A New Town Hall Proposal - Conversations for the Rest of Us

One need I see is for a well researched and documented “How To Manual” on designing and facilitating High Engagement Town Meetings. America Speaks does a great job of running major town hall meetings on critical topics. They are experts in designing and facilitating a deliberative process for engaging very large audiences on national topics. But what about smaller civic groups, community organizations and school systems.

To be honest, most of the “town halls” I have attended have been very similar, basically one way communication events with a single microphone for “public comment.”

 Although everyone has the right to speak at these events, not everyone does. In fact, much of the talk comes from the most extroverted in the audience, making very emotional appeals to a disinterested powerful few. It’s disheartening, and it doesn’t have to be this way. We have learned over the last 20 years how to design and facilitate high engagement meetings where everyone has input. These high engagement meetings can be made available to the rest of us at a reasonable cost with the proper training.

Our company designs and facilitates these meetings for our corporate clients who continually need to garner buy-in across increasingly diverse groups of passionate individuals. As companies truly go global they realize just how important it is to respect and honor the different cultural perspectives across wider audiences with different needs and perspectives. The one way, command and control system of our fathers and grandfathers simply won’t work in a global community where talent and skill demand to be respected and listened if cross functional projects are to succeed.

The authoritarian system operating at the local level in our communities is also under siege from highly talented people with access to new tools for connection and collaboration. I believe we need to discover new ways of connecting with each other at a local level which transcends the political trap of bifurcating the conversation, hardening opinions, and leading time and time again to embarrassing incidents of incompetent certainty.

Over the next few months I will be writing about our adventure into this new arena. We plan to launch Citizen Summit as a methodology, and a practice. Stay tuned…