“Spinning plates” meeting method

I was to facilitate a group of eight people. I collected from each member what they wanted to deal with, and added some ideas that had emerged from the conversations with them. It grew to a massive list of thirty-something items. I felt tempted first to find a common pattern in all these issues, to have a central issue. Then I changed my mind from a number of reasons.

Since I’ve been using Mark Forster’s Autofocus for two months now, it inspired me to try something similar in a group setting. I also asked at Mark’s forum if anyone had experience with it, Mark himself gave me some ideas.

Making a list in a group is easy, anyone can add an item or ask the facilitator to add it. There are two steps that don’t easily translate to a group,

• Pick a task that stands out. Different members would pick different tasks. How to find the task that stands out to the group as a whole?
• Work on an item until you feel like doing so. The same problem here, one member would stop, the other would go on.

When to stop working on a task seemed easier to me. I gave each participant a yellow and a red index card. They could put a card into the middle anytime, they could even take them back if they wanted. The red card means, stop it right now. If a red card appeared, we stopped
there, maybe even in the middle of a sentence. Red cards gave people a sense of security that they can stop a process and the rest of the groups would respect it.

A yellow card means, I am running out of oomph. This is just a warning sign. The more the yellow cards, the stronger the warning. When I saw four yellow cards, so half of the group was losing energy, I stopped the process.

I, the facilitator, also had a red and a yellow card. This way I could give feedback about the process without having to use external means. When I felt a discussion is getting off-topic, I didn’t interrupt them and comment on what I observed, but simply showed my yellow card.

I introduced one more element, a timer that I set to 15 minutes as soon as a task was chosen. When the timer went off, it worked just like a red card. Using a timer proved an efficient way to keep the group focused. Even if they were bogged down or side-tracked in a heated conversation, it couldn’t last longer than 15 minutes. Timing also helped in keeping the energy high.

To pick the task that stands out for the whole group, I had two methods. When I took part at one of Keith Johnstone’s workshops, I enjoyed the exercise called “Speak in one voice”. Keith said something and the group as a whole responded. It’s an amazing and shocking experience that you improvize a conversation with twenty other people in unison. That gave me the idea to ask members of the group to scan the list, then say one task as a group. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. The group was quite cooperative, but people had different issues. I would say the method half worked, because half of the group said one task, the other half another task. It just didn’t resolve into one. So I tried a more traditional method.

The tasks were written on a flip chart, marked with letters, A, B, C, etc. My instructions to the participants were as follows,

• Scan the tasks individually
• Pick one that stands out
• There might be some tasks that also stand out, but one of them stands out most.
• Remember the second rank tasks, too.
• I will say the letters of the tasks. If you hear the one you picked, stand up. If you hear one of the second rank tasks, raise your hand.
• Standing up for a task scores 3, raising a hand scores 1.

I used a white-board with letters running from A to Z, so I could easily put the sum near the letter and remove them after each round. The group choice was evaluated using a simple method,

• If no letter gets more than 5 scores, the whole page is dismissed. A minimum of 6 scores in a group of 8 people means, it stands for at least two people or it almost stands out for the majority.
• The highest score wins.
• If two letters get the same score, the first one on the page wins.

This ensures we process the old ones first. This whole selection and voting process took only a minute or two, especially after a few rounds when the participants got used to it.

I learned a lot during this workshop,

• The group worked on a high energy level. They couldn’t stop, wanted to do more and more. I had to tell them we’d better stick to the original schedule.
• Some participants felt frustrated that no big issues were completely finished. Results were less tangible, people were asking, “fine, but when am I goint to take home?”
• Some participants felt more relaxed about decisions. They said decision making felt organic rather than labored or forced.
• There were issues important to a few individuals only. After the group issues were dealt with, the whole group was willing to deal with these individual issues.

One last word about the name, a participant said this method reminded him of spinning many plates, giving some attention to each.