Hosting Conversations about Questions that Matter
A story of hosting participatory conversations at the European Consumer Summit
"Change happens when many of us believe long enough that it will and are equally willing to act and let go!"
The EU Consumer Summit is a multi-stakeholder event in Brussels organised every year by the Health and Consumer Directorate (DG Sanco) of the European Commission. This event used to be, what we would call a ‘classical conference’: with lots of plenary presentations, little opportunities for participants to contribute and networking happening only in the breaks. Not this year…
The organisers from the European Commission (EC) had the vision to make this event much more participatory, as evaluation of previous years had shown that participants always liked the breaks the most because they could talk to each other. One of the organizers had participated in an internally
organised “Art of Participatory Leadership” training. (Since 2009 Toke Moeller, Monica Niessen, Maria Scordialos and others are co-hosting these trainings with and for staff of the EC.)
We were called ca. one month before the event with the question if we could co-host 6 parallel world cafés during the summit. We soon found out that teams had been working for weeks to organise 6 workshops on predefined themes, quite different in scope:
• How can we help consumer to choose the right service provider?
• Web 3.0 - Challenges and Opportunities for Consumers in the internet of the future
• Bank Account Fees - How to ensure transparency and choice?
• The Adventure of Car Hire - Enforcement challenges
• The Green Energy challenge
• Going around in circles. How to improve urban sustainable mobility
The conference was 1.5 days long and a general flow had been decided. On day one after a formal opening speech by the new Commissioner we were to split up into our workshop groups. There were about 420 participants in total and we had different sized groups ranging from 35-75 participants. Each workshop was asked to address challenges in the morning, solutions in the afternoon and prepare recommendations for the EC, based on the above.
On the second day rapporteurs (harvesters) were asked to present those findings back in plenary. Each
of us was asked to work with a workshop team composed of: a chair, workshop organiser(s), an AoH practitioner internal to the EC and an external rapporteur, who is familiar with the subject.
All 6 teams had been working hard to prepare their workshops, invite speakers, define a purpose statement. Then they were asked to work with an external facilitator and the world café method. Some of the teams were totally unfamiliar with participatory methods and therefore quite skeptical, while others were very open and trusting. And some of the workshops had more difficult starting conditions than others, e.g. high conflict potential between participating stakeholder groups (often industry and consumer organizations), a very broad scope and not enough context etc. We all were challenged to be very flexible and adaptive to the situation of our particular workshop and on the other hand to
squeeze a design into a standard format, which worked really well for some themes and less well for others. We renamed solutions into ‘enabling conditions’, 'essential elements' or ‘possible approaches’, to create space for conversation and move away from right-wrong debate inducing questions. We were under quite some time pressure, juggling between guardianing the integrity of the AoH and World Café, meeting our co-organisers where they were and hosting them into their next level.
We all had separate meetings with our workshop teams and shared our scripts with each other (among hosts) as we developed them. Even though each host worked on a different workshop, we felt and worked as a team, supporting each other morally and practically throughout the preparation time. The evening before we - the ‘external’ hosting team - met for a check-in circle to share our hopes and concerns, to give each other strength and courage. Also in the morning we had a quick huddle and during the day we looked out for each other. We also want to thank all of our mates who have been holding us form afar and showing their support by sending us messages and their love.
Some of the workshops turned out what we know as the 'real' World Café, some only squeezed in a quick round of small group conversations in between speakers. After the event we met at the organized cocktail with all hosts and were in a great mood. We felt we had all done our best to create space for participants to really contribute and had gotten the best result we could under the conditions. Participants seemed to be in a good mood too, there was a buzz in the building and lots of
conversations continued.
During the evaluation meeting with all organizers and hosts the feedback was very positive overall, also the evaluations of the participants were positive. Of course there are some things to improve, as there always are, but the World Café method has been praised by many people. The group where it was not used as such (only small group conversations) had the most difficulties the next day in the plenary with the harvest. But also the representative of that group said during the evaluation, that this was a step forward.
There is no doubt that the Commission has taken many steps towards embracing the Art of Participatory Leadership & World Café. As the regulator of the world’s largest economy, decisions taken by the Commission often have a global impact, improving its engagement with stakeholders is a very important issue. This was the first time that a participatory approach was taken in such a large conference with external stakeholders. It has not gone unnoticed by people in high ranks, who were chairing the overall summit, quite on the contrary.
This success was a truly collaborative effort, but also very much due to the courage of some EC internal pioneers, who have been dancing between the orthodox and extraordinary for years to introduce a more participatory culture in the EC and how it works with its stakeholders. We are deeply inspired by this work and will continue to support our mates in the EC in their brave endeavors.
Major learning points:
Questions we checked out with in a small circle of callers, holders and hosts:
Co-experienced and written by Simone Poutnik, Hendrik Tiesinga, Ria Baeck, Stien Michiels, Julie Arts, Nina and Mahmood Nisar
"Change happens when many of us believe long enough that it will and are equally willing to act and let go!"
The EU Consumer Summit is a multi-stakeholder event in Brussels organised every year by the Health and Consumer Directorate (DG Sanco) of the European Commission. This event used to be, what we would call a ‘classical conference’: with lots of plenary presentations, little opportunities for participants to contribute and networking happening only in the breaks. Not this year…
The organisers from the European Commission (EC) had the vision to make this event much more participatory, as evaluation of previous years had shown that participants always liked the breaks the most because they could talk to each other. One of the organizers had participated in an internally
organised “Art of Participatory Leadership” training. (Since 2009 Toke Moeller, Monica Niessen, Maria Scordialos and others are co-hosting these trainings with and for staff of the EC.)
We were called ca. one month before the event with the question if we could co-host 6 parallel world cafés during the summit. We soon found out that teams had been working for weeks to organise 6 workshops on predefined themes, quite different in scope:
• How can we help consumer to choose the right service provider?
• Web 3.0 - Challenges and Opportunities for Consumers in the internet of the future
• Bank Account Fees - How to ensure transparency and choice?
• The Adventure of Car Hire - Enforcement challenges
• The Green Energy challenge
• Going around in circles. How to improve urban sustainable mobility
The conference was 1.5 days long and a general flow had been decided. On day one after a formal opening speech by the new Commissioner we were to split up into our workshop groups. There were about 420 participants in total and we had different sized groups ranging from 35-75 participants. Each workshop was asked to address challenges in the morning, solutions in the afternoon and prepare recommendations for the EC, based on the above.
On the second day rapporteurs (harvesters) were asked to present those findings back in plenary. Each
of us was asked to work with a workshop team composed of: a chair, workshop organiser(s), an AoH practitioner internal to the EC and an external rapporteur, who is familiar with the subject.
All 6 teams had been working hard to prepare their workshops, invite speakers, define a purpose statement. Then they were asked to work with an external facilitator and the world café method. Some of the teams were totally unfamiliar with participatory methods and therefore quite skeptical, while others were very open and trusting. And some of the workshops had more difficult starting conditions than others, e.g. high conflict potential between participating stakeholder groups (often industry and consumer organizations), a very broad scope and not enough context etc. We all were challenged to be very flexible and adaptive to the situation of our particular workshop and on the other hand to
squeeze a design into a standard format, which worked really well for some themes and less well for others. We renamed solutions into ‘enabling conditions’, 'essential elements' or ‘possible approaches’, to create space for conversation and move away from right-wrong debate inducing questions. We were under quite some time pressure, juggling between guardianing the integrity of the AoH and World Café, meeting our co-organisers where they were and hosting them into their next level.
We all had separate meetings with our workshop teams and shared our scripts with each other (among hosts) as we developed them. Even though each host worked on a different workshop, we felt and worked as a team, supporting each other morally and practically throughout the preparation time. The evening before we - the ‘external’ hosting team - met for a check-in circle to share our hopes and concerns, to give each other strength and courage. Also in the morning we had a quick huddle and during the day we looked out for each other. We also want to thank all of our mates who have been holding us form afar and showing their support by sending us messages and their love.
Some of the workshops turned out what we know as the 'real' World Café, some only squeezed in a quick round of small group conversations in between speakers. After the event we met at the organized cocktail with all hosts and were in a great mood. We felt we had all done our best to create space for participants to really contribute and had gotten the best result we could under the conditions. Participants seemed to be in a good mood too, there was a buzz in the building and lots of
conversations continued.
During the evaluation meeting with all organizers and hosts the feedback was very positive overall, also the evaluations of the participants were positive. Of course there are some things to improve, as there always are, but the World Café method has been praised by many people. The group where it was not used as such (only small group conversations) had the most difficulties the next day in the plenary with the harvest. But also the representative of that group said during the evaluation, that this was a step forward.
There is no doubt that the Commission has taken many steps towards embracing the Art of Participatory Leadership & World Café. As the regulator of the world’s largest economy, decisions taken by the Commission often have a global impact, improving its engagement with stakeholders is a very important issue. This was the first time that a participatory approach was taken in such a large conference with external stakeholders. It has not gone unnoticed by people in high ranks, who were chairing the overall summit, quite on the contrary.
This success was a truly collaborative effort, but also very much due to the courage of some EC internal pioneers, who have been dancing between the orthodox and extraordinary for years to introduce a more participatory culture in the EC and how it works with its stakeholders. We are deeply inspired by this work and will continue to support our mates in the EC in their brave endeavors.
Major learning points:
- In our post-meeting the EC pointed out how much they all understood the value of us really being a team, how it enriched the work we did with
the bigger team of internal and external hosts and the
summit overall - A diverse hosting team of internal EC and external AoH practitioners, more process oriented and more content savvy people
- Good to have someone who was familiar with the content as a harvester (instead of the AoH hosts)
- On one hand it was good to concise outputs, but the pressure to present 3 key outcomes to the conference chair right at the end of the last
session seemed unnecessary. It was nevertheless useful
for the EC to focus minds and prepare follow-up actions - Meeting the client where they are at, some workshop leaders were initially quite resistant using a World Café. In working with them with an open
mind towards their needs and anxieties some of
them made small steps some of them huge steps towards a different way
of hosting. - We all felt that next time earlier involvement of the external hosts in the overall design - and harvest! - and more hosts per workshop could be an improvement
Questions we checked out with in a small circle of callers, holders and hosts:
- What if… the EC was seeing the potential in using this approach for any kind of engagement with the outside world?
- What does this mean for the trust of those involved?
- How can we support this process of resilience and empowerment? What is the next thing we can do together?
- How can we create a thriving ecology of practitioners both inside and outside the commission that can support each other?
- What’s the new paradigm that wants to be born here?
- How can we stay vulnerable and humble in what we do?
- How can we keep the freshness of this first time?
- What’s the depth of the gift of this collaboration (between internal and external hosts)?
Co-experienced and written by Simone Poutnik, Hendrik Tiesinga, Ria Baeck, Stien Michiels, Julie Arts, Nina and Mahmood Nisar
Tags: Commission, European, conservative, environment
Replies to This Conversation
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Permalink Reply by juanita brown on -
Hello everyone,
This is a WONDERFUL STORY!! It is so exciting to see what unfolded here--and both the learning points and the questions at the end.
Thank you so much for such an incredible harvest. I'm letting Amy Lenzo, our director of global communications know of this story since I think it's an important one to share also via our newsletter with the larger World Cafe community-- are you o.k. with this being a link in Table Talk, our global newsletter?
Fond regards and best wishes,
Juanita
-
Hello Juanita,
wow great, yes I'd say we'd be really honored if the story travels through the World Cafe community via the newsletter! I've sent it to the people in the European Commission before we posted it on the AoH list, they liked it and were happy with us spreading it among our fellow practitioners.
Love from Brussels,
Simone
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Permalink Reply by Ria Baeck on -
I think we are OK with that Juanita. Maybe good to have the language checked beforehand, as the matter is quite 'sensitive' within the Commission itself.
With love from Belgium,
Ria
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Permalink Reply by Ursula Hillbrand on -
I am an internal European Commission person, and was approached to help with this event, but could not make it for time reasons. Anyway, I followed it through the stories that travelled in the AoH circles inside the Commission, and we are proud of all of you externals and of our internal coaches, who were involved.
Great you are sharing this break-through experience here. You know that the Director General was so excited that he suggested to make this a way of working, not just conferencing!
As co-editor of the "Management Matters" magazin, our internal management newsletter, I know that we are certainly planning to report on the summit. Maybe not too focused on the methods, but the outcome, and how this way of working made a difference to previous summits.
Once you are starting to have successes, it is a great way to have the method exit the "sensitivity" box.
Looking forward to sharing more of this!
Ursula Hillbrand
Brussels
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Permalink Reply by juanita brown on
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Hi everyone,
This is a wonderful thread of conversation-- and an exciting collaboration among all us AoH/TWC and others working with these participatory approaches.
Fondest regards to all,
Juanita
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