Speaker 1: All media welcome. It could happen here.
Speaker 2: A podcast that is in many cases about organizing. I
Speaker 2: AnGR host Mel Wong and with me is one of
Speaker 2: the most experienced organizers I know, Margaret Kiljoy.
Speaker 1: Oh no, hi, I'm a little out of practice, but
Speaker 1: I have done it a lot.
Speaker 2: You know, Margaret says this and also has been doing
Speaker 2: shit for like one bazillion years, and this is, this
Speaker 2: is and I will say this. The sign of you
Speaker 2: that you are running into a good organizer is when
Speaker 2: you talk to them about their organizing and they immediately
Speaker 2: start downplaying it.
Speaker 1: That's when you know that you haven't catched a good organizer.
Speaker 2: If they started immediately going I'm the best fucking organizer
Speaker 2: in the world, run like hell, this is an asshole
Speaker 2: who sucks someone who's like, ah, like I did this
Speaker 2: a million years ago, I'm not good at it and
Speaker 2: it didn't matter and blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: Very good organizer, thank you. Yeah. I remember once I
Speaker 1: went to a thing wait that was put on and
Speaker 1: there was this, uh they were kind of turfy people
Speaker 1: who are coming through and we didn't totally know that
Speaker 1: right away, and their pitch about why they were such
Speaker 1: a good experienced organizers, as one of them was like,
Speaker 1: and this person has been organizing for more than three years,
Speaker 1: and it was just like, Okay, every person you are
Speaker 1: giving this talk to has done this for at least
Speaker 1: three times as long as that. And don't get me wrong,
Speaker 1: if you're listening and you've been organizing for three years,
Speaker 1: you've learned a lot. I'm not trying to tell you
Speaker 1: you're bad organizer. You might be a better organizer and
Speaker 1: someone's been doing it longer, but don't use that as
Speaker 1: your selling point anyway. That's very funny.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So okay, this episode, we were asking you a
Speaker 2: very very important question. Okay, you want to change something
Speaker 2: about the world. I don't know what that thing is
Speaker 2: that is up that is for you to determine. The
Speaker 2: question that you need to be asking is are you
Speaker 2: organizing because you want to feel cool? Or are you
Speaker 2: organizing because you want whatever you're doing to fucking work?
Speaker 2: And if you want you're organizing to work, literally, no
Speaker 2: matter what it is. You actually need to listen to
Speaker 2: this episode and you need to have some rudimental knowledge
Speaker 2: of the thing we are about to talk about, because
Speaker 2: if you do not, your organizing will fail. If you
Speaker 2: cannot do this, the thing we're going to talk about
Speaker 2: in this episode, If you cannot do this, everything else
Speaker 2: you know, all of your experience, all of your knowledge,
Speaker 2: all of your passion, all of it is fucking useless
Speaker 2: because the actual work of organizing is incredibly unglamorous. It
Speaker 2: is un sexy, a lot of it is very time consuming,
Speaker 2: a lot of it is not cool. It is you
Speaker 2: sitting there and talking to a bunch of people. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and if you want your movement to succeed, you have
Speaker 2: to be able to do this kind of like groundwork,
Speaker 2: logistical work, because if you don't, it won't work. So
Speaker 2: what we are going to teach you the very very
Speaker 2: very very basics of in this episode is a social
Speaker 2: technology that has been developed over the course of literal
Speaker 2: centuries of movements.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: This is something that has been passed down and refined,
Speaker 2: like through generations and generations of organizers. I mean, I
Speaker 2: could do a genealogy of this. A lot of the
Speaker 2: modern stuff sort of came through the Quakers, moved through
Speaker 2: the civil rights movements, moved through the anti war movements,
Speaker 2: moved through like in Vietnam, moved to a whole bunch
Speaker 2: of other movements like to be passed down to you today.
Speaker 2: This is a complicated social technology. It does not sound complicated.
Speaker 2: If you do not know how to do this, it
Speaker 2: is impossible to try to replicate on the fly. And
Speaker 2: that is we are going to explain to you the
Speaker 2: very basis of how to run a meeting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I really like this way of phrasing it that
Speaker 1: it's it's a technology, Like it's a way of applying
Speaker 1: ideas to get something to happen. Even if a lot
Speaker 1: of it is instinctive, there is an art to it,
Speaker 1: but like, yeah, no, there's stuff you can like learn
Speaker 1: and apply and it's Yeah, technology is a good way
Speaker 1: of framing it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it's one of these things where you know,
Speaker 2: you can kind of if you don't know how to
Speaker 2: do this and you have people, you can kind of
Speaker 2: sort of maybe approximate something that is a little bit
Speaker 2: functional and the moment it runs into a stress point,
Speaker 2: it will collapse completely. And this is a thing that
Speaker 2: like you know, I have talked to I have done
Speaker 2: a lot of these. I have talked to a lot
Speaker 2: of people who've done this. I have like I have
Speaker 2: been in rooms of people knew how to run meetings.
Speaker 2: I've been in rooms people didn't know how to run meetings.
Speaker 2: I have talked to a bunch of people who have
Speaker 2: been in rooms who don't know how to run meetings,
Speaker 2: and like there are rooms of people with collectively hundreds
Speaker 2: of PhDs and because nobody in the room knew how
Speaker 2: to fucking run a meeting, complete disaster they're organizing didn't work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, you have to be able to do this.
Speaker 2: And it doesn't really matter, you know, we're not going
Speaker 2: to get that much into like what mechanism are using
Speaker 2: to make decisions because this is this is like even
Speaker 2: like a layer below that, and so this is not
Speaker 2: that you can use it, you know, regardless of whether
Speaker 2: you're doing consensus and like, you know, like and I
Speaker 2: think that like, if you're trying to make a decision
Speaker 2: as a group, right and you're trying to get everyone
Speaker 2: to want to do the thing and do it, I
Speaker 2: think that some version of consensus is a good idea.
Speaker 2: But this can be for a sort of just like
Speaker 2: a you know, like a majority of world democratic process,
Speaker 2: whatever process you were using to decide things. You need
Speaker 2: some kind of structure thing there otherwise it's just not
Speaker 2: going to function like none of it will.
Speaker 1: What's wild to me is that it's almost like the
Speaker 1: important thing is that there is a structure. There's so
Speaker 1: many different structures you can use. Like when we come
Speaker 1: at this, I don't actually know I'm the podcast idiot
Speaker 1: on this episode and me is going to explain something,
Speaker 1: but like there's a lot of different ways to do this,
Speaker 1: and the important way, the important thing is is that
Speaker 1: you do one of them. Like there are ways that
Speaker 1: I think are better or worse, right, but you do
Speaker 1: actually need to create a structure and move forward with
Speaker 1: that structure in order to get anything done, which is
Speaker 1: the whole secret of organizing. Like that is what organizing is.
Speaker 1: Is you actually have to say, not only do I
Speaker 1: want something to get done, but I'm going to figure
Speaker 1: out the steps by which to get that done. And
Speaker 1: it also applies to metians.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and like that kind of undergirting thing of
Speaker 2: figuring out how how you're going to do it, right,
Speaker 2: Like that that's the part of organizing that as you're saying,
Speaker 2: it's like nothing works without it, because it is like
Speaker 2: of what organizing is, and otherwise you were just saying
Speaker 2: things into the wind. And admittedly my job is to
Speaker 2: say things into the wind. So I hope you do
Speaker 2: it so like, you know, I have a little bit
Speaker 2: of respect to that. But also you need to have
Speaker 2: some way of getting other people to do things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like a when you sit around with your
Speaker 1: friends and like, oh, someone should do this. No one's
Speaker 1: actually named someone. Yeah you know, I mean somewhere, there's
Speaker 1: a non binary person somewhere. But shout out to someone.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you're listening to someone, congratulations, you're a master
Speaker 1: level troll. But like my friend, don't ask their name was,
Speaker 1: don't ask. It's great anyway, whatever, but someone needs to
Speaker 1: get something done. And if you leave a thing being like,
Speaker 1: oh someone should do this, you didn't organize, you have
Speaker 1: to say, yeah, this is what following people are doing. Yep.
Speaker 1: Also shout out also to everyone who has been in
Speaker 1: meetings with me and are like Smark, I'm insufferable in meetings.
Speaker 1: I try really hard, but anyway, whatever.
Speaker 2: Oh god, okay, okay. So this largely is going to
Speaker 2: be like how to run a meeting?
Speaker 1: What a one.
Speaker 2: We're going to start at like zero zero zero, which
Speaker 2: is you need a place to meet, and that place
Speaker 2: to meet has to be accessible to everyone who's trying
Speaker 2: to go to the meeting. This is a thing that
Speaker 2: people screw up a lot. It is not that hard
Speaker 2: to find the place as accessible for everyone to go.
Speaker 1: You can do this.
Speaker 2: There are lots of places you can have meetings, depending
Speaker 2: on how sensitive the meeting is, you know, how formal
Speaker 2: and formal it is. I've done meetings and restaurants and
Speaker 2: meetings and bars of them in libraries, people use churches sometimes,
Speaker 2: like queer centers, union halls, parks.
Speaker 1: I want to shit talk bars really quickly. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't think bars is a great idea, but I don't
Speaker 1: think it's accessible to people who are under twenty one,
Speaker 1: and I don't think it's accessible to people who have
Speaker 1: problems being around drinking. That said, they happen there, and
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to say you're bad for having had
Speaker 1: meetings there, but I just want to say that, yeah,
Speaker 1: Bars is one that like people go to a lot.
Speaker 2: And like, yeah, there's definitely issues with it, right, But
Speaker 2: I don't know, like you can have them people's houses.
Speaker 2: Sometimes you can like go into like a mesa or
Speaker 2: whatever and you can go have am meeting there. You
Speaker 2: can get people to just like go out somewhere and
Speaker 2: do it.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't know like you.
Speaker 2: You are capable of thinking of lots of places where
Speaker 2: you can have meetings, but you actually do need to
Speaker 2: have a location. And this is actually again I've talked
Speaker 2: about this before, but it's like one of the organizing
Speaker 2: things that is actually really important is like knowing how
Speaker 2: to get a room for a meeting or get it
Speaker 2: room for something to happen. You have to be able
Speaker 2: to do this. This is like zero o zero, like okay,
Speaker 2: you know, okay, so you've now achieved this, and congratulations,
Speaker 2: you clowns have now achieved a location. I am going
Speaker 2: to stick a provisional thing in here, which is this
Speaker 2: is this has jumping the gun a little bit, but
Speaker 2: I need to put in here. Do not use Robert
Speaker 2: rules of order. One of the things you will be told,
Speaker 2: and if you have been in organizations before, a lot
Speaker 2: of them use the thing called Robert rules of Orders,
Speaker 2: which is this old, like incredibly allaborate set of parliamentary procedures.
Speaker 1: Do not use them. They suck.
Speaker 2: And this gets into before we can even talk about
Speaker 2: what a meeting is right and how you do it.
Speaker 2: You really really do not want your meetings to get
Speaker 2: bogged down in everyone having to learn one million lines
Speaker 2: of parliamentary procedure. And this is a problem for any
Speaker 2: meeting technology that you use, because they all do involve
Speaker 2: a little bit of technical stuff because you have to
Speaker 2: get people to be able to do things okay, But
Speaker 2: one thing with Robert Tools of Order is that like,
Speaker 2: it's like hundreds of pages, right, and in those hundreds
Speaker 2: of pages are the recipe for one asshole to derail
Speaker 2: your entire meeting by doing a whole bunch of unhinged
Speaker 2: parliamentary shit. I have seen this happen. It sucks. This
Speaker 2: is something that you can technically do in any meeting structure.
Speaker 2: But the more pique the rules of the meeting are,
Speaker 2: the easier the shit is to do and the harder
Speaker 2: it is to be Like please stop.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you have to have a a certain amount of
Speaker 1: flexibility in the way that you do things because every system,
Speaker 1: it's the problem with law as a concept, right, is
Speaker 1: every system can you can find loopholes. And anyone who's
Speaker 1: been in a lot of meetings has seen people learn
Speaker 1: how to abuse the process in order to get their
Speaker 1: position to win by making everyone else too tired to
Speaker 1: continue or to use up all of the space in
Speaker 1: the room, or you know whatever. But I think that, yeah,
Speaker 1: this idea that the rules that are used in your meeting,
Speaker 1: I think that a very a good facilitator, which is
Speaker 1: something that I tend to believe in for meetings, is
Speaker 1: capable of explaining the process in such a way that
Speaker 1: even when a lot of people come who are not
Speaker 1: familiar with the process, they will leave familiar with the process. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like to that sort of end, if you need
Speaker 2: a like, okay, we need a written procedure thing, the
Speaker 2: thing I would recommend is called Rusty's Rules of Order,
Speaker 2: which is an unbelievably paired down version of Robert Rools
Speaker 2: of Order that was like specifically developed to be used
Speaker 2: not in like union circles, in activist circles. And it's
Speaker 2: like the total PDF of it is twenty five pages.
Speaker 2: That makes it sound way longer than it actually is.
Speaker 2: Like several of those pages are like a glossary, and
Speaker 2: like the cover, it's very easy to read. It's easy
Speaker 2: to understand if you have to use a like this
Speaker 2: is a formalized procedure. Do Rusties, don't do Roberts, This
Speaker 2: is just a I need to do this before we
Speaker 2: say anything else, because a bunch of people are going
Speaker 2: to push you to use this and it sucks. So
Speaker 2: having gotten that out of the way, we can now
Speaker 2: get into okay things from meetings.
Speaker 1: I was supposed to make a joke about at the
Speaker 1: top of all this. I'm sorry everyone. Everyone has been
Speaker 1: waiting for me to make this joke. I'm certain, but mio,
Speaker 1: which one of us is going to keep stack during
Speaker 1: this meeting so that we know who can talk products
Speaker 1: and services support this podcast?
Speaker 2: Are gonna keep stack and we're gonna go to the
Speaker 2: right the foot Now.
Speaker 1: We are back, and I really just want to say,
Speaker 1: as timekeeper, I'm a little bit upset about how much
Speaker 1: time that those ads used during the meeting and if
Speaker 1: we can not fucking damn it.
Speaker 2: Okay, we will explain what a stack is and what
Speaker 2: time is in a second. However, comm so things you
Speaker 2: need to do at the very start of a meeting.
Speaker 2: You need to take like two minutes to do this,
Speaker 2: but you need to explain how the meeting fucking works,
Speaker 2: and you need to assign everyone roles, and you can't
Speaker 2: assume that everyone who is going to be in this
Speaker 2: meeting understands how the rules work, like you cannot. And
Speaker 2: there's something I've run into is like you can't assume
Speaker 2: that everyone understands what your hand signals are, or even
Speaker 2: just basic like everyone has been in a thing before
Speaker 2: and understands what a stack is, right, you can't assume
Speaker 2: that unless you know everyone in the room. And more
Speaker 2: than that, like unless you know everyone's love experience in
Speaker 2: the room and you've been in meetings with them before, Like,
Speaker 2: you can't assume the level of knowledge that everyone has.
Speaker 2: And I have watched these processes not work because people
Speaker 2: just did that and then a bunch of people in
Speaker 2: the room were like, what the fuck is going on?
Speaker 2: So you need to at the start of the meeting
Speaker 2: explain how the meeting is going to work, like at
Speaker 2: least a little bit. It doesn't have to be super formal.
Speaker 2: This can be like fucking two minutes of like we're
Speaker 2: gonna have a stack blah blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: And for anyone just say, you know what we're saying
Speaker 1: right now, we'll explain stack. More. That is the order
Speaker 1: in which people talk. It is a way of like
Speaker 1: keeping track of the line of who's gonna talk when.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm realizing this explanation is jumping around a little bit.
Speaker 2: But you need to make sure that everyone understands how
Speaker 2: the meeting is supposed to work, and you know, usually
Speaker 2: that's really quick. Sometimes someone will just not know something
Speaker 2: and then okay, you explain it to them and that's
Speaker 2: like fine and chill, and like, I don't know. I
Speaker 2: remember being a little tiny baby anarchist and like not
Speaker 2: knowing anything and going to my first meeting and like
Speaker 2: people were talking about restorative justice and I was like, Hi,
Speaker 2: what's your storative justice. I'm like a little tiny child,
Speaker 2: I don't know anything. And they explained it and it
Speaker 2: was like chilling, good and you can just do this
Speaker 2: and it helps people feel included and yeah.
Speaker 1: Totally okay.
Speaker 2: So general meeting facilitation things you need. You need one
Speaker 2: an agenda. An agenda is what the fuck are you doing?
Speaker 2: And generally speaking, secondarily, you want to try to have
Speaker 2: time planned out because one of the one of the
Speaker 2: failure modes of a meeting is the meeting goes for
Speaker 2: fucking thirty hours and everyone's miserable. So you generally want
Speaker 2: to have an agenda that has what you're going to
Speaker 2: talk about and then kind of guidelines roughly for how
Speaker 2: long you think it'll take to talk about the thing.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm.
Speaker 2: We'll get more into that in a second. Sometimes people
Speaker 2: create the agenda beforehand. Sometimes you start you set the
Speaker 2: agenda at the beginning of the meeting, but like you
Speaker 2: do want an agenda so people know what you're doing, and.
Speaker 1: It should be similar that everyone can see a whiteboard
Speaker 1: or like I guess in a zoom meeting notes or
Speaker 1: a dock that everyone has open. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you want to make sure everyone has it, okay,
Speaker 2: And this is the point where we need to talk
Speaker 2: about roles. So part of the technology this right and
Speaker 2: the stack is a big piece of technology to keep
Speaker 2: track of who's talking. But a big part of what
Speaker 2: the technology of this is is a bunch of roles
Speaker 2: that you assign people and that ideally everyone rotates through
Speaker 2: so you learn how to do all of them, and
Speaker 2: so to prevent people from sort of concentrating power by
Speaker 2: like monopolizing one role. So the first role we need
Speaker 2: to talk about, and this is I don't know if
Speaker 2: the big one is the right one, but this is
Speaker 2: the one that I think people know kind of. I
Speaker 2: don't know if intuitively understand is the right word, but
Speaker 2: like this is the one that there are usually versions
Speaker 2: of in a meeting, and a lot of those versions
Speaker 2: are bad.
Speaker 1: Is a facilitator?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so okay my explanation of what a facilitator is,
Speaker 2: and Margaret, I'm going to ask you for yours too,
Speaker 2: because I don't know. So, as a facilitator, your job
Speaker 2: is to like point to the agenda and go, okay,
Speaker 2: we're talking about this. Your job is to move people
Speaker 2: through discussions. Your job is to try to get people
Speaker 2: to a consensus on what you're doing. And your job
Speaker 2: is to stop people from giving speeches. And this is
Speaker 2: I'm gonna take a little digression here, which is, Okay,
Speaker 2: we've been talking about way's meetings fail, right. Number One,
Speaker 2: no one can go to it. That's way meeting fails. Two,
Speaker 2: you don't have an agenda and everyone it just goes
Speaker 2: off the rails and no one has any idea what
Speaker 2: you're supposed to be meeting about. Three, and this is
Speaker 2: a huge one, is that one of the biggest ways
Speaker 2: of meetings fail and I have seen this in every
Speaker 2: single context I have ever worked in, is that someone
Speaker 2: and it is usually a dude it's almost always a dude.
Speaker 2: It cannot be a dude, but it's usually a dude
Speaker 2: just keeps talking and keeps talking and keeps talking and
Speaker 2: will not shut the fuck up, and nothing gets done
Speaker 2: because the entire meeting is one hour of this guy
Speaker 2: just yabbering.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 2: And one of your most important jobs as the facilitator,
Speaker 2: and this is genuinely a huge part for social technology
Speaker 2: of the structure of meetings is to make sure that
Speaker 2: your meeting is not one person talking. Yeah, this is
Speaker 2: why this exists.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And you know, if you want to get into the
Speaker 2: sort of dire this right, if you do not stop
Speaker 2: all of your meetings from being one annoying guy talking,
Speaker 2: your projects will fail.
Speaker 1: You must do this.
Speaker 2: This is the one thing here that is like, you
Speaker 2: absolutely positively must get this guy to stop talking.
Speaker 1: I think that the important thing to think about a
Speaker 1: facilitator is that most people come from a background of
Speaker 1: assumed authoritarian politics, assumed politics where someone is in charge.
Speaker 1: Even our democracies are built around this idea that you
Speaker 1: elect someone to tell you what to do. When we
Speaker 1: talk about meetings, we are talking about building bottom up structures.
Speaker 1: Even when we later I think will end up talking
Speaker 1: maybe a different episode or something about larger structures you
Speaker 1: can build up out of these sort of local assemblies
Speaker 1: and meetings. The idea is that everyone is empowered, and
Speaker 1: so because we're really used to this competitive decision making
Speaker 1: around who is in charge, we struggle a little bit
Speaker 1: adapting to egalitarian meetings and also to consensus isn't the
Speaker 1: only way to make decisions, but people struggle with consensus
Speaker 1: because they'll think of that at meaning one hundred percent
Speaker 1: vote where everyone votes for the same thing, and that's
Speaker 1: a mistake. And so we think of the facilitator accidentally
Speaker 1: as the leader, and they are a leader in the
Speaker 1: sense of a whatever. You could use the word leader
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways, and some of them are
Speaker 1: positive and not authoritarian, and so in that context they
Speaker 1: are leading people through the meeting. But they are absolutely
Speaker 1: not only not the decision maker, they are less the
Speaker 1: decision maker than everyone else. Choosing to be a facilitator
Speaker 1: of a meeting is choosing to go in and say
Speaker 1: I'm not actually even going to push for my side
Speaker 1: unless you are in a like tight knit enough group
Speaker 1: where everyone knows each other and everyone kind of knows oh,
Speaker 1: in this group, Margaret's opinion is always going to be this,
Speaker 1: and so and Soo's opinions always going to be this.
Speaker 1: If you know people really well, you can kind of
Speaker 1: still be both facilitator and a participant. But by and large,
Speaker 1: when you are the facilitator, your job is to help
Speaker 1: the decision form. It is to help take what people
Speaker 1: are saying and say, Okay, this seems like what we're saying.
Speaker 1: Is this the Is this the proposal? And not say
Speaker 1: I think this is the proposal, but say is this
Speaker 1: the proposal? And yeah. It is to keep people on track,
Speaker 1: and every meeting is gonna have different I really like
Speaker 1: a strong facilitator. I really like someone who's going to
Speaker 1: shut me up. I really like someone who's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's not what we're talking about right now. And it's
Speaker 1: hard because your feelings get hurt, like especially for example,
Speaker 1: someone says a joke and then someone else is a
Speaker 1: joke and then you're the third person and you say
Speaker 1: the joke too, and the facilitator's like, yeah, that's enough
Speaker 1: of that. We got to keep going. You're the third
Speaker 1: person who said the joke, and you're like, why am
Speaker 1: I getting yelled at? And the other two people didn't Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's the wrong way to look at it. We're
Speaker 1: not yelling at anyone. We're trying to keep things moving forward.
Speaker 1: And you're absolutely right also about the people grandstanding. And
Speaker 1: you know, a particular habit that men often have, especially
Speaker 1: since men, is that they'll come in and be like,
Speaker 1: they'll listen to what someone else says and then repeat
Speaker 1: it louder and then be like yeah, yeah, right, and
Speaker 1: as if it's their idea and they don't even realize
Speaker 1: they're doing it. It's kind of cute. But there's a
Speaker 1: lot of that you can learn about yourself by going
Speaker 1: into these meetings and learning about your own habits and
Speaker 1: what you've been and culturated to do. And it shouldn't
Speaker 1: be about shaming people around this as long as people
Speaker 1: are able to like kind of get called in and
Speaker 1: listen to it. And one of the things that I
Speaker 1: think when you teach the meeting, at the beginning of
Speaker 1: the meeting, you also explain some of this social stuff
Speaker 1: and you say, like, you know, we believe in a
Speaker 1: step up, step back thing. If you're someone who generally
Speaker 1: feels comfortable talking in large groups, we invite you to
Speaker 1: step back a little bit, and if you're not someone
Speaker 1: who generally feels comfortable expressing your opinion in groups, we
Speaker 1: invite you to step up. Do you know what also
Speaker 1: needs to learn to step up? Is I actually think
Speaker 1: we don't get enough advertising in our lives. I think
Speaker 1: that the people who are afraid to take up space
Speaker 1: are the people who pay a lot of money. Physical
Speaker 1: block a physical block. All right, babe, isn't consensus. Here's
Speaker 1: ads we are back.
Speaker 2: I think this saucer, you know, as we've talked about
Speaker 2: sort of in some way, in a lot of ways,
Speaker 2: like how important the role the facilitator is. This is
Speaker 2: a role you need to rotate because that is a role.
Speaker 2: It's like those are skills that everyone needs. Like if
Speaker 2: everyone knows, did you just do the hand I did?
Speaker 1: I did? I don't know whether people still do it
Speaker 1: metal hands versus twinkle fingers.
Speaker 3: Sorry, okay, this is completely Unfortunately podcasting is an audio medium,
Speaker 3: So all of you just missed me losing my mind
Speaker 3: because Margaret, Margaret did one of my hand signs for agreements.
Speaker 1: I was like, shit, God, damn it. Okay, we're talking
Speaker 1: about meetings that just came naturally.
Speaker 2: Well, well, we'll get the hand signed, but like you know,
Speaker 2: you actually do you all of these things should be
Speaker 2: road hitting and you should be teaching everyone to be
Speaker 2: able to do all of the facilitation roles because a okay,
Speaker 2: there's there's lots of reasons for this, right one. Facilitation
Speaker 2: in particular can be kind of dangerous because there's a
Speaker 2: real risk of someone who is facilitating deciding that they
Speaker 2: are the leader and they're going to steer how everything
Speaker 2: goes and they're going to make their decisions. And by
Speaker 2: rotating that around, it becomes a lot easier to not
Speaker 2: have that happen. And also, doing a role makes you
Speaker 2: a more active participant in the meeting. A lot of
Speaker 2: times it depends on the role obviously, but like it's
Speaker 2: a way to get people to keep everyone.
Speaker 1: Engaged in a thing. That's a good point. Thank you. This.
Speaker 2: I stole this from my friend who is going to
Speaker 2: remain nameless. But if you're out there, I love you.
Speaker 1: Your friend's name is nameless, I understand. Yeah, friends saying
Speaker 1: this the nameless child to somewhere there's someone whose name
Speaker 1: is the whole last kid and anyway whatever, anyway, okay, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: But the other thing about it, right is the more
Speaker 1: everyone knows about these skills, the more effective of a participants,
Speaker 1: and the more effective you can be making decisions in
Speaker 1: the meeting.
Speaker 2: Like that, the more everyone understands how the process works
Speaker 2: and knows how to do it and knows how to
Speaker 2: because like being in a meeting and being in community
Speaker 2: with other people and making decisions together is a skill,
Speaker 2: and we don't have it. There's this great David Graeber,
Speaker 2: the anthroologist, David Graeber, who actually spent a lot of
Speaker 2: time like writing about these meetings in a way that
Speaker 2: doesn't usually happen.
Speaker 1: As like as as an anthropologist.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, as an anthropologist, right, because he was both
Speaker 2: both an activist and an anthropologist. And he has this
Speaker 2: great line where he says Americans are great at communism
Speaker 2: and terrible at topocracy, which is that they're really really
Speaker 2: good at like doing things each according to their need
Speaker 2: and from each according through ability. Like if you try
Speaker 2: to organize a barbecue, everyone can do the things through
Speaker 2: the barbecue, but no one knows how to make decisions together,
Speaker 2: because that's a skill. And the more you're rotating through
Speaker 2: all the roles and the more you understand how everything works,
Speaker 2: the more you understand, you know, how to do the
Speaker 2: facilitation stuff of like getting everyone to figure out what
Speaker 2: the thing that they want is and how to express
Speaker 2: that and how to like how to work together. The
Speaker 2: more you understand that as like a person who's not facilitating,
Speaker 2: the more you can understand like how to actually do democracy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it rules. And it's also the fact that like,
Speaker 1: if you are indispensable to your group, you've actually failed
Speaker 1: your group. Yeah, especially when you're talking about stuff like activism,
Speaker 1: that has a certain risk. If you are the only
Speaker 1: medic in your affinity group, that is a problem because
Speaker 1: if you get arrested, now there's no medic. If you're
Speaker 1: the only facilitator who is a very skilled facilitator, what
Speaker 1: happens when you're sick or in jail and you all
Speaker 1: have a very intense meeting that you have to do,
Speaker 1: and you need a skilled facilitator. Not that everyone needs
Speaker 1: to be equal in all skills within in a given group,
Speaker 1: but you need to learn to If you are very
Speaker 1: good at something, your job is to make someone else
Speaker 1: very good at it too.
Speaker 2: That's the thing both for meetings on the way it
Speaker 2: was explained, same me, and this is a more kind
Speaker 2: of I don't know what term be't used for, but
Speaker 2: it was taught to me as your job is to
Speaker 2: organize yourself.
Speaker 1: Out of a job. Yeah, totally, okay, So.
Speaker 2: We're going to move on to the second roll, which
Speaker 2: is the stack taker. So okay, the stack. This when
Speaker 2: I first started talking about this is as a social technology,
Speaker 2: the thing I specifically meant was the stack, and then
Speaker 2: eventually I was like, no, it's actually the whole process is.
Speaker 2: But the stack very very simple invention, but if you
Speaker 2: don't have it, it's a disaster. The stack, as we
Speaker 2: said before, is just literally a list of names of
Speaker 2: who's going to talk in what order. Someone raises their hand,
Speaker 2: they could add to the stack.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 2: That is very simple. It is also absolutely crucial to
Speaker 2: making sure a meeting runs at all. Most groups tend
Speaker 2: to use some variation of what's called a progressive stack,
Speaker 2: where you know, this is part of we were talking
Speaker 2: about earlier, like step forward and step back, But when
Speaker 2: you're compiling a stack, you want to have the people
Speaker 2: who speak less in front m M. And this works
Speaker 2: sort of in two ways, right. One is it's okay,
Speaker 2: so if there's someone who's not like a cis white dude,
Speaker 2: and who is trying to say something, you probably want
Speaker 2: them to say something because they are less likely to
Speaker 2: be the one who says something. Yeah, just because of
Speaker 2: the way that sort of whiteness is structure, because of
Speaker 2: the way that like masculinity structure, because of the way
Speaker 2: that these things work. So you want to give opportunities
Speaker 2: to speak to people who like don't usually get heard.
Speaker 2: And then also if someone just like hasn't been talking
Speaker 2: in a meeting and they want to say something, and
Speaker 2: that's also a part of the sort of facilitation. And
Speaker 2: sometimes I know this is the thing that like a
Speaker 2: role that I've seen passed out between a bunch of
Speaker 2: different roles, and I guess everyone kind of has a
Speaker 2: responsibility to do this. But if there's someone in a
Speaker 2: meeting who has not been saying anything, it's generally a
Speaker 2: good idea to be like, hey, are you okay? And
Speaker 2: also like more important lead to some extent than there
Speaker 2: are you okay? Of like what do you think about this?
Speaker 1: Yeah, although I do think that there's a little bit
Speaker 1: of a like some people don't want to specifically be
Speaker 1: called on in that way, and so that's kind of
Speaker 1: a like learning to read the room skill definitely about
Speaker 1: when you want to encourage people to step up versus
Speaker 1: other people are like, no, I don't have anything particular
Speaker 1: to say, and I don't want to get, you know,
Speaker 1: singled out. I think that in smaller meetings sometimes the
Speaker 1: facilitator can keep stack. Larger meetings, that's a terrible plan. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's large meetings. You need to you can't. Yeah, I've
Speaker 1: been put to be during it. Yeah, because you need
Speaker 1: someone keeping track of who's raising their hands when and
Speaker 1: things like that. Sometimes you're actually even writing the stack
Speaker 1: on a whiteboard so people can see yeah, yeah, you
Speaker 1: look a piece of paper. Yeah. I have been in
Speaker 1: meetings that sort of self facilitate fairly effectively in smaller groups,
Speaker 1: where a thing that people can do is if they
Speaker 1: have a thing they want to say, they hold up
Speaker 1: one finger and they keep that finger up, and if
Speaker 1: someone else is something that they want to say, they
Speaker 1: put up two fingers, and then if someone else is
Speaker 1: something they want to say, they put up three fingers.
Speaker 1: And so you can have this method by which people
Speaker 1: track their own stack. But this is a small group thing.
Speaker 1: This is not a and this is a people who
Speaker 1: know each other and know how to do the balancing
Speaker 1: that we're talking about about making sure everyone gets heard.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think part of this also it's important
Speaker 2: to remember, is like this is like one oh one.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, sorry, as an advanced scale.
Speaker 2: Kind of And I'm introducing some things that are probably
Speaker 2: more advanced than one on one, like like like they like, okay,
Speaker 2: figuring out why someone is uncomfortable talking on a like
Speaker 2: this person wants to talk, doesn't feel comfortable to and
Speaker 2: if you ask them, they will say something. And this
Speaker 2: person doesn't feel comfortable talking because they don't want to talk.
Speaker 2: That's kind of a more advanced thing. Fair enough, I
Speaker 2: guess we should talk about hand gestures here, which is
Speaker 2: that okay, over the course of these beings one of
Speaker 2: over the course of like movements, one of the things
Speaker 2: that is built up is hand gestures because they can
Speaker 2: be a very effective way of, you know, someone expressing
Speaker 2: something without having to talk over someone else. This is
Speaker 2: I don't know, this is the one on one. I'm
Speaker 2: not going to teach hand gestures because everyone has different ones,
Speaker 2: and there are some that are pretty universal. But like
Speaker 2: the number of different gestures I've seen for like direct
Speaker 2: response mm hmm and ship like it's the thing that
Speaker 2: like like hand gestures can work and can be really
Speaker 2: fish Yeah.
Speaker 1: See you're doing one of the head you're doing one
Speaker 1: of the.
Speaker 2: Make a triangle your hands. Fuck, I forgot about point
Speaker 2: a process. Oh no, well so there's all of this
Speaker 2: very very complicated stuff. It's not that complicated, but like,
Speaker 2: like point up process sucks like that, she's actually complicated.
Speaker 2: I'm actually derailing again. I'm so sorry. This is an example.
Speaker 2: If there was a facilitator in this call, they would
Speaker 2: be making me shut up. That's what's happening. Yeah, no,
Speaker 2: but but but this is actually like this this this
Speaker 2: is this is the one time I've ever wished there
Speaker 2: was like videos you could see the hand gestures because
Speaker 2: like the thing about this, right is once you are
Speaker 2: good at meetings, and like if you have people who
Speaker 2: do this and you talk about what the hand gesters
Speaker 2: are beforehand, that's also important. You can't even if if
Speaker 2: you're very good at meetings and you're still listening to
Speaker 2: this episode for some reason.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know it.
Speaker 2: It's a good episode, but like, you can't assume that
Speaker 2: everyone knows what your hand gestures are. Yeah, and sometimes
Speaker 2: people have different hand gestures for different things. Sometimes you
Speaker 2: have contextual hand gestures for like like there are like okay,
Speaker 2: like you're if you are trying to meet in the dark. Yeah,
Speaker 2: your your hand gestures don't work, right. This is also
Speaker 2: stolen from another friend, right, Like sometimes you need to
Speaker 2: use snaps for that because so that you can hear, right.
Speaker 2: Like what all of this is to say that, like
Speaker 2: the stuff with hand gestures, it can make your meetings
Speaker 2: a lot more effective. This is the thing you can
Speaker 2: do if everyone in the group understands how they work.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to be like teaching you sets of
Speaker 2: hand gestures here because I can't guarantee that any gesture
Speaker 2: I teach you will be the one that people use.
Speaker 1: Can I can? I though, like speed run the concepts
Speaker 1: of some of them, because I think they are useful
Speaker 1: to understand. Yeah. Yeah, because it's hard to imagine when
Speaker 1: you imagine meetings. I think about this a lots. I
Speaker 1: write meetings into fiction, which is a very hard thing
Speaker 1: to do and make them entertaining because they're also hard
Speaker 1: to be entertained and by when you're in them, unless
Speaker 1: they're contentious. But there are certain things that you learn
Speaker 1: derail meetings. And there are ways in which by using
Speaker 1: hand gestures you can avoid having more people speak. And
Speaker 1: the single most important and common one is a way
Speaker 1: of saying I agree, and so that way people when
Speaker 1: they really want to say something but they're not on
Speaker 1: stack and they get really frustrated, they can do that
Speaker 1: hand gesture, which you know is very easy to make
Speaker 1: fun of. You know, when I was coming up, it
Speaker 1: was twinkle fingers, where you waggle your fingers, and then
Speaker 1: we were like punk, so we did metal fingers instead,
Speaker 1: which was literally the same thing but reverse. It's kind
Speaker 1: of like the look that you do when you like,
Speaker 1: really like music, and it's actually sort of like mimicking
Speaker 1: playing a guitar. And so that's a very important concept.
Speaker 1: And sometimes people use snaps, although sometimes people prefer non
Speaker 1: audio and other people prefer audio.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and and and so's that's likely and that's
Speaker 2: that's posture.
Speaker 1: While I was talking about like.
Speaker 2: Like that's that's dependent on who's in the room and
Speaker 2: what the room is, and.
Speaker 1: Like, but I think that a I agree without needing
Speaker 1: to say anything is essential. Yeah, Yeah, that's a good one.
Speaker 1: Other ones to just know of is that there are
Speaker 1: things like people will say like, please move this along.
Speaker 1: It's a way of saying, hey, facilitator, please shut this
Speaker 1: person up usually or can we talk about something else.
Speaker 1: There's ones that are direct response, which is saying I
Speaker 1: would like to jump stack because this person has just
Speaker 1: insulted the honor of my family or whatever, and it's
Speaker 1: up to the facilitator to decide whether to do these.
Speaker 1: Another one is point of process, which is saying like, hey,
Speaker 1: I actually don't want to talk about the thing we're
Speaker 1: talking about. I want to talk about how the meeting
Speaker 1: is going. Meetings get real meta and it's real frustrating anyway,
Speaker 1: So it's worth knowing that this is part of the technology.
Speaker 1: It seems cringey from the outside, but like are other options.
Speaker 1: I mean, there are other technologies about decision making that
Speaker 1: people have developed, but like actually living democratic lives in
Speaker 1: which we all have a say in our decisions sometimes
Speaker 1: means that we go to meetings and we can actually
Speaker 1: kind of learn to I'm talking shit on meetings, but
Speaker 1: that's Meetings are also a ways to get to know
Speaker 1: your friends and express yourself and get things done.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, as much I've been talking about being boring,
Speaker 2: like I've had things that were technically organizing meetings that
Speaker 2: were like some of the most transformational experiences in my
Speaker 2: life totally because me and a bunch of people who
Speaker 2: you know, a bunch of people are really close to me,
Speaker 2: like came together and we figured out how to do something,
Speaker 2: and there is a beauty there that is and this
Speaker 2: is personal to why it's hard to talk about these things,
Speaker 2: right because like the technical process of it, like the
Speaker 2: technical description of what we're saying, is at the same
Speaker 2: time being used to do something that can only be
Speaker 2: described instead of poetic terms. Yeah, Like, the the actual
Speaker 2: experience of like you and a bunch of other people
Speaker 2: coming together to do something and figure out how to
Speaker 2: do it and fucking doing it is it is a
Speaker 2: transcendent act of creation.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And these are like you know, yeah, like it doesn't
Speaker 2: like the fucking hammers and shovels and like fucking slide
Speaker 2: rules that you use to construct something don't look very
Speaker 2: pretty and then at the end of it, you've built
Speaker 2: something together and it's beautiful.
Speaker 1: Yeah. No, it's it's the other side of the coin
Speaker 1: of the first time you watch the police run away
Speaker 1: from you. Yeah, it is a way of coming together
Speaker 1: with other people to accomplish something and make something powerful
Speaker 1: is meetings. And it is also it's interesting because we
Speaker 1: talk about how men will often take up too much
Speaker 1: space in meetings. This is not a universal thing anytime
Speaker 1: we say this kind of thing, but it is actually
Speaker 1: often feminized labor because it's this invisibilized labor that happens
Speaker 1: behind the scenes that is not as sexy, right and
Speaker 1: is about just actually hearing people out. It is like
Speaker 1: conflict resolution speed run. Anyway, I accidentally went off on
Speaker 1: the meta of meetings also.
Speaker 2: But no, it's good. Well, and I think there's an
Speaker 2: important thing here too, because like we're talking about the
Speaker 2: politics of like meetings themselves, right of like the you know,
Speaker 2: the actual political angle of what it means to have
Speaker 2: a democracy where what democracy means you make decisions together. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and this is something There's also a very important actual
Speaker 2: procedural meeting note here, which is that one of the
Speaker 2: things you will learn over the course of doing meeting
Speaker 2: is that a lot of times people wage battles over
Speaker 2: the content of political ideology in the form of fighting
Speaker 2: over how a meeting works. Yeah, totally, And you can
Speaker 2: see this everywhere from like your fucking local organizing meeting
Speaker 2: and people yelling about who's on stack or whatever all
Speaker 2: the way up to like, you know, when like when
Speaker 2: like the Democrats are saying that, like like in Congress
Speaker 2: that like the parliament the budget parliamentarian won't let them
Speaker 2: like raise the minimum wage.
Speaker 1: That's what they're doing.
Speaker 2: They're using an argument over procedure to like disguise the
Speaker 2: fact that what they're really arguing about is like it
Speaker 2: is an actual political argument. Yeah, but this is also
Speaker 2: a thing where like the way you structure a meeting
Speaker 2: is political. It doesn't seem like it, right, But you
Speaker 2: can have a meeting where, you know, it's like the
Speaker 2: fucking plenipotentiary meeting of like the Executive Committee of I
Speaker 2: don't know, the People's Congress, the Chinese Companies Party or whatever.
Speaker 1: Those are not the right words. I'm on five hours
Speaker 1: of sleep.
Speaker 2: But you can have a meeting where it's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: the way the meeting works is one guy stands out
Speaker 2: there and he gives a speech and he tells everyone
Speaker 2: what to say, and then everyone votes yes. Yeah, that's
Speaker 2: the way you can do a meeting, right, And that's political,
Speaker 2: and it fucking sucks, and We're trying to teach you
Speaker 2: how to do a meeting where you know, we do democracy,
Speaker 2: where everyone comes together and we like do a thing. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and we will get to more roles next week. This
Speaker 2: was originally planned to be one episode. It is not
Speaker 2: one episode. It is now two episodes. But the upside
Speaker 2: is that we solved a bunch of the fundamental logistical
Speaker 2: problems about how to build a free society. So stay
Speaker 2: tuned for that, stay tuned for more roles you want
Speaker 2: in your meetings. And yeah, it's been It can happen here,
Speaker 2: and thank you Mark for coming on the show.
Speaker 1: It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening,