flyingzumwalt
commented
6 years ago For this particular instance, my goal is specifically to place people in the landscape of projects, working groups, etc. That will eat all of the allocated time for the session.
I have primarily seen this exercise used for subjective, polarizing topics as you suggest. Sometimes it works well. It can be stimulating and fun, but when it's badly planned or facilitated wrong it's either tiresome or infuriating. If someone wants to do another spectrogram later in the meetings that digs into subjective topics, it's easy to do but I would press them to prepare thoroughly. Here's a short list of things the facilitator would have to keep in mind
- plan the exercise and all the questions in advance
- have an overall objective in mind -- what will people get out of the exercise -- and design the exercise to suit
- make sure the ends of the spectrum are crystal clear for each question, strictly avoiding double negatives
- don't linger on a bunch of ponderous crosstalk once everyone has placed themselves on the spectrum
- if you ask truly polarizing questions, be prepared for the fact that 2 minutes of discussion isn't going to resolve people's disagreements
I feel like a lot of suggested spectra are fairly objective — things we might be able to measure without an activity like this. I think they’d still be super useful to do interactively with humans this way (so still 👍 to this!), but in my past experience with this exercise, it really shines with more subjective questions where the places people line up might be surprising and tell us something new (or form a jumping-off point for deeper exploration), like “I feel IPFS really solid,” “I feel our organizational process is working well,” “I feel like I have a good handle on how to use IPFS well,” etc. Any plans to also do some that are more in that vein?