How to Run Better Meetings, Groups, Clubs and Classes
by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
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Dynamic Format opens Socratic Method to all of us, rather than only to an advantaged few. For the first time in history, it is now feasible to bring the benefits of Socratic Method to absolutely everyone in a group or classroom, at one and the same time, over extended intervals of time.
Previously, the most-tested educational method in 2400 years of history, Socratic Method, whose main concept education and educators are themselves named after, the method which over that span of history has always and consistently and dramatically been associated with highest-level intellectual performance, had been only the purview of a privileged elite. While you Socratically interviewed one or two students, the other forty-seven in the group would get understandably restless, and eventually their restlessness would disturb even the one interview. A Socratic educator for just one or two students is way too costly, and that was why Socratic-powered education was limited to only a select few. Now, Socratic-powered learning and growth can benefit literally everyone.
And now that we finally understand what makes Socratic Method so consistently productive of highest-level intellectual performance, we see some uses for the method which are more important even than its educational use, including its major applications to your own life and work….
Have you ever had the experience of having something important to say but no opportunity to say it? How easy or hard is it for you to really hear and respond to what someone else is saying while you’re sitting there seething with your own thwarted urgent contribution?
The same goes for your participants. Every time you’ve done your job as chair or moderator so well that your people have gotten interested and involved, you inflict that perception-inhibiting frustration on your brighter members and in direct proportion to the degree that each has something important to contribute.
The same for your students. Every time you’ve done your job so well that your lecture starts to get interesting, you inflict that perception-inhibiting frustration on your brighter students and on your class generally.
In a corporation where time is money, how much time is wasted in board and staff meetings, either in lengthy discourse by the chair or CEO while expensive specialists and executives sit mute, or in pre-orchestrated speech presentations whose “discussion” outcome was determined long since, or in a chaos ended only when the chair or CEO goes out and either does things himself or by dictate, dismissing 99% of all that was said at the meeting? Or where everyone is saying only what the chair or CEO wanted to hear, providing no meaningful feedback or direction?
Here, then, just a few paragraphs below, is a summary of a very few, very simple provisions through which you can build interest and sustain tight topical focus while fostering dynamic expressive interaction. It wonderfully integrates and develops your group’s various perceptions and perceivers.
This highly efficient group, boardroom or classroom management process is also a way to discover and focus your people’s (your people’s!) very real genius.
What is Dynamic Format?
Dynamic Format fits comfortably with, and can benefit, most other group methods and procedures. It can turn miraculously productive all kinds of group meetings, from classroom (and even faculty meeting!) to board room to sales meeting to Town Hall and civic clubs.
Dynamic Format makes it easy for you to get the members of your group actively, richly exploring, debating, investigating and relating to any topic or issue, yet staying far better focused than can the most forceful lecture or most rigorous use of Robert’s Rules.
Dynamic Format helps your participants to participate without getting in each other’s way or in your way. Dynamic Format is a set of techniques to conduct the transaction of information and/or decision with maximum sensitivity and breadth of consideration and perception, quickly, crisply, in depth but efficiently. (Doesn’t sound like some of the meetings you’ve been in before, does it?)
The simple “house rules” of Dynamic Format enable your people to be interactive, thoughtful, perceptive, expressive, comprehensive, and yet to maintain a tight, clear, progressing focus on your topic.
Here is how to bring about these and other desirable effects from a group meeting:
Form Teams or Partners
At the start of your session, have any group of more than 5 to 6 participants subdivide so each is already in place with his or her partner(s) on a stand-by basis. This way you can move swiftly and smoothly in and out of the interactive mode when you come to the point in your session where you want to use it.
Have your people stay oriented with their partner(s) even while functioning in your larger (plenary) group. This way, when you want to switch modes, no logistics are required and you are free to move deftly between levels of interaction as well as from step to step, or into interaction and seamlessly back to formal lecture or other formal process.
Your teams can be pairs, or threes, or you can have “buzz groups” consisting of as many as 5 or 6 participants, depending upon what you want to do with them.
Each participant in a pair has more “air time” in which to examine and describe what s/he is perceiving in the context of the defined topic or question.
The larger the group, the more chance that someone in it will catch on to what you want and model how it is done. The more difficult your question or task, therefore, the larger you want your groups, up to a maximum of six, to ensure that someone there in each group will be able to comprehend and get things moving as you want.
Most of the time, to get the maximum of Socratic benefit, you will want to work your participants within pairs. You can even have your participants, as this writer has often done in his workshops and teachings, orient in pairs within larger sub-groups of 4 to 6 members.
Core Agreements
From the very start of such a session, set up at least some of the following “Core Agreements” or “house rules for this session,” to make it easy for you to swiftly and gently guide and focus or refocus your people into, through, and out of highly involved, highly interactive “buzz” sessions:
1. Waterglass Rules
Have on hand a waterglass or chime which can be heard easily when everyone is talking at the same time—so your voice won’t have to compete with all the other voices…
- Three ‘bings’ = Instant pause in talking.
Rule: the moment you hear 3 bings, pause in talking not only in mid-sentence but in mid-word so that you and others can hear the next topical question or step of instruction.
- One ‘bing’ = Half-minute’s notice (before the 3-binger).
Rule: keep on doing what you are presently doing but be ready a half minute after this one bing to pause in talking to hear the next instruction.
- Hand-Up = Instant Talk-Pause + Hand Up (this simple device is often used by the Scouts). This is best for very large groups, of one hundred or more members. (On-off flicks of the room lighting can serve the same purpose.)
Rule: the instant you notice either the leader’s hand go up or other people’s hands going up, pause instantly in your talking and get your own hand up!
2. Relevancy Challenge
Make a triangle of your thumbs and forefingers, sight at the speaker through that triangle.
Rule: in that instant, whoever is speaking must (1) demonstrate how his/her remarks relate to the topic; or (2) return to the topic; or (3) yield the floor. Instantly. (How many times have you been reluctant to shut off someone’s story but had to stand there bleeding internally while s/he got further and further off the subject and broke the context?!?)
You can see how, with just a little simple pre-arrangement, major group dynamics can be set in motion or stopped, directed and focused, how you can orchestrate them to maximum effect in terms of learning or of meeting the goal. Simple arrangement of easily used hand signals as standing rules or agreements allows you to orchestrate a wide range of group behaviors virtually without effort or delay. On the same principle, from time to time you may want to set up these special-occasion rules for particular situations.
3. On-Task Pointer
Fingertips steepled together and lightly bounced, pointing forward and the person so signifying leaning forward. This sign represents someone’s perception — within the group or from outside it, such as by a wandering-by instructor — that the group has gotten off-task and is encouraged to get back on the main track. Easily keep your groups on-track and highly productive, with this little sign. Even establishing this sign, as an agreed-upon meaning, helps orient your participants or students toward keeping on task, and a little light (and good-humored) maintenance can get almost unbelievably fine production from your participants.
4. Support-First Rule
Every major system of creative problem solving has some form of this rule. To obtain creative production, fresh ideas and perceptions, innovations, and answers to questions or issues whose outcome is not narrowly predetermined, and to get more and better ideas contributed, the first response to the contributing of an idea should be a positive reinforcement.
Rule: No matter how off-the-wall an idea or input may seem at first, the first response to it must be some form of meaningful, content-related support!
After that meaningful first support, then it’s okay to carve that weird notion into corned beef hash, so long as the support came first. To use this rule effectively, simply put it in this form:
- Any time you observe an idea not getting supported first, whether yours or someone else’s, clasp your hands together over your head for a second or so while looking wistfully upward, then go on.
- Note: the best ideas usually are those which were greeted first with a burst of laughter. You may wish to give those laugh-burst ideas special attention. In any case, make sure that the first response positively reinforces the act of creating and contributing ideas and fresh perceptions. Win your way past the usual reflexive self-censorings which stifle creative thought and perceptiveness.
- Don’t use this support-first rule where you don’t want richly expansive creativity, multiple considerations, and enthusiastic participant expression.
5. Three-Sentence Limit
Or 4, or 2, or simply a 1-minute limit per input, depending upon the size of group and the nature of the process you are working. Once this rule is invoked, any time you notice someone going beyond the set limit, simply lean forward with hands clasped in front of you.
6. Make Record of the Run-Pasts!
This corrects the main frustration about any group discussion or process which gets interesting enough to provoke a lot of desire to participate.
Rule: Anything you notice that seems worthy of mention, but which the group process (or lecturer!) has stampeded past — make a written note or record of it, immediately!
So reinforce your own perceiving of overlooked aspects, not merely that particular point. And clear the traffic jam in your perceptions between thinking about what you have to say and giving more attention to what others are saying now. And if others also follow this Record Run-Pasts Rule, your inputs when you do get to make them will receive attention.
Sometimes there is a chance before the end to pick up some of these points and consider them — but the main purpose of this rule is to reinforce your own perceptiveness and integrity of view. Any time you notice someone else seething with an overrun item, point to his or her notepad and waggle pen or pencil at it.
7. Namas-Te
Hands together parallel, pointing upward, accompanied by a slight bow. This can be a powerful positive reinforcer for a brilliant contribution to the group process, delivered without breaking up context or taking time.
The original, more spiritual meaning of the Namas-Te gesture from India was, “The Divine in me greets the Divine in you.” In broader secular use here, establish the context and meaning to be, “The genius in me (or us) recognizes and salutes the genius in you!”
Using this is a very splendid concept. Considering the powerful natural Law of Effect (“you get more of what you reinforce”), this can become a very powerful positive tool and resource, for both sender and receiver. Where a group or a class establishes this as a very special-occasion gesture not lightly used, careful not to cheapen it or use it routinely, but where all spontaneously follow suit pointing the hands toward the contributor, after the instructor or another participant has appropriately so signified, this can become a very powerful experience.
By following these dynamic-format procedures you are, in fact, likely to get more and more high-quality responses from your participants, several or more of which may well deserve this salute.
A Respite for Teachers
- Buzz-grouping your students gives you, the teacher, a respite in which, for the moment, your students are doing all the work and you have a breather. While they are processing with one another how to answer your question or challenge, you are recollecting your thoughts and perceptions, rediscovering where you are in what you had planned to teach at this point and can be planning how to pick up pieces you had missed getting to or which you felt had been under-received by your students. You can take a fresh grip on the information you have yet to impart to your students that session.
- If you have really done your job as a teacher and got your students all wrought up over an issue you were teaching, as we remarked at the start of this paper, all of them are waving their hands, all urgent to speak. Instead of thwarting that effect, throw your students immediately into buzz-groups to sort out their responses on that issue and report back in a more orderly fashion. All getstheir say, all are reinforced in the topic and in their related awarenesses, all are heard by others. (“Turn to the two or three people nearest to you and develop, between you, what YOU think is the best answer to this matter…..”)
- Best of all: you get to observe your students meaningfully in action. Normally, so many things are demanding your attention that your attention machine gets worn out before you ever discover much about your students, where they are, what is going on with them, and what they really know and understand about your topic or subject. Now, you can discover these things with great ease and comfort, and empower yourself to resolve much of what had been between you and the most successful of educational outcomes in your class.
An Aside: A Lecture for Teachers
The lecture method was invented for the situation, back in the Dark Ages before printing, when only one copy of some book would be at the university, and the most qualified person would both read from it to the class and lecture based upon it, for the benefit of all the students who otherwise had no access to that book and its contents.
A few of the relevant circumstances have changed since then. Some churches and most schools have continued the practice, though — all that most classrooms need to become a religious service is a hymn or so!
Even if you are wedded to the lecture method and have never “buzzed a group” in your life, you can experiment just a little. Identify the key point you’ve just been trying to make in your lecture and instruct your students to turn to their partner, or to “the person next to you” if you’ve not pre-set the class, and ask, “Between you, let’s see which pair of you can come up with the best statement of this issue.” Or turn your main point into a question and ask that question.
- Get them started (by look or persuasion, make sure all are participating).
- Allow 3 to 4 minutes.
- Sound your waterglass, cup or chime one bing and state the half-minute’s notice.
- Sound three gentle bings to end the “buzz.”
- Sound out (and give at least a little positive reinforcement to) each of a few pairs’ wording of the issue (or answer), reinforce from there the point you were making, and move on.
Now, that wasn’t too hard, was it? And easier to do next time. Courage, there — you soon can be effortlessly moving your students in and out of interactive process, and through different levels of process, with amazingly well-focused discussions, like a master conductor directing his well-trained orchestra! Yes, you!
If you are shy about it, test out these rules one step at a time until you feel them working for you, and you see and are pleased with the results — especially pleased with what you see happening with your students, as you manage your classroom into ever more excellent topical focus and intensity.
Consider: what matters in the classroom is what is learned, not what is taught. Of what value is even the most eloquent lecture if little is learned from it? Dynamic Format lets you have it both ways.
Beyond the Classroom — The Board Room, the Clubhouse, City Hall
Note that Robert’s Rules of Order were designed to shut down communications within a group so that business can be transacted. The too-typical result leads to the joke about the hippopotamus being a horse designed by a committee.
Dynamic Format, instead, elicits focused communications in a way which causes the business transacted to reflect the highest considerations and actual genius of the group.
Board meetings, annual business meetings of societies, faculty or staff meetings, planning groups, task forces, town meetings, etc., are just as appropriate for this set of focusing strategies. This form of participant involvement, fostering expression from each participant’s own perceptions while sustaining a topical focus, yields results far superior to those of the methods historically or currently in general use.
Any corporation, society, committee, task force or staff can immediately, easily and sharply improve its performance and product.
Beyond Clearing the Mental Traffic Jam
Focused “buzz-grouping” per Dynamic Format enables everyone to get in his/her say, so that deliberations can move forward and all participants are fully and productively engaged. Instead of sitting there bursting with things to say and mentally rehearsing what they’re going to say until they can grab the floor, participants fully express themselves and are freed to listen, as well as to move forward in their thoughts and perceptions. Beyond that effect —
Socrates was among the first to discover that to describe a perception develops that perception further. The original schools, in classical Greece, were set up not for the benefit of students, but to provide qualified audiences for the leading thinkers and perceivers to describe their perceptions to. Socratic method is a set of techniques for getting participants to examine their inner and/or outer perceptions and to describe in detail what they discover there.
The resulting peak learning experiences and “Socratic miracle leaps” phenomena which frequently occur with this kind of process, no less than the insights that come up on the couch of a good psychologist, are now easily understood in terms of modern psychology’s most widely accepted or “first law”: You get more of what you reinforce. Each time you describe one of your own perceptions, you —
- Reinforce that particular perception, discovering more and more about it, sometimes until it seems that you’re perceiving the whole universe at once.
- Reinforce the behavior of being perceptive!
This is why groups conducted extensively through Dynamic Format not only perform so much better but increasingly better than do groups conducted through conventional meeting methods. All participants not only “get their say” without slowing one another down, but describe enough from their own perceptions to expand those perceptions, to deepen their insight, and to be freed to listen further.
The Japanese had to teach us the American-discovered technique of product quality control. Can we teach ourselves this form of meeting quality control, which may well prove to be of far greater significance to us all? You have the above simple instructions in hand, and enough information about them to devise your own “Dynamic Format” rules, should you need different ones. The rest is up to you.