29 Ways to Increase Participation in Gatherings

Pluralize the power!

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🇵🇸 Ceasefire now. Aid into Gaza now. I hope you will join me in continuing to call our representatives, showing up, immersing in as much context as possible, letting our hearts break open, not turning away.

photo by: Bo Le

“Everyone should have a chance to talk and laugh in the first 10 minutes of a meeting,” my facilitator friend Biz Nearing once told me, casually, just as a small aside, as if it weren’t one of those things that makes your brain explode and whoosh back together and melt again as the idea lodges itself in there, permanently, forever something that will be stuck in my little head. (Just kidding, my head is big! Most hats don’t fit it.)

What a powerful principle! What a great vision to work backwards from! 

There are so many ways to get there – quick introductions, breakouts where we make things together, silly stretch and dance breaks. But what’s for sure is that you can’t get there if one person is talking for those precious 10 minutes.

If we want to create transformative spaces, we need to transform the very recipes for how we come together in those spaces. Disrupting a top-down dynamic is one of the ways we might do that. 

Participation is a practice. We need to warm up to it, repeat its movements over and over again, build the muscle memory to do it well.

And yet so often, we expect entire groups of people to participate with gusto after they’ve been sitting absorbing content for an hour, or haven’t connected with another person in the room, or reacted or gotten their hands on anything. They haven’t spoken a single word in 90 minutes, and somehow we expect them to bring their best selves to a breakout group.

This isn’t to take down all gathering formats that center on one person. A one-to-many or top-down structure is just that: a structure. Jan Steward: “A structure is a series of short-term goals.” Is this structure serving your goals? Asking this of ourselves might help us reshape our gatherings to fit the kinds of community we want to be in together.

You might be so glad you focus your gathering spaces deeply on one person when there’s a need to communicate critical information quickly, or make someone feel deeply celebrated, or witnessed, or adored (birthday parties, performances, farewell gatherings), or where it’s otherwise important to build deep, meaningful attention around one central person.

It’s also often the path of least resistance when designing for communities to come together, possibly because it’s the structure we’re most familiar with in our workplaces, governments, families, schools. (Side note to self: this is just one of the bazillion reasons why play + game structures are so powerful in group settings; we are used to all participating in a game.)

When we repeat this recipe enough, though – enough lectures, enough meetings dominated by one or two people, enough gatherings organized and agendas set by the same limited few – it has a cumulative effect on a community of people. 

It might shift your very universe to orbit around a single person, maybe completely by accident. And you can just tell when that’s the case; you open up the floor for discussion, or questions, and you can almost feel the tumbleweed scoot by. Why isn’t anyone saying anything? No questions, really? Why is nobody hanging out with each other?

One way to think about community shapes is the Pools/Hubs/Webs framework shared here (scroll down to the teal image and click the expand arrow) and explained so well by Daniellexo in this post. 

credit: Harvard Business Review

I know I’m often in the position where I want a Web – to be a part of a community where there are deep connections between people and a high amount of agency to make a difference – but am often accidentally designing for a Hub, where all the focus zeroes in on just one person.

If I can offer yet another visual metaphor, might I invite you to think about GREMLINS? (Video here but don’t watch if things multiplying grosses you out.) If you get a single gremlin wet, it will cause it to burst into half a dozen versions of itself. THEY MULTIPLY WHEN WET! But hey, maybe that’s what you want! Going from one to many! 

I posit: What if we get the gremlins wet?

Below I’ve listed 29 tactics – big and small and specific and meta – that we can use to pluralize attention, de-center a single host, and invite participation in. I tried to keep these high level enough that they don’t get into deep specifics, but focus more on the level of mindset and framework shifts. 

Because it can be as simple as that; a shift.

Squinting at the lineups for our gatherings and seeing who gets the most space and why.

Always asking the question: If I want this to be a community where people participate, where do they get the chance to actually do it?

29 ways to pluralize participation

Openings

Welcoming + grounding the group in purpose, announcements, “housekeeping”

• Collaborative agenda setting beforehand, voting on themes or topics the group is most engaged in

• Being fluid with the schedule if there’s more group heat around a certain area; releasing rigidity around an agenda

• Asking different people to read announcements or more boring “housekeeping” items – something practiced all the time in churches!

• Opening up a parking lot for ideas or resources, a collaborative space people might add to as you go to share their own goodies and follow up later

• Inviting people to say hi to someone they don’t know, or the person closest to them, or giving random pairings (especially helpful if meeting virtually using breakouts or asking people to DM each other) 

• Group warmups or activities that engage everyone instantly; i.e. each person leads a stretch for everyone else to follow. Improv games should be a rich source of inspo!

• …or even simpler: inviting everyone to make a sound or movement at the same time – thinking of Olivia Vagelos’ invitation for everyone to come off mute and make whatever sound is in their heart during Design for Feelings! 

• Pulse check: any activity that allows a group to share how they’re feeling or what’s on their mind from the very beginning

• Collaborative Scroll – a funny activity I once hosted where every person on the board spoke a line out loud that had to begin with “may we always…” or “may we never…” about the culture + mission we wanted to make together (i.e. May we always put empathy first, may we never run out of cookies…)

• Swapping out welcomers; if one person welcomes at the door, what if you switched off with every 3rd person to come in? Or delegated several people in the Zoom chat to welcome in newcomers?

• Intention setting where each participant (privately or outwardly) shares a wish for the time together

Main Shares

Presentations, teachings, skillshares, lectures, big context setting

• Adding in small interactive invitations throughout, i.e. the tried-and-true “raise a hand if this is you” or “drop a heart in the chat if this resonates”. Two keys to this: 1) actually doing this throughout to keep people feeling engaged and 2) actually responding to what is seen/heard in these moments so it truly feels like a two-way dialogue

• Multiple hosts that swap each gathering, different people leading activities, shares, notetaking duties, or vibe checking

• “Unconference” style shares where participants offer to give their own short talks based on individual passion areas and expertise

• Keeping the Zoom chat active + alive, especially helpful if it’s one person’s role to moderate

• Making actual, frequent, and generous time for comfort breaks or stretch moments

• People’s mic - repeating what one person says as an entire group. Mostly meant for unamplified spaces and movement spaces, but a powerful tool for any context

• Expectation that everyone must speak once; used in consensus spaces and classrooms. Bonus points if you make it silly and less compulsory, i.e. handing out a banana to everyone who has spoken already

• Instant practice; if introducing a new tactic or activity, inviting people to do the thing in breakouts or by themselves and share feedback

Practice + Decisionmaking

Feedback, synthesis, dialogue, Q&As

• Practicing a tool first with a silly prompt; rather than going straight into an activity, using a collective moment to practice on something low stakes. If it’s a polling tool or reaction tool, vote on your favorite pickled vegetable. Practice voting or decisionmaking around a fake prompt, i.e. use consensus to order pizza (warning: this did once take 45 minutes though).

• Warm up the skills required to engage together; to practice active listening skills in a workshop one time, we were broken into pairs and given stories to read at the same time as the other person and asked to reflect on how this felt since it was the opposite of active listening

• Choice! So much choice! Giving participants a chance to pick where they want to go deep in reflecting, practicing, or making decisions about a certain area

• …and giving participants choice in their mode of reflection. Not everybody prefers to contribute verbally, or using complex online feedback and brainstorm tools. 

• 1-2-4-All method for reflecting by yourself, in a pair, with another pair, and finally, to the group at large

• …or any of the Liberating Structures activities

• Expectations that everyone gives each other feedback and critique, not just a single facilitator or expert

• Buildable brainstorms; develop several questions or themes for the group to respond to, break out in small groups and rotate between each prompt and building on the group before them

• Templatize Everything™  so that the tools practiced can be immediately used again beyond the space hosted 

• Closing with intentions, gratitudes, or wishes for others in the group. Again, suggesting random pairings and inviting them to swap notes with each other is a sweet, almost pen-paly way to create sweet connections 

And this is surely just the tip of the iceberg. I’m so curious; how do you invite participation in? How do you pluralize people power beyond a single host, facilitator, or expert? How do you get people talking and laughing in the first 10 minutes? I would love to hear what’s up your sleeve.

What if you shared this with someone you wanted to pluralize a space with?