Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Meeting Tools

[Rob Sandelin (Floriferous]

Mac asked I would love to hear of any techniques that other groups have run 
across  that work well for them.

As a group grows, its meeting process needs changes. For example, in a group 
of 5 communication is pretty easy and so process can be sort of informal. This 
informal process will probably not work as the group grows to 10 or so, and so 
the group needs a more structured communication and meeting process. This 
changes again around 20 or so, where the process needs yet more refinement and 
structure. It is at this point, 20-25 that most groups start having meeting 
problems, and try out a system like the colors of consensus.

So here are some techniques for what I call large groups, 25 or more people in 
a meeting.

The first thing technique is simple, it is called evaluate the agenda. The one 
most prevailent, consistent problem I see in large groups is that they are 
using large group time for small group agenda items.  The faciliator needs to 
evaluate every item on the agenda with the notion, can this be done in a small 
group? It is a huge waste of 50 peoples time, to spend even 10 minutes on the 
details of the garden plan, unless 80% of the people in the room are 
gardeners. 

In general, if less than 20% of the members at a meeting are involved in an 
issue, it should go to a small group to decide.

Second technique. Divide the group into smaller peices, spread them out with a 
specific mission, then regather them and report. My experience is that hot 
issues that take 2-3 hours of large group discussion, which typically does not 
go anywhere, can be handled in 15 minutes of small group time, and 20 minutes 
of report time. Then take the reports and work with them.

Limit the speechifying by giving constraints. For example, the two-cent 
method. In this approach, everyone has gets two pennies, it costs a penny to 
speak for one minute. If you go one second over a minute, it costs you your 
other penny. Once you have given your two cents, You then can not speak again 
until all the pennies are spent. What this does is forces people to thing 
about what they want to say first and to be breif and hopefully to the point.

Another large group method is to use a survey to gather opinions and ideas 
rather than group meeting time. Then use the surveys to draft your proposals.

Rob Sandelin
Northwest Intentional Communities Association
Effective meetings workshop slots now available for June and July - Contact me 
for rates (cheap!) to come to your community and teach you what I have learned 
about how to run effective meetings.