Scaling Conversations. Dave MacLeod
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As I reached my mid‐twenties, I left the outdoors school world and ventured into creating new year‐round businesses focused on human potential.
Fast‐forward a few years and I was operating a small leadership development and consulting company focused on event facilitation and workshop development and delivery. I won a contract with a health organization that gave me the audacious and slightly uncomfortable title of Community Development Leader. In this initiative I was tasked broadly with increasing the health of young people in the Cariboo and Chilcotin regions of British Columbia by finding places to invest small amounts of capital which could have a large impact. Key to the success of this initiative was leading conversations to learn what people felt would inspire increased health based on their local knowledge. This was meant to be a grassroots initiative; in my region it focused both on First Nation communities and small municipalities.
As part of the process of distributing funds I facilitated a number of conversation‐based meetings to decide how to do this in the most impactful way. I soon became painfully aware of individuals and organizations with vested interests who dominated agendas with their personal mandates. Academically, I understood interest groups and mandates, but experience is the very best teacher. These people and groups arrived at planning meetings with the pre‐established goal of securing additional dollars for their existing projects. To be sure, many others arrived simply to learn, to join the conversation, and try to facilitate a group outcome. Unfortunately, those people were in the minority.
I wanted to involve everyone in a real conversation, and not just provide a platform for the loudest voices. So, I had to innovate.
Along my educational journey as a group facilitator, I came across a game called “35.” It was exactly the tool I needed in this situation. The idea was simple: To learn what a group values, you ask an open question and give everyone a recipe card or sticky note to write down their answer. A common question was: “What is the most important thing we need to talk about today?” Each person wrote their answer down and did not sign their name. The cards were then shuffled around the room by people exchanging them with one another, one at a time, until they were told to stop. Each person then looked at their card and rated the idea out of seven. This shuffling and rating happened five times. At the end of this ordered chaos, I collected the cards and counted backwards from 35 to find the highest‐rated cards. The agenda was then formed based on the top‐rated items.
By adding this structure to a conversation, everyone who came to the event had a chance to contribute their thinking and for their thoughts to be validated and evaluated. This transparent process revealed what mattered to the group. People with special interests couldn't disproportionately affect the event by hijacking the agenda or overwhelming the conversation. Everyone felt included in the process because it was deemed “fair.”
This consistently successful activity fascinated me: It became the first step along a path of learning how to scale conversations. Inside this little game were critical components which could be examined and then scaled up. Practically, it boils down to four things you need to provide everyone with:
1 A safe place for diverse people to share independent thoughts
2 A bias‐free method for everyone to evaluate thoughts one by one
3 A fair process for all thoughts to be evaluated equally
4 A method to understand what thoughts matter most
Along with my initial experiences gathering perspectives in my role as a Community Development Leader, I was hired to facilitate an assortment of events, with 50 to 100 people, in which a mixed group of stakeholders, with different needs and agendas, needed to agree actions. While tackling subjects such as local economic development, policy, strategic plans, health spending, etc., I constantly leveraged the conversation power of the facilitation tool “35.” It consistently created great insight and the necessary buy‐in for whatever actions resulted from the gathering.
This was my foundational experience of scaling conversations: Anyone can repeat it at a face‐to‐face event with a stack of recipe cards and a pen for everyone. I recommend changing one aspect of the instructions you can find online: Instead of having pairs of people debate the cards and agree how to distribute points, simply instruct everyone to rate their thoughts on a scale of one to five based on how strongly they agree (one = strongly disagree and five = strongly agree). This maintains the feeling of safety for the participants (the first hierarchy level of scaling conversations) and leads to a better group answer.
Moving scaled conversation into an online environment may have seemed like a natural progression to some, but it wasn't to me. I wasn't a “software sort of guy” and strongly believed in the power of being in the room with other humans; to look one another in the eye as ideas about the future were discussed. But my friend Lee White, former Executive Director of Outward Bound BC, observed “35” in action. He told me that a connection of his, Jim Firstbrook, had recently read James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds. Jim and his software development team had taken an angel investment from their former boss Amos Michelson, CEO of a BC company called CREO. They were apparently trying to build crowd wisdom software by aggregating ratings on electronic sticky notes in a similar way to my facilitation process.
I was skeptical, to say the least. But Lee was persuasive and resolute that there was power in the idea. He convinced me we should meet with Jim to share ideas at his upcoming launch event.
I learned later from Jim that, when Lee saw this potential, at the same time he had reached out to me he had also contacted Jim about this guy who drives around running meetings in remote communities using recipe cards. And Jim's reaction? Skepticism. Doesn't seem like a fit.
Fortunately, Lee succeeded in convincing both Jim and I to meet, and a few weeks later Lee and I traveled to Vancouver to attend the crowd wisdom software beta launch workshop. The rest, I suppose, is history.
After seeing this early attempt to facilitate conversations online I very literally dropped what I was doing and started working for the company, Thoughtstream, for free and for no equity. We had a simple agreement—to split the revenue from any early sales I could make as the beta product developed. I instantly both loved and hated what the team had built as their first guess at how to scale conversations online. But, one thing was clear to me: I felt passionate, and I wanted in.
The point of this is not what I did, but rather why. I had refined my face‐to‐face facilitation skills for nearly 15 years and had experience with many different methodologies beyond “35,” including well‐known gathering formats, such as World Cafe and Open Space. I was proud of my skill and my growing reputation but I was also growing increasingly disappointed by the limitations of face‐to‐face events.
Attendance at collaborative planning events was typically poor. Many of the people who did attend had good intentions but were also privileged and homogenous. Methodologies like the “35” game prevented or stymied big personalities and extroverts from taking over any agenda. But the results of employing “35” were ultimately still dictated by the people in the room. The staggering majority of people ultimately affected by the decisions of the small group were not able to be in the room. Every facilitator I knew was trying to attract more people, larger groups, to their events to avoid small loud groups taking over agendas about decisions that affected a lot of people. This same problem exists in nearly every organization in the world. Millions of people affected by decisions about training, funding, strategy, etc., have no, or very limited, ability to be a part of the conversation about those decisions. Much to the detriment of the outcomes.
The internet held amazing promise. Jim and the team had a huge idea. With the right structure anyone can go online to participate and share their diverse and independent thoughts, in any time zone, and even in any language. Algorithms can ensure all thoughts are seen by everyone. Digital “sticky notes,” and the thoughts on them, can be translated into any language in real time, and shared with people worldwide in a microsecond. The wisdom of the crowd can be leveraged to solve nearly any challenge an organization might face. While not everybody has perfect access to the internet, the number of people who do completely dwarfs those who can equitably participate in face‐to‐face