voting Archives : Conferences That Work

Participatory voting at events: Part 2—Low-tech versus high-tech voting

Monday, May 23rd, 2016 by Adrian Segar

In Part 1 of this series, I defined participatory voting and we explored the different ways to use it to obtain public information about viewpoints and participants in the room, paving the way for further useful discussions and conversations. Now let’s explore low-tech and high-tech voting solutions.

High-tech voting

There is no shortage of high-tech systems that can poll an audience. Commonly known as ARSs, Student Response Systems (SRSs), or “clickers,” these systems combine an audience voting method—a custom handheld device, personal cell phone/smartphone, personal computer, etc.—with a matched receiver and software that processes and displays responses.

Here are three reasons why high-tech ARSs may not be the best choice for participatory voting:

ARSs necessitate expense and/or time to set up for a group. No-tech and low-tech approaches are low or no cost and require little or no preparation.

Most ARS votes are anonymous; no one knows who has voted for what. When you are using voting to acquire information about participant preferences and opinions, as opposed to deciding between conflicting alternatives, anonymous voting is rarely necessary. (An exception is if people are being asked potentially embarrassing questions.) When a group of people can see who is voting for what (and, with some techniques, even the extent of individual agreement/disagreement), it’s easy to go deeper into an issue via discussion or debate.

Participatory voting techniques involve more movement than pushing a button on an ARS device. This is important, because physical movement improves learning. Some techniques include participant interaction, which also improves learning.

While there are times when low-tech or high-tech voting is the right choice, I prefer no-tech and low-tech techniques for participatory voting whenever possible. No-tech techniques require only the attendees themselves. Low-tech approaches use readily available and inexpensive materials such as paper and pens.

No-tech and low-tech

Wondering what no-tech and low-tech voting techniques can be used for participatory voting? Here’s a list, taken from a glossary of participation techniques covered in detail in my book The Power of Participation: Creating Conferences That Deliver Learning, Connection, Engagement, and Action.

Body/Continuum Voting: See Human Spectrograms.

Card Voting: Provides each participant with an identical set of colored cards that can be used in flexible ways: typically for voting on multiple-choice questions, consensus voting, and guiding discussion.

Dot Voting: A technique for public semi-anonymous voting where participants are given identical sets of one or more colored paper dots which they stick onto paper voting sheets to indicate preferences.

Hand/Stand Voting: In hand voting, participants raise their hands to indicate their answer to a question with two or more possible answers. Stand voting replaces hand raising with standing.

Human Graphs: See Human Spectrograms.

Human Spectrograms: Also known as body voting, continuum voting, and human graphs. A form of public voting that has participants move in the room to a place that represents their answer to a question. Human spectrograms can be categorized as one-dimensional, two-dimensional, or state-change.

Idea swap: A technique for anonymous sharing of participants’ ideas.

One-dimensional Human Spectrograms: Human Spectrograms where participants position themselves along a line in a room to portray their level of agreement/disagreement with a statement or a numeric response (e.g. the number of years they’ve been in their current profession.)

Plus/Delta: A review tool that enables participants to quickly identify what went well at a session or event and what could be improved.

Post It!: A simple technique that employs participant-written sticky notes to uncover topics and issues that a group wants to discuss.

Roman Voting: Roman Voting is a public voting technique for gauging the strength of consensus.

State-change Human Spectrograms: Human Spectrograms where participants move en masse from one point to another to display a change of some quantity (e.g. opinion, geographical location, etc.) over time.

Table Voting: A technique used for polling attendees on their choice from pre-determined answers to a multiple-choice question, and/or for dividing participants into preference groups for further discussions or activities.

Thirty-Five: A technique for anonymously evaluating participant ideas.

Two-dimensional Human Spectrograms: Human Spectrograms where participants position themselves in a two-dimensional room space to display relative two-dimensional information (e.g. where they live with reference to a projected map.)

This ends my exploration of low-tech and high-tech voting solutions. And what are public, semi-anonymous, and anonymous voting? We’ll explain these different voting types and explore when they should be used in the third part of this series.

Tags: body voting, card voting, continuum voting, dot voting, hand/stand voting, human graphs, human spectrograms, idea swap, participatory voting, plus/delta, Post It!, roman voting, table voting, thirty-five, voting| Posted in Event design | 1 Comment »

Participatory voting at events: Part 1—Introduction

Monday, April 25th, 2016 by Adrian Segar

Look up “voting” on Google and the top search results are dominated by links about electoral voting. Making decisions (about elected leaders, opposing choices, action plans, etc.) is the first function of voting that comes to mind for most people.

In a participatory meeting environment, however, voting is most useful as a way to obtain information early in the process. It provides a “straw poll” that provides public information about viewpoints in the room and paves the way for further discussion. I call such process participatory voting.

Ways to use participatory voting

Perhaps surprisingly, voting is not a simple, well-defined process. The International Society on Multiple Criteria Decision Making lists more than four thousand articles on decision theory in its bibliography. Voting, it turns out, can be a complex and subtle business.

For most of us, “group voting” brings up the concept of voting as decision-making. But voting can be used to test learning and to elicit and share information. To guide your choice of the participatory voting techniques I’ll cover in later posts, here are short descriptions of various ways to use voting in meeting sessions.

Determining consensus

It’s often unclear whether a group has formed a consensus around a specific viewpoint or proposed action. Consensual participatory voting can quickly show whether a group has reached or is close to consensus, or wants to continue discussion. It can also pinpoint those who have significant objections to a majority position and give them the opportunity to clarify their reasons for opposition.

Making decisions

How people use voting techniques depends a lot on their presentation/facilitation/management style. If you are focusing on making a decision, voting is a tempting method to obtain an outcome. But if a vote is held prematurely, before adequate exploration of alternatives and associated discussion, the “decision” may have poor buy-in from those who voted in the minority or who feel they weren’t heard. People will rightly feel ambushed if they are asked to vote on a decision without adequate warning and opportunities for discussion.

Thus, if you plan to use voting for decision-making, explain up front the processes and time constraints you will be using before the vote. Unless the vote is purely advisory, give participants the chance to determine what they will be voting on, and how it will be framed. Such preparation lets people know their opportunities to shape discussion, and minimizes the likelihood that unexpected premature voting will cut off exploration of important creative or minority options.

Testing learning

Polling an audience is a time-tested technique, as old as teaching itself, for teachers to obtain feedback on student understanding. “Pop” quizzes, multiple-choice tests, and modern Audience Response Systems can be useful ways to test audience learning. But they have their limitations. As Jeff Hurt explains:

“[Audience Response Systems] are good for immediate feedback. They are good for ‘knowledge learning.’ Studies show they increase engagement and let someone know whether their answer is right or wrong. In short, they are good for surface knowledge. They however do not promote deep learning…which leads to higher level thinking skills such as estimation, judgement, application, assessment and evaluation of topics.”
—Facebook comment by Jeff Hurt

The participatory learning philosophy I espouse concentrates on these deeper learning skills. From this perspective, traditional voting supplies limited information when used as a testing tool.

Setting context

We know that small group discussion is key to effective learning during an event. But how do we set an initial context for discussion? Participatory voting techniques supply important information about the views, preferences, and experiences of participants, both as a group and as individuals. You can then use this information to set up appropriate discussions.

Eliciting information

Perhaps the most important benefit of participatory voting techniques is their ability to elicit important information about the people, needs, and ideas in a group and make it available to the entire group. Although you can use some voting techniques to provide anonymous or semi-anonymous information, I believe that sharing information provided by group members to group members is one of the most powerful ways to strengthen connection, openness, and a sense of community in a group.

Allowing participants to discover those who agree or disagree with them or share their experience efficiently facilitates valuable connections between participants in ways unlikely to occur during traditional meetings. Giving group members opportunities to harness these techniques for their own discoveries about the group can further increase engagement in the group’s purpose.

Determining the flow of group conversation and action

Participatory voting techniques such as card voting provide large groups the real-time feedback required to productively steer a complex conversation to best meet the needs of the group.

Planning action

Finally, we can use participatory voting to uncover group resources, interest, and commitment on specific action items from individual participants.

Some concluding observations about voting

If you’re using voting to test understanding of a concept or explore a group’s knowledge of a topic, include time for small group discussion before the vote. Pair share is a great technique for this. Provide enough time for each participant to think about their answer and then have them pair share their understanding. After the vote, you can facilitate a discussion with the entire group about the differences uncovered.

To avoid making premature decisions, use consensual voting to uncover significant alternative viewpoints. Test the depth of agreement before confirming that you have substantial agreement through decision-oriented voting.

Think about when and how you use voting. Voting on alternatives that have been inadequately explored or discussed is counterproductive.

Use public voting methods whenever appropriate—which is, in my experience, most of the time.

If people wish to “sit out” their vote when using participatory voting, support their right to do so. (Unless you are testing for consensus, in which case it’s reasonable to ask for their feedback.) Consider using anonymous voting if people seem reluctant to express an opinion.

[This post is adapted from a (longer) chapter on participatory voting in The Power of Participation: Creating Conferences That Deliver Learning, Connection, Engagement, and Action.]

Read more about participatory voting at events in Part 2 and Part 3!

Red pill blue pill image modified by yours truly, attribution W.carter under CC BY-SA 4.0 license

Tags: action planning, audience response systems, consensus, context, decision making, elicit information, group voting, participatory voting, polling, testing learning, voting| Posted in Event design | 2 Comments »

Dear Adrian—More questions about event process design

Monday, December 21st, 2015 by Adrian Segar

Dipesh Mody, writing from Mumbai, India, asks five great questions about event process design. I’ve interspersed my answers after each question.
Q. Dear Adrian,

I have now read both your books and have truly enjoyed reading them. Your work has been very inspiring to many; and I am certainly one of them.

While your book is very well written and structured, I had a few questions for you and I am hoping that you will find the time to respond.

Question 1

After the peer group session sign-up and once the time and space are allocated, who decides which technique to use? Is it the volunteer facilitator of the peer group? If yes, what if the volunteer is not familiar with these techniques? Will he invariably choose a roundtable technique?

Yes, the volunteer facilitator(s) of a peer session is/are responsible for determining the format used in the session. As covered in The Power of Participation, there are a number of basic formats you can use. I give every attendee a one-page peer session facilitation handout (free download) at the start of the event. This short document explains session facilitation, offers a suggested step-by-step process, and includes some tips for effective facilitation.

Analyzing thousands of evaluations of Conferences That Work format events, it’s very rare to see a complaint about the quality of peer session facilitation. So I believe this simple handout is an effective tool for volunteer facilitators. While I could include some additional opening techniques such as Post It, described in The Power of Participation, it’s possible that making the handout longer might reduce its overall effectiveness.

In India, and other regions where organizational cultures tend to be more hierarchical than those in North America and Europe, participants may be less comfortable taking responsibility for leading a session. Under such circumstances, taking twenty minutes at the opening of a peer conference to explain basic peer session leadership techniques can be helpful.

Question 2

From what I understand that certain sessions only a trained facilitator can run them such as World Café, fishbowl, or a human spectrogram. Is my understanding correct? If yes, then such techniques can only be used involving the entire group. For e.g., if the conference size is 50 people then all 50 people need to be in that one session when a human spectrogram technique is being used? Is my understanding correct?

It depends on what “trained” means. I have not received any “formal” facilitation training, but I experienced World Café, fishbowl, and human spectrogram process run by others before I attempted to facilitate them myself. I think many people who have experienced a human spectrogram once could successfully facilitate it under similar circumstances. There are plenty of good resources (including The Power of Participation😄) for other group work techniques.

As participative techniques become more frequently used at conferences, attendees are increasingly likely to be capable of facilitating them. So, I expect the requirement for a “trained” facilitator will decrease over time.

Question 3

About the beginning and the end sessions, I am quite clear but for the middle sessions is there a particular sequence (s) that works best based on your experience? For e.g., use fishbowl to gain a deeper understanding of the top six issues and then follow it up with World Café to discuss solutions to these issues (assuming we have 6 tables with five people on each table: Conference size 30 people). Then use a human spectrogram to vote on the proposed solutions and to select the most plausible ones.

Again, the answer to your event process design question depends on the circumstances—in this case, a session’s desired outcomes. It sounds like you are asking about process to explore and choose solutions to problems. Because we hold meetings for many different reasons, there’s no single process sequence that’s appropriate for every situation.

The Conferences That Work format, for example, works very well for a group of peers who are meeting to learn and connect for individual reasons, determine common ground, and discover and act on opportunities available to the group.

If, as per your example, the meeting is to learn and discuss six pre-determined important issues, you might well use techniques like fishbowl and World Café as opening and mid-course process. If attendees don’t know each other well, an opening roundtable would be useful. Or if the important issues were unknown or unclear at the start of a meeting, introductory educational sessions plus affinity grouping might be appropriate.

As far as discussing solutions is concerned, while human spectrograms are a useful tool to gauge sentiment, process prescribed by the norms of the group, organization, association, or corporation stakeholders typically determines outcomes.

Question 4

About World Café or human spectrogram or voting, while a volunteer team can assist in framing the right questions as pre-work but my experience shows that getting them to contribute to the questions is difficult as they don’t have time to devote to such pre-work activities due to work-related and other commitments. Further, on page 222 of Power of Participation, you have identified questions for collective attention, for finding deeper insights, for forward movement, etc. In light of this, would it be a good idea for the attendees to frame the questions during the conference beginning? Would this work in your experience?

If you are going to use World Café at an event, pre-work defining good table questions is essential. While there are frameworks that can be helpful in devising Café question rounds (e.g. those for sense-making by Chris Corrigan and strategic planning by John Inman), I think it’s very hard to build consensually-good questions on the fly at the event unless participants are patient and willing enough to spend a significant amount of time. It’s akin to bringing a large group of people to a building site and asking them to collectively design and erect a building from scratch. Not impossible, but difficult!

Question 5

While your book does provide model conference schedules, it falls a bit short of getting a real sense of what a real schedule looks like. It would be really great if you could add a few real examples of conferences you facilitated. And useful to get a sense of how you mixed and matched various techniques (fishbowl, World Café, spectrograms, etc.) during a let’s say three-day conference around a particular theme. It would be a great addition to what a truly amazing book it already is.

Dipesh, I think that’s a good idea in principle. However, I’m wary of supplying such examples unless they include extensive background on why the specific types and flow of process techniques were used in the event process design. The danger of providing condensed examples is that some readers will be tempted to copy them verbatim for events that involve participants, logistical constraints, and desired outcomes that are significantly different from those that generated the example design. End result—a design that doesn’t satisfy stakeholder needs, leading to poor evaluations and, perhaps, the conclusion that these new-fangled event designs “don’t work.”

There are so many factors involved in creating a good event design that I estimate a useful case study of a single event design that comprehensively covers the reasons for the design choices made might require 10,000+ words and many days of work! A worthy project, but one that may have to wait a while…

Best regards,

Dipesh Mody, India

Thanks for your thoughtful questions about event process design, Dipesh. I hope these answers help a little in your quest to produce fine events in India!

Best wishes,

Adrian Segar

Another issue of an occasional series—Dear Adrian—in which I answer questions sent to me about event design, elementary particle physics, solar hot water systems, and anything else I might conceivably know something about. If you have a question you’d like me to answer, please write to me. (Don’t worry, I won’t publish anything without your permission).

Tags: dear Adrian, Event design, fishbowl, human spectrograms, voting, World Cafe| Posted in Dear Adrian | 2 Comments »

Testing consensus using Roman voting

Wednesday, June 27th, 2012 by Adrian Segar

Here’s part 2 of The Right (Way) To Vote series – posts on voting at events. It covers testing consensus using Roman voting. Feel free to read Part 1, on hand and stand voting.

How should groups make decisions? Common answers to this question include “by voting” or “by discussion and then the boss gets to decide.” But what if we want a decision method that provides consensus, or as near consensus as we can get?

An individual making a decision may agonize over it. But when more than one person is involved, the decision-making process can turn into an argument. So groups need a way to test their agreement, discuss concerns, and arrive at a decision that all can support.

Forcing a yes/no vote about a proposal hides the degree of support for the resulting vote. Sometimes the level of enthusiasm for a decision is tepid, or a minority of those voting are adamantly opposed. Serious problems can surface later when it’s time for implementation.

A better approach is to publicly discover the degree of consensus about a proposal. If doubts or opposition are uncovered, addressing them is possible before a final decision is adopted.

Testing consensus using Roman voting

My favorite solution for gauging the strength of consensus is Roman voting, as described by Esther Derby in Self-facilitation Skills for Teams:

The Romans indicated their will in the gladiator’s arena with a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. A modern modification of Roman voting helps groups arrive at a decision.

Thumbs-up = “I support this proposal.”

Thumbs-sideways = “I’ll go along with the will of the group.”

Thumbs-down = “I do not support this proposal and wish to speak.”

If all thumbs are down, eliminate the option. On a mixed vote, listen to what the thumbs-down people have to say, and recheck agreement. Be cautious about choosing an option if the majority are thumbs-sideways: This option has only lukewarm support.

This technique generates consensus. Consensus doesn’t necessarily mean complete unanimity. Consensus means that everyone must be willing to support the idea, even if it’s not his personal first choice.

Sooner or later, you’ll have a situation where one person withholds support for any option. Manage this situation before it happens. At the start of the consensus process, set a time limit:

“We’ll work really hard to reach consensus until the end of this meeting. If we don’t have agreement by that time, we will turn the decision over to _________, or take a vote, or __________ (a technical expert, coach, manager) will decide.”

Most people don’t hold out to be obstinate; they are responding to a deeply held value or belief. Often the lone holdout will move on, but not at the cost of relinquishing an important belief. Respect the belief, use your fallback decision-making method, and move forward. However, when a group seldom reaches consensus but instead relies on voting or deferring to authority, it’s a sign there are deeper issues at play.

Silence when someone asks, “Do we all agree?” does not signal consensus! Instead, try testing consensus using Roman voting. Do you test consensus on decisions made at your meetings?

Photo attribution: Flickr user vegaseddie

Tags: consensus, hand voting, Roman, voting| Posted in Event design | 15 Comments »

The right (way) to vote – part 1

Wednesday, June 20th, 2012 by Adrian Segar

The right way to vote

When and how did you first learn to vote? Probably in school by raising your hand. This time-honored method of polling an audience may seem straightforward, but I frequently see presenters who don’t use this simple participation technique correctly. Here’s how to do it right.

Make sure you list all the possible choices you’re offering before you poll. If you’re asking an “only-one-of-these-answers-is-right” question, providing all options in advance helps to reduce the natural hesitation to pick the early “correct” answer when you haven’t heard all the alternatives.
Next, ask if the alternatives you’re giving are clear and complete, and give the audience a chance to clarify the choices you’ve provided or incorporate additional potential answers you’ve overlooked.
Now it’s time to ask for a show of hands. Remember that because you’re at the front of the room you can see the response better than anyone in the audience except, perhaps, the people in the back row. It’s frustrating for audience members to take the trouble to vote and not be informed of the group’s response. Present each answer in turn and give people time to respond. After each answer, estimate the proportion of the audience that has hands raised and give that feedback to the audience, e.g. “About half of you prefer bacon.”

Yes-No voting with no abstentions

If you need a yes-no vote with abstaining not an option, use stand voting. Ask everyone in favor/agreement to stand. (If any audience member is unable to stand, have them raise their hand.) Then say “Everyone standing sit, everyone sitting stand.” If you’re looking for unanimity, ask anyone now standing to explain what they feel they can’t commit to, and, if necessary, the group can work on an agreement as to how to proceed.

In part 2 of this post, I’ll describe another right way to vote: Roman voting.

Tags: hand voting, voting| Posted in Presentations | No Comments »

Torn About Technology

Tuesday, April 24th, 2012 by Adrian Segar

Here’s a transcript of my four-minute Blink! talk Torn About Technology given on Monday, April 23, at the Green Meetings Industry Council 2012 Sustainable Meetings Conference:

“Let me make one thing clear.

I love technology!

I love my iPad and my iPhone! And I love my iPod touch! (Three computers in one man purse!)

And I’m a big fan of the appropriate use of technology at events.

That people anywhere with an internet connection can get a taste of what’s happening at this conference in Montreal, Canada, without having to use significant amounts of energy and resources to travel here is a GOOD THING!

But I’m Torn About Tech at face-to-face events.

I’m Torn About Tech because technology can distract us from what I believe is the core reason for having face-to-face events.

Because we don’t have to travel anymore to hear someone speak or to obtain up-to-the-minute content.

We can get all that online.

So what is the core reason for having face-to-face events these days?

It’s so we can meet, share, and learn through face-to-face personal connections and interactions.

And there’s a danger, a very seductive danger that I’m certainly not immune to, of focusing on new technology, new gadgets, new apps to mediate our face-to-face experience and, in the process, ignoring much simpler non-tech ways to increase learning, connecting, and sharing at events.

An example. Audience response systems: clickers, gadgets we can hand out to audience members to get responses to questions.

Great devices for anonymous polling, where no one in the room gets to find out how anyone else voted. Occasionally that’s appropriate and useful.

But, come on, is this really what we want at a face-to-face event? I’d like to know how you, you and you feel about an issue. There are a ton of low-tech/no-tech methods we can use to share that information.

We have:

hand voting
card voting
voice voting
dot voting
Roman voting
(one of my favorites) body voting aka human spectrograms

Body voting has audience members stand along a line in the room to show the agreement/disagreement gradient on an issue. You can use it to discover different viewpoints, create debates, and create homogeneous or heterogeneous small discussion groups on a topic—all things that gadgets can’t do.

These voting methods involve people moving about which improves learning, retention, and recall. They’re free or incredibly cheap and they’re a lot more fun.

Yes, there are some things that technology does better than the old ways. Having multiple session scribes live blog into a shared Google Doc projected on a big screen is much better than scribes taking notes on yellow pads or flip charts.

But let’s not fall into the trap of believing that new technology is the only way to improve events.

Very often we can simply use different human process to greatly improve learning, connection, and fun at our events.

That’s why I’m Torn About Technology.

Thank you very much.”

Tags: audience response systems, polling GMIC, Sustainable Meetings, Technology, voting| Posted in Presentations | 6 Comments »