pair-share Archives : Conferences That Work

Using pair share for group work practice

Monday, May 1st, 2023 by Adrian Segar

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!

Tags: feedback, pair-share, practice, The Three Questions| Posted in Event design, facilitation | No Comments »

Can Broadcast be Personal? Exploring New Ways to Connect with Others

Monday, April 24th, 2023 by Adrian Segar

We prize personal moments of connection, moments when we are moved. But today, broadcast messages bombard us. This leads to the question: Can broadcast be personal?

Occasionally, the answer is “yes”.

A paragraph in a novel unexpectedly hooks your heart.
An inspirational speaker says something that totally resonates with an audience member.
The meditation teacher on Zoom looks right at you as they deliver a perfect piece of wisdom.
A political slogan captures your imagination at the right moment.

And yet, broadcast being personal happens relatively rarely.

As George Orwell remarked, “In much more than nine cases out of ten the only objectively truthful criticism would be ‘This book is worthless …'”.
I once heard a motivational speaker whom I found inspirational at the time. Three months later, I couldn’t remember a thing he said.
The meditation teacher was looking at their camera, not you—and there were 500 other people listening too.
Millions of people heard the slogan that high-priced consultants crafted to appeal to them.

When people come together at a meeting, an event, or a social, we usually default to broadcast-style experiences. We listen to speakers. We’re assigned to large tables where we can’t quite hear the individuals three chairs away from us. We use formats like theater seating that minimize interpersonal contact. Broadcast modalities like these breed a passive experience. And they are so engrained that we default to them unconsciously.

Which leads to a better question.

Are there better ways of creating personal moments of connection?

Yes, there are. We can gently steer people into opportunities to connect one-to-one, or in small groups. And it’s easy to do. Here are three examples:

David Adler’s Jeffersonian dinner

David Adler, the founder of BizBash, loves to connect people. One of his favorite approaches is to host a Jeffersonian dinner, where guests take turns sharing their answers to a question the host offers.

David often uses the question: What was your first job, and what did you learn from it? Each participant broadcasts their answer to everyone, but only for a few minutes, and the sharing moves around the group. Each story provides opportunities for personal connection, as many of the stories involve common threads and learnings.

Pair share

Pair share (or trio share) is such a simple and effective way to create personal moments of connection I don’t understand why it’s not more widely used. Announce a topic or question to a group, ask people to find a partner, provide a little time for everyone to think of their response, and then give each pair member a minute or so to broadcast/share their thoughts with their partner. Maybe add another minute for the pairs to talk to each other about what they just shared.

Voila! You’ve created an opportunity for everyone in the room to have a short, focused conversation, and maybe a moment of connection with another person (whom they may have never met before). Pair share is quick, so you can run it multiple times while people are together, each time with different partners to create new connections.

The Three Questions

I often use The Three Questions to open a peer conference. (See Chapter 18 of my Event Crowdsourcing book for a full description of this core meeting format.) Like the Jeffersonian dinner, each participant has a short-broadcast time to share their answer to a question—in this case three questions—with an entire group.

There are three things meeting participants really want to know about each other. These three questions allow each person to share their past, present, and future in a way that is appropriate and safe for them with everyone in the group. This sharing provides the foundation for connections to deepen during the conference that follows.

Can broadcast be personal?

Traditional broadcast formats are rarely personal because one person dominates the time. But by breaking broadcast into small segments where many people get to talk, broadcast can become personal, while also fostering multiple moments of new connection.

Try it, you—and the people in the room—will like it!

Tags: broadcast, connection, Jeffersonian dinner, pair-share, personal, The Three Questions| Posted in Connection, participation | 1 Comment »

Six fundamental ways to make a better conference

Monday, October 10th, 2022 by Adrian Segar

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.

Using participant agreements

Meeting ground rules, covenants, or agreements. Whatever you call them (I’ve used all three terms), explicitly naming and asking participants to commit to appropriate agreements at the start of a meeting fundamentally improves conference environments.

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.

Creating agreements at the start of a meeting takes five minutes!

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.]

[BONUS TIP: There’s a fishbowl variant, the two sides fishbowl, which is great for exploring opposing viewpoints in a group.]

See this post’s conclusion for one more variant!

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.

Check out this introduction, or Chapter 57 of The Power of Participation for full details.

A group spective

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.

Check out this introduction, or Chapter 58 of The Power of Participation for more details.

[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 😀.)

Tags: agreements, fishbowl, group spective, pair-share, personal introspective, The Three Questions, trio share| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

Ask Me Anything—a better alternative to guest lectures

Monday, March 15th, 2021 by Adrian Segar

Recently, I’ve been appearing as a guest at college event planning and hospitality courses to talk about meeting design. (I love to do this. Teachers, please contact me, it’s free!) Rather than lecture for an hour, I’ve been using an Ask Me Anything (aka AMA) meeting format.

Here’s why I think Ask Me Anything is almost always a better session format than a lecture.

I’ve written extensively on this blog (1, 2, 3) and in my books about why the meeting lecture is a terrible way to learn. (A one-sentence distillation: learning is a process not an event.)

But suppose a group gets the opportunity to spend time with a content expert who knows a lot more about their field than anyone else present? Isn’t a lecture the best format to use in these circumstances?

Well…sometimes. First, let’s explore the circumstances when a lecture may be the way to go. Then I’ll make a case for why an Ask Me Anything format is usually a better choice.

When a lecture is appropriate

Lectures have one thing going for them. They are very efficient ways to share a lot of information with a group.

Short talks

The problem with broadcasting information is, of course, that the recipients are passive attendees. And they may well not be attending. Research shows that our ability to absorb and retain broadcast information falls rapidly over time. To avoid significant “tuning out” it’s vital to share content in small chunks, typically not more than ten minutes long.

So one scenario where lectures work is when they are short. I’m a big fan of carefully prepared five-minute lightning talks and Pecha Kucha (6 minutes, 40 seconds) and Ignite (5 minutes) formats. The latter are invariably entertaining, which helps people absorb and retain what’s presented.

Brilliant presenters

Some people — but not as many as you might think — are really good at creating effective learning experiences via a lecture format.

However, these folks are rarely the people who get the big bucks for their inspirational keynote speeches. Highly paid speakers are usually good at creating emotional experiences for their audiences. Now, there’s nothing wrong with creating an emotional experience for an audience. In fact, learning is often enhanced. Unfortunately, a great speaker may well provide a more enjoyable and emotionally satisfying presentation—but the learning that results is not significantly better than that provided by a mediocre lecturer!

Sadly, I can count on the fingers of one hand the presenters who taught me, via lecture, things I still retain to this day:

My mentor Jerry Weinberg (a genius at telling incredible stories that illustrated the learning he wanted to impart);
The molecular biologist John Medina (who always divides his lectures into ten-minute segments, each introduced with a relevant emotional hook); and
A few of my high school science teachers who knew the draw of enthusiastically performing exciting experiments in front of us (“What will happen?” “Can you figure it out?“)

Conclusions

So, unless your presenters speak for a short time or are brilliant (and I’m not including motivational speakers in that class), lectures are a lousy way for audiences to learn. We can do better.

Ask Me Anything — a better format for learning

We know that active learning is a superior modality for learning more, learning more accurately, and retaining learning. So, how can we incorporate active learning into a session where the session leader/presenter has far more expertise and knowledge than everyone else present, and time is limited?

An Ask Me Anything format provides a great way to improve session learning. Why? Two reasons.

First, the attendees are not passively sitting listening or watching but are actually interacting with each other (see below) or the presenter. That means that active learning is taking place, with all the benefits that ensue.

Second, an Ask Me Anything responds to what participants actually want and need. Rather than a presenter guessing exactly what their audience wants to learn, an Ask Me Anything ensures that many topics, issues, and questions that are top-of-mind for the audience will be addressed.

OK, let’s see how this works.

Warming up an Ask Me Anything with preliminary small group work

I suggest priming the audience with a couple of introductory pair- or trio- shares.

If meeting in person, have people move into small groups with others they don’t know. Online, move people into a set of Zoom’s automatically assigned breakout rooms, or another online platform’s equivalent.

Typically, the first trio share is a “take 90 seconds each to”: a) introduce yourself to the others in your group, or b) “share how you got to be in this class/session/event”.

On returning, ask everyone to think of one issue or question they’d like to discuss with or get answered by the presenter. Emphasize that it can be anything they want to know or hear about.

When working with students, ask the class teacher to pose this exercise a few days before the class and collect and share responses with the entire class and me. This helps the presenter, the teacher, and the class learn about what’s on students’ minds. Before running the next pair share, tell the students they don’t have to stay with what they submitted if something else has come to mind.

Next, run the second pair share, giving each member 90 seconds to share with their partner what they would most like to learn from the presenter. For students, this gives them a chance to prepare for asking the presenter what they want in front of the class.

The Ask Me Anything

Running the Ask Me Anything is straightforward. Have your presenter ask for questions, and enter a dialog with each questioner in turn. If there are a slew of questions, use a fishbowl (in person) or hand raising (online) to control the flow. Remind your presenter that silence before someone speaks is OK; they don’t need to fill it by speaking themselves. Also, make sure that everyone who wants to participate gets the opportunity before allowing more questions from people who have already spoken.

Closing pair share

I strongly recommend closing such sessions with a final pair share on “lessons learned”. This reinforces learning while it’s fresh, making it more likely to be retained, remembered more accurately, and retained longer. For more details, see my post on the fishbowl sandwich, or read the relevant chapter in my second and third books.

That’s it! What do you think of Ask Me Anything as a replacement for lectures in a session? Do you have comments to add or questions to ask? You can Ask Me Anything! Simply share in the comments below.

Tags: AMA, Ask Me Anything, experts, fishbowl sandwich, lecture, lectures, pair-share, presentations, trio share| Posted in Event design | 4 Comments »

When trio share works better than pair share

Monday, December 14th, 2020 by Adrian Segar

One of the best and simplest ways to build active learning and connection into any meeting is to regularly use pair share. (See Chapter 38 of The Power of Participation, or Chapter 27 of Event Crowdsourcing for full details.) I’ve recently noticed that in some circumstances, trio share — pair share but with three participants — works better.

Advantages of pair share

Pair share has a lot going for it. It’s the most efficient way to ensure that every participant periodically switches into active learning, which, as explained in The Power of Participation, provides:

better comprehension and retention;
participant agency about what is discussed; and
connection building between peers.

Pair share duration is minimal. I commonly allow each partner a minute to share their response. Including instructions, a typical pair share might take around three minutes. Getting every participant to actively think and respond to a question or issue in this time pays rich dividends.

Comparing trio share with pair share

A trio share takes longer than a pair share, given the same sharing time per participant. The example above would require at least an extra minute. I say “at least” because it generally takes longer (at least at in-person meetings) to create trios than pairs.

In addition, the conversational directness and intensity may be less in a trio share, since each participant is talking to two people instead of one.

On the other hand, each participant is connecting with two other people, rather than one.

None of these differences is a deal breaker. In the past, I have tended to use pair share, simply because my time with participants is limited and pair shares are quicker.

Since the coronavirus pandemic, however, I’ve noticed something new.

When trio share works better than pair share

Ultimately, you can’t force adult attendee participation. Nevertheless, at in-person meetings it’s rare to have people sit out pair sharing. The reason, of course, is unspoken social pressure. Anyone choosing not to participate is obvious to the people around them.

When the coronavirus pandemic forced meetings online, I began to see more people avoiding session pair shares. I’d allocate pairs into Zoom breakout rooms, and, quite often, one or two people didn’t join their allocated room but stayed in the Zoom lobby.

As the host, I’d gently check in with those remaining behind. Sometimes they hadn’t accepted the breakout room assignment and would do so. But more often than not, it turned out they were absent (it’s hard to tell when their camera’s off).

Their unfortunate partners who went into the breakout room had no one to talk to!

At in-person meetings, this is easy to handle. I ask anyone without a partner to raise their hand, and then pair up isolated people.

Online, this takes too much time, and those without a partner suffer.

Using trio share instead of pair share online

So I’ve started using trio share for online meetings. There are two reasons.

First, trio share reduces the impact on “orphaned” participants. If one person in a trio doesn’t join, the remaining pair can still reap the benefits of pair share.

And second, trio share gently increases social pressure for attendees to participate. Bowing out of pair share affects one other person. Avoiding a trio share affects two.

To conclude

Whatever you do, some people will opt out of small group work. Their reasons are — their reasons. We need to accept that. Switching to trio share for online work is a small tweak that seems to improve participation. And creating a meeting environment where small group work is more likely to occur is always worthwhile.

What’s your experience of using pair share and/or trio share at in-person and online meetings? Please share in the comments!

Tags: active learning, connection, group work, online meeting, pair-share, small group work, trio share, virtual meeting| Posted in Event design, facilitation, participation | 1 Comment »

The best way to hold a discussion online

Monday, July 20th, 2020 by Adrian Segar

What’s the best way to hold a discussion online?

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!

Tags: discussion, fishbowl, fishbowl sandwich, pair-share, trio share, Zoom| Posted in Event design | 2 Comments »

Who goes first — protocols for online meetings

Monday, April 27th, 2020 by Adrian Segar

Last week I shared protocols for “Who goes next?” at meetings. This week it’s time to cover a closely related topic: who goes first?

When everyone shares at a meeting, someone has to start! There are two scenarios to consider: facilitating a discussion for a single group and providing directions for choosing who goes first when simultaneous small group discussions are needed or desired.

Face-to-face and online meetings have different signaling options, which I described in detail last week. So for this post, I’ll chronicle “who goes first” options for single and multiple group scenarios.

Options for choosing who goes first with a single group

• Ask for a volunteer

Probably the most common protocol for determining who goes first is to ask “Who wants to start?” and provide a signaling method: e.g., raise your hand, or use an online signaling option.

This is generally a perfectly acceptable method, though, as you’ll see the next two options may be preferable under some circumstances.

• Facilitator/leader goes first

Sometimes a topic under discussion is tough to talk about. I’ve been in many meetings where the first contribution avoided addressing what was asked or was meager or superficial. This gives later sharers a license to follow suit. For example, a question about how a person feels about an issue may be answered by what they think about it.

When a meeting facilitator or leader starts the sharing and models the kind of response that’s wanted, it’s much more likely that others will respond similarly.

• A plant goes first

No, not that underwatered yet surprisingly intelligent potted hibiscus that’s sitting next to the speakerphone. Or Groot. Rather, the facilitator asks a reliable participant, perhaps warned beforehand, to provide a great response to the posed question/issue/challenge.

Ways for small groups to independently determine who goes first

When you’re facilitating multiple small group sharing, either in person or online, you need to provide each group with guidance on how to choose who goes first. You can provide this guidance in person once everyone is in their small group. Online, typically, you will need to supply “who goes first” instructions before people are whisked into their virtual breakout rooms.

A word about pair share

One of the best ways to improve any meeting session is to regularly include pair share (where paired participants each take time, in turn, to share their thoughts with their partner). Online, rather than splitting everyone into pairs, I recommend you create groups of four. Instruct each group to form two pairs, perhaps using one of the methods described below. Have one pair run pair share while the other pair listens, and then switch. This makes it more likely that each pair will actually follow instructions, and gives the group of four people a taste of three perspectives rather than one.

Methods for small groups to choose who goes first

You can use a couple of strategies: either leave it up to the groups to decide or provide a method for them.

[Some of the following ideas were sparked by this post (check it out for even more ideas!) by Ted DesMaisons]

Letting each group decide who goes first is always an option, but it can also be fun to have groups compare or discover something about each other. Here are some simple ideas; feel free to add your own, especially if you can identify something that relates to the topic groups or pairs are going to discuss:

First name closest to the start of the alphabet
Longest first name
Tallest
Nearest to birthday
Earliest up in the morning
Lowest street address number
Closest to a point in the room
Longest hair
Most pockets
Lives nearest to water
Most recently worked in the garden
Last purchased something
Most colorful clothing

Feeling whimsical? For a pair share, pick neutral substitutes for partners A and B. For example: “One of you is cup, one of you is saucer.” “One of you is coffee, the other tea.” “One of you is sun, one is moon.” You can use plenty of other pairs (rock and roll, knife and fork, bread and butter), but avoid those that could have a negative connotation (e.g., life and death, right and wrong). And if you’re running multiple pair shares in a session, have Partner B start first sometimes, and change partners and who-goes-first strategies as well.

Are there other ways to decide who goes first?

I hope these ideas will prove helpful. I bet there are more I haven’t thought of. If you have additions and improvements, please share them in the comments!

Tags: choice, facilitation, online meeting, pair-share, sharing, small group work, who goes first| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

How to facilitate a community discussion using fishbowl

Monday, December 9th, 2019 by Adrian Segar

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
Was efficient.

I ended up designing (and moderating the first half of) a fishbowl format. To be more precise, I used what I’d call “half a fishbowl sandwich“: an opening pair share plus a standard fishbowl. (All three of these techniques are covered in detail in my latest book Event Crowdsourcing: Creating Meetings People Actually Want and Need.)

The pair share

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.

poster=”https://www.conferencesthatwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/BCTV-screenshot-2.png”

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.

Tags: community discussion, dialog, fishbowl, fishbowl sandwich, Marlboro College, pair-share, respect| Posted in Event design | 1 Comment »

Use pair share to improve conference sessions

Monday, October 10th, 2016 by Adrian Segar

In less than three minutes, you can use pair share to improve conference sessions. 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. (More details can be found in Chapter 38 of The Power of Participation.)

Pair share (aka think-pair-share) is not the same as conversation, because pair share gives each person an exclusive minute of active sharing and a minute of pure listening. This balance rarely occurs during conversation, because typically:

One party speaks more than another, and;
Whoever isn’t speaking is often not fully listening to what is being said because they’re thinking about something they want to say themselves.

Improve conference sessions

Pair share improves conference sessions by:

Resetting every participant’s brain to a state of active engagement;
Providing structured opportunities for participants to share expertise and experience with their partner, and (if built into the subsequent session design) with others in the room; and
Modeling and supporting social learning during the session.

For pair share to work effectively:

Each assigned topic must be central to the session’s purpose;
If the session is presenter-content heavy, hold a pair share roughly every ten minutes to explore and consolidate participant learning; and
Design the session to build on relevant expertise and experience uncovered by each pair-share.

I also like to incorporate a closing pair-share where partners each share three takeaways they’ve acquired during the session. I’ve found that when I use this in a session design like the fishbowl sandwich, participants inevitably stay around deep in conversation after the session is officially over. (That always looks and feels good!)

Finally, you can use pair share as a tool for introductions. Invite everyone to pair up with someone they don’t know and have each person take a minute to introduce themselves to their partner.

Improve conference sessions with pair share: it’s quick, simple, versatile, and effective. Use it!

How do you use pair share? Share with everyone in the comments below!

Tags: active learning, conference sessions, conversation, fishbowl sandwich, improvement, pair-share, social learning| Posted in Event design | 3 Comments »

Nine learnings from the first Meeting Design Practicum

Monday, February 22nd, 2016 by Adrian Segar

I’ve returned from a wonderful 48-hour whirlwind of experiments and play with 30 meeting designers in Utrecht, The Netherlands. We came from Europe, South America, Slovakia, and the U.S. (me) to learn, share, and connect at the first Meeting Design Practicum, hosted by Eric de Groot and his merry gang. Here are nine learnings from the first Meeting Design Practicum.

Similar in spirit to the many EventCamps held around the world since 2010, the Practicum was a safe place for event professionals to experiment with techniques, approaches, ideas, and formats without the obligation and pressure of a “successful” outcome for a paying client. We met informally at an ancient Dutch fort, cooked meals together, did our own housekeeping, and quickly built an intimate community with connections that will continue to reverberate into the future.

I can’t give a complete survey of everything that happened at the Practicum. For one thing, I couldn’t attend every Practicum session because we often had to choose between simultaneous sessions. In addition, some of the important takeaways were already familiar to me, so I don’t include them here. Rather, I’ll share new insights that made an impression on me during our three days together. I apologize for not attributing them to specific people; suffice it to say that every single participant brought important insights and contributions to our gathering.

Elementary meetings

One of the great concepts Eric & Mike van der Vijver introduced in Into The Heart of Meetings was modeling portions or an entire event on the familiar format of what they call Elementary Meetings—such as weddings, legal trials, birth celebrations, etc. The Practicum provided several examples of this.

Our journey through the event was mapped onto a large wall “tree”, with our influences mapped onto the roots at the start. We added our learnings from the Meeting Design Practicum as leaves to the branches as the Practicum progressed.

Participants had the opportunity to share a single short meeting design tip/trick. This was mapped onto the magic competitions of Asterix and Obelix where druids demonstrated their magic to the tribes. On several occasions, those of us offering magic disappeared into a small room, only to reappear wearing impressive druid beards. One at a time, introduced by a flourish played on a trumpet we shared our tips. At the end of the Practicum, we chose the most useful tip. The winner, Victor Neyndorff, took home the golden snouieknife (sp?).

Gardening

Metaphors provide powerful ways to communicate, and I find them surprisingly difficult to discover. A delightful and effective metaphor for meeting design was shared early in the Practicum. Seeing the meeting designer as a gardener maps so many aspects of meeting design process onto the familiar act of gardening that enumerating the parallels is left as an exercise for the reader.

Objects

In 2007 – 8 I was a participant in a year-long leadership workshop held over a dozen weekends. For our last meeting, we were asked to bring a personal object and share its meaning and relevance to what we had learned and our experience. I found this a moving and bonding experience, as we told our stories, each linked to an object that we held in our hands or placed at the center of our group.

The Practicum reminded me of this format, thanks to a session on using objects at events. We concentrated on using individual objects with attributes that evoked a desired event theme, message, or mindset. One interesting aspect of this approach is that you could use it to replace the common practice of saturating the event environment with theme/message decor. Imagine—no more branded cocktail napkins needed! Another interesting suggestion was the use of two or more interacting objects. (For example, a mirror ball together with lights held by participants.)

Improving a traditional presentation with closing Q&A

Instead of moving straight into Q&A after a presentation, provide a short time for participants to share possible questions in small groups. This helps introverts get their just-as-good-as-anyone-else questions out. It also provides a check for those wondering whether their question is a good one, or optimally phrased.

“Never trust a leader who doesn’t dance at the event party”

I’ll let this stand without comment, except to say my experience bears this out.

A good question for pair-share

“What motivates you the most?” An excellent question for energizing participants by reconnecting them with their personal passion.

Working with status-conscious leaders at events

Some leaders are heavily invested in their personal status. At events, they may insist on speaking at length to everyone, even though the audience may widely consider their talk a waste of time. We discussed this issue at one of the four Practicum “challenge sessions”. One possible solution suggested was to elevate the leader’s status, for example, by adding a short well-produced video showing the leader to best advantage. Then the leader may accept more interactive and interesting formats, such as an interview by key participants with preplanned questions.

Relief from discomfort

My philosophy when facilitating is to bring participants as gently as possible into situations or experiences that may be uncomfortable but are needed to satisfy desired outcomes. During the Practicum we went through “a Maori discussion format”. We found an issue on which our group was roughly equally divided and, with the two groups standing facing each other, took turns arguing for our point of view using the format “YOU think that… WE think that…”

I found the format artificial and uncomfortable (not least because none of us had any idea of what the other members of our group actually thought). What was interesting to me was the next step. We all came together, sharing hugs and reconnecting across the groups, followed by a debrief where we all lay down and spoke about the experience when we felt we had something to say (rather like a Quaker Meeting). The relief felt after the “confrontation” was much stronger than if we had used a less aggressive discussion format. The experience made me think that there may be times when it’s worth increasing the discomfort at some points of event process to improve post-discomfort bonding.

Escape Rooms

On the last evening of the Practicum, we piled into cars for a mystery outing. Our destination was revealed to be an Escape Room or rather three Escape Rooms.

We had an opportunity to cooperatively solve (or watch others solve) a myriad of physical and mental problems in order to either escape from a room or, in my case, to compete against another team in an identical room. I had heard about these rooms but never experienced one before. For a group to solve the puzzles, members had to communicate effectively with each other. Our group worked fairly independently, calling out or showing findings to the other members as we found clues and objects needed to increase our score or unlock further puzzles. I heard afterward that our competitors were less effective at listening to each other, which is why we ended up “winning”. Video cameras watched us as we worked, though the staff told us that the video would stay private.

I had fun working with my six first-time teammates!

The Escape Room experience is an effective way to expose existing or potential communication problems in a group. It could be debriefed afterward using video of the session. However, it might be a rather negative experience, as there’s certainly potential for intra-team conflict. So I’m not sure if it’s an optimum environment for team building.

Learnings from the first Meeting Design Practicum

I’ve shared nine learnings from the first Meeting Design Practicum that this unique event uncovered. As always, reading about an experience is a pale ghost of the experience itself. Just as important was the opportunity to reconnect and deepen relationships with old friends, and make some wonderful new connections. I hope that Eric and Co will do this again; I will be among the first to sign up!

Tags: Druids, Elementary Meetings, Escape Room, meeting design, metaphor, pair-share, Practicum, status| Posted in Event design | 1 Comment »