Facilitation practice note: the one-word purpose

Today, I was working with a client designing a one-day conference for their members. As always, my focus was on the chaordic stepping stones as a way to design, which defers decisions about structure, agenda and logistics until after we have focused the groundwork of the event.

Participatory events are not highly engaging without tapping into the group’s urgent necessity and a clear sense of purpose for the gathering. From that point, design becomes easier, and invitation becomes alive.

Today, we focused on necessity and purpose. I kicked us off by asking, “What is happening that makes this gathering important? What conversations are you expecting to have?” in this sense, the question places people at the centre of the participant experience. Immediately, they feel the emotions of the gathering and connect with the obvious sensations present in the current context. That helps them to find the language to invite others into a gathering that will address the energy of the current moment.

For the second exercise, I had them tightly constrain their purpose statements for the gathering. I asked them to give me one word describing the purpose of the gathering given the context conversation we just had. Each of the six people typed a single word into the chat and we went around and had each person describe what that word meant and how they saw us doing that at the conference.

This led to a set of really focused insights on what we should be doing and how, and it helped to flesh out some of the other stepping stones: the outputs, architecture of implementation and some of the preliminary structure.

As I considered this technique, I reflected on how I study jazz language. I love learning licks and phrases of melody that people use to express different things. On their own, licks are just the building blocks of bigger phrases of meaning (although some licks, like the Salt Peanuts lick, convey A LOT of information). But a lick opens up possibility. It suggests something else, it even recalls past experiences. It comes from what your fingers or voice has done before, what is natural, what is top of mind.

The point is that licks are small units of language that an improviser can use to expand upon. Starting small and simple is incredibly helpful. From a one or two-bar phrase, you can develop variations and different kinds of tension and release. Writers know this from the prompts that are used to stimulate creativity. No one gets activated staring at a blank page. But give me a prompt, and we’re off.

In our meeting today, starting from a one-word purpose helped develop a grounded rather than abstract purpose for the conference. After an hour and a half together, we had a lot of good material for an invitation, some ideas for how to be together and the stuff we would create together, and the beginnings of a structure. It was a lovely improv session.