Conversation Week

We created a Question Suggestion and Selection process for Conversation Week 2007 and refined for CW 2008. Rather than simply announce the ten “most important questions in the world” we invited friends and colleagues around the planet to develop them with us. We discovered that by soliciting questions we drew our larger community in to a provocative collaborative inquiry even before the day of the conversation. It can work in villages, conferences, organizations –anywhere people need to make meaning together. This process creates buzz, attention and buy-in. It gives participants influence over the outcome. It causes people to think deeply about their field or town or country or business – each one considers the state of that particular union. It’s very powerful. Below are the steps for doing

Begin with an online survey tool.

An online survey tool allows you to set up a series of questions that can be answered via multiple choice or ranking or essay or “check all that apply”. Suggestions of specific tools are below. The online survey tool itself generates a link to your survey. Send that link to all your constituents, noting a deadline, which should be not too soon (many won’t open your email right away) and not too late (people forget or postpone). A city-wide conversation, for example, might need a longer time frame to allow time for the buzz to build and the word to get around. For a conference, you can email all participants the week before the conference as part of creating the buzz.

Suggested tools:
We’ve used both Survey Monkey and Zoomerang, plus there are several others, including a new one, Survey Gizmo. You can find a great comparison chart at: https://cc.readytalk.com/cc/schedule/display.do?rfe=wviry6spmzb3&udc=pi7os9o8bpc7 – in the right column under Downloadable Files you’ll see the pdf Comparison Chart. Each tool is available as a free option (as well as pay-for-options with additional features). Find the one that works best for you and your constituency.

Creating the survey

Introduce your survey with a few sentences about your upcoming Conversation Café event and why knowing what questions are most interesting for participants is important.

Good questions

Be sure to tell recipients what makes a good question:

• Open , without embedded cultural, political or ideological assumptions.
• Inviting both head and heart. People can respond with both their feelings and their thoughts.
• Honest. It has not already been answered conclusively - yet finding an answer is crucial to moving forward.
• Experiential. People can if they choose tell a story or recall an experience that relates to the question.
• Inclusive. Anyone at the table could have something valuable to say - whatever age, race, gender or education level.
• Stimulating. Generates a lively exploration; can’t be answered with a “yes” or “no” or a platitude.
• Relevant. It may be general, but it relates to people’s lives - from the personal to the political to the philosophical.

This will limit the number of inappropriate questions.

Now, seed the question gathering process, by asking this one question: What’s the most important question for [XXX- your group] now? (Or some variation of this that works for you.) Then insert three text boxes with the instruction for survey-participants to submit up to three questions

Review the suggestions

This is the fun part. See how they may group together into themes that seem to arise. Decide if you want to synthesize, eliminate, edit, etc. Depending on how many responses you receive and how many final questions you want, you may need to refine these down to 20 or 50, which you’ll then submit in another survey asking participants to rank or vote on them.

Engage in the community in voting on the top suggestions

Set up another survey, with a deadline set for the voting period. The survey is set up for people to pick their top 1 or 3 or 10 questions OR they rank each question on a scale of 1to 4 or 1-6. (Using even numbers for your scale prevents middle of the road people from picking the middle number which doesn’t let you choose yeah or nay).
At the end of your voting period, you can download the responses via a special link on the survey website in a format such as Excel, enabling you to identify the winners.

Share the exciting results!

Post the questions on your site and send out broadly. This is a good time to send out a press release since people are very curious about what others think is the most important question now.

You can also use a survey tool to gather feedback after the conversation if you need it. People can evaluate the process, the question or the experience. They can report their top three insights (using text boxes again). The tool will produce reports for you – especially if you pay for the higher end products rather than go with the free ones.

Please, let us know how it goes at info@conversationcafe.org. We are learning together to create a culture of conversation – one where thoughtful citizens discern the truth together. The other name for this is democracy.

JUST IN!!! — a new tool.

Coming out of the election of Barack Obama, Google created a new tool, Google Moderator. It allows groups of people to suggest questions and then rate them – not quite with the precision of the CW process but in an all one step process. You can find Google Moderator at http://moderator.appspot.com/#0 and if you use this link http://moderator.appspot.com/#e=1e5a2 you’re invited to participate in the test “What’s the most important question for us now?” process. Let’s see together how this works. Send this link out to ten friends suggesting they send it to ten friends and see what questions we get – and what ones we all like a lot. Then you can use those questions for any Conversation Café.