The Spark Camp Playbook
Part 4: How to Manage a Large Conversation
Note: This the last of a four-part series from the founders of Spark Camp for anyone who enjoys throwing events or aspires to do so, and everyone wants to explore different approaches to bringing people together, whether for a meetup, conference, or party.
For the past five years, we’ve crafted an event series we think is somewhat unusual for the quality of the connections and insights it produces for participants. We published our reflections on what we’d learned back in 2013. Since then, we’ve experimented a lot, and learned countless more lessons along the way. So we wanted to produce a guide describing exactly what it is we do, how those practices have evolved over time, why they’ve developed that way, and where we think they still need refinement. In each posting, we’ll take you into a different part of our process.
Part 4: Facilitating Exceptional Conversations
Facilitated conversations are the centerpiece of Spark Camp programming. It’s common nowadays to say of conferences that the best conversations happen in the hallways between the sessions. Yet we’ve found that not to be entirely true of Spark Camp: again and again on feedback forms, participants say these facilitated discussions are the main event. We’ve put a lot of our time and thought into discovering how these conversations work at their best.
There are three roles in every Spark Camp facilitated conversation:
- The facilitator: This is usually one of the four co-organizers of Spark Camp (Amanda, Amy, Andy, or Matt), but we’ll sometimes ask Spark Camp alumni with a knack for guiding a discussion to play this role if we have more conversations than organizers during a given block of time.
- The convener: This is typically whoever proposed the conversation topic. They have no formal responsibilities in the conversation other than being curious about that topic, but that curiosity helps to determine the flow of discussion. They’re the natural person for the facilitator to turn to if conversation hits a standstill, or if it starts to depart from the original topic. (Branching out into other topics is often fine and natural; the convener can merely provide a handy perspective on whether to keep going along a branch, or whether to steer the discussion back toward its starting point.) Before the conversation begins, we’ll often encourage the convener to think about what they want to get out of it. We also often start the conversation by asking the convener why they were interested in hearing about it, and what they wanted to learn. Sometimes, we may return to the convener toward the end of a session, to summarize a bit of what they heard during the hour.
- The participants: This is everyone in the conversation who isn’t a convener or facilitator. During most of Spark Camp, attendees can choose among multiple sessions to participate in.
What we’re aiming for
A well-balanced discussion schedule: As we described in Part Two, the first night of Spark Camp is spent composing the discussion agenda for the event. For the most part, Spark Camps feature multiple hour-long blocks of four concurrent conversations, each facilitated by one of the four co-organizers, with some padding time before and after the discussion to ensure it can come to a natural end. Ideally, two of these conversations will be relatively large (20 or more people), but the other two will have fewer participants. Throughout the day, each attendee should have the chance to sit in on both large and small conversations.
Conversations scoped to the size of the group: The number of participants in a conversation determine much about the way that conversation can play out. In everyday, non-working life, it’s relatively uncommon for conversations to encompass more than 6 people or so; even large dinner parties typically comprise multiple simultaneous conversations among just a few tablemates. This is why we’ve found facilitation necessary: large conversations are inherently unnatural. Careful, attentive guidance must be applied to make them rewarding.
Stories drawn from personal experience: Participants are free to engage in many different ways in a conversation, of course. They can pontificate, ask questions, listen quietly, play devil’s advocate — these are all legitimate modes of engagement, and we encourage all of them in our conversations. But when a discussion is just beginning, or beginning to wander, we try to elicit personal stories. Accounts drawn from the lives of participants are the very best discussion fodder: they tend to be the most memorable statements shared in a session, they’re often laden with hidden insights, and they’re more neutral than opinions or conjecture might be.
Candor: Spark Camp is most successful when it elicits stories and insights that participants would not often share or encounter in their everyday lives. For many of us, the life experiences that have shaped us most significantly are the very ones we hesitate to talk about, because they inspire emotions we tend to try very hard to inhibit in our professional lives. They’re valuable to others precisely because they are so potent and so rarely shared; we aspire to make Spark Camp a venue where participants feel emboldened and protected enough to share them.
Our process
Setting the stage for a good conversation is a process that begins well before the conversation itself, but for this post, we’ll stick to what happens in the room. Most of the steps below become most salient when the conversation is large and unwieldy; small, intimate conversations tend to find their own natural flow without needing much help.
Step one: Get your notebook and a writing implement. Good facilitation of a large conversation all but requires pen and paper.
Step two: Adjust the room. The shape and setup of the room plays a big, hidden role in the nature of the conversation that happens there. This isn’t superstition. If the conversation takes place around a large table, for example, people will naturally place their notebooks or devices on the table, sit forward, and spend much of the session looking at whatever’s placed in front of them. Without the table, people will naturally sit back in their chairs and look at one another more often. We usually strive for the latter dynamic, and will usually try to remove tables from the center of the room unless it’s a small and cozy enough space that participants can’t easily be distracted from the conversation. We learned from experience that rooms with permanent furniture––such as auditoriums, university lecture halls and the like––typically make bad conversation rooms.
Step three: Consider sitting near the convener: Often, mid-discussion, it can be helpful to be close to the convener, to consult with them on the flow of the conversation, or give them advance notice that we’d like them to weigh in.
Step four: Wait a few minutes for participants to find their way in. We leave a natural pause before the conversation begins for participants to choose among sessions and find their way into the room. Often, facilitators will use this time to do some brief prep with their conveners, encouraging them to think about what they most want to get out of the session, sparking their thoughts on questions for the other attendees.
Step five: If it’s shaping up to be a large conversation, map the room. When many people are in the room and want to talk at once, knowing everyone’s name is invaluable. The beginning of the session is a good time to ensure all the participants’ lanyards are visible, and that you know who’s where, so you can easily call on individuals during the discussion. One technique that can help, particularly if you’re not great with names, is to write the names of the participants in the order they’re seated around the room, like this:
Step six: Ask the convener to kick things off, explaining what inspired their pitch. We’ve found that articulating a goal at the start helps ground and focus the conversation. And people respond positively, knowing that they’re helping address or answer something that’s befuddled another participant.
Step seven: If many people have thoughts to offer at once, start a queue. It can be tempted to let a large, rollicking conversation follow its own gravity, without intervening too much. We’ve found that makes for bad, unsatisfying conversations for everyone involved; a finding that is backed up in our feedback forms from participants. People with naturally loud voices or those who don’t mind interrupting other participants will wind up dominating the conversation, and no one will be able to finish a thought.
The very best tool for managing a discussion that gets to this point is a formal queue. The facilitator will pause the conversation, ask for everyone to raise a hand if they’ve got a thought to offer, list their names on paper, and cross each person’s name off as they’re called on to speak, a la:
The queue will feel forced at first. Give it a minute. A queue is an explicit acknowledgment that a conversation is being managed artificially, not flowing naturally. This is why it’s worth restating the point: Conversations among more than 6 or so people at once are inherently somewhat unnatural.
One technique to help manage this awkwardness is to start tracking the queue before deploying it to manage the conversation. Silently take note of who wants to speak and list their names in an order that will almost always be arbitrary. Then, just step in: “After Dana, let’s hear from Solomon, then Anne G. If you’d like to speak up, just raise a hand to catch my eye, and I’ll add you to the list.” Restate the list of who’s up next after each participant finishes a remark.
Another technique is offering the group a silent but visible way to say ‘yes, I feel the same way.’ People speak up for all sorts of reasons, sometimes just to voice agreement. It can be as simple as showing a thumbs-up (although it’s worth knowing that this gesture can feel a little silly to people outside the United States).
Step eight: Continuously scan the room to see who’s trying to speak, and bring quieter participants in. As participants realize that the flow of conversation is being actively managed, most of them will spend less energy trying to jump in, and return more of their attention to listening to others. Some folks likely won’t be shy about trying to jump in even when they’re not next in the queue; others will give you the smallest of gestures to quietly indicate they’d like to speak. Actively try to bring those quieter voices into the conversation; chances are they’ve been listening carefully, and have an especially thoughtful contribution to make.
Step nine: Insert pauses and pivots into the conversation, especially if you find yourself creating queue after queue. It can be incredibly useful to ask someone, at the tail end of a longer story, what they’d most like people to know about their experience or why they feel so strongly about a particular position. Storytelling at the start of a session helps participants open up and puts them at ease. But stories don’t necessarily answer the questions at hand. We often pivot mid-way through a discussion, explicitly telling attendees, “We’ve heard from several of you why this topic is important to you and how. But let’s now turn to the central question, X.”
Step ten: Consider soliciting a summary from the convener. We often alert the convener toward the end of the conversation that we’ll ask them for some takeaways from the discussion shortly. (Often, we’ll tell the convener at the start of the session that this may be coming; it encourages them to listen especially carefully to everyone’s remarks.) With this advance notice, some of our conveners have ended sessions with lovely, detailed summaries that reinforce insights exchanged during the previous hour.
Step eleven: End the session on time, particularly if it’s a large session. Leave ’em wanting more. The more energy remains in the conversation at the end, the better it is to end on time. Invariably, participants will linger, splintering off into small groups to follow up with one another about points raised during the discussion, and those follow-up conversations will add to the experience of the entire session.
What we’ve found
Individual feedback from each of Spark Camp’s cofounders
The good:
- When sessions are facilitated well, we create space for everyone to speak while still nurturing a robust conversation. This can sometimes mean intentionally teasing out the ideas, opinions and experiences from everyone in the room. It helps to research each of the participants in advance, and to draw them into the conversation using what we know of their personal experiences. (Amy Webb)
- Facilitation often makes for a more intense and rigorous discussion. I’ve learned so much more from discussions as my facilitation techniques have improved. (Amanda Michel)
- As we’ve gotten more and more diligent about how we facilitate discussions, we’ve heard better and better feedback about these sessions from participants. Over the course of a weekend, the conversations build on one another, spilling out into breaks and mealtimes, and lingering in attendees’ minds long after the event is done. (Matt Thompson)
The challenges:
- The active, constant facilitation that large conversations require is exhausting, and prevents the facilitator from engaging in the conversation as fully as they can in smaller, more self-directed sessions. We try to divvy up discussions among the four of us so we each have a mix of large and small, but it’s often hard to predict which sessions will draw the most interest, even knowing which topics drew the most votes. (Matt Thompson)
- It can be challenging at the beginning of a Spark Camp, before we’ve held facilitated sessions, to learn the particular nuances of each room. Some rooms can physically fit a large number of people, but there may be variables––acoustic inconsistencies, proximity to staff setting up meals and the like––that render the perfect space into a difficult one. (Amy Webb)
- In some cases, we’ve added a fifth session to a discussion block, asking an attendee who’s familiar with our events to play the role of facilitator. Sometimes this works. Often, though, feedback reveals these sessions to be less satisfying for attendees. Experience with these facilitation techniques helps a lot, but it’s hard to acquire unless, like us, you run an event like this. (Matt Thompson)
- In particularly robust conversations, the queue system doesn’t necessarily work for me — by the time I arrive at someone on the list, the conversation may have forked or meandered into a different direction. It’s jarring both for the facilitation and participants to start and stop conversations. I’ll often ask participants to speak only if they’re furthering the current topic. If they have a new point to make, I’ll come back to them. (Amy Webb)
- It can be incredibly challenging to focus a conversation, especially when the topic is personal. I recently attended Newsgeist, where Josh Sterns asked participants to take half a minute to reflect on what they’d learned and most wanted to share in the remaining twenty minutes. The pause was incredibly helpful, so I’m adding Josh’s technique to my toolkit. (Amanda Michel)
- I’m soft-spoken so I’ve taken to bringing a ‘pointer’ that I can use to bring participants into the conversation, like a spare paint brush or a bright pen. (Amanda Michel)
Spark Camp is a 501(c)(3) organization that brings extraordinary people together to discuss challenging topics confronting society. Spark Camp’s cofounders are Andrew Pergam, Amy Webb, Amanda Michel and Matt Thompson.
Read Previous Chapters of the Spark Camp Playbook:
