Designing community listening events

I had another opportunity this past week to attend a community listening event. This one was successful in a number of ways, but I am now beginning to form a short list of principles I think may lead to improving the design of these events.

• Design to the type of thinking task(s) you require of participants.
• Ensure real lived experience – not conjecture – informs dialogue or decision making.
• Design for > 90% active participation.
• Actively reinforce the values of civic participation.

(You can see the development of most of this thinking here, here, here and here.)

Design to the type of thinking task(s) you require of participants.

Organizers of listening events may default to a routine (i.e., listening session = town hall) or they use a meeting structure that is prioritized to gather data or ideas in support of a specific need (i.e., consultants or planners using dot voting to prioritize issues, or having participants review work-in-progress on community issues).

Neither is inherently bad. But they are a choice – a design choice. What I am suggesting is that we need to overlay these choices with another question that focuses attention on the participant experience rather than the organizer’s information sharing or data gathering needs.

What types of thinking tasks may we desire participants to perform?

• Tap into their memories and share actual lived experiences
• Make a decision
• Brainstorm solution ideas (individually or with others)
• Co-create solution ideas with other participants
• Build consensus
• All or some mix of the above

Being explicit about these thinking tasks – and using them to help plan participant experience – is important for a couple of reasons.

It forces us to think about the cognitive effort folks must put into whatever activities we plan. Some tasks take more thinking effort than others. Building small group consensus or co-creating solution ideas are more challenging than recounting routine lived experiences. Dot voting to make a decision can be simple or complex, depending on the voting setup. Being aware of effort helps us design to adapt to the effort required or to reduce unnecessary effort.

Being explicit about thinking tasks also helps us design strategies to model and reinforce the kind of thinking engagement we desire. In the most recent listening event I attended, participants were divided into small table groups to review and discuss a set of specific, local environmental justice issues organized by themes (transportation, housing, open space, community services). A facilitator gave a clear description about the activity to participants before they broke off to assigned table groups. However, an assumption is made here that telling folks about the activity is enough to get set off in the right direction.

That’s a dangerous assumption. People come with agendas and strong opinions and may hijack the activity. Folks may misinterpret or mishear the facilitator’s instructions. They may be unfamiliar with the type of activity you ask them to engage in, or lack confidence in their ability to participate effectively.

You can design strategies to mitigate these challenges. For example: Modeling an activity or behavior before participants engage in it.

Modeling might take the form of spending a short time before moving into small groups explicitly introducing key thinking work we want people to do (i.e., “We want you to share your experiences with an issue.”). Then help them warm up by giving an example of an issue, asking one or more folks to share their experience with it, and then give brief feedback on what was said (“Yes, exactly that.” or “More of this, less of that” using what was said).

The key point is: Designing to the type of thinking tasks forces us to focus our attention on participant experience, and not just on our own data-gathering needs.

Ensure real lived experience – not conjecture – informs dialogue or decision making.

One of my favorite structures for group collaboration is What, So What, Now What? (from Liberating Structures). It moves a group toward thinking about new possibilities but only after first understanding what actually happened and then unpacking what that experience may mean.

It’s also consistent with one of the key lessons from the work of my former teaching colleague Teresa Torres: You get more reliable information when you ask about specific, real experiences rather than asking “how do you typically…?” or “how often do you…?” “Tell me about what you had for dinners this week?” is better than “Tell me what you typically eat for dinner?”

Focusing on stories or moments of real lived experience offers a few benefits.

• It leads folks away from just spitting out ungrounded opinions.
• It emphasizes what people actually do vs. what they think they do.
• It offers up stories that provide rich and subtle insights into how folks deal with situations and make decisions.

A community listening event should always lean into the opportunity to collect stories of real lived experiences, in some form or another. It’s why folks come to a listening event; with the hope that their lived lived experience will make a difference. And we must remember that lived experience continuously changes over time. What we heard last year (or even last month) may not be the same as the current state of the community. Listening deeply helps us pick up the signals of changing circumstances.

Designing to ensure that lived experience informs dialogue or decision making means paying attention to the prompts we use to initiate engagement. The What, So What, Now What? format begins with “What happened?” “What did you notice?” The focus is on facts and observations.

Prompts can also focus on telling stories or describing moments of time:

• Can you think of an example from your own experience?
• Tell me about a time when you experienced …

The key point is: Think about the points in your listening session where it is important to focus participants first on real lived experiences. Then build off of those experiences to more complex thinking (i.e., making decisions, finding consensus, brainstorming ideas, etc.)

Design for > 90% active participation.

How does the event give voice to every participant? And preferably, make that voice visible to both organizers and other participants?

This might really be “design for 100% active participation.” But I am accounting for some event formats – like town halls with civic leaders or panels – where participants may attend because they sincerely just want to listen, learn and/or judge.

Even in these cases, however, we should design opportunities to tap into the thinking of those who make the effort to join the event. An audience passively listening is still an audience thinking and making connections to their own experiences. We should find ways to make that thinking visible.

I recently attended a town hall with more than 100 participants that relied on open-mic Q&A for participation. That gave voice to about 8 people. What were the other 92 thinking? We’ll never know.

Here are some ideas I quickly brainstormed to address that participation gap:

• 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.

These are 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.

This goal of > 90% active participation is an outcome that should frame all manner of community listening events. Not just town halls. We need to create a framing that forces us to design ways to both give voice to all and to make those voices more visible to the community.

Actively reinforce the values of civic participation.

Why do people choose to attend community listening events?

I would love to explore this more explicitly with participants: “Tell me about when you decided to attend this session. What happened?” My assumption is folks are drawn by a deep interest in the topic of an event (i.e., climate change/environment, transportation, education, etc) or they have a complaint or challenge they want leaders to hear (during, say, a meeting held by local politicians). They may also see it as a way of contributing to a particular cause that cuts across local, regional and global settings (i.e., climate change). Or making visible their commitment to the community and their neighbors.

These are all good reasons.

The experience I have had at recent events, however, was transactional. Come to the meeting, engage, and…thank you. No effort was made to connect our engagement to a larger set of values, or how our participation is evidence of our understanding what it means to be an informed citizenry.

In other settings I have experienced efforts to make a connection to some larger set of values. I have heard judges eloquently reinforce the value of “a jury of one’s peers” during jury selection proceedings. When we vote, we reach for the “I voted” stickers and wear them to signal that we have completed our duty.

If we really value the fact that folks take time away from their families, their routines, and the challenges of everyday life to engage in the work of sharing their thinking about the community, then let’s recognize this as a core foundation of our democratic system of governing.

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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.