Yesterday evening I helped to facilitate a People’s Forum.
I was there because I wanted to help, but also because I wanted to see how it worked.
The aim was to find out what participants thought and felt about a particular set of issues, plus the outcomes they wanted to see as a result of addressing those issues.
There had been a lot of research carried out beforehand to uncover the key issues to be discussed – by talking to people, researching local stats and information.
It worked really well. It was well attended, good-natured, productive and informative, generating a huge amount of data to be fed into an independent manifesto for the forthcoming UK election.
It worked because there was a simple and clear process, with a couple of equally clear and simple rules.
In a nutshell the rules were: “We welcome all people, but not all behaviours.”, and “Everyone’s experience is valid.”
And the process was – introduce yourselves, get to know each other a little bit, then take turns to talk through your perspective the issues under discussion and the 2 questions for each one. Then add in any issues you feel are missing.
My job as facilitator was to make sure that process happened fairly, smoothly and in time to capture all the results we could in the time.
The best thing is that for this community, this is just the start. No matter who ‘wins’ the election, the aim is to carry on running people’s forums, both as a truly meaningful form of consultation and as a way to hold the MP to account. Also as a way to get as many people as possible used to the idea that they can be citizens in their community, not simply consumers of services, and certainly not subjects of whoever is in power.
It seems to me that small businesses could benefit from this approach too.
As soon as there’s more than one person in your team, you could start to regularly raise, discuss and address issues using this simple format. After all, none of us are smarter than all of us.
In effect, you’d be moving towards making everyone a Boss. Tapping into the hive-mind, energising engagement and grooming potential successors. Spreading the load of being a Boss.
And the more you do it, the better it gets.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
