Ken Jennings: “Welcome to America’s favorite answer and question game, Adrian! The answer is ‘The Fishbowl Sandwich’.”
<DING!>
Adrian:“If you had to pick one unique/creative/innovative session format or strategy you successfully implemented or you’ve witnessed that resulted in better interaction and engagement, what would that be and why?”
—Merijn van Buuren question via LinkedIn, July 17, 2024
Ken Jennings: Right!
And, just like that, I was on to the next round!
We can dream
Here’s how I answered Merijn’s question:
“In 2015, I invented the fishbowl sandwich. It’s a session format where hundreds of people can profitably discuss and learn more about a “hot” topic—typically “hot” because it involves difficult challenges for the participants—and crowdsource creative, unexpected solutions by drawing from the ideas and experiences of the entire audience.
A well-designed and facilitated fishbowl sandwich is the best way I know to uncover, share, and develop solutions in a single session. People are often unaware that they know things that could be of immediate value to other group members. The fishbowl sandwich process finds these individuals and helps them share their knowledge and expertise. It encourages active participation and ensures that multiple perspectives are heard.
As a bonus, you can also use a fishbowl sandwich to offer structured consulting to group members grappling with a specific issue or problem.”
Having only one tool in your tool chest of conference session designs and formats won’t get you far. No problem! I also wrote The Power of Participation: Creating Conferences That Deliver Learning, Connection, Engagement, and Action, which Julius Solaris called “a mandatory read for the modern event professional”.The book comprehensively covers twenty-seven fundamental session formats that transform traditional conference sessions into a powerful learning and connection experience for your attendees. That’s why Jerry Weinberg described The Power of Participation as “a catalog of tools for designing meetings”.
For each format, the book includes:
A descriptive overview.
When to use the format.
Required resources and pre-planning.
Step-by-step implementation guidance.
Thousands of event professionals have purchased Event Crowdsourcing and The Power of Participation. They’ve beefed up their event design toolkits with the tools to tackle the hardest event design jobs.
The other day, a client booked an hour with me to discuss how to make their conference better. Not much time, but enough for us to uncover and for me to suggest plenty of significant improvements.
Thinking about our conversation afterward, I realized that all my recommendations involved six fundamental processes that, when implemented well and appropriately, will make any conference better.
Using participant agreements.
The Three Questions.
Pair/trio share.
Fishbowl.
A personal introspective.
A group spective.
So here’s a brief introduction to each of these core processes. Each section includes suggested links and resources to learn more.
Participant agreements help to create an intimate and safe conference environment. They set the stage for collaboration and participation because they give people permission and support for sharing with and learning from each other
I’ve used the six pictured above for many years. You can read more about ways to create attendee safety and intimacy via agreements—and the benefits for your meetings—in Chapter 17 of The Power of Participation.
The Three QuestionsUltimately, there are three key things that conference attendees want to know about each other. As this post explains, they want to know about:
Attendees’ relevant pasts that bring them to the meeting;
What people personally want to learn and happen at the meeting; and
The valuable experience and expertise that’s available from others in the room.
I’ve covered the value and how to run The Three Questions in all three of my books, but the latest and most up-to-date description is in Chapter 18 of Event Crowdsourcing.
And check out this video (transcript included) where I explain The Three Questions with the help of my friends at Endless Events.
The Three Questions typically takes 60 – 90 minutes. When you add it to a one-day or longer conference it will significantly deepen participant connections made and strengthened during the event that follows.
Pair/trio share
Any conference session that doesn’t regularly use pair share (or trio share) is missing out on the simplest and easiest tool I know to improve learning and connection during the session. (Okay, if you’re running lightning talks, Pecha Kucha, or Ignite, you get a pass.)
The technique is simple: after pairing up participants and providing a short period for individual thinking about an appropriate topic, each pair member takes a minute in turn to share their thoughts with their partner. Read this post to learn why you should use pair share liberally throughout an event. More details can be found in Chapter 38 of The Power of Participation.
Fishbowl
Every good conference includes participant discussions (aka breakouts). The single best way to create a productive discussion that prevents anyone from monopolizing the conversation is the fishbowl format. (Which you can also use online.)
[TIP: You can use fishbowls to great effect in panel discussions too! Here’s how I do it.]
Fishbowls are flexible formats that you can adapt to the time available and the number of participants. Learn more about them in Chapter 42 of The Power of Participation.
A personal introspective
Much of the learning that occurs during a traditional conference is wasted because participants don’t have the time or opportunity to consolidate and integrate personal learning into their future life and work. Though a personal introspective takes about an hour to run, it’s the single best way I know to maximize the learning and future outcomes of an event. I recommend you use one at the end of any multi-day conference.
Every conference I design and facilitate has a final session that I call a group spective. The personal introspective described above allows participants to review what they have personally learned and to determine what they consequently want to change in their lives. A group spective provides a time and a place to make this assessment of the past, present, and potential future collectively.
The design of a group spective depends on the goals and objectives of the preceding event. These days, I invariably start with a beautifully simple technique, Plus/Delta, (see Chapter 56 of The Power of Participation) in which participants first publicly share their positive experiences of the conference. When that’s done, they share any changes they think would improve the event if it were held again.
Plus/Delta is an elegant tool for quickly uncovering a group’s experience of a conference. I’ve run them for hundreds of people in thirty minutes. (Some groups take longer; your experience may vary!) A Plus/Delta usually has an immediate emotional impact, drawing the group together right at the end of the event.
[TIP: A variant, action Plus/Delta, is a great tool for a group to determine and commit to group action outcomes uncovered at a conference.]
Conclusion
It’s best to think of these six core processes as building blocks that can be used in multiple ways. Combining them appropriately allows you to create customized optimum process to meet different goals. A great example is using two pair shares around a fishbowl to create what I call a fishbowl sandwich: an incredibly effective way to create very large group discussions around a meaty topic.
It’s also helpful to see these processes as parts of the conference arc, which is how I envision the overall flow of a participant-driven and participation-rich meeting.
One final point. When appropriately incorporated into a good meeting design, these six core fundamental processes will make any conference better. But for maximum effectiveness, it’s important to use them in a congruent way.
For example, participant agreements are useless, even counterproductive, if conference and session facilitators don’t support them. Similarly, telling attendees they’ll have the opportunity to participate in their learning and then feeding them a diet of broadcast-style lectures will not be well received. In fact, competent facilitation is a prerequisite for these processes to be successful. (Yes, I’m here to help 😀.)
[Note: This event was a workshop, not a presentation. Sessions are often advertised as “workshops” that aren’t. If you want to know the difference, read this.]
Allocate enough time for workshops so you don’t have to rush
I think my biggest regret about this workshop is that it felt rushed. Why? The quick answer is that I tried to include too much for the time available. But it’s more complicated than that.
Don Presant asked me to offer a CSAE session of up to an hour in length. I asked for the maximum. In retrospect, I should have asked for more time. (I might not have got it, but it never hurts to ask.) After the workshop, Don asked me how much time I would have preferred. “Two hours,” I replied immediately.
Over the years I’ve become good at keeping to the time allocated for sessions. My approach is simple; I practice what I plan to do with a stopwatch running and keep paring down what I’d thought to include until it fits. I note the elapsed time at the start of each new segment and check how I’m doing during the session, adjusting accordingly.
This workshop didn’t work out so well. I cover the logistical reasons below. But being rushed is never good. I had never tried to run a one-hour online workshop before. And one lesson I learned is that I’m not going to try to run one in just one hour again.
Additional concerns when a workshop is online
My workshop was designed to include two chunks of content and two participative exercises. As is usually the case in my workshops, I work at two levels. I try to make the workshop personally useful for the participants by allowing them to learn about each other. Simultaneously, participants experience and get familiar with how the formats I use work.
This workshop would have been better in person. I probably could have done it in an hour. What made it rushed online was the time taken to switch between content and participative segments, and the toll this took on the flow of the session.
If I’d run this workshop in person, I could have easily run it by myself. Online, I needed two assistants — thank you, Don and Carrie Fischer! Don did the intro and close, monitored the chat, and fed me questions. Carrie hosted the meeting on Zoom, set up multiple breakout rooms, and messaged instructions while the breakouts were in session. There’s no way I could have run this workshop without them. Yet I now realize that having one of them or a third person manage the context switches between the interactive and content portions of the workshop would have helped me a lot!
Over the last couple of years, I’ve run multiple successful two-hour or longer online workshops. Looking back at the run of shows, these workshops had a similar or fewer number of context switches between interactive and content segments. Consequently, I’m going to allocate longer time for workshops than an hour from now on.
Logistical concerns that made this workshop rushed
One unexpected logistical concern occurred just before the workshop started. Instead of using CSAE’s Professional Zoom account, we had to use mine. Fortunately, my Zoom settings were set as I needed them to be, but I did worry that this would require me to take over some of Carrie’s work. Luckily, with Don and her as co-hosts, Carrie was able to handle the usual Zoom support.
Unfortunately, I was responsible for the context switches between Zoom Gallery mode and sharing my keynote presentation slides. That was a mistake; at least the way I tried to implement it.
Using Keynote in Zoom
There are several ways to share a Keynote presentation in Zoom. My favorite is to share my Keynote presentation as a virtual background in Zoom. Zoom has described this functionality as “beta” for a while, but I’ve not had any problem with it to date except for the minor bug I found this time, as described below. My “talking head” is superimposed on my slide at the size and position I choose. Here’s an example (this is my view as the presenter):
This works well for a one-off presentation in a Zoom meeting. However, it turns out to be painful to implement when you need to switch in and out of Keynote during a workshop. Here’s why:
When you switch to displaying a Keynote deck via this method in Zoom, there’s a short delay while Zoom loads the deck. We tested this during our tech rehearsal and the delay was acceptable (a few seconds) with the setup and bandwidths we had. This is not a big deal, though it’s not what a professional production team would do.
More seriously, if you stop sharing your deck and then want to share it again, you can’t continue from the last slide you displayed. Zoom reloads the entire deck from scratch. My workshop involved three shares of my master deck, interspersed with participative portions in Gallery view. To avoid having to step through previously viewed slides, I split my workshop presentation into three Keynote decks. And that’s when I found a Zoom/Keynote bug…
The Zoom/Keynote bug. After splitting my presentation into three separate decks, I began a rehearsal. I ran through the first deck, stopped sharing it, and then selected the second deck. Zoom picked the wrong deck to display! (At first, I thought I’d clicked on the wrong deck, but it quickly became clear that Zoom+Keynote was to blame.) This was not acceptable! I realized that each of the three decks had the same long filename with a number appended to the end. I guessed that Zoom was not reading the entire filename, and that’s why it was picking the wrong deck. Sure enough, when I renamed the three decks with a number at the beginning of the filename, Zoom reliably picked the deck I had chosen. Phew!
Better ways to manage context switching
During the hour workshop, I had to perform six context switches while facilitating: Gallery->Keynote->Gallery->Keynote->Gallery->Keynote->Gallery. I found it distracted my mental flow, especially the several steps involved in starting up a different Keynote deck each time.
In Gallery View, I used breakout rooms and a camera off/on technique for simple human spectrograms and fishbowl discussion during the last segment of the workshop. This was complicated to manage in the short time available, and I felt the quality of the workshop suffered.
I mentioned these problems to my friend and event production expert Brandt Krueger, who sympathized. He pointed out that I had encountered limitations of software-based solutions to what are essentially production issues. For example, I could run Keynote on a second machine (I have three in my office) and use a switcher to instantly switch video between the Zoom and presentation computers. (Brandt loves the ATEM Mini switcher, and I have come close to buying one on several occasions.)
Consequences
I had assumed that what I’d rehearsed might take a little longer when I went live. And I expected to spend some time answering impromptu questions during the first three segments of the workshop. But I had reserved what I thought was enough time for the open-ended final discussion so I could still end on schedule.
As it turned out, I underestimated the slowdown from context switching. Answering a couple of questions brought me to the final segment about ten minutes later than I had planned. The time for the concluding discussion was shorter than I would have liked. We went over a few minutes, and I cut a final “lessons learned” pair share I had planned to include.
Although I covered everything I’d planned, the workshop felt rushed to me, and I don’t do my best work under the circumstances.
Well, that’s how you learn. I’ll do better (and allow longer to do it) next time.
Conclusion
There are some of the lessons I learned from this online workshop. I hope they help you avoid my mistakes. If you have other suggestions for improving the challenging exercise of running an ambitious online workshop, please share them in the comments below.
Tired of meetings that don’t end on time? Who isn’t? Things were bad enough when we held our meetings in person. Now so many meetings are online, it’s easy to saddle remote workers with back-to-back meetings. When one overruns, you’re late to the next one. Hey presto, your tardiness snowballs! (And, no, you can’t be on two Zooms at once without going through tortuous hacks.) Sure, sometimes you’re at the mercy of others. But you can stay on time at online meetings when they’re your meetings — if you follow the guidance below!
NOTE: Many of these suggestions are good practice for any meeting!
Before the online meeting starts
Set expectations
Apart from those rare meetings that are ritual courtly dances with every step minutely choreographed, what happens at a meeting is unpredictable to some degree.
Ideally, the only unpredictable parts should be when you’re doing useful work, like sharing ideas, discussing options, making decisions, etc. And setting expectations for the meeting before it starts is key to minimizing the time-wasting behavior that we’ve all experienced during meetings.
You have two tools to set meeting expectations: creating agreements and the meeting agenda.
Creating agreements
I’ve facilitated meetings for decades. In my experience, the best way to reliably improve a meeting is to create and (gently) enforce agreements about how participants act there. Consensual group norms generate powerful motivation to keep meetings running smoothly and productively while discouraging unruly behavior. I’ve found that having an appropriate set of agreements eliminates the vast majority of common problems. And if someone still goes down an irrelevant conversational rabbit hole, interrupts others, or talks too much, it’s much easier to lightly redirect them.
Agreements can either be communicated before the meeting or at the start. While there’s no single set of agreements that’s optimum for every meeting, some base agreements should be familiar to anyone who regularly meets online. For example:
Signal via a pre-agreed protocol when you want to say something, e.g., by raising your hand (literally or via a platform mechanism like Zoom’s “Raise Hand”), or via text chat.
If you’ve joined by phone, say your name before speaking.
Additional agreements
Additional agreements that are generally helpful include:
Commit to being present at the meeting unless an emergency occurs.
Don’t interrupt. Instead, use an agreed process to indicate you want to speak.
Follow the group’s discussion and decision processes.
Respect agreed time limits on speaking.
Support the meeting’s scheduled ending time.
Besides meeting-wide agreements, agreements about processes you will use during the meeting are very important. Create agreement and a clear understanding of how participants will:
take turns to speak;
discuss issues; and
make decisions.
The processes to use depend on the meeting’s goals (see agenda) and implicit or explicit power differentials between attendees. For example, you’ll use different procedures if a decision is going to be made by consensus, majority vote, or the presiding CEO. I’ve included some examples below.
Whatever processes you chose, be sure to explain how they work either before or at the start of the meeting. Make sure that all supporting technology, such as an on-screen timer, is available and there’s someone responsible for running it.
Providing an agenda in advance
An agenda is a vital tool for staying on time at online meetings, in fact at any meeting. Providing participants with a clear, detailed agenda in advance is respectful and smart. “In advance” doesn’t mean five minutes before the meeting. It means giving attendees enough time to read and review beforehand. This allows people to formulate questions, ideas, and positions on agenda items beforehand, saving time during the meeting. Whenever possible, include participants’ input into the agenda by distributing a draft with a deadline for questions, corrections, and additions for a final agenda before the meeting.
Timed agendas are very helpful for staying on time. Even if it turns out the written times can’t be fully adhered to, they give attendees an idea of what’s expected and make it easier to reschedule upcoming agenda items on the fly.
Be clear about who is running the meeting. Online meetings often need various kinds of support. Be sure everyone knows their responsibilities for note-taking, setting up breakout groups, displaying visual aids, polling, monitoring text chat for questions or requests to speak, maintaining time agreements, etc.
Occasionally, an itemized agenda is impracticable because the meeting is preliminary and exploratory: for example, a group meeting for the first time to discuss a possible collaboration. Even under these circumstances, be sure you circulate a brief description of the meeting goals and a start and end time.
Check that everyone involved with meeting tasks and support — facilitation, note-taking, setting up breakout groups, displaying visual aids, polling, monitoring text chat for questions or requests to speak, maintaining time agreements, etc. — is present and ready to do their work. If the meeting is large, a backchannel for these folks to communicate, like Slack, can be very helpful.
Online discussions can often become messy, with people interrupting, taking up too much time, or going off-topic. To avoid this:
gently enforce time limits for speakers. I use an on-screen timer program, ManyCam, but low-tech solutions such as a timekeeper displaying their phone’s countdown timer work too.
Expect to readjust your schedule during the meeting
If you haven’t supplied a timed agenda, it’s important for the meeting leader to share their thoughts on how the group will use the time available. Since it’s rare to precisely follow such plans, regularly recalculate the time allotments as the meeting proceeds, and update/consult with participants on any changes you think you’ll need to make.
If you complete the meeting agenda ahead of schedule, end it early! No one will complain. 😀
Finally, end on time! It sometimes becomes clear during a meeting that the agenda scope was unrealistic. More time is needed to satisfy the meeting’s goals. Asking to extend the meeting duration may be an option, but don’t just keep going. Instead, before the meeting is scheduled to end, estimate how much longer is needed and poll attendees to see if they can stay. Respect their responses and proceed appropriately. Options include:
Continue for an additional agreed-upon time (which you may need to negotiate).
Continue without one or more participants if you can still achieve your meeting goals despite their absence.
Schedule another meeting to finish what’s been started.
Conclusion
It’s important to stay on time at online meetings. Yes, running late inconveniences everyone attending, and some people may have to leave on time, with the consequent loss of their contributions and involvement. In addition, every corporate or community meeting that runs late reinforces the all-too-common dysfunctional cultural norm that all meetings will overrun. The resulting psychological, and emotional burden imposed on attendees who routinely experience losing control of their time is high.
Hopefully, these ideas will help you and your colleagues stay on time at online meetings. Do you have further suggestions? I’d love to hear them in the comments below!
It’s easy to start working with Stooa. Registering a (free) account requires the usual information: name, email, and password. You can also add your Twitter and/or LinkedIn profiles if desired.
Once you’ve registered your account, you’re ready to create a new fishbowl.
As you can see, you can specify a discussion topic, add a description, and schedule the fishbowl start and duration (up to four hours; though that would be cruel and unusual punishment). You can also choose a language to use. Currently, the choices are English, Spanish, French, and Catalan. On clicking Create fishbowl you’ll see a summary of your new fishbowl, together with a link to distribute to others so they can join it. You’ll also receive an email with the same information — a nice touch.
Starting your fishbowl
When you click on Go to the fishbowl, Stooa will ask for permission to use your camera(s) and microphone(s). (Once you’ve joined a fishbowl, you can choose which ones to use.) Enter how you’d like to display your name, and you’ll see this screen:
When you’re ready to begin, click Start the fishbowl. At this point, the camera and microphone will be active just for you. Share a short introduction with the waiting attendees. When done, you’ll appear in one of the five fishbowl “seats”. Click Allow attendees to join the conversation to begin a discussion.
Running your fishbowl
At the top of the screen, you’ll see the remaining time for the fishbowl, a button to end it, and the number of attendees present. Clicking on the latter displays a list of people currently in the seats, followed by the remaining attendees. The list includes links to the Twitter and LinkedIn profiles of each attendee if they entered them.
At this point, attendees can enter/leave one of the fishbowl seats by clicking on the Join/Leave the conversation button at the bottom of the screen. The other buttons allow participants to choose and control their camera and microphone.
Five participants is a good maximum for a controlled and useful discussion. Stooa smoothly implements the entry and departure of fishbowl participants.
When your discussion is over, use the End fishbowl button to close the session.
Stooa review — what do I think?
Here are my initial impressions from a brief look. First, I want to acknowledge Stooa’s creator, Runroom, for developing this tool and making it Open Source: software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify and enhance. Hosting the software so that anyone can use it is another Runroom gift. They explain why they did so here. Thank you Runroom!
Stooa was easy to register and use on Chrome or Safari. First-time users should have little difficulty, as the entire onboarding process is designed very well. I haven’t used the tool with a large number of attendees, so I can’t say how it holds up under load. Given that the number of folks simultaneously on video chat is limited to five, I expect it will work fine.
Stooa succeeds admirably in its purpose as a single process tool that facilitates effective group discussion.
Limitations
Currently, you can’t remove a fishbowl participant. This could be a problem if you used Stooa for a public fishbowl discussion, publicized via a link on social media.
In addition, with all seats filled, there’s no way for waiting attendees to indicate that they’d like to join the discussion, so a fishbowl host doesn’t know how many others are waiting to speak. To deal with this, attendees could use a backchannel tool like Slack to message the host that they’d like to join in. Alternatively, adding a hand raise option to the attendee list would help to solve this problem. And incorporating a simple text chat for all attendees into Stooa would provide even greater flexibility.
Stooa is not the only tool for running online fishbowls. In July 2020, I shared how to use Zoom to run fishbowls online. Zoom is, of course, a fee-based platform, but many organizations own a license and Zoom does many other things as well. In this situation, Zoom includes attendee text chat and hand raising. And its breakout rooms allow you to create, inside a single tool, the fishbowl sandwiches I use to facilitate group problem-solving.
In an ideal world, the tools we use would include only the features we need. We don’t live in such a world, and Stooa is a well-crafted platform that allows groups to meet and discuss online. Whether it includes everything you need to make such discussions effective and fruitful is ultimately up to you to decide.
More about Stooa
I hope you’ve enjoyed this Stooa review and found it useful. Here are some additional resources for exploring Stooa. Feel free to add your experiences and thoughts in the comments below!
21:00 How these formats satisfy the core purpose of meeting formats: creating great conversation with smart people that delivers valuable takeaways.
22:45 Using the Post It! technique to determine what should be covered during a meeting or session, and at what level.
24:45 Most important takeaway: Be curious about doing meetings differently. Now, there are better formats available for meetings than those we’ve always used. Don’t just read about these formats, but experience them at a well-designed, well-facilitated/moderated event to truly learn how great a meeting can be.
We covered a lot in a short time, but there’s much more to learn about Powerful panels and good meeting design!
For years I’ve been successfully facilitating in-person group discussions at meetings, using the simple fishbowl and fishbowl sandwich processes. These techniques work because, at any moment, only a small, clearly defined, (but constantly changing) group of people are involved in the discussion. As a result, you can moderate an interesting, orderly discussion with hundreds of people, any of who have an equal opportunity to speak.
Online group discussions bring a new set of challenges.
We have all experienced poorly facilitated online meetings, where people unilaterally turn on their microphones and speak away, colliding aurally with others and monopolizing the conversation. An experienced moderator can minimize this behavior with a starting set of clear agreements that participants will follow during the discussion.
But however good the facilitation, there is far less environmental and body language information available online than in-person. The subtle cues we’ve all learned for moving between listening and speaking in a conversation are largely absent. (Stephen Mugford and Pamela Kinnear go into more detail here.) This makes creating a useful, flowing discussion harder.
Existing solutions and their limitations
Some of the fancier online meeting platforms provide functionality that can support simple fishbowl process quite well. Typically they use the “panel on a stage” model. A moderator moves audience members who raise their hand in some fashion into a panel (speaking) seat. When people have finished speaking, they leave the stage and the moderator can fill their seat with someone else.
Currently, though, such platforms don’t make it easy to move people in and out of pair or trio share groups: a requirement for the “bread” portions of the fishbowl sandwich.
One of the reasons I like to use Zoom for online meetings is its reliable and easy ability to quickly move people into breakout room groups for sharing. Zoom is a great tool for a discussion session’s opening and closing small-group fishbowl sandwich sharing. But how can we moderate discussion amongst a sea of faces during the fishbowl itself?
How to effectively hold a discussion online in Zoom
I’m indebted to Stephen Mugford for suggesting a simple and effective way of moderating fishbowl in Zoom.
In-person fishbowls use “people sitting in the 3 – 5 chairs up front, facing the group” to indicate who can speak at any moment. For a Zoom discussion, the same delineation can be made. Simply ask everyone except the facilitator/moderator to turn off their camera and microphone at the start.
When someone wants to speak, they turn on their camera and microphone. A nice feature of Zoom is that their picture will then jump to the top of Zoom’s speaker or gallery view. This makes them easy to spot.
The moderator guides the order of speaking and discussion with those who are “live” in the usual way. When people have finished sharing for the moment, they turn off their video/microphone and return to listening.
A variation
Sometimes when I run a fishbowl in person many want to speak. I have them queue up in a short line at the side of the chairs. That provides feedback to the folks in the chairs that maybe it’s time to give someone else a turn!
Similarly, you can use Zoom’s text chat to queue up people who wish to enter the fishbowl. This allows:
those who are calling in by phone to signal they want to speak; and
the facilitator and group to see how many people are waiting to speak.
In practice, I’ve found the suggested live/listening camera/microphone protocol works very well. I only add using text chat as a signaling channel when there are participants who are calling in by phone.
Simple!
This is a simple and successful way to implement fishbowl and fishbowl sandwich discussion process in Zoom. I recommend you try it! And if you have used other platforms to run these processes successfully, please share in the comments below!
What’s the best way to facilitate a community discussion? Recently, I had to answer that question at short notice. My task: design and facilitate a two-hour community discussion in response to a bombshell announcement made by the largest employer in my tiny rural hometown of Marlboro, Vermont.
[Update: Want to know how to do this online? See this post!]
The community was in shock. Consequently, I felt it was important to use a discussion format that:
Supported respectful dialog from a variety of constituencies;
Created an environment that was as safe as possible for people to share;
Minimized the likelihood that people would monopolize the meeting;
Allowed both short statements and controlled impromptu conversations; and
I ran a one-minute-per-partner pair share with this question. “What do you think about the proposed Marlboro College plan to close down the school and transfer the endowment and campus to Emerson?”
The fishbowl format
Now, watch this three-minute meeting video clip in which I explain how fishbowl works.
Here’s the fishbowl rules poster used at the meeting.
We listed two topics for the community discussion, and allocated roughly half the available time to each, with a short break between them. I facilitated the first topic, and a community member with mediation experience took over for the second topic so I could join the discussion as a participant.
Results
About 75 people attended the meeting (watch the video below to see them!) which ran for 2¼ hours.
Most community meetings in my town are done in “New England Town Meeting” style, where a moderator picks people from those with raised hands to speak. This approach:
May miss people who have something important to say.
Allows individuals to monopolize meeting time by speaking for a long time.
Doesn’t support the development of coherent conversations between a small number of people.
Our opening pair share allowed everyone to think and express their initial thoughts and feelings at the beginning of the meeting. This modeled the potential for contributing right at the start. It made it more likely that an individual would realize they had something they wanted to share.
The fishbowl, by allowing anyone to take a chair at any time, encouraged spontaneous and responsive sharing. (Check out the video linked below to see how well it worked.)
In conclusion, the feedback I received about the meeting process was uniformly positive. Both those physically present and those who watched the video agreed that the format allowed townsfolk to reflect and share their thoughts and feelings in a respectful and flexible way.
Find out more
If you’d like to watch more of the video, go here. This linked page includes an annotated timeline of the meeting.
How often have you heard “Any questions?” at the end of a conference session?
Hands rise, and the presenter picks an audience member who asks a question. The presenter answers the question and picks another questioner. The process continues for a few minutes.
Simple enough. We’ve been using this Q&A format for centuries.
But can we improve it?
Yes!
Let’s explore, starting with…
Six criticisms of traditional Q&A
Traditional Q&A reinforces the engrained assumption that the presenter is the expert, and audience members are relative novices. This ignores today’s reality that the smartest person in the room is the room.
Traditional Q&A is a one-to-many process. These days, conference attendees come to learn andconnect. But the only connection going on (if any) during traditional Q&A is between the presenter and individual audience members.
Have you ever thought, “I could answer that question better than [the person on stage]!”? Traditional Q&A provides no opportunity for obtaining answers from audience members.
Who gets to ask questions? The presenter decides, allowing any implicit (and explicit) bias full reign.
How much time is available for questions? Again, the presenter decides. Too little time scheduled frustrates audience members whose questions remain unanswered. Too much time leads to a premature session close.
During traditional Q&A, the questioner is in the audience while the presenter is up on stage. As a result, questioners remain largely anonymous; audience members can’t even see a questioner behind them without turning around.
Ways to improve Q&A
I can think of two fundamental ways to improve Q&A. Here are…
Five ways to refine the traditional Q&A format
Include multiple Q&A opportunities throughout the session. This helps audience members get answers to questions while they’re top-of-mind, rather than waiting until the end of the session. It also increases interaction with the presenter, which can help maintain attendee attention and improve learning.
Instead of the presenter picking the questioners, have an independent third party (a moderator) choose them.
Or you can have the audience submit questions via an app and then vote on the list. This helps uncover popular questions.
If you’re using a moderator, have the audience submit questions in writing or via an app. This allows the moderator to curate questions to be asked. When appropriate, the moderator can combine similar questions.
Instead of taking questions from the audience, have questioners line up at a front-of-room mike so everyone can see them.
Or, we can…
Further improve Q&A by integrating it into a discussion format
Traditional sessions have two parts, first a lecture, and then Q&A. As mentioned above, presenting multiple short pieces of content interspersed with Q&A increases interaction and consequent learning. But we can do better!
Combined with experiential exercises, here’s the approach I use in my Participate! Labs.
Using a facilitated discussion format like the fishbowl sandwich, I create a session that offers Q&A on an as-needed basis. As I share content, attendees can join me on stage at any time for questions or a discussion that I moderate. (Check the link to see how this works.) The session then becomes more like a live Ask Me Anything (AMA) around my content.
Creating a truly participative Q&A in this way lets the resulting questions and discussions reflect the audience’s just-in-time needs, optimizing the value of the session for participants.
Do you have additional suggestions for improving Q&A? Share them in the comments below!
So you’re holding a conference. How are you going to get your audience tuned in and engaged?
I shared my thoughts on this topic on a 2017 episode of the weekly #EventIcons interview with good friend and host Brandt Krueger. Our hour together was packed with useful information, so feel free to watch the whole thing (scroll down to view the video) or check out the timeline below for the main themes we discussed.
3:00 Adrian tells the unlikely story of how he got into the events industry.
8:10 What would Adrian be doing if he wasn’t in the events industry?
9:10 The one driving passion shared by so many event professionals.
10:10 Why event planners and stakeholders should care about engagement.
11:20 Why traditional meetings don’t meet attendee needs very well.
12:10 How building participation into meetings creates engagement that significantly improves learning, connection, and outcomes.
14:20 Why lectures are so ineffective.
15:50 How to work with speakers and attendees who are introverts.
18:50 How to create a safe environment for attendees to share, learn, and connect.
20:15 An explanatory journey through the stages of participant-driven and participation-rich meetings that use the Conferences That Work model.
26:30 The positive aspects of supporting engagement at events, and the neglected need to evaluate events’ long-term impact.
29:10 The value of incorporating white space into events and several ways to do it.
34:50 How to work with speakers to make sessions more participatory.
37:20 How to market participant-driven conferences.
42:30 Three examples of simple participation techniques you can use to improve meetings: body voting, large facilitated fishbowl discussions, and The Solution Room.
50:30 The biggest mistake meeting planners make when attempting to improve participation and engagement.
54:30 Where to find all kinds of ideas about meeting design — and Adrian’s next book on crowdsourcing events.
Ken Jennings: “Welcome to America’s favorite answer and question game, Adrian! The answer is ‘The Fishbowl Sandwich’.”
The book comprehensively covers twenty-seven fundamental session formats that transform traditional conference sessions into a powerful learning and connection experience for your attendees. That’s why Jerry Weinberg described The Power of Participation as “a catalog of tools for designing meetings”.
Much of the learning that occurs during a traditional conference is wasted because participants don’t have the time or opportunity to consolidate and integrate personal learning into their future life and work. Though a personal introspective takes about an hour to run, it’s the single best way I know to maximize the learning and future outcomes of an event. I recommend you use one at the end of any multi-day conference.
In 2022, I ran a 
Tired of meetings that don’t end on time? Who isn’t? Things were bad enough when we held our meetings in person. Now so many meetings are online, it’s easy to saddle remote workers with back-to-back meetings. When one overruns, you’re late to the next one. Hey presto, your tardiness snowballs! (And, no, 
I’m a big proponent of 
What’s the best way to facilitate a community discussion? Recently, I had to answer that question at short notice. My task: design and facilitate a two-hour community discussion in response to a bombshell announcement made by the largest employer in my tiny rural hometown of Marlboro, Vermont.
How often have you heard “Any questions?” at the end of a conference session?