The conversation is the outcome

Reading Jo’s notes on her Cards Against Technology idea I was wondering about what situations I’d deploy them, which led me into wider thoughts about group exercises and my natural aversion to them. At least in the ways that I tend to encounter them.

It’s usually with groups of complete (or at least relative) strangers. We’re broken into groups tasked with taking “big” or “important” topics, and then supposed to brainstorm and discuss solutions; which are then presented back to the wider attendance.

To me it all feels obviously superficial. Folk don’t know each other well enough to get beyond dancing around broadly-culturally-acceptable proposals, and there’s never enough time to reflect on, or really dig into, anything substantive.

However, I think it is useful to convene people and find ways to have them interact. Maybe the problem I have is the need that we feel to generate outcomes. For the work to be for something.

Recently we did an exercise much like this in the DoES Liverpool community. We had one of our annual-or-so Future Gazing sessions.

These are gatherings for the whole community (and friends beyond are welcome too) where we try to take a step back and think about DoES in a wider context and/or across a longer time-frame.

Rather than all sit round a table trying to have one discussion, I distributed sheets of paper seeded with questions or topics around the room. That encouraged people to be on their feet; to move around between the “idea sheets” spending as much, or as little, time on each topic as they liked; and to discuss proposals and thoughts with whomever they found themselves alongside.

We did then reconvene after a round of “dot voting” (everyone had up to five ticks they could place next to ideas that particularly resonated) for a bigger group discussion at the end.

I think the group discussion was the least important part of the session, although the dot voting leading into it encouraged us all to revisit each sheet and look over all of the ideas that had been generated.

The real value in the exercise was the conversations and connections that happened as part of it. The finding of common ground, and the surfacing and acknowledging of different perspectives. The getting to know each other better.

The sheets of paper have only captured a fraction of what was discussed, but I don’t think that matters. Anything important will bubble up in further conversations over the coming months.

Maybe everyone else has known this all along. But it’s been useful for me to acknowledge and explicitly state. In the DoES context we can generalise that the monthly community meetings are for generating tasks and getting things done; and the future gazing is to seed discussion, ideas, and conversation.