Monthly Archives: September 2015

0 Community Development and Community Activity

It is easy to forget why supporting community activity is important, when there are big plans on the table.  This post highlights some of the pitfalls.

Community Development Corporations

During the eighties, I attended a workshop about Community Development Corporations (CDCs), led by two Americans.  CDCs are similar to what we call Community Development Trusts in the UK.

I remember one American observed they were talking to the wrong people.  The room was full of community development workers, council officers and other professionals.  In the States he said he would be addressing a completely different audience.  It would be a mixture of community activists and representatives of foundations.  (Foundations are trusts set up by businesses that support community and charitable objectives and receive tax incentives.)

The representatives of foundations are business people seeking deals with local people.  The aim of a similar meeting in the US would be to help activists and foundations make business deals.

The professionals who attend this type of meeting in the UK would, in the States, be back in the office!  The local activists attend the meetings and negotiate with the foundations.

I have rarely seen anything like this in the UK.  Grants, contracts and loans fund community development,  promoted by professionals who have little at stake in the communities they claim to represent.

Social Enterprises

Social entrepreneurs are perhaps the closest we come to the US approach but many social enterprises are still grant orientated.

This has major disadvantages.  How many social enterprises have failed because they received up-front funding before they had built a customer base?  They fail when their funding runs out before they can build their own income stream.  The grant making body does not treat the grant as an investment and so has little real interest in the outcomes apart from requesting an evaluation report.

Community development must focus on developing people so they are able to raise and manage funds themselves.  Failure to this:

1. undermines the role of local activists
2. marginalises local entrepreneurs
3. denies community groups the business support they would receive with an investment
4. makes social enterprises dependent upon grants, contracts and loans, all tied to the objectives of the body that awards them.

Grants, contracts and loans have a role but when they dominate the funding scene they distort how local organisations function. Development workers need to equip local activists to take on entrepreneurial roles in community.

Can you think of examples of  social enterprises financed too soon or where finance has helped them grow?

0 Partners and Allies

Successful local businesses network. Some are natural networks of suppliers, for example. Other networks succeed because local businesses promote each other.

Sometimes businesses collaborate and form partnerships. These might be temporary, perhaps for a particular project, eg where a particularly challenging client needs co-ordinated support from more than one business. Or businesses might market a particular service jointly. Sometimes two or more local businesses form a partnership business and work together for the long haul.

Other partnerships resource businesses in a local area. So, for example, a group of otherwise unrelated traders might hire, refurbish and manage a building together.

Despite media rhetoric, businesses rarely compete. Most understand their success depends upon the success of others. Building relationships often unearths new possibilities for collaboration.

There are aggressive people who get their kicks from competition with others. They may claim to be successful but upon analysis their business will depend on others in dozens of ways. The competitive mindset is rarely effective, particularly into the long-term. People need to know, like and trust the people they do business with and fear does not help!

The idea of the niche might help us understand partners and allies. It comes from biology and shows how organisms adapt to their environment. What do you need to be successful in your niche?

All these require you to pay attention to other businesses in your locality. Asking for help, listening to potential customers or other traders who will help you find your niche. You may know what you want to do, eg cupcakes, but you need to know how your place sets the agenda. If people want celebration cakes, you may need to adjust your activities. The person who makes 6 wedding cakes a year, however, will have plenty of time to do other things. They have a niche where they can make a living through relatively little effort. The customer is not interested in how much time it takes to make and ice a cake – they care about the contribution the cake makes to their wedding.

Your place sets your agenda; an agenda dominated by its local businesses. So, your business relationships, your partners and allies, are not an afterthought, they are at the core of any local businesses’ practice.

This post is a part of the series based on the circuit questionnaire, the element about branding.

0 Who Owns the Future?

Who Owns the Future by Jaron Lanier offers two visions for the future. Like all such visions, they are incomplete.

The first is a humanistic future, where machines help people become their true selves. It is where people find “the thing they cannot not do” and if they need help machines are on hand. So, the surgeon uses machines to monitor and guide her hand. And note this is a world where all benefit. Those who are differently-abled find machines help them live a full life. The key idea is shared benefits are true benefits.  Maybe this is idealistic but some people have already chosen this future and through collective action we can choose to make this real for all.

The alternative is not, as you might expect, a machine-centred future. Machines have no purpose of their own and Artificial Intelligence is still something we’ll ever see. The alternative hierarchical future is where machines concentrate money and power into fewer hands. Again, some will argue, it is already happening.

Evidence for both futures can be seen in the present. We can choose either.  There are other possible futures, for example where there are no machines because we can no longer fuel them. My hunch is the second future is a step along the road to ecological disaster.

Our Choice

We can choose to use machines to help us become better human beings. The key word in that last sentence is “us”. Who is “us”? I could have written, “We can choose to use machines to help others become better human beings”. Perhaps I mean “those whose hands are on the levers of power can choose to use machines for the benefit of others”. If current practice is evidence of their intentions in this respect, the prospects are not encouraging.  The Volkswagen scandal suggests they have used machines to deceive; no-one believes they are the only ones.

“We can choose to use machines to help others become better human beings”. Look closely at the last sentence and ask, who is “we”? Perhaps the key to this is mutuality or self-interest. When I help others, I benefit too. The key to the future is not machines, it is collaboration. People working together for a better future for all.

Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier in his book “ Who Owns the Future?” argues the impact of machines has not been entirely benign because they have concentrated information into the hands of the few. Kodak used to employ 140 000 people and was worth $28 billion. It is now bankrupt and replaced by Instagram, worth $1 billion and employing 13 people.

Middle class people used to benefit from what Lanier calls levees. Levees are the walls built in fields to retain water and so feed the crops. It used to be possible to build levees around certain activities, where the practitioner’s expertise prevented others joining them without being accepted into the profession. Machines are used to break down these walls. For example, a few years ago you would have had to ask professional video makers to produce a video. Now you can easily do it yourself. Granted there is still a market for good videos from those who don’t have the time or patience to learn to do it well. The same applies to web design.

However, what might appear to be a process of democratisation, where people are able to do things they couldn’t a few years ago has its downside. Are those 13 Instagram employees really worth $76 million each? Compared with Kodak’s employees worth only $200K? If Instagram’s employees are really worth that much, I wonder how many of them have seen anything like $76 million.

Siren Servers

Lanier writes about “Siren Servers”; they

“gather data from the Internet, often without having to pay for it. The data is analysed using the most powerful available computers, run by the very best available technical people. The results of the analysis are kept secret, but are used to manipulate the rest of the world to advantage.”

Think of the impact of siren servers on bookshops. Siren servers practice data scraping, where they pick up bargains on rival bookshops’ websites and then they can undercut them. How do we react? We can choose to visit the local bookshop to look at books but there is always the temptation to find the online offer that undercuts their special offer. The net result is fewer bookshops. Is that what we really want?

(Yes I am a hypocrite.  I use affiliate links to a huge siren server.  I don’t do this for the money (income from my affiliation so far is zero) and I don’t believe this will significantly change.  It serves as a link to more information about the book I’m reviewing.  Where you choose to buy it is your choice.  Perhaps we need a peoples’ movement who check out online and then purchase in shops, where shops are accessible.)

Conclusion

Lanier’s book is a good explanation of the challenges we face from those who control new technologies. He suggests solutions, which certainly open up new possibilities and show how decisions sharing data online are not set in stone.

Whether his solutions are practical is another matter. My view is people need to be realistic about where the power is online and work together to create genuine alternatives. These alternatives must be rooted in our lives as we live them and we decide if machines will aid us.

We have access to information and communication unparalleled in human history. We can allow the corporations to control it and so concentrate power in their hands or we can collaborate to build our own levees, where genuine interactions can take place in our neighbourhoods, cities, towns and villages.

2 Participative Methods 6: Non-Directive Consultancy

Non-directive consultancy differs from the other participative methods because it is an arrangement between a consultant and a consultor, usually one person.  It is not usually an activity for a group, although it is possible for the consultant to work with a few people from the same organisation.    See my previous posts about consultancy for resources about this method.

Usually organisations pay consultants to do research, planning and / or design because they lack capacity to do the work.  The consultant is the person who does the work because the consultant is the expert.

Space shuttle Atlantis a booster analogy that probably breaks down if you push it too far!

With non-directive consultancy the consultor is the expert and does the work.  The consultant boosts the consultor’s brain power.  The consultor knows the situation better than any consultant and so the consultant’s role is to help the consultor think things through. This approach is sometimes called coaching.

The task might be analysis, design or problem solving.  The consultant might have specialist knowledge, although this is not essential.  So, I use non-directive consultancy as an approach to website design in a community development context.  Whilst I may know more about web design, the consultor knows more about the purpose of their organisation and their website.  The consultor is often unaware of how much they do know and the consultant’s task is to help them access and apply their knowledge.  Where I can use my specialist knowledge of website design and community development it is always to help the consultor as they work on their own task.

The project is always in the hands of the consultor and the role of the non-directive consultant is to provide the consultor with approaches to problem solving they need to complete their task.

Four Issue Types for Non-Directive Consultancy

George Lovell developed non-directive consultancy in the context of church and community work.  He identified four types of issue workers might encounter, based upon community workers’ experience.

More information about these can be found in my series of posts about non-directive consultancy.  It may seem obvious these can all be used to mentor new workers.  In practice, all workers benefit from non-directive consultancy support and many experienced workers continue with this type of support.  Similarly, development workers can use these approaches with activists in their neighbourhoods.

Have you had experience of working with or as a consultant in community development?  Why do you think your consultancy worked or failed?  Leave a comment to let me know what you think!

0 Authority

It is difficult to sell your offer if you are not known, liked and trusted. All three are essential for online authority. It is essential to tell your site visitors about yourself and provide evidence in support of your claims.

In real life, you meet with prospective clients and answer their questions. They can see and hear you. They make up their minds from what you say and how you say it; body language and other visible cues.

This is not so easy online because you are dependent solely upon your content. You can use video and this may provide some visible cues people need to decide but it is still nothing like personal encounter.

It is hard to avoid concluding online marketing is more difficult than face-to-face marketing. For larger investments, your aim is to move prospective clients from your website to a face-to-face, phone or Skype meeting. The last two are perhaps not as good as face-to-face meetings but if you are selling something people want and they cannot find anything similar closer to where they are, they do work.

So, the question is how to marshal evidence on your website that will encourage visitors to explore your offer further or for low-priced products make a first purchase.

Is your site full of useful, reliable information? People impressed by your knowledge may give your offer a try.

Closely related to this is generosity, where you provide useful information free of charge. If you can show you are the hub of an online community that exchanges ideas, so much the better. This can be difficult if you are starting out but established organisations can encourage their members to contribute to their sites. A blog can have several authors who should respond to comments on their articles. A strong community of authors and plenty of comments can do more to contribute to site authority than just about anything else.

If this does not work for you, for example if you don’t have time to blog, it is inappropriate or you are not established, what can you do?

Sources of Authority

Here are examples of things you can include on your site to increase authority. Be aware, it is better to integrate these items into your pages and not relegate them to their own page. However, if someone does want to know more about you it can be helpful to have an about page with detailed information in one place.

Authority on Your Website

You don’t want pages of tedious material. You need somewhere (and a Linked-In profile is ideal) where you can marshal this material and clear links to it on your site. Some visitors who are really interested will seek out this information, so it needs to be available.

Where you can, integrate testimonials into your copy. Mostly people need to know they are there and scan them. If someone is really interested, they will read them.

For organisations with history, the challenge is how to convey your authority on your website. If you are starting out, it will take time to grow authority but persevere; small incremental improvements can lead to a more convincing website over time.

If you are clear about what you want to convey, you can adjust some of the above items to meet your needs. For example, you can ask clients to write testimonials to a template that asks them about aspects of your work where you need evidence.

This post is a part of the series based on the circuit questionnaire, the first element about branding.

1 Our Town Centres Tomorrow

The core principle to Julian Dobson’s approach in “How to Save Our Town Centres” is perhaps summarised in this single sentence:

“The thriving high streets and town centres of the 21^st century will be those that rediscover how to maximise returns to their communities.” (page 127)

The concept of community is notoriously slippery and perhaps mostly we must fall back on “I know community when I see it”. We can say community is present where there is growth of sustained relationships between people committed to a particular place. Whilst there is a degree of trust required in any financial transaction, in large commercial chains it is primarily through written contracts and familiar branding; not so much through personal contact.

City Centres are Complex

So far, so simple. Dobson shows how complex our cities are and the many factors we need to consider. So, in the second part of the book, he has written chapters about:

Economic Development Equals Community Development

Dobson questions the approach to regeneration that brings together the great and the good. He writes:

“They fail to appreciate that economic development must encompass community development … this means considering not only what kind of places we want to create, but how they are to be run and in whose interests: who will control or influence what can happen in 5, 10, 20 or 50 years’ time and how to ensure our towns are no longer at the mercy of decisions taken hundreds or thousands of miles away – or even behind closed doors in the local town hall or chamber of commerce.” (page 262)

In my free e-book (see below) “Community Development is Dead! Long Live Community Development!”,  I argue practitioners have ignored the local economy. The corporations have taken advantage of the neglect many local activists have practiced towards their local economy. They have their power because activists have refused to dirty their hands in trade. As a result community activity has become grant dependent and so unable to build sustainable programmes in their communities.

An Objection

And this brings me to an objection to Dobson’s argument. We cannot get there by concentrating solely on town centres. Town centres are one part of larger towns and cities with many suburban centres. And they too need regeneration. The big supermarkets recognise local shopping centres are important and wealthier centres usually house at least one major chain in direct competition with local businesses.

Local businesses not only base their activities outside their town centre because they can afford the premises but also because they value where they are. They build networks of suppliers and customers where they are.

We need a model that provides a framework for trade across the city, allowing customers to find local businesses not only in the centre but across the city. I’ve written about Hunters Bar in Sheffield, a distinct centre that draws people for recreational purposes, perhaps on an afternoon off work. In the same post, Spital Hill is another example of a local centre, where there is in embryo an Islamic shopping centre. There are many other similar places in the city. We need to find ways of supporting all this economic activity and the city centre can support these satellite centres.

This apart, “How to Save Our City Centres” is an essential contribution to the debate about the future of our cities, local economies and communities.

3 Participative Methods 5: Using Citizens’ Organising

Citizens’ Organising is immensely powerful in the United States but is not established in the UK. However, I suspect many development workers pick and mix insights from citizens’ organising and so it has not been without influence.

You can find out more about the history and background to Citizens’ Organising, including some reference works in my post Citizens’ Organising.

I took Citizens’ Organising leaders’ training in 1992.  Whilst I had issues with their whole package, much of what I learned has been helpful in my community development practice.  The method is not written down anywhere because citizens’ organising is passed from practitioner to practitioner; by mentoring not study.  Be aware there are sound reasons for this.

Some Basic Citizens’ Organising Concepts

1. 

   Old church buildings can still contribute to the community. Friends of Burngreave Cemetery organise events for local residents from the old chapel.

   Organising starts with the churches.  Why?  Because churches are there for the long haul.  In disadvantaged communities they can be the only institutions that maintain a presence.  (While it is true that in the UK, churches are often the last institutions to leave some estates, the churches overall have less influence in the UK.  There are fewer of them, fewer people involved and therefore they are less financially robust.       Leaving aside any reservations churches may have about being involved in Citizens’ Organising, the reality is their presence is nowhere near as decisive as it is in the United States. It is hard to think of any other organisation that could take on the role in the UK.)

2. Organising depends upon power analysis.  The statutory, private and professional voluntary sectors access power through organised money.  Community organisations cannot do this, as they have no money, so they access power through organised people. (In the UK, the grants industry usually drives community development. Citizens’ Organising in my city went down the road of applying for grants, presumably because it couldn’t generate the income it needed from its members’ dues. This had two effects: it subtly changed their approach. They made demands on community organisations that should have been their allies and failed to build a sustainable movement and so eventually closed.)
3. Contributions from member organisations are the sole source of funding for Citizens’ organisations.  This guarantees independence, as grant aid means they become beholden to donor organisations.  Citizens’ organisations must unambiguously represent the interests of their members. (This is perhaps the fatal dilemma for Citizens’ Organising in the UK. With less potential for support from the churches, it cannot generate sufficient income from membership dues. This not only means they are prone to become beholden to grant making bodies but also they are unable to build a citizens’ movement. In grant dependent culture, organisations normally receive money to pay for community development and do not pay for it themselves.)
4. Power tempered by love.  Power is collectively exercised and used in a disciplined way that marginalises no-one. (In the UK, power language is somehow extreme.)A
5. Anger and self-interest motivate the people involved.  Anger energises leaders and ensures things get done.  Self-interest is where I understand I benefit when I work for the benefit of others and so it is the wellspring of mutuality. (Words like anger and self-interest are not commonly used of community activities in the UK. Community is about people working together and so conflict is frowned upon. In reality, community organisations (and churches) are often battlegrounds because people do not know how to resolve conflict. Citizen’s Organising offers the structures organisations need to resolve conflict and help organised citizens be more effective. Whilst it is possible to use some of these insights they are not generally understood.)
6. Leaders never occupy any position in the organisation for more than one year. They develop their skills by moving between positions and not remaining in them.  This way they pick up new challenges and make space for others who pick up their old responsibilities. (Whilst UK groups do talk about succession, the most common reason is fear of losing the current leader. A lot of the conflict within organisations is because they become ‘self-perpetuating oligarchies’ and one reason for this is most organisations do not take seriously the training and education of their members for leadership. This is surprisingly common in the UK and indeed many churches face similar issues. Perhaps the best known failure to bring on the next generation of leaders is the current leadership election in the Labour Party. (They are enacting the consequences in the full glare of the media although all parties face similar difficulties.))
7. They work by ensuring people with power, eg local politicians, business people, church leaders, etc are accountable through their own aims.  (And this is something not generally understood. The first recourse needs to be to the aims of the organisation that is using power to the disadvantage of our communities.  Malice does not motivate most institutions but they often act in self-defeating ways. This is often caused by failure of their own leaders who lose touch with their organisation’s purpose.)
8. Citizens’ Organisations have no permanent friends or enemies, the aim is always to develop relationships. (This insight has become better known in the UK. Properly understood, it helps community organisations enter into genuine partnerships, helping powerful institutions meet their objectives locally. Where it is not understood, groups collude to make cosmetic changes and do not address deeper drivers of disadvantage.)

Conclusion

So, in Britain we have not yet developed an approach to organising that suits our own culture.  I’m not sure it is possible if the churches are unable to provide support equivalent to churches in the US.

How would you apply these principles in the UK?  Use comments to tell me what influence organising has had in your community. Perhaps you live somewhere where there is still a citizens’ organisation. If so, how do you fund it?

0 Compromise

Don’t compromise your business. Why not? Because it sends out mixed messages. If people struggle to understand your offer it can be because you are not clear about it or your market.

However, compromise is hard to avoid. You develop a package for your consultancy service and someone comes along and wants something different. They want to work with you and so it is hard to resist their requests for a specially tailored service.

Is this compromise or simply responding to your client’s reasonable requests? Surely you need to be flexible, if not why shouldn’t your client seek something more suitable?

This is the issue. Is there someone who could deliver what your client wants better than you? Maybe it would be better if you referred them on? Think of the advantages:

1. the client gets a good service, will thank you for sending them there and may be inclined to recommend you to others;
2. the other practitioner will be grateful for the support from you and may seek some way to return the favour, and
3. you don’t dilute your message and have time to improve your packages and market to the right clients.

If you’re not sure about your package or market, try different types to find the best fit for you. I suspect whilst the best businesses don’t compromise, they needed to compromise to work out what they should not compromise! Once established some businesses find they can relax their rules a little.

What Works for Me

So, I compromise by underselling my business.  I charge less than my support is worth and as a result find my work undervalued.  This is a common issue for new businesses.

Clarity about what I offer, makes it easier for prospective clients to say “yes” and the reason they say yes is they understand the value of my offer.  If I don’t charge enough it means I undervalue my work!  Obviously there are several factors involved in what I charge.  Too much and people genuinely can’t afford it and too little they may not feel committed to working with me as a coach.

My Offer

I offer a Done With You (DWY) service to help clients sort out their organisation’s online presence, fully integrated with its in-person activities.  It would not make sense to charge more than Done For You (DFY) website designers, of course.  However, DWY has advantages over DFY for some organisations and so it is not just a way of saving money.  Ultimately, I do not offer a website; I help clients develop and carry out a marketing strategy for their organisation.  What they get is something the website (with other activities) delivers in terms of new supporters, partners and income.

And from my point of view I balance what I charge with capacity.  I can manage only a few clients at a time, so it is crucial I find clients who are right for me, perhaps passing on others who need a different service to the one I provide.

How have you compromised your business or community activities?  Did compromise work out for you or against your best interests?

This post is one of a series exploring questions in the circuit questionnaire and addresses the branding element of the questionnaire.

2 Our Town Centres Today

So, what are the problems facing town centres today? Last Friday I introduced Julian Dobson’s book, “How to Save Our Town Centres”. Today I shall summarise what he understands their problems to be.

What Are Town Centres?

We are making a massive mistake if we think town centres are solely about retail; fundamentally they are places where relationships develop between citizens. Retail depends on trust and so the nature of cities and their spaces, where relationships can grow, is important. At least, that is true for local retail businesses. The large corporations depend on their brand to develop trust and so have become independent of civic institutions.

Dobson writes:

“Not only the shops are going: many of the institutions that once anchored town centres, from churches to libraries to adult education centres, have disappeared or diminished. The activities that brought people into town in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries are often no longer there, and sometimes no longer anywhere.” (page 10)

Later, he writes:

“Go back to the ancient Greek idea of the agora and you will find a far richer mix than exists in even the most successful contemporary street markets. The agora was a civic space, not just a marketplace. In the agora of Athens there was the courtroom, places of religious worship, the gymnasium, the mint that produced the city’s coinage, and the bouleuterion, the council building where people assembled to legislate and to discuss public affairs. The agora was used for theatre and performance, meeting and holding court: it was far more than a shopping precinct.” (page 46)

The Marketplace

This vision will be familiar to readers of this blog although I’ve usually used the word marketplace to describe similar diversity. People generate all these activities and so we say they are people-centred. Of course, some institutions, for example civic authorities, manage activities such as courts or council meetings. But all these activities are essentially public activities. They take place behind closed doors only in totalitarian states.

But ideally local businesses and community organisations generate most activity. Each activity supports future activities because town centres have histories known by the people and are an inspiration to them. They take civic pride in their unique place.

Three Trends Undermine Town Centres

According to Dobson there are broadly three trends that have undermined our town centres in recent decades:

“The shopping centre, the supermarket and the internet giant: each in its way is stripping trade out-of-town centres and away from local businesses.” (page 78)

And when the trade goes it becomes more difficult to sustain the other activities.

The one thing that unites these three threats to town centres is branding. Meadowhall, Tesco and Amazon (for example) are all trusted brands. This means they are well-known, provide a massive range of goods and offer credible guarantees of quality.

What Can Be Done?

Whilst many local retail businesses can compete on quality they can rarely compete on their range of goods (addressed by having many businesses and not so much by increasing the range of goods held by a trader) or becoming well-known because they have limited marketing budgets and are often based in premises they can afford outside the town centre.

Somehow we have an economic system that makes no effort to protect the interests of local businesses and communities.  Local authorities plan to attract corporate businesses into their areas in the hope it will regenerate their towns.  Instead they take more finance out of the area, destroy local supply networks and then when they find a better offer, are likely to leave.  Where are the plans to grow, support and protect local businesses and communities?

No summary can do justice to Dobson’s book and especially the wealth of examples he offers based on good and bad practice.

Next week I shall explore some of the solutions Dobson offers and reveal the one point on which I do not agree with him.

0 Participative Methods 4: World Café

Whilst I want to encourage the use of participative methods, I don’t want to imply they are easy.  These posts about community development draw attention to a variety of participatory methods.  My message is experiment, acknowledge your limitations and you will improve over time.  Share leadership and work with others when you can.

A view of typical “paraphernalia” from a World Cafe session I helped facilitate a few years ago.

World Cafe can be more flexible and straightforward than open space technology.  Broadly people sit in small groups around tables, discuss a topic which might be the same for each table or vary from table to table.  From time to time people move around, leaving one person behind to introduce new people to what was discussed earlier  This mixes insights from several tables.

Some Issues to Consider

Furniture and Paraphernalia

The main difficulty (apart from actually being participative!) is resources.  You need to accommodate everyone in a single large room around small tables, 4 at each table is ideal.  You also need flipchart paper and various flowers, sweets, toys, information sheets to encourage the right sort of atmosphere (You don’t need all this stuff but it helps some people).  One advantage of working with churches is there is no shortage of large rooms.  The ubiquitous trestle tables can be a bit of a problem but the method can work quite well with them.  Round tables optimise distance and so help with hearing and of course look better.

Hearing

Hearing can be a problem.  If tables are close together and there are a lot of them, background noise can be a real problem for some people.  (Me included!)  The size of tables is relevant: groups of 12 around vast tables are impossible because everyone has to shout to be heard.  Use the loop or PA system to clearly set the task and ask people to make sure everyone has a say.  Large sheets of flipchart paper where participants can record the conversation, can help with hearing (and will help more people than you think).

Keeping Track

With large sheets of paper and plenty of pens, people can share ideas and they serve as an aide memoire when people move around.  They can be pinned to walls to share conclusions at the end.  If you can’t manage all the other paraphernalia, do make sure pens and large A1 sheets are available.

For more information, take a look at my previous post about World Cafe that includes some resources.

Some people relate to issues by thinking about them, others through emotions or design and others by playing with things.  Have you experience of ideas springing from these different approaches?