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Simple meeting design

November 10, 2012 By Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting, Conversation, Design, Facilitation, Invitation 7 Comments

This afternoon, Toke Moeller and I are hosting a little session on Art of Hosting basics at a gathering for emerging indigenous leaders. We decided this afternoon to bring real design challenges into the room and we improvised this simple, simple design checklist. In some ways this is the simplest form of the chaordic stepping stones. Here’s how it works.
In my experience good participatory meetings result from good design and preparation. In this diagram the meeting itself is the last thing we design. First we design the bookends: Purpose on the one hand and harvest/action on the other hand. Once we know that, then we can develop an invitation and finally choose processes that bridge the two sides. The meeting itself therefore become the vehicle by which a group of people reach a harvest and wise action ground in a purpose and a deep need.

Purpose
What is the big purpose that we are trying to fulfill?

A meeting that has too small a purpose has no life in it.  It just seems to be a mundane thing done for it’s own sake.  To design creatively, keep purpose at the centre and ensure that everything you do is aligned with that.

Harvest
What do you want to harvest?
– in our hands ( tangible)?
– in our hearts ( intangible)?

Not every meeting needs to have a report and an action plan, but every meeting does have a harvest. This question is the strategic conversation that helps us focus our time together. We need to think about the shape of the harvest we can hold in our hands (reports, photos, videos, sculptures…) and those we hold in our hearts (togetherness, team spirit, clarity, passion…).

Wise action
How will we make action happen?
– who will help us tune in to the reality of the situation?
How will you keep people together?

It is easy to make a list of to do’s at the end of a meeting and feel like something has been accomplished, but that is a naive approach to change. If action is required get really clear about who needs to be involved to make it happen. Think about who enables action or who can stop it and what resources are required. And if the resources aren’t available or accessible, then make a different action plan.

Also, never forget to make a plan for how people will stay together.  If sustainability is important, then strong relationships are important.  Building a process that doesn’t enhance relationships does not contribute to sustainability.

Invitation –
What is the inspiring question that will bring people together?
How will we invite people so they know they are needed?

Good participatory gatherings depend on the quality of the invitation.  A lazy invitation attracts confused participants.  A clear and powerful invitation accompanied by a powerful personal invitation gets participants who are ready and eager for the work. Invitation is a lot of work.  It SHOULD be a lot of work. A good invitation process makes the meeting easy.

Meeting
What will you do to make the meeting creative and powerful?

Once we know all of this we can choose a meeting process that helps move from purpose to wise action. We can use pre-existing processes like Open Space or World Cafe or design new ones particular to our needs. Today we are using the group pattern language card deck to inspire creative thinking about meeting design.

If we really want to create a new normal, we shouldn’t settle any longer for boring meetings. If the processes we are using aren’t serving us, or helping us crack the deepest questions that confound us, then we should stop using them and start being more creative and powerful.

This little tool has the feeling of a portable, quick and dirty design checklist, that allows core teams and process designers to get working pretty quickly.  Use it and let me know what you learn.

It’s not easy

November 7, 2012 By Being, Leadership

Working with groups is not easy.  This is Ian McGeechan, manager of the British and Irish Lions before a dead rubber test.

My friend Kathy Jourdain was quoted yesterday as saying “our power comes from our vulnerability.”  This video reminds me of how that feels some days.

Three practices Occupy gives and gave us

November 6, 2012 By Being, Collaboration, Community, Leadership One Comment

A little reflection today about social change and Occupy coming out of a conversation yesterday.

When I was a young man we talk about “movements” like we were on the go.  From whatever place we were in we will move to another.  And we marked this action with marches and demos, dancing and action.  The feeling of action was powerful and palpable.

Once in a while we occupied a place and sat there for a while.  But in general we were all about the movement.  We made ourselves different from those we were working against and we moved.

Occupy did two things to change this, or at least introduce some new strategies.  For one, they began by staying right where they were: occupying the place where you already are seems like not a very radical form of action, but fully occupying a space, living there, governing yourselves, creating services: that was somehow new, and over the past year I have thought about what it means to choose simply to be present and fully occupy your own space.

Second, the occupy movement in it’s declaration of “we are the 99%” played at a halfway gesture towards thinking about what social change looks like if you first have to build relationships with many who are your traditional “enemies.”  The 99% contains a lot of people that you and I would rather not be associated with in any way.  The choice was a conscious practice of seeing each other together.  Occupy breaks down, as has always been the case, when difference drives people apart.  If difference could drive people together, if we could practice handling difference with a container of relationship, then something new might be born.

And third, Occupy gave up the idea that any of us know exactly what changes are required in the world to make it better.  Obviously there are strategies, tactics, policies and experiments that can be tried, but there are no answers.  Refusing to publish demands is a key piece of this acknowledgment that a) the world is too complex to direct its evolution and b) any action that does not work with existing power in some way is easily crushed.  Once demands are issued, the anti-Occupy narrative can be framed and the movement is marginalized and dissolved.

Occupy was, and continues to be, an experiment.  It is not a new experiment but it is a recent iteration of an age old experiment to see what happens when we choose to stay where we are and deepen relationships.  It continues to share learning, but for me these three practices of occupation, building a common container to hold difference and staying together in no knowing continue to echo in my own work and practice with groups trying to affect changes.

Practice Notes: Cafes for taking a conference to action

October 27, 2012 By Art of Hosting, Conversation, Design, Facilitation, Open Space, World Cafe One Comment

This week I was hosting at a moderately sized conference in Victoria BC with 100 regional public sector union members.  The purpose of the gathering was to increase the number of active members and to inspire members to engage and improve local communities.  These union members all work in the public service and so they have a close ear to the ground on the issues facing communities from homelessness to addictions to environmental degradation to service levels in health and education.  Many of them took public service jobs in the first place because they are caring and committed people, intent on making a better world, especially for the most vulnerable.

This is the fourth year we have done this conference, and the structure has remained pretty much the same over the past four years.  The first evening there is a keynote from the union president (who then stays and participates through the whole two days) and a special speaker, in this case a well-known progressive lawyer who is currently running for office in a local federal by-election. That is usually followed by a plenary panel, which this year featured some provincial politicians from the labour movement and the current legislature and a journalist.

Day two begins with morning workshops on community organizing.  in the afternoon we begin with a World Cafe.  This year we took the Cafe through the following flow:

  • Two rounds on the question of “What does all of this inspiration mean for my own community activism?”
  • One round on the question “what do I still need to learn to deepen my activism?” The harvest from that round was a post it note from each participant outlining some of their learning needs, which union staff will use to help support the members with resources and materials.
  • Following that round I invited participants to reflect on an area of focus for their activism, such as homelessness, environment, youth engagement and so on.  Participants wrote their focus on the blank side of their name tags and then milled around the room and found others who shared those areas of focus.  We ended up with about 12 groups composed of people from across the region who didn’t know each other and who were interested in working in the same issue area.
  • Using this network we next invited the participants to consider the question “What are some of the key strategic actions we can take in this sector?”  The harvest from this was simply to inspire and connect each other in preparation for the next day’s work.

That was the end of our days work.  A quick poll of the room showed that perhaps 20 people had some ideas for action that were considering.

This morning was devoted to a ProAction Cafe.  We had 21 tables in the room and I opened up the marketplace.  It took about 20 minutes for 21 hosts to come forward and for everyone to get settled.  From there we followed a standard ProAction Cafe format.  During the reflection period, when participants are given a break and hosts are able to take a breath and make sense of all the advice we heard, three people all working on engagement strategies got together to compare notes.  This helped them a lot before the fourth round as they were able to point to work the others were doing.  The action networks were already taking shape!

We finished in just under 2.5 hours.  In previous years we ran Open Space meetings on the last morning, but this year the shift in format gave a more concrete set of actions and surfaced more leadership in the room.  With a quarter of the room engaged as hosts, we topped the average 20% of the room from previous years using Open Space.  ProAction Cafe, used at the end of a conference to generate and develop concrete actions is so far the best process in my practice for getting good ideas out of the room with passion, precision and participation.

Including difference to strengthen a movements

October 26, 2012 By Conversation, Facilitation, Leadership

Heard a great story today.

I’m at a conference of union activists who are working to build their activist muscles up and do work in communities.  One of the presenters here is Jason Sidener, who I’ve enjoyed spending a couple of hours with.  Jason is the Member Mobilization Coordinator for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).  he is abased in Madison, Wisconsin and played a key organizing role in the upheavals there in 2011 when public sector unions successfully stood up to Governer Scott Walker’s anti union agenda.

Jason told a story today about some of the work he did long before that high profile action.  He was brought up on a farm, a conservative rural young man who was raised Republican and came from a Republican family.  He changed as he grew up, and when he started working for the union he discovered that in the AFSCME about a third of the members are Republicans.  They like their guns, they are social conservatives and they don’t trust outsiders.

Jason noticed that at union meetings and conventions, these conservatives, who nevertheless were supporters of fair wages and benefits for public sector workers, often found themselves silenced, ostracized and marginalized.  The temptation is to argue with conservative union members and try to convince them that their politics are wrong.  But Jason took another approach.  He saw that the split between conservative and progressive members was dangerous to the unity of the union, so he set about creating a Conservative caucus within the union, where Conservative members could have a safe place to discuss their ideas.

Although counter intuitive, this initiative paid dividends when Republican Scott Walker tried to pass his radical legislation last year.  Many of the members of the Conservative caucus started coming to Jason saying “take me off that list.”  They were realizing that the guy they had elected was no friend of theirs after all.  They appreciated the Conservative caucus but saw that in this case, the bigger movement was more important.

I was struck by Jason’s unfettered approach to this work.  His confidence in the right thing to do, his commitment to inclusion and his presence of mind to care for the bigger movement is inspiring.