While I was assembling my off-the-cuff analysis of input types on Change.gov, I felt compelled to revisit two existing facilitation techniques that help guide participation by adding to the process the kind of structure that I believe could work very well for large-scale efforts.
First, Dynamic Facilitation, a method I first learned about at the 2006 National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation in San Francisco, CA (emphasis mine):
What is Dynamic Facilitation?
Dynamic Facilitation is a natural way of facilitating that works well with people addressing difficult issues about which they care deeply. Rather than asking them to limit themselves — to hold back their emotions, to stay on the agenda, or to follow the process — the dynamic facilitator frames the conversation so that all comments are helpful and productive. He or she establishes a “zone” of thinking and talking known as “choice-creating,” where shifts, insights and breakthroughs are frequent. The process allows ordinary, untrained people to address difficult issues and reach consensus solutions that are better, faster and which have more support than traditional means of “consensus-building.”.
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The dynamic facilitator starts by helping people determine an issue they really care about, whether it seems solvable or not. Then he or she helps them to say what is on their minds and hearts. To do this she uses four flip charts for creating lists of: Solutions, Problem-statements, Data, and Concerns. A fifth chart of Decisions is added as group conclusions emerge.
Here, the participants’ input is discovered, captured and structured using content categories or input types. And while Dynamic Facilitation is intended for small groups only and relies heavily on the facilitator role, I believe that in principle this could be applied to large-scale engagements as well.
The other process I wanted to reference here is plain old brainstorming (again, emphasis mine):
Brainstorming is a method for developing creative solutions to problems. It works by focusing on a problem, and then having participants come up with as many deliberately unusual solutions as possible and by pushing the ideas as far as possible.
During the brainstorming session there is no criticism of ideas – the idea is to open up as many possibilities as possible, and break down preconceptions about the limits of the problem. Once this has been done the results of the brainstorming session can be analysed and the best solutions can be explored either using further brainstorming or more conventional solutions.
The key here is to suspend judgment while the brainstorming process is still ongoing. If we were to view the various e-participation efforts on Change.gov as large brainstorms (which, in my view, is a fairly reasonable characterization), then clearly this principle of suspending judgment was not adhered to. Instead, participants were allowed and encouraged to rate each other’s contributions by way of simple up-or-down votes at the same time new contributions were still being added.
In their excellent book Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making (2nd edition, 2007), the authors Sam Kaner et. al. have this to say about “the cost of premature criticism” (p. 118):
Rough-draft thinking is just like rough-draft writing: it needs encouragement, not evaluation. Many people don’t understand this. If they notice a flaw in someone’s thinking, they point it out. They think they’ve been helpful. But rough-draft ideas need to be clarified, researched, and modified before being subjected to critical evaluation. The timing of critical evaluation can make the difference between the life and death of a new idea.
Premature criticism is often inaccurate. And stifling. When ideas are criticized before they are fully formed, many people feel discouraged and stop trying. Furthermore, they may become unwilling to volunteer their rough-draft thinking at future meetings. They anticipate objections and keep quiet unless they can invent a counterargument. Thus, people learn to practice self-censorship. A group is then deprived of access to its most valuable natural resource: the creative thinking of its members.
I’d argue that in the context of e-consultations like the ones seen on Change.gov, the same rule applies not only to ideas but to personal stories, concerns, questions etc. as well.
The key take-away here is that structure can be added to an input gathering process not only by categorizing participant contributions (brainstorming relies on additional processes for category creation and input sorting to handle this), but also by applying time-based activities or phases.
Following this approach, here’s what the process on Change.gov might have looked like at a very basic level:
- Invite a lot of raw input (using e.g. forum-type discussions)
- Organize and refine participant input (e.g. by way of categorizing along input types, by summarizing, rephrasing or merging content and by removing duplicates)
- Evaluate and select (e.g. by way of ranking, prioritizing or voting at the summary level, not the raw input level)
Potentially, this could make for a much more efficient setup.
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