“About Bumblebees, Brown Bags &
Fishbowls – Creative Meeting Formats”
Frontal teaching at school meets its equivalent in the professional context in classic meetings with classroom style seating. At a first glance this concept might look effective and target-oriented, but on the second look it doesn’t really give room for creativity and the atmosphere might not really encourage the participants to bring up their own ideas. So there might be a reason for the education sector’s constant call for new group working methods.
To breathe some fresh air into your usual meetings and at the same time come up with new solutions and different approaches adding on top a learning effect for your attendees – what can you do? We want to present three ideas how your conference can be turned into a cooperative and communicative group working session. Especially for meetings with high attendance it can be a challenging task to arrange them in an interactive way.
BROWN BAG SESSION
Sometimes a small alteration in the setting can make a big difference. In this case, the little change to hold a brown bag session instead of an ordinary meeting is that the attendees are eating together while discussing. Often this kind of meetings is set up in the official lunch breaks – in this case the participation is non-mandatory, of course! The relaxed atmosphere while eating lunch together (“brown bag session” because of the typical brown paper lunch bags) helps to address and discuss topics in a more casual way, especially those that don’t really fit into the weekly meeting agenda. In most cases the lunch bag session is limited to one hour at the most and the agenda won’t be set in advance.
This meeting method is also being used more and more online, for webinars for example: This way even a high number of attendees can meet up via video chat at a certain time (e.g. their lunch break) to get information on a specific topic and join a discussion about it for one effective hour. Performed offline this meeting method is more suitable for smaller groups of about 10 to 30 participants, to ensure productive communication is still possible. Often there will be an official short meeting after the brown bag session to provide a framework for the presentation of the ideas and solutions elaborated before. In this more formal meeting afterwards the actions needed to reach new goals can be officially captured and planned.
Working together in a dynamic way…
OPEN SPACE
What first sounds like something related to rocket science actually is a method for moderating bigger groups. It’s especially used for dealing with broad but urgent topics that can be divided in smaller sub-themes. There is no agenda to be set beforehand; the schedule is worked out by the participants during the workshop. The first thing to be done is usually the collection of concerns and ideas during a plenary session. Those will be summarized and split into the subjects that will be worked on in smaller groups afterwards.
Why do you call this working technique “open space”? Every individual person in the meeting will choose for him/herself, on which topic they want to work, usually based on interest and personal relevance of the question or problem. People stay in the working group just as long, as they consider their participation meaningful, as long as they can contribute to the subject or learn something from the others. This principle is called “law of two feet” because these you shall use to make your way to just the place or the team, where you will be the most useful at the moment and this as often as you consider it necessary.
… as bumblebees and butterflies
Following this law there are two different but very typical movement patterns that can be observed easily: “Bumblebees” on the one hand move slowly from team to team and make sure, the different workshops “fertilize” each other by bringing ideas and results from one discussion to another. “Butterflies” on the other hand are more static and like to stand their ground on a topic by attracting other participants with their thoughts and ideas and motivating them to work together productively on behalf of their chosen topic. Open spaces are normally held like a dynamic brown bag session to avoid interrupting the content flow of the attendees. It’s highly recommended to offer a buffet with snacks and beverages for the group all day long to keep the daily organization as flexible as possible.
FISHBOWL
Not enough of the allusions to the animal world yet, this meeting format is named after the typical shape of a goldfish’s habitat. Fishbowl discussions are a tool to make productive discussions possible for very large groups, even for emotionally charged topics. The method’s description should explain the unusual name perfectly well: Two chair circles are built, a big outer and a way smaller inner circle. The participants sitting in the inner circle could be specialized in the topic for having an experts’ discussion or otherwise (even randomly) chosen colleagues.
Their task is to discuss a certain issue on behalf of the whole group. All the others – sitting in the outer chair circle – are supposed to attentively watch the discussion and are called to action at certain specified times. Then they are asked to comment, add to or redirect the conversation. An alternative way of connecting the two circles is leaving an empty chair in the inner circle to be taken by the people in the outer circle on an ad hoc basis and enabling each of them to join the discussion for a defined short time span.
… equipping everyone with knowledge
The method is recommended especially for groups that are too large for a productive discussion in plenary. This way, issues that are important to all attendees can be discussed without leaving people out and without losing track of the way to a solution. If the inner circle really is taken by a group of experts it’s also an efficient way to let the listeners expand their knowledge in an interactive way.
Conclusion
Some of these methods, especially open space need a bit of preparation beforehand and might (in contrast to brown bag sessions) not be suitable for weekly meetings. But for extraordinary meetings that are set up for finding solutions or to work on difficult topics one can definitely profit from these ideas. They help the attendants to think outside the famous box and make space for more creative and productive ways of working.
