Have direction, let the dialogue go where it wants to go, and engage everyone.

I recently facilitated two meetings that took me slightly outside of my normal setting, which was teaching working professionals in a graduate degree program. Both recent experiences yielded interesting insights in my journey to apply my know-how in different settings.

One of the things I realized is that these three things – have direction, let the dialogue go where it wants to go, and engage everyone – work pretty well as guiding principles around which to design and execute a facilitated experience. Which is good. Because that’s the ground in which I am planted.

Here’s what those principles mean to me.

• “Have direction” is an antidote to creating a long list of specific goals or objectives that you feel compelled to meet. It means being clear about where you want to go, but allows for flexibility in how to get there. Because…
• …you want to let any dialogue go where participants want to let it go (with some guardrails). It’s reading the room and allowing participants to make meaningful connections based on their own experiences, not the connections you think they must make.
• Engage everyone forces you to think about different ways to engage folks who are coming into an experience at different, unique moments in their lives. They may be tired or energized, clear minded or clouded in other thoughts, confident or nervous, wanting to advocate or wanting to absorb, etc. You need to account for the fact that participants are humans living in their singular moment in time. They are not necessarily the humans you imagined when you designed the experience.

These items played out pretty well in a meeting I facilitated with staff of Open Communities, a fair/affordable housing organization working in Evanston and nearby suburbs.

I loved this opportunity. It came through Eve Williams, who works at Open Communities and who I met through our mutual association with the Master’s Program in Learning and Organizational Change at Northwestern University. We chatted a few times about community listening and I shared some of my work on this blog. Eve asked if I could come in and talk during a staff meeting about designing engaging ways to listen to community members.

Some of the staff members do more 1×1 interactions with the community (folks seeking housing assistance) rather than working on events of group engagements. So we chatted about an approach to nudge the group to “think like designers” about their specific roles and activities.

This framing – “think like designers” – comes from my teaching experience. Few professionals think about what they do as doing design. But anytime we create something that other people experience, we are doing design. Once we got students to accept this broad definition of design, they began to see the profession of design as yielding a whole new set of practices and tools that might be useful in designing solutions to solve problems across a number of settings. They felt more comfortable with the idea that they “do design.”

So we had a direction for the Open Communities meeting: Think like a designer.

I then put together five of my own observations about designing experiences. I used “observations” intentionally. These were not rules or principles to be followed precisely, but a list of a few things that I see when observing or critiquing the design of community listening events. My intention was to open the door a bit to co-creating thoughts about doing design together with the Open Communities group.

I set up the session by handing out a one-page list of the observations (a few bullet points to explain each) that would guide our initial discussion. Participants also were given post-it notes. The room had a whiteboard which I divided into sections for each of the five observations plus one labeled “other.” My instructions were to use the post-it notes to record any thoughts, aha’s, questions, ideas that came to mind as we talked through each observation. We would then post the notes to near the observation that triggered the thought to create a kind of heat map to visualize our thinking. Then we would talk about what that heat map might mean.

Here’s how the session flowed:

• We talked about the observations (and participants took notes) for about 25 minutes.
• We posted notes to the whiteboard (5 mins).
• I broke the group into smaller groups of 2 or 3 and gave them about 10 minutes to consider the question: Looking at the whiteboard now, what do you think this means, for this team?
• We than debriefed for another 10 minutes back in the large group.
• We wrapped up trying to summarize insights.
• I closed by handing out sets of stickers – cats, balloons, unicorns, silly faces – as a reminder that we can use very small things to change our experience of something.

Behind this structure are some ways I apply the three guiding principles.

Have direction. The direction was simply to nudge the group to realize that they can in fact “think like a designer” and improve the ways they engage folks in whatever setting they work (individual or group). I had no idea what parts of my observations may resonate but trusted that, through dialogue, the group will discover its own connections.

Let the dialogue go where it wants to go. This principle influenced two elements. The first was having folks write down their thoughts while we talked through my observations. I advised them to write down whatever work-related thought or idea was sparked by the observation – even if it wasn’t related exactly to the observation. If the observation sparked some thought, capture it. Second was the prompt question to review the heat-map whiteboard – What do you think this means, for this team? “What do you think this means” is a great open-ended, no-wrong-answer prompt that inspires exploration.

Engage everyone. Again, this influenced two elements. The post-it writing component nudged 100% active participation. The fact that we were going to post each note to create the heat map also motivated participation. The second element was breaking into small groups for discussion rather than just staying in the large group. As almost always happens, this part of the agenda was filled with energy.

Three things indicated that the meeting structure worked.

• The whiteboard exercise revealed a clear pattern. The group had a lot more post-its about things like setting outcomes for their work and really understanding their community. Fewer post its were on things that were about design practices, like thinking about openings, middles and endings, or about how to do small experiments.
• The group’s interpretation of the whiteboard. They concluded that they are comfortable with outcomes and community understanding – it’s central to their work as a not-for-profit – but need to do more work to think about how to apply different design practices to improve experiences.
• The stickers were a hit. My takeaway: Stickers work for all age groups in all settings.

The second meeting I facilitated was an entirely different setting.

I am taking a class through Northwestern University’s the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. I have friends who participate in this program and thought it would be an interesting experiment to go back into learner mode in a formal setting. (There’s a lot to say about my experience – and I won’t go into it here – but taking these classes is not something I will continue.)

The class was organized around a reading of Matthew Desmond’s book Poverty, by America. Each week we discussed two chapters. Classes are entirely student led with a new discussion leader each week. When my turn came up, I followed the norm of writing out 5-6 discussion questions related to each chapter and sharing them several days before class.

The classroom is set up with tables arranged in a large rectangle to accommodate 15-20 participants. Discussion leaders sit at the top of the rectangle. In past sessions, the leaders went through their discussion questions one-by-one until they covered them all. Discussion participation was always one person at a time (by design).

Here’s what happened during my session.

• I skipped, in whole or in part, more than half of the discussion questions I posed.
• I said several times “so what I am hearing is,” then summarized, paused and waited for someone to jump in again.
• Near the end of the session I flipped the order of my final two questions. A participant opened up a conversation that was similar to my topic in my original final question. So I paused a moment to say “let’s explore this topic” but also said that we were going to circle back in the final 10 minutes to cover my new final question. I realized the new final question was actually a better summary question.

This was really 90% about letting the dialogue go where it wants to go. And I was recognizing, in the moment, how difficult it is to balance “letting the dialogue go where it wants to go” with having the dialogue go in a meaningful direction and ensuring no one hijacks the conversation (this particular group self-monitors very well).

And I recognized that my toolkit – “so what I am hearing is…” and preparing folks to think about a question before it gets asked – plays well in this type setting.

I just wish I had brought stickers.

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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.