. two things to bear in mind if you're in that lucky situation. One is that you can alternate and you can push as a decision maker for alternating between virtual and in-person conferences and that cuts in half your emissions while still giving people the opportunity to meet in person every other year. And another thing just to put in there, where you put your conference if you're going to have an in-person one also makes a huge difference to the amount of greenhouse gas you emit. So don't just go to San Francisco because it's a cool city. But really think about, especially the Midwest, as a place that's really going to save a lot of carbon. And there are calculators to help with that. So those are the people who have really an obvious superpower. I would also just name a few other folks. If you're a funder, you have an enormous superpower because you can affect all the projects you fund in one fell swoop by pushing for less travel and more justification and low carbon options and, of course, virtual.
So you have a leverage sort of multiplicative impact as a superpower. Platform providers also have an opportunity here to really push their designs to focus more on supporting this kind of lovely social informal networking that we're talking about that's so lacking in the virtual space. And so really pushing for, I'll just give one example, which is levels of just-in-time information. As people meet each other in these spaces, there's not much time. I have to get to know you really fast and to have an access to a very appropriate level of information about you. Maybe it's just, hi, I'm Sue. Ask me about conferencing. That's my thing. Or ask me about my dog because I love dogs. That gives somebody an immediate in without having to read a whole bio. So that's something that platform providers could be doing.
Exhibitors are enormously important and they, exhibitors and vendors often drive the whole system that brings in the money that supports conferences that brings in thousands of people to travel. They, by the way, do not generally love in-person conferences either because they have to ship a whole lot of stuff and they have to talk to people who really don't want to be there and they have to put out candy to try and entice them to talk to them.
So that's not really working either. There's an opportunity for exhibitors and vendors to stay really involved in virtual conferences. And in particular, I think the way there is to really focus on going from the funnel model that they have going from many people to a few key decision makers to drop that many people phase and go straight to identifying cleverly and possibly with AI, he kinds of people that you really want to be talking to, because a few great conversations are way better than a lot of lousy ones. And the last person I just want to name is attendees. So many of us are conference attendees and we think, well, I didn't decide, here we are, we're flying around the world to be at this thing. Well, first of all, you do vote with your feet and if you don't go, that's significant. As we accumulate numbers, that's something where you become a change agent. Also, express your views to the people that are making the decisions. Make sure they know that you support alternating between virtual and in-person. And also, of course, take care of yourself when you are at a conference. Make sure that you have a good experience. taking breaks and making sure you're fully present, setting aside time as you would if you were attending a conference and really going to the virtual networking sessions, which people always say they want to network. And then when you have a session, people are a little scared and run away, which is one of the reasons we're working so hard to make social norms that make people feel more safe and secure when they're in those sessions.
Josh: And I just want to add another group, which is organizational leaders. So I'm thinking of administrators at universities or leaders at organizations that set policy for travel to conferences. For example, academics often think that if they give a talk at an in-person conference, it will count more. Than if they give a talk at a virtual conference for things like tenure or for promotion. And that's usually not true. We have some great partners at the University of California, San Francisco that are working on this, Sarah Ackerman and Katherine Gundling, that are looking at really clearly articulating the policies for regular faculty so they better understand what do they actually have to do in terms of attending conferences and disseminating their work. But the leaders of those organizations can set policies that incentivize more virtual conference attendance. For example, a lot of universities set aside funding for students to attend conferences or for junior faculty to attend conferences. And some universities like UCSF are now starting to set aside funding for attending virtual conferences. So here's some funding to register for that virtual conference. And that can really incentivize people to move away from travel and towards doing the virtual conference. So these are all, I just wanna say these are all like thinking at the systems level rather than that individual level of.
Thomas: Mm-hmm.
Josh: Each person saying, what should I do here? Should I go with my values and skip this conference? Or should I advance my career and fly to this conference? We're trying to say, let's shift that lens and instead of forcing the individual to make those kind of hard choices, let's change the systems that we're in. I think it's part of this whole movement.
that's now waking up and recognizing that thinking about climate change as something that we individually have done and collectively, but individually we each have contributed to. And that's the carbon footprint idea that was designed and disseminated by BP, a fossil fuel company, to get us to feel guilty about climate change, to get us to feel defensive and to live in apathy and denial, shifting away from that and thinking about this as a systemic issue. know, Nathaniel Stinnette, the founder of the Environmental Voter Project, says, this is a homicide, not a suicide. Meaning, are not doing climate change to ourselves, the individual person around the world.
This is a small number of actors who are forcing all of us to use particular systems of energy development, energy creation and dissemination, using particular systems for travel and lots of other things, food that are changing the climate. And we need to reframe and be thinking about those actors and the systems we’re all in.
Thomas: That's wonderfully said. I'm really glad we got it because it's at its base it's ethics and being our best selves and doing the best we can. So I'm glad we got we've covered a lot of ground. There's a lot you know for listeners there's a lot of misconceptions you know academics think they have to travel but that doesn't affect their tenure you know. In fact, most of the travel for academic conferences are well established faculty, know, so there's a lot of systemic things. Let's, in our final thing, final section here, let's turn it around to the individual, because I think we can learn a lot for our personal lives.
I you know what I'm thinking as you talk about superpowers as we individually have superpowers in our own lives I know it's not as easy when we have an organization, but you know, know, and I have talked about this, you know, in terms of our families, all of us are all of us have families, think all of us are, you know, in families, our parents, our parents or whatever.
So let's talk about that and this may be more speculative, but like we have superpowers because we, know, in terms of my family reunion or whatever, I am the organizer. I am often the funder. I am an attendee. And so have you can we speculate a little bit about takeaways for personal life? Anybody have thoughts?
Josh: Well, one thing I'll say is just that what we found is that when you hold a virtual conference, just setting aside the family reunion for a moment, when you hold a virtual conference, you tend to get a lot more people who have family responsibilities attending the conference. So people with small children who would have a really hard time leaving their kids and traveling.
Thomas: Mm-hmm.
Josh: For example, or who have pets and would have a hard time leaving them. So it can be much more accessible. It's not just accessible to people who can't afford to go to travel to another city for a conference. It can be for people who just have family obligations. Of course, there's a flip side to that, which is then, and this is kind of what Sue is talking about, then,
Thomas: Mm-hmm.
Josh: Creating your space at home where you can fully attend to the conference without distraction as much as possible. And this is another place where organizations can offer funding for people who want to stay home to rent a little shared workspace, for example, to attend the conference. If they don't have a place in their home to be able to get away from the everyday obligations to attend the conference. So there are ways to bring more people into the experience.
Sue: Then the other thing I would add is just what this has really done for me is that it has given me quite a lot of hope actually, especially this planet we're on that is so interconnected now. The idea that if we get something right, it catches on really quickly. And if we can solve making virtual meetings and virtual conferences just to that tipping point where they become really fun and really rewarding and engaging, then we believe that overnight it would be taken up because all the people who are attending, all the people who are in meetings, all the people who are even doing birthday parties virtually and discovering that there are funner ways to do it than you realised, all of that starts to build on itself. And so we do believe that this is something that you can have a lot of hope for because the connectivity of the world really works in our favour.
Thomas: Yeah.
Josh: Yeah, FaceTime has taken off, right, on the phones because it is really lovely to chat with a family member who, you my kids are away in college and it's great to be able to catch up with them and see them while I'm talking to them. I remember 20, wow, 23 years ago when my daughter was just born, my mother who lived across the country would Ichat with us. That's what it was called back then. It was called Ichat. And we set my mother up with a camera and she would read books to our children and hold up the book to the camera. And I just remember after she started doing that, when we did finally then see my mother, you know, once a year or something, would, the kids were instantly connected with her. already, felt they knew her, they felt they could just run to her and be with her. There was no hesitation, no awkwardness. And so to Sue's point, these technologies can really help keep us connected, even in between the annual or biannual family gatherings that you were talking about, Thomas. So maybe the whole family could get together a little less often in person, but much more often virtually just to keep those connections alive.
Thomas: Yeah, tons of ramifications. We're going to wrap up our discussion today. Panu, why don't you close us out? I imagine in Finland, culturally, there are ways that this is happening as well. So what are your thoughts either on the personal or professional as we wrap it up today?
Panu: Yes, thanks Sue and Charles for sharing all that and for your passion into working with the current reality and shaping it to the better and taking into account basic human needs and trying to do a systems level thinking about how to get things forward. So much appreciating that. Finland is a small country with high levels of education, so different startups and things to do with electronics. Technology are a big part of what's going on here. There's lots of things who will resonate with what you are doing and listeners will put links to the website where you can find much more information about the practicalities and different possibilities about what you and Josh have been talking about here. Also appreciating that you are view on success is that everything good counts. So it doesn't have to be that we instantly change everything into virtual, but for example just having the annual conference every second year virtually so it's already cutting half of the emissions for example and that's related to living with complexity and ambiguity that we have been often talking about in this podcast. So warm thanks from my side.
Thomas: Yeah, so listeners, I hope you got something interesting out of here. It perked your interest. We'll have some good links in the show notes. There's a ton of stuff going on in this area and it's again, as we've talked about, you have an epiphany or once you have some new creative knowledge, it can spark all kinds of things. Psnu said we can change the structure to meet our human needs so that's ultimately what it's all about. So Sue and Josh thank you so much for the work that you're doing and for the structural changes that you're making and Panu and listeners everyone be well.
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