Thinking about: Town halls and missed opportunities to engage the engaged

Earlier this week I attended a meeting billed as a community listening event. It drew 100-plus folks. And it has me thinking about missed opportunities to engage every participant who attends such events.

The event I attended was styled as a town hall with a very specific topic focus: Options to address serious financial challenges for the regional transportation system. Public transportation is robust in our area. Changes to service levels, cost and options ripple deeply.

I am going to critique the meeting experience. But I want to caveat this critique. It comes from my evaluation of how things like this are designed and not about the intentions or performance of the meeting’s organizers. Design is about making choices. Following routines that we’ve used in the past is a choice. Breaking or tweaking those routines is also a choice.

In this case, three leaders from the Illinois state legislature plus a policy analyst from a regional planning authority chose to hold this event like a town hall. After presenting some (very good) content, they opened the floor to questions and comments for 30-40 minutes. Maybe 8 or 9 of the 100 attendees had a chance to speak.

My critique centers on the limitations of asking people to take a microphone, stand up and have their say. But honestly: In today’s partisan political environment, I applaud the legislative leaders for taking this risk. One even joked about it (“yes, we really are going to take questions at a town hall”).

I recognize that “normal” routines may turn into tough choices at times. This event’s open questions and comments session went smoothly. The leaders and analyst listened carefully and responded clearly, and made sure they summarized what they were hearing. Frankly, it all gave me a bit of hope. It is an example of an Evanston story I could tell: Communities still do have the muscle memory to effectively work together and be civil.

Yet, I see a missed opportunity to engage every participant who attended.

Think about this: More than 100 people came to the City Council Chambers in downtown Evanston on a Monday evening to hear an analyst from the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) – a little known state and federally mandated planning group – talk about a 130-plus page Plan of Action for Regional Transit (PART). CMAP does not operate or directly control any of the transit services in the region. It was commissioned by the state to develop policy options that are now under consideration by the state legislature as the regional transportation system faces critical financial challenges.

How amazing is that? More than 100 folks signed up to attend this event! Apparently the community is filled with policy wonks and folks who care about engaging in civic discussions about critical services.

The open-question “listening” element of this town hall, however, limited participation to those who were motivated enough to take a microphone and speak in front of 100 strangers. I can say with a high degree of certainty that:

• Every single person in that room had some thoughts or questions after hearing the analysts’ presentation on the plan.
• Not every single person in that room was willing to grab that microphone. (Me included).

So we have a predictable gap.

Total participants [minus] microphone speakers [equals] voices left out of engagement.

In this case, that was 90-100 people.

This really bothers me as a missed opportunity. You have 100-plus people in a room, from diverse backgrounds and ages, listening and learning. But whatever is on their minds at the end of the session walks out the door, never made visible to the meeting’s organizers. Or to all the other participants.

This is not an unsolvable problem. Nor an expensive problem to solve.

Let’s start first with a vision of a different outcome: 90% or more of participants actively engage in at least one opportunity to share their thinking.

It would be easy set up small, inexpensive participation experiments in these town halls and then tweak the ideas based on actual results. What ideas generate movement toward the 90% outcome?

Here’s a quick start at brainstorming:

• Hand out cards at the end of the meeting and ask folks to write out a short answer to some prompt.
• Have cards pre-printed with a multiple choice survey question on one side and blank on the other. Have participants answer the survey and add comments on the other side.
• Use cards (put into a box) or sticky dots (pasted to flip charts) to have participants vote on one or more questions before they leave.
• Set up flip charts around the room and encourage folks to write questions or thoughts.
• Have meeting collaborators use their phones to record (and later transcribe) participant thoughts before they leave.

I’m brainstorming about experiments to test ideas at the end of the meeting. But you could also start thinking about different ways to engage at the beginning of the meeting, or throughout it at planned moments. You might also think about how these ideas might make community thinking more visible to both organizers and participants. And I know there are many other ideas that could be generated; this is just a start.

The point is: Don’t waste an opportunity to engage folks whose presence at an event tells you they are already deeply engaged. Experiment with design choices to move toward an improved engagement outcome.

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The photographs which accompany these posts are taken by me, and show different settings and views of Evanston (where I live). It is a visual reminder that this is the most important setting for belonging and contributing to community: our neighborhoods, our cities.