A terrific example of the value of client feedback—Part 2

client feedback: Photograph of participants at a Peace and Security Funders Group meeting from the organization's websiteIn Part 1 of this post, I offered gratitude for client feedback and gave an excellent example from Rachel LaForgia, the Senior Program Director of The Peace and Security Funders Group (PSFG).

In this continuation post, I’ll share what I learned from Rachel’s feedback.

I get client feedback!

Right after PSFG’s second peer conference in May 2024, I was delighted to receive detailed feedback from Rachel (in red), which I shared in full in Part 1. Here’s what I learned.

Peer session development process

Rachel made two great additions to the peer session development process we’d designed for her first peer conference.

1 . BRAINSTORM AND REFLECT

I like the ancillary questions she added to the key prompt: “If you could pick a session to hold … using the people and resources around you, what would it be?”

  • What topic or question would it address?
  • Who here could you enlist as an ally or speaker or support person?
  • Why does it matter? (Here and now)

These are excellent ways to help participants think more deeply about a session they might propose.

2. SESSION DESIGN

“…we gave [participants] the option of either working alone or finding someone else to create a session (we wound up having a group of 6 people interested in a specific topic create a two-party session together, which was great). We also had them confirm any facilitators or speakers during this creating time, which made the voting/scheduling piece easier for us.”

Adding time for people to explore buddying up to create a session together is a wonderful way for participants to choose session leaders. In the past, I’ve given this task to a small independent group of subject matter experts. Giving participants time (if available) to do this work themselves is a definite improvement when—as in this case—most if not all participants have significant experience and expertise to share.

Full group share outs

PSFG used my personal retrospective process during their conferences. For the second conference, Rachel added an innovation: participants could optionally share their action items with the whole group.

She reported: “We had 4 participants elect to share their action items to the full group and it turned out in a few cases that participants in other groups had someone to offer that person around their action item. It was useful for us as conference organizers to know some of the things that actually came out of the conference.”

I’d describe this as a novel variation on the “action” version of Plus/Delta included in my second and third books. Scheduling this opportunity during the personal retrospective allows participants to share with the full group what they’ve just uncovered and verbalized. This can make sharing more impactful because the work is fresh. On the other hand, an action Plus/Delta’s sole focus on individual offers of accountability and asking for help is, I think, a more structured and inclusive process to consider when a group wants to move to action on one or more objectives.

Group retrospective process

“We shifted this to a reflection exercise where we asked people to reflect on four things (LEARN, APPRECIATE, PLUS, DELTA), circle 2 of their top items from each category, write them on post-it notes, and then we did a gallery walk. After the gallery walk, we invited share outs on what people noticed. We made this shift because last year, we found that the plus/delta process wound up being mostly focused on logistics and we really missed getting insights into what the group noticed about themselves, so we tried to parse that out a bit. We also heard from the introverts that they did not like having to come up to the mic to share. This process felt more introvert-friendly, while allowing people to still “hear” from one another (via the post-it notes). I copied the questions we asked below in case it’s useful.”

Column 1: LEARN

    • What did you learn? About yourself? This community? Your work?

Column 2: APPRECIATE

    • Who or what do you want to celebrate or appreciate today?
    • Someone in this room? Yourself? One of your pair share partners? Maybe it was someone who facilitated a session or someone you met at the snack table

Column 3: PLUS

What’s something you thought went well? What are the things you wouldn’t change, that you really appreciated about the Annual Meeting?

Column 4: DELTA

Deltas are the things you might change or do differently next time.

This is a creative and excellent alternative to Plus/Delta. I, too, have noticed that Plus/Delta sharing can focus on logistics rather than participants’ learning and connection. Rachel’s process has three great features. It:

  • Allows participants uncomfortable speaking in public to share their thoughts and feelings in writing.
  • Emphasizes personal, community, and work-related learning outcomes.
  • Provides a specific place for appreciations. Although I always encourage participants to give appreciations during a closing Plus/Delta, I think featuring an opportunity to post them is likely to encourage more sharing.

A small improvement: I’d add a prompt to the appreciation column to include the “why?” of the appreciation.

On the other hand, I still like the classic Plus/Delta for three reasons:

  • With large groups, due to its fast pace, a classic Plus/Delta provides more opportunities to share.
  • Its fast pace typically leads to an emotionally energetic closing session.
  • When sharing deltas, alternative points of view can be shared immediately as pluses.

Having received Rachel’s feedback, I will consider using her approach for more introverted groups with enough time to complete her process. And I think I will change my Plus/Delta instructions to encourage sharing and appreciations more than I have in the past.

Unsolicited client feedback is a gift

In conclusion, think about a teacher or mentor who helped you in some important way in the past. Did you ever thank them and tell them why your experience with them was important to you? If you’re like me, the answer to that question is usually “no”.

So please remember that unsolicited feedback is a gift. Thank you Rachel LaForgia ( and my other generous clients) for giving me such excellent client feedback that tells me my work has been noticed and values it enough to suggest how it might be improved.

Image attribution: photograph of a PSFG meeting from the home page of the organization’s website.

A terrific example of the value of client feedback—Part 1

I love my clients, but some have a special place in my heart — those who generously give me feedback.

All the conferences I design and facilitate have a time and place for participants to share their experiences. But most clients don’t give me post-event feedback about my work or the event.

And that’s okay. After all, feedback benefits me, and it takes time and effort for a client to articulate clear feedback.

So when a client graciously takes the time to share significant and useful feedback with me, I am very grateful.

One such client is Rachel LaForgia, the Senior Program Director of The Peace and Security Funders Group (PSFG).

My work with The Peace and Security Funders Group

The PSFG is a community of practice headquartered in Washington, DC, that “connects and supports the global community of funders advancing peace and security efforts in order to build a more peaceful, just, and equitable world.” Its members include over fifty well-known international foundations, non-profits, and collectives.

PSFG has a deep appreciation for the importance of meeting design. Here’s what Cath Thompson, Managing Director at PSFG shared about this topic in a 2024 interview:

“…One thing that we have learned over the past several years is that we need to be designing our events with such deep intention to bring folks together to have the conversations that they cannot get elsewhere, to not be reinventing the wheel, and to create spaces where people know they belong, they can find their people, and they can also have these challenging and expansive conversations that lead to social change. So that, we see as the core of our work, is not just to design a whole bunch of programs, but to design them well, to bring the right people around the table together.
…In networks, the strength is in the collective wisdom of the participants. One of my colleagues said to me recently, “If PSFG members can just watch the recording after an event and get out of it as much as they would have if they had participated in real time, then we’ve done them a disservice.” So we try to design things so that we are both addressing the power dynamics that are inherent in the field of philanthropy and trying to dismantle some of that and also making it very valuable to people where they walk away knowing at least one new person, for example, or knowing something new, or engaging in self-reflection that helps them improve their own work. We do a lot of that and focus on that.”
—Extract from an interview with Cath Thompson of Peace and Security Funders Group (PSFG) by Alec Saelens on January 25, 2024

Rachel contracted me in 2022 for design consultation on PSFG’s first online peer conference.

One of the first things we did was a short exercise that helped us explore the essence of her desired meeting. I asked her to visualize and draw what PSFG wanted and needed the conference to achieve.client feedback: Photograph of Rachel LaForgia sharing her visualization drawing of her organization's wants and needs

Over several meetings in 2022 and 2023, we spent ten hours reviewing and refining her excellent draft design. PSFG held their first online conference in May 2023 [“We just finished our first peer conference—people loved it! “], and a second in  May 2024.

I get feedback!

Right after the second peer conference, I was delighted to receive detailed feedback from Rachel. I share it here [in red] because it’s a terrific example of the value of client feedback.

“Reporting back from another fantastic peer conference! Our second peer conference was even better than our first. We had great feedback from participants and even had one participant interested in learning how to bring peer conferences to her own work (I recommended your book and blog!).

We made three tweaks this year that worked really well for us:

1. Peer session development process.

We added more scaffolding/support to the peer session design process and got noticeably better (clearer, more well-defined) peer sessions. We added some guided reflection around possible topics (including asking people to think about why their session mattered to this group). Then, we had them workshop their idea with a partner in a quick pair-share (this was intended to just have them speak their idea aloud, which in of itself can help them get more clarity, but also to get some feedback from a colleague).

After that, we gave them the option of either working alone or finding someone else to create a session (we wound up having a group of 6 people interested in a specific topic create a two-party session together, which was great). We also had them confirm any facilitators or speakers during this creating time, which made the voting/scheduling piece easier for us.  I copied the details below.

2. Full group share outs.

We asked for share outs at various points in our agenda, but found that asking for share outs after the individual retrospectives was really helpful both for us as organizers and for the participants. We had 4 participants elect to share their action items to the full group and it turned out in a few cases that participants in other groups had someone to offer that person around their action item. It was useful for us as conference organizers to know some of the things that actually came out of the conference.

3. Group retrospective.

We shifted this to a reflection exercise where we asked people to reflect on four things (LEARN, APPRECIATE, PLUS, DELTA), circle 2 of their top items from each category, write them on post-it notes, and then we did a gallery walk. After the gallery walk, we invited share outs on what people noticed. We made this shift because last year, we found that the plus/delta process wound up being mostly focused on logistics and we really missed getting insights into what the group noticed about themselves, so we tried to parse that out a bit. We also heard from the introverts that they did not like having to come up to the mic to share. This process felt more introvert-friendly, while allowing people to still “hear” from one another (via the post-it notes). I copied the questions we asked below in case it’s useful.

Here’s a quick run down of the peer session process and the group retrospective:

PEER SESSION PROCESS (Total time: ~45 minutes, probably could have used an hour)

ENROLLMENT AND INSTRUCTIONS (5 minutes)
    • We gave examples (from last year) of the conference agenda, explained how long the sessions were, etc.
    • (About 70% of the attendees had done the peer conference the prior year, but we did have a lot of new people this year–interestingly many new people wound up leading sessions)
BRAINSTORM AND REFLECT (5 minutes total)
    • If you could pick a session to hold at this Annual Meeting, using the people and resources around you, what would it be?
      • What topic or question would it address?
      • Who here could you enlist as an ally or speaker or support person?
      • Why does it matter? (Here and now)
PAIR SHARE (6 minutes)
    • Turn to a person next to you.
    • Person 1 shares the what/who/why of your session in 1 minute
    • Person 2 has 2 minutes to offer tips/feedback/ideas/ask clarifying questions.
    • Switch!
SESSION DESIGN (30 minutes)
    • Now that you have shared and gotten feedback, you have the next 15-20 minutes to further develop your idea.
    • Again, by the end of this time, the goal is for you to create a topic for one conference session that you feel like you could make some headway on in 60 minutes tomorrow, with the people in this room.
    • You have two options:
      • Work independently. You can draft your dream session by yourself.
      • Find friends. You just spent an hour listening to what other people want to do and what expertise they have. Is there anyone here you want to buddy up with to propose a session?
    • By 5:10, here is what we need from you:
      • A Title for your session
      • A 7-10 word description of your session
      • Who can lead it/speak on it (yourself or others–go find them and confirm they are on board before submitting)

GROUP RETROSPECTIVE (30 minutes)

Column 1: LEARN
    • What did you learn? About yourself? This community? Your work?

Column 2: APPRECIATE
    • Who or what do you want to celebrate or appreciate today?

    • Someone in this room? Yourself? One of your pair share partners? Maybe it was someone who facilitated a session or someone you met at the snack table

Column 3: PLUS:

What’s something you thought went well? What are the things you wouldn’t change, that you really appreciated about the Annual Meeting?

Column 4: DELTA:

Deltas are the things you might change or do differently next time.

Hope this is useful info–happy to hop on a call to debrief this further or answer any questions you might have.”

I love Rachel’s feedback! In Part 2 of this post, I’ll explain why, and what I’ve learned.

Using pair share for group work practice

Group work practice. An image of two people who are seated in adjacent chairs looking at each other. They are part of a circle of chairs filled with other people.I’m a big fan of the core facilitation technique pair share. After pairing up participants and providing a short time for thinking about a topic or question, each pair member takes a minute or so, in turn, to share their thoughts with their partner. I use pair share regularly to move participants’ brains into active learning, introduce them to someone new, and share relevant ideas and information about what we’re currently exploring together. But there’s always more for me to learn. Last week, a client pointed out that we can use pair share for group work practice too!

Rachel and I were preparing for another core facilitation technique I use at the start of meetings: The Three Questions. Participants think about their answers to the questions and then share their answers, in turn, with the group. We were reviewing Rachel’s outline and I came across an addition to the process.

“Practice Round (3 minutes). Now, turn to the person next to you and in 60 seconds or less, share your answers. Ask for feedback.”

Rachel had added a pair share to allow all participants to practice their answers before sharing with the entire group.

I immediately loved and saw the value of her idea!

I devised The Three Questions thirty years ago and have run it hundreds of times, but I’d never considered this improvement. Though I mention common slip-ups to participants, such as spending too long on the first question, they sometimes still occur. Allowing everyone to practice their answers with one other person before group sharing is a simple and effective way to help each participant:

  • Feel more confident about their answers;
  • Get personal feedback; and
  • Provide better answers to the group.

Conclusion

I will be adding Rachel’s small but valuable improvement to my future sessions of The Three Questions. As a proponent of lifelong learning, I’m happy to use observations, feedback, and trying new things to continually refine what I do. A generous hat tip to Rachel LaForgia, Senior Program Director of the Peace and Security Funders Group, for sharing this simple application of pair share for group work practice with me!

Don’t waste valuable meeting time having experts presenting to “learners”

Don't waste valuable meeting time having experts presenting to "learners". A panel from a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. Calvin is sitting at a school desk saying "THIS IS A BIG, FAT WASTE OF MY TIME!"

Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to waste valuable meeting time.

Ask attendees why they go to meetings and their top two responses are to learn and connect. Remember kids that ask a question, and when you answer it they say “why?”

“Why can’t we go outside?”
“Because it’s raining.
“Why?”
“Well, water’s coming out of the sky.”
“Why?”

So be that annoying kid for a moment and ask: “Why do you want to learn and connect?

If you play enough rounds of the why game, and ignore the unprofessional but possibly truthful answers — for example: “I’m hoping to get to know an attractive colleague better”; “My boss said I had to and I need a pay raise”; “It’s been too long since I ate fresh Maine lobster” — you will find that the core motivation to go to meetings is to change in some useful way. Change how you see things, and, most important, change how you do things: i.e. behavior change.

The dubious value of public speaking

So now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s review what Harold Jarche, a veteran educator in the Canadian Armed Forces and now a leading consultant on workplace learning, has to say about the value of public speaking [emphasis added]:

I do a fair bit of public speaking. But I doubt that much of it has changed anyone’s behaviour. I may have presented some new ideas and sparked some thinking. With a one-hour lecture, you cannot expect more. Yet a lot of our training programs consist of an expert presenting to ‘learners’. Do we really expect behaviour change from this? That would be rather wishful thinking. Learning is a process, not an event.”

To learn a skill or get better at one you have to practice. Deliberate practice with constructive feedback is the key for long-term success.

“I conduct face-to-face workshops as well as online ones. For my on-site sessions, usually 1/2 or a full day, I try to cover the basics and the key concepts. We do a few exercises to get people thinking differently. But I don’t expect significant changes in performance as a result of one day together.”
Harold Jarche, no time, no learning

Like Harold, after years of running meetings and workshops I’ve learned that the likelihood creating permanent valuable behavior change increases as a power of the time spent together. By “together” I don’t mean listening passively to an expert talk. I mean working together as a group to learn new skills and approaches and ways of thinking and practicing with constructive group and expert feedback.

We’ve all heard we should be doing these things to maximize the value of our valuable time together. But very, very few of today’s meetings involve even a smattering of facilitated deliberate practice with constructive feedback.

When you think of all the expensive time we continue to waste doing things we’ve been doing for hundreds of years which we now know don’t work — well, I think tragedy is an accurate description of what routinely passes as a “meeting”.

Change is hard. We now know that social production is the way to maximize learning that leads to significant, valuable, long-term change. At meetings, the instantiations of social production are facilitated workshops run by and/or with content experts. That’s what we should be doing.

Not lectures from experts. Don’t waste valuable meeting time doing that!

Why experiential learning is superior to every other kind

experiential learning: photograph of a young boy learning to surf in the ocean with his father standing just behind him. Photo attribution: Flickr user mikebairdWhy is experiential learning superior to every other kind? In a word: feedback. Jerry Weinberg explains simply and concisely.

“Why is reading or writing something different from doing something?

First consider reading. Reading is (usually) a solitary activity, with no feedback. Without feedback, there’s no check on what you believe you’re learning.

Now, writing. Unless you put your writing in the hands of someone (or perhaps some computer analysis app), there’s also no feedback, so there’s no check on whether you wrote sense or nonsense.

When you do something, you interact with the real world, and the world responds in some way. With the world’s feedback, you have the possibility of learning, confirming, or disconfirming something. That’s why we strongly favor experiential learning over, say, lecturing or passive reading or writing.”
—Jerry Weinberg, Why is reading or writing something different from doing something?

Photo attribution: Flickr user mikebaird

Three prerequisites for lifelong learning

three prerequisites for lifelong learning: a black and white photograph of the cellist Pablo Casals. Photo attribution: Gus Ruelas

Three prerequisites for lifelong learning

When the renowned cellist Pablo Casals was asked why, at 81, he continued to practice four or five hours a day he answered: “Because I think I am making progress.” Here are my three prerequisites for lifelong learning.

Like Casals, I want to keep living lifelong learning by:

As an example, here’s what I recently learned while leading a workshop.

Trying new things and noticing what happens

During the workshop:

  • I used a projected countdown timer and a 90-second piece of music to get participants back in their seats on time at the end of a short mid-workshop break. Outcome? It worked really well!
  • While facilitating body voting (aka human spectrograms) I verbally stated each question we were exploring. Outcome? It seemed like a few participants didn’t hear or understand what I’d said until I repeated myself. Verbal communication didn’t work so well.
  • I wore a red hat when I was explaining/debriefing and took it off when I was facilitating experiences. Outcome? This was the second time I’ve tried this approach, and I’m still not sure whether it’s effective/useful or not.

When you pursue risky learning, some things work while some don’t — and for some, the jury is still out. Whatever happens, you can learn something!

Soliciting and being open to observations and feedback

During the workshop:

  • Some of the questions I asked during body voting asked individuals to come up with a numeric answer, and then join a group line in numerical order. Someone had the bright idea of showing their answer with fingers raised above their head, so it was easy for others to see where to go in the line. Many participants copied the idea, which sped up forming the human spectrograms. I’d never seen this done before and will adopt this simple and effective improvement.
  • I love to use a geographic two-dimensional human spectrogram to allow participants to quickly discover others who live/work near them. The wide U.S. map I projected did not correspond to the skinny width of the room. A participant suggested that we rotate where we stood by 90º. I tried her suggestion and found that it was easy for people to move to their correct positions. Duly noted!
  • At the end of the workshop, I solicited public feedback at a group spective. One participant shared frustration with my verbal statements of the body voting questions and suggested that the questions also be projected simultaneously. An excellent refinement that I will incorporate in the future.

Notice how participants were able to point out deficiencies in processes I used and simultaneously came up with some fine solutions. Peer learning in action!

Final thoughts

I’ve been designing and facilitating participant-driven and participation-rich meetings for 33 years, and many participants have been kind enough to share that I’m good at what I do (check out the sidebar testimonials).

But I don’t want to rest on my laurels. I’m no Casals, but, like him, I keep practicing, learning, and — hopefully — making progress.

Photo attribution: Gus Ruelas

Thank you for your feedback

Thank you for your feedback: a screenshot showing 1,000 WordPress comments on this blog as of December 2014Thank you for your feedback! Although some say that comments on blog posts are passé, I still think they provide valuable feedback and connection for communities that develop around posts and the topics covered on a blog.

So I’m happy that currently [December 2014], readers of this niche blog (albeit one that will surpass 6M pageviews this year) have shared 1,000 comments on the 343 Conferences That Work posts I’ve written over the last five years. Many commenters are now friends, and some of you I met first through a comment on a post.

Thank you for your feedback!

[September 2023 Update: Although the pace of commenting has slowed, we’re up to ~2,000 comments. I continue to appreciate and welcome your feedback on my 800+ posts and thank everyone who has taken the time and trouble to write back.

Sadly, I had to remove the Disqus comment system a year ago. It was slowing down the site and occasionally conflicted with other plug-ins. This removed some of the nice display and threading features we used to enjoy.]

How To Design Events That Get Amazing Participant Feedback


Here’s how to design events that get amazing participant feedback. Nick Martin of Denmark’s workshopbank interviews me. Topics include participant-driven events, ground rules, The Solution Room, The Three Questions, and Personal Introspectives.

Nick is building an interesting collection of interviews with facilitators about the processes they use. His site is well worth checking out. The interview is under half an hour and includes an extremely cute intruder around the 23-minute mark.