Improve Something Today

“What did you notice?”

Asking this question is an incredible way to close out a meeting or gathering.

Here’s how it’s done

1. Pose the question: “What did you notice?”
2. Invite everyone to share an answer, or pass.
3. Indicate that you'll answer first and point out who’s next.
4. Give your answer. (I tend to say something like, “I noticed how everyone contributed in their own way and appreciated learning from each of you.”)
5. Go around the room. Listen. Offer the kindest attention and warmest eye contact you can muster. If someone needs help, ask, “What did you notice?” or the more advanced form, “What’s one thing you noticed?”
6. When everyone has had a chance to speak, you’re done.
7. Close with your thanks.

So, what do people say?

Sometimes people share simple things: appreciations and gratitude. For one another. For time together. For kindness or collaboration that has occurred. People might say they noticed conflict, especially if they can point to a moment where it was identified or resolved.

Then a transition happens. This is the magic trick.

It happens in a group of 5 or a group of 50. I don’t know why, but it does. I’ve done this a hundred times in dozens of different groups and each time I worry it won’t happen. It always does. The transition is:

About halfway through, responses shift away from sensory observations and towards the retrospective. Reflection, decision, statements of purpose.

The question hasn’t changed—“What did you notice?”—but the room has.

Maybe some perspective-taking happens. Or someone reinforces shared purpose, especially where there has been disagreement.

By the end, the answers to “What did you notice?” tend toward summary and action. What's next. What's the opportunity. Noticing consensus or its lack.

The group has started with “what” and moved on to “so what” and then “now what.” All with a single question and the lightest structure.

If you want a little more

There are facilitation methods for doing this with a little more scaffolding.

For example, the Institute of Cultural Affairs’ Focused Conversation method is a facilitated discussion that leads a group through stages from Objective to Reflective to Interpretive to Decisional (ORID). Focused Conversations are lovely too, and I use them often.

A simpler version is the “What/So What/Now What” Liberating Structure.

Simpler still is the “what did you notice?” question.

Try it sometime. It’s so simple, it’s magic.

"Whoever comes is the right people."

I love the slight awkwardness of this sentence as it describes what happens when people (plural) become a people (singular). A people as a process, not as a shuffling, muttering crowd of individuals.

I can think of only two contexts where I’ve experienced this “peopleing”—

1. Open space technology. This is a lightly facilitated, carefully organized format for a gathering. Open space is convened on a challenge so puzzling that people are compelled to show up to work and listen. It is the most direct, accessible format for group self-organization I’ve ever encountered: both a chapel and a chainsaw.
2. The Buddhist sangha, in its various permutations. I keep a mailing list of 75 of us who sat weekly for some years in a frigid room before COVID sent everybody home. Over time, I learned some incidental details (occupation, class, family composition, neighborhood, etc.) about maybe 1 out of 8 of those people. But in terms of the topic at hand—styles of meditation, preferred traditions, favorite teachers, etc.—I still recall where each person was and where they were headed, even though we haven’t met since early 2020. Similarly, I sat on a week-length retreat with 50 people and felt like I came to know them so deeply, and shared something so precious, even though what we shared together was silence. These groups—this sangha—is vital, even though it is transient or ‘incomplete’ in a conventional sense.

We’d all benefit from more spaces where two people, or two hundred, could gather and say—“I don’t know anything about you, and you don’t know anything about me, but we have what we need to get this sorted.”

It is an antidote to the social atomization inhibiting our lives under capital.

And until we get there, it’s a hell of a way to organize a meeting.

Open space technology series:

• “Whoever comes is the right people.” → now reading
• “Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.”
• “Whenever it starts is the right time.”
• “When it is over, it is over.” (forthcoming)