The Three-Hour Event
The how-to guide for an easy, meaningful and participatory evening event.
Often we are asked to help design and facilitate evening events for others (normally companies). These events tend to gather between 50 and 100 people, are hosted on a school day, and organisers don’t want to disrupt the normal working hours. This has become such a regular request, that we thought it was time to put together a quick guide.
This is a guide for participatory events!
We believe a good event is at least 70% participatory. If you are thinking of hosting an event where most of the content is provided frontally — as in, by a range of speakers talking at people — then you won’t find this guide very useful.
Venue Specifications
Make sure that participants can be arranged in islands of maximum 6 people. These islands can be created simply by six chairs in a small circle, or even better if they can be around a table. If you can only have rows of chairs facing forward, as in a theater, then you will have limited options for the participatory exercises.
When searching and arranging the venue, we recommend you use this specification file, adapting it to your needs. Working on a live document with the people from the venue can save you many emails and some headaches down the line.
At what time, exactly?
Most companies seem to prefer a starting time that is 30 minutes before the usual time to end work. This obviously varies from country to country. For instance, in the UK it seems ok to start the event at some point between 5pm and 6pm, and run until 8pm or 9pm.
Create a Runsheet
We can’t recommend enough that you create a runsheet with every step of the event. Ideally you would create the runsheet in such a way that others can contribute to it in real time. We use Sessionlab, an online tool that does exactly that, runsheets. You could also use Google Sheets or any other apps out there. If you use Sessionlab, here you can find the outline runsheet of the “three-hour event”.
Overview of the “Three-Hour Event”
The event basically consists of:
6pm to 6.20pm — Arrival and Heat Map
Some people will invariably arrive late, so this first 20 minutes can be dedicated to a heat-map exercise. People are welcomed on arrival and invited to access the space. In some of the walls you can hang some big boards with a question, and provide stickers for people to provide their answers. This will help gather some views of the participants and will spark a few conversations before the event starts. In this link you can find a template in SVG for the heat map example below.
6.20pm to 6.30pm — Welcome and opening
The hosts welcome the attendees and the event kicks off properly. This is also the occasion for the host to provide the institutional message, the why of the event, the context and the agenda. Ten minutes is more than enough if you want to keep the event agile and fresh.
6.30pm to 6.45pm — First keynote
Just after the welcoming, it is a good time to bring up the first keynote, ideally provided by a third-party speaker.
6.45pm to 7.30pm — Collective Intelligence
Now that the participants have been welcomed to the event, understand the context and have had an inspiring keynote, you can move on to the first out of two participatory exercises. In this block we recommend doing an exercise of collective intelligence, where participants work in the groups of a maximum of six people to address a given question.
There are many exercises that you can do for collective intelligence. Three examples would be: World Cafe (for mixing things up and have an easy way to collect views from the participants), Triz (a sometimes shocking exercise that makes people realise the need for action) or Impromptu Networking (an easier exercise than the other two, but still generates some interesting ideas).
As you can see in the runsheet, we don’t plan having a break at all during the 2.5 hours of the event. If you must have a break, this would be a good time to do so. Note that a toilet break for large groups takes an awful lot of time…
7.45pm to 8.30pm — Collective Conversation
This is the second and final participatory exercise. Now you can facilitate a collective conversation where everybody can participate and use some of the ideas harvested so far, either during the collective intelligence section or provided by the speakers during their keynotes.
If the number of participants and the space allow it, one great exercise is the fishbowl. With this format, participants are arranged in concentric circles and the conversation is being held in the inner circle, where there are some empty chairs. As participants see that they have something to contribute, they can move forward to take one of those empty chairs.
In case the rearranging of the space and moving the chairs around is too cumbersome, you could do something similar with an open panel. You could start with a moderator and the two speakers at the stage, flanked by three empty chairs, just to get started with the conversation (and ideally using some of the harvest of the collective intelligence exercise). Then the moderator could let the conversation flow and participants can join the empty chairs as they see fit.
8.30pm to 9pm — Wrap up
And finally, you can use the last thirty minutes to wrap things up, say your thank yous and propose a follow up (if there is any). It’s advisable to leave the last 15 minutes or so for participants to continue whichever conversations they had open, exchange contact details and so on.
Tell me what you think
I hope you find this how-to guide useful, but I am sure you will have some remarks or questions. Please do share them with us and let’s make this guide even better. You can comment here directly or send me an email at manel@ouishare.net. Look forward to hearing from you!
About me
I’m an organisational transformation facilitator who works with organisations seeking to empower their teams to innovate and transform business strategy. My focus is on collaborative and agile practices, knowledge management and collective intelligence. I’m fascinated by networked organisations, distributed leadership and innovative governance models, and their ability to transform traditional companies into adaptive and purposeful organisations.
You can contact me at manel@greaterthan.works or simply check out our work at Greaterthan.
