June 30, 2025 • 37 mins
Mia talks with Margaret Killjoy about how to actually run a meeting and the role of proper meetings as the tools that build a democratic society.
https://libcom.org/article/how-hold-good-meeting-rustys-rules-order
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
All media welcome. It could happen here.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
A podcast that is in many cases about organizing. I
AnGR host Mel Wong and with me is one of
the most experienced organizers I know, Margaret Kiljoy.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Oh no, hi, I'm a little out of practice, but
I have done it a lot.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
You know, Margaret says this and also has been doing
shit for like one bazillion years, and this is, this
is and I will say this. The sign of you
that you are running into a good organizer is when
you talk to them about their organizing and they immediately
start downplaying it.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
That's when you know that you haven't catched a good organizer.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
If they started immediately going I'm the best fucking organizer
in the world, run like hell, this is an asshole
who sucks someone who's like, ah, like I did this
a million years ago, I'm not good at it and
it didn't matter and blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Very good organizer, thank you. Yeah. I remember once I
went to a thing wait that was put on and
there was this, uh they were kind of turfy people
who are coming through and we didn't totally know that
right away, and their pitch about why they were such
a good experienced organizers, as one of them was like,
and this person has been organizing for more than three years,
and it was just like, Okay, every person you are
(01:18):
giving this talk to has done this for at least
three times as long as that. And don't get me wrong,
if you're listening and you've been organizing for three years,
you've learned a lot. I'm not trying to tell you
you're bad organizer. You might be a better organizer and
someone's been doing it longer, but don't use that as
your selling point anyway. That's very funny.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Yeah, So okay, this episode, we were asking you a
very very important question. Okay, you want to change something
about the world. I don't know what that thing is
that is up that is for you to determine. The
question that you need to be asking is are you
organizing because you want to feel cool? Or are you
organizing because you want whatever you're doing to fucking work?
And if you want you're organizing to work, literally, no
(01:58):
matter what it is. You actually need to listen to
this episode and you need to have some rudimental knowledge
of the thing we are about to talk about, because
if you do not, your organizing will fail. If you
cannot do this, the thing we're going to talk about
in this episode, If you cannot do this, everything else
you know, all of your experience, all of your knowledge,
all of your passion, all of it is fucking useless
(02:19):
because the actual work of organizing is incredibly unglamorous. It
is un sexy, a lot of it is very time consuming,
a lot of it is not cool. It is you
sitting there and talking to a bunch of people. Yeah,
and if you want your movement to succeed, you have
to be able to do this kind of like groundwork,
logistical work, because if you don't, it won't work. So
(02:42):
what we are going to teach you the very very
very very basics of in this episode is a social
technology that has been developed over the course of literal
centuries of movements.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Right.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
This is something that has been passed down and refined,
like through generations and generations of organizers. I mean, I
could do a genealogy of this. A lot of the
modern stuff sort of came through the Quakers, moved through
the civil rights movements, moved through the anti war movements,
moved through like in Vietnam, moved to a whole bunch
of other movements like to be passed down to you today.
This is a complicated social technology. It does not sound complicated.
(03:16):
If you do not know how to do this, it
is impossible to try to replicate on the fly. And
that is we are going to explain to you the
very basis of how to run a meeting.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Yeah, I really like this way of phrasing it that
it's it's a technology, Like it's a way of applying
ideas to get something to happen. Even if a lot
of it is instinctive, there is an art to it,
but like, yeah, no, there's stuff you can like learn
and apply and it's Yeah, technology is a good way
of framing it.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Yeah, And it's one of these things where you know,
you can kind of if you don't know how to
do this and you have people, you can kind of
sort of maybe approximate something that is a little bit
functional and the moment it runs into a stress point,
it will collapse completely. And this is a thing that
like you know, I have talked to I have done
(04:07):
a lot of these. I have talked to a lot
of people who've done this. I have like I have
been in rooms of people knew how to run meetings.
I've been in rooms people didn't know how to run meetings.
I have talked to a bunch of people who have
been in rooms who don't know how to run meetings,
and like there are rooms of people with collectively hundreds
of PhDs and because nobody in the room knew how
to fucking run a meeting, complete disaster they're organizing didn't work.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Yeah, right, you have to be able to do this.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
And it doesn't really matter, you know, we're not going
to get that much into like what mechanism are using
to make decisions because this is this is like even
like a layer below that, and so this is not
that you can use it, you know, regardless of whether
you're doing consensus and like, you know, like and I
think that like, if you're trying to make a decision
as a group, right and you're trying to get everyone
to want to do the thing and do it, I
(04:51):
think that some version of consensus is a good idea.
But this can be for a sort of just like
a you know, like a majority of world democratic process,
whatever process you were using to decide things. You need
some kind of structure thing there otherwise it's just not
going to function like none of it will.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
What's wild to me is that it's almost like the
important thing is that there is a structure. There's so
many different structures you can use. Like when we come
at this, I don't actually know I'm the podcast idiot
on this episode and me is going to explain something,
but like there's a lot of different ways to do this,
and the important way, the important thing is is that
you do one of them. Like there are ways that
I think are better or worse, right, but you do
(05:31):
actually need to create a structure and move forward with
that structure in order to get anything done, which is
the whole secret of organizing. Like that is what organizing is.
Is you actually have to say, not only do I
want something to get done, but I'm going to figure
out the steps by which to get that done. And
it also applies to metians.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
Yeah, yeah, and like that kind of undergirting thing of
figuring out how how you're going to do it, right,
Like that that's the part of organizing that as you're saying,
it's like nothing works without it, because it is like
of what organizing is, and otherwise you were just saying
things into the wind. And admittedly my job is to
say things into the wind. So I hope you do
it so like, you know, I have a little bit
(06:09):
of respect to that. But also you need to have
some way of getting other people to do things.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Yeah, it's like a when you sit around with your
friends and like, oh, someone should do this. No one's
actually named someone. Yeah you know, I mean somewhere, there's
a non binary person somewhere. But shout out to someone.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Yeah, if you're listening to someone, congratulations, you're a master
level troll. But like my friend, don't ask their name was,
don't ask. It's great anyway, whatever, but someone needs to
get something done. And if you leave a thing being like,
oh someone should do this, you didn't organize, you have
to say, yeah, this is what following people are doing. Yep.
(06:48):
Also shout out also to everyone who has been in
meetings with me and are like Smark, I'm insufferable in meetings.
I try really hard, but anyway, whatever.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Oh god, okay, okay. So this largely is going to
be like how to run a meeting?
Speaker 1 (07:04):
What a one.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
We're going to start at like zero zero zero, which
is you need a place to meet, and that place
to meet has to be accessible to everyone who's trying
to go to the meeting. This is a thing that
people screw up a lot. It is not that hard
to find the place as accessible for everyone to go.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
You can do this.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
There are lots of places you can have meetings, depending
on how sensitive the meeting is, you know, how formal
and formal it is. I've done meetings and restaurants and
meetings and bars of them in libraries, people use churches sometimes,
like queer centers, union halls, parks.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
I want to shit talk bars really quickly. Yeah, I
don't think bars is a great idea, but I don't
think it's accessible to people who are under twenty one,
and I don't think it's accessible to people who have
problems being around drinking. That said, they happen there, and
I'm not trying to say you're bad for having had
meetings there, but I just want to say that, yeah,
Bars is one that like people go to a lot.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
And like, yeah, there's definitely issues with it, right, But
I don't know, like you can have them people's houses.
Sometimes you can like go into like a mesa or
whatever and you can go have am meeting there. You
can get people to just like go out somewhere and
do it.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
You know, I don't know like you.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
You are capable of thinking of lots of places where
you can have meetings, but you actually do need to
have a location. And this is actually again I've talked
about this before, but it's like one of the organizing
things that is actually really important is like knowing how
to get a room for a meeting or get it
room for something to happen. You have to be able
to do this. This is like zero o zero, like okay,
you know, okay, so you've now achieved this, and congratulations,
(08:35):
you clowns have now achieved a location. I am going
to stick a provisional thing in here, which is this
is this has jumping the gun a little bit, but
I need to put in here. Do not use Robert
rules of order. One of the things you will be told,
and if you have been in organizations before, a lot
of them use the thing called Robert rules of Orders,
(08:56):
which is this old, like incredibly allaborate set of parliamentary procedures.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Do not use them. They suck.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
And this gets into before we can even talk about
what a meeting is right and how you do it.
You really really do not want your meetings to get
bogged down in everyone having to learn one million lines
of parliamentary procedure. And this is a problem for any
meeting technology that you use, because they all do involve
(09:25):
a little bit of technical stuff because you have to
get people to be able to do things okay, But
one thing with Robert Tools of Order is that like,
it's like hundreds of pages, right, and in those hundreds
of pages are the recipe for one asshole to derail
your entire meeting by doing a whole bunch of unhinged
parliamentary shit. I have seen this happen. It sucks. This
(09:47):
is something that you can technically do in any meeting structure.
But the more pique the rules of the meeting are,
the easier the shit is to do and the harder
it is to be Like please stop.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
Yeah, you have to have a a certain amount of
flexibility in the way that you do things because every system,
it's the problem with law as a concept, right, is
every system can you can find loopholes. And anyone who's
been in a lot of meetings has seen people learn
how to abuse the process in order to get their
position to win by making everyone else too tired to
(10:21):
continue or to use up all of the space in
the room, or you know whatever. But I think that, yeah,
this idea that the rules that are used in your meeting,
I think that a very a good facilitator, which is
something that I tend to believe in for meetings, is
capable of explaining the process in such a way that
(10:43):
even when a lot of people come who are not
familiar with the process, they will leave familiar with the process. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Yeah, like to that sort of end, if you need
a like, okay, we need a written procedure thing, the
thing I would recommend is called Rusty's Rules of Order,
which is an unbelievably paired down version of Robert Rools
of Order that was like specifically developed to be used
not in like union circles, in activist circles. And it's
(11:11):
like the total PDF of it is twenty five pages.
That makes it sound way longer than it actually is.
Like several of those pages are like a glossary, and
like the cover, it's very easy to read. It's easy
to understand if you have to use a like this
is a formalized procedure. Do Rusties, don't do Roberts, This
is just a I need to do this before we
say anything else, because a bunch of people are going
(11:31):
to push you to use this and it sucks. So
having gotten that out of the way, we can now
get into okay things from meetings.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
I was supposed to make a joke about at the
top of all this. I'm sorry everyone. Everyone has been
waiting for me to make this joke. I'm certain, but mio,
which one of us is going to keep stack during
this meeting so that we know who can talk products
and services support this podcast?
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Are gonna keep stack and we're gonna go to the
right the foot Now.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
We are back, and I really just want to say,
as timekeeper, I'm a little bit upset about how much
time that those ads used during the meeting and if
we can not fucking damn it.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Okay, we will explain what a stack is and what
time is in a second. However, comm so things you
need to do at the very start of a meeting.
You need to take like two minutes to do this,
but you need to explain how the meeting fucking works,
and you need to assign everyone roles, and you can't
assume that everyone who is going to be in this
(12:41):
meeting understands how the rules work, like you cannot. And
there's something I've run into is like you can't assume
that everyone understands what your hand signals are, or even
just basic like everyone has been in a thing before
and understands what a stack is, right, you can't assume
that unless you know everyone in the room. And more
than that, like unless you know everyone's love experience in
the room and you've been in meetings with them before, Like,
(13:02):
you can't assume the level of knowledge that everyone has.
And I have watched these processes not work because people
just did that and then a bunch of people in
the room were like, what the fuck is going on?
So you need to at the start of the meeting
explain how the meeting is going to work, like at
least a little bit. It doesn't have to be super formal.
This can be like fucking two minutes of like we're
gonna have a stack blah blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
And for anyone just say, you know what we're saying
right now, we'll explain stack. More. That is the order
in which people talk. It is a way of like
keeping track of the line of who's gonna talk when.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Yeah, I'm realizing this explanation is jumping around a little bit.
But you need to make sure that everyone understands how
the meeting is supposed to work, and you know, usually
that's really quick. Sometimes someone will just not know something
and then okay, you explain it to them and that's
like fine and chill, and like, I don't know. I
remember being a little tiny baby anarchist and like not
knowing anything and going to my first meeting and like
(13:51):
people were talking about restorative justice and I was like, Hi,
what's your storative justice. I'm like a little tiny child,
I don't know anything. And they explained it and it
was like chilling, good and you can just do this
and it helps people feel included and yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
Totally okay.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
So general meeting facilitation things you need. You need one
an agenda. An agenda is what the fuck are you doing?
And generally speaking, secondarily, you want to try to have
time planned out because one of the one of the
failure modes of a meeting is the meeting goes for
fucking thirty hours and everyone's miserable. So you generally want
to have an agenda that has what you're going to
(14:27):
talk about and then kind of guidelines roughly for how
long you think it'll take to talk about the thing.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
We'll get more into that in a second. Sometimes people
create the agenda beforehand. Sometimes you start you set the
agenda at the beginning of the meeting, but like you
do want an agenda so people know what you're doing, and.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
It should be similar that everyone can see a whiteboard
or like I guess in a zoom meeting notes or
a dock that everyone has open. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Yeah, you want to make sure everyone has it, okay,
And this is the point where we need to talk
about roles. So part of the technology this right and
the stack is a big piece of technology to keep
track of who's talking. But a big part of what
the technology of this is is a bunch of roles
that you assign people and that ideally everyone rotates through
(15:13):
so you learn how to do all of them, and
so to prevent people from sort of concentrating power by
like monopolizing one role. So the first role we need
to talk about, and this is I don't know if
the big one is the right one, but this is
the one that I think people know kind of. I
don't know if intuitively understand is the right word, but
like this is the one that there are usually versions
(15:34):
of in a meeting, and a lot of those versions
are bad.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Is a facilitator?
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Yeah, so okay my explanation of what a facilitator is,
and Margaret, I'm going to ask you for yours too,
because I don't know. So, as a facilitator, your job
is to like point to the agenda and go, okay,
we're talking about this. Your job is to move people
through discussions. Your job is to try to get people
to a consensus on what you're doing. And your job
(15:57):
is to stop people from giving speeches. And this is
I'm gonna take a little digression here, which is, Okay,
we've been talking about way's meetings fail, right. Number One,
no one can go to it. That's way meeting fails. Two,
you don't have an agenda and everyone it just goes
off the rails and no one has any idea what
you're supposed to be meeting about. Three, and this is
(16:18):
a huge one, is that one of the biggest ways
of meetings fail and I have seen this in every
single context I have ever worked in, is that someone
and it is usually a dude it's almost always a dude.
It cannot be a dude, but it's usually a dude
just keeps talking and keeps talking and keeps talking and
will not shut the fuck up, and nothing gets done
because the entire meeting is one hour of this guy
(16:39):
just yabbering.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
And one of your most important jobs as the facilitator,
and this is genuinely a huge part for social technology
of the structure of meetings is to make sure that
your meeting is not one person talking. Yeah, this is
why this exists.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
And you know, if you want to get into the
sort of dire this right, if you do not stop
all of your meetings from being one annoying guy talking,
your projects will fail.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
You must do this.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
This is the one thing here that is like, you
absolutely positively must get this guy to stop talking.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
I think that the important thing to think about a
facilitator is that most people come from a background of
assumed authoritarian politics, assumed politics where someone is in charge.
Even our democracies are built around this idea that you
elect someone to tell you what to do. When we
talk about meetings, we are talking about building bottom up structures.
(17:37):
Even when we later I think will end up talking
maybe a different episode or something about larger structures you
can build up out of these sort of local assemblies
and meetings. The idea is that everyone is empowered, and
so because we're really used to this competitive decision making
around who is in charge, we struggle a little bit
adapting to egalitarian meetings and also to consensus isn't the
(18:01):
only way to make decisions, but people struggle with consensus
because they'll think of that at meaning one hundred percent
vote where everyone votes for the same thing, and that's
a mistake. And so we think of the facilitator accidentally
as the leader, and they are a leader in the
sense of a whatever. You could use the word leader
in a lot of ways, and some of them are
positive and not authoritarian, and so in that context they
(18:22):
are leading people through the meeting. But they are absolutely
not only not the decision maker, they are less the
decision maker than everyone else. Choosing to be a facilitator
of a meeting is choosing to go in and say
I'm not actually even going to push for my side
unless you are in a like tight knit enough group
(18:42):
where everyone knows each other and everyone kind of knows oh,
in this group, Margaret's opinion is always going to be this,
and so and Soo's opinions always going to be this.
If you know people really well, you can kind of
still be both facilitator and a participant. But by and large,
when you are the facilitator, your job is to help
the decision form. It is to help take what people
(19:04):
are saying and say, Okay, this seems like what we're saying.
Is this the Is this the proposal? And not say
I think this is the proposal, but say is this
the proposal? And yeah. It is to keep people on track,
and every meeting is gonna have different I really like
a strong facilitator. I really like someone who's going to
shut me up. I really like someone who's like, yeah,
(19:25):
that's not what we're talking about right now. And it's
hard because your feelings get hurt, like especially for example,
someone says a joke and then someone else is a
joke and then you're the third person and you say
the joke too, and the facilitator's like, yeah, that's enough
of that. We got to keep going. You're the third
person who said the joke, and you're like, why am
I getting yelled at? And the other two people didn't Yeah,
and that's the wrong way to look at it. We're
(19:46):
not yelling at anyone. We're trying to keep things moving forward.
And you're absolutely right also about the people grandstanding. And
you know, a particular habit that men often have, especially
since men, is that they'll come in and be like,
they'll listen to what someone else says and then repeat
it louder and then be like yeah, yeah, right, and
as if it's their idea and they don't even realize
(20:08):
they're doing it. It's kind of cute. But there's a
lot of that you can learn about yourself by going
into these meetings and learning about your own habits and
what you've been and culturated to do. And it shouldn't
be about shaming people around this as long as people
are able to like kind of get called in and
listen to it. And one of the things that I
think when you teach the meeting, at the beginning of
the meeting, you also explain some of this social stuff
(20:31):
and you say, like, you know, we believe in a
step up, step back thing. If you're someone who generally
feels comfortable talking in large groups, we invite you to
step back a little bit, and if you're not someone
who generally feels comfortable expressing your opinion in groups, we
invite you to step up. Do you know what also
needs to learn to step up? Is I actually think
we don't get enough advertising in our lives. I think
(20:52):
that the people who are afraid to take up space
are the people who pay a lot of money. Physical
block a physical block. All right, babe, isn't consensus. Here's
ads we are back.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
I think this saucer, you know, as we've talked about
sort of in some way, in a lot of ways,
like how important the role the facilitator is. This is
a role you need to rotate because that is a role.
It's like those are skills that everyone needs. Like if
everyone knows, did you just do the hand I did?
Speaker 1 (21:36):
I did? I don't know whether people still do it
metal hands versus twinkle fingers.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
Sorry, okay, this is completely Unfortunately podcasting is an audio medium,
So all of you just missed me losing my mind
because Margaret, Margaret did one of my hand signs for agreements.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
I was like, shit, God, damn it. Okay, we're talking
about meetings that just came naturally.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Well, well, we'll get the hand signed, but like you know,
you actually do you all of these things should be
road hitting and you should be teaching everyone to be
able to do all of the facilitation roles because a okay,
there's there's lots of reasons for this, right one. Facilitation
in particular can be kind of dangerous because there's a
real risk of someone who is facilitating deciding that they
(22:21):
are the leader and they're going to steer how everything
goes and they're going to make their decisions. And by
rotating that around, it becomes a lot easier to not
have that happen. And also, doing a role makes you
a more active participant in the meeting. A lot of
times it depends on the role obviously, but like it's
a way to get people to keep everyone.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
Engaged in a thing. That's a good point. Thank you. This.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
I stole this from my friend who is going to
remain nameless. But if you're out there, I love you.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Your friend's name is nameless, I understand. Yeah, friends saying
this the nameless child to somewhere there's someone whose name
is the whole last kid and anyway whatever, anyway, okay, okay, yeah,
But the other thing about it, right is the more
everyone knows about these skills, the more effective of a participants,
and the more effective you can be making decisions in
(23:08):
the meeting.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
Like that, the more everyone understands how the process works
and knows how to do it and knows how to
because like being in a meeting and being in community
with other people and making decisions together is a skill,
and we don't have it. There's this great David Graeber,
the anthroologist, David Graeber, who actually spent a lot of
time like writing about these meetings in a way that
doesn't usually happen.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
As like as as an anthropologist.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
Yeah, yeah, as an anthropologist, right, because he was both
both an activist and an anthropologist. And he has this
great line where he says Americans are great at communism
and terrible at topocracy, which is that they're really really
good at like doing things each according to their need
and from each according through ability. Like if you try
to organize a barbecue, everyone can do the things through
the barbecue, but no one knows how to make decisions together,
(23:51):
because that's a skill. And the more you're rotating through
all the roles and the more you understand how everything works,
the more you understand, you know, how to do the
facilitation stuff of like getting everyone to figure out what
the thing that they want is and how to express
that and how to like how to work together. The
more you understand that as like a person who's not facilitating,
(24:11):
the more you can understand like how to actually do democracy.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Yeah, and it rules. And it's also the fact that like,
if you are indispensable to your group, you've actually failed
your group. Yeah, especially when you're talking about stuff like activism,
that has a certain risk. If you are the only
medic in your affinity group, that is a problem because
if you get arrested, now there's no medic. If you're
the only facilitator who is a very skilled facilitator, what
(24:37):
happens when you're sick or in jail and you all
have a very intense meeting that you have to do,
and you need a skilled facilitator. Not that everyone needs
to be equal in all skills within in a given group,
but you need to learn to If you are very
good at something, your job is to make someone else
very good at it too.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
That's the thing both for meetings on the way it
was explained, same me, and this is a more kind
of I don't know what term be't used for, but
it was taught to me as your job is to
organize yourself.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Out of a job. Yeah, totally, okay, So.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
We're going to move on to the second roll, which
is the stack taker. So okay, the stack. This when
I first started talking about this is as a social technology,
the thing I specifically meant was the stack, and then
eventually I was like, no, it's actually the whole process is.
But the stack very very simple invention, but if you
don't have it, it's a disaster. The stack, as we
(25:32):
said before, is just literally a list of names of
who's going to talk in what order. Someone raises their hand,
they could add to the stack.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
That is very simple. It is also absolutely crucial to
making sure a meeting runs at all. Most groups tend
to use some variation of what's called a progressive stack,
where you know, this is part of we were talking
about earlier, like step forward and step back, But when
you're compiling a stack, you want to have the people
who speak less in front m M. And this works
(26:01):
sort of in two ways, right. One is it's okay,
so if there's someone who's not like a cis white dude,
and who is trying to say something, you probably want
them to say something because they are less likely to
be the one who says something. Yeah, just because of
the way that sort of whiteness is structure, because of
the way that like masculinity structure, because of the way
that these things work. So you want to give opportunities
(26:22):
to speak to people who like don't usually get heard.
And then also if someone just like hasn't been talking
in a meeting and they want to say something, and
that's also a part of the sort of facilitation. And
sometimes I know this is the thing that like a
role that I've seen passed out between a bunch of
different roles, and I guess everyone kind of has a
responsibility to do this. But if there's someone in a
(26:44):
meeting who has not been saying anything, it's generally a
good idea to be like, hey, are you okay? And
also like more important lead to some extent than there
are you okay? Of like what do you think about this?
Speaker 1 (26:56):
Yeah, although I do think that there's a little bit
of a like some people don't want to specifically be
called on in that way, and so that's kind of
a like learning to read the room skill definitely about
when you want to encourage people to step up versus
other people are like, no, I don't have anything particular
to say, and I don't want to get, you know,
singled out. I think that in smaller meetings sometimes the
facilitator can keep stack. Larger meetings, that's a terrible plan. Yeah,
(27:19):
it's large meetings. You need to you can't. Yeah, I've
been put to be during it. Yeah, because you need
someone keeping track of who's raising their hands when and
things like that. Sometimes you're actually even writing the stack
on a whiteboard so people can see yeah, yeah, you
look a piece of paper. Yeah. I have been in
meetings that sort of self facilitate fairly effectively in smaller groups,
where a thing that people can do is if they
(27:40):
have a thing they want to say, they hold up
one finger and they keep that finger up, and if
someone else is something that they want to say, they
put up two fingers, and then if someone else is
something they want to say, they put up three fingers.
And so you can have this method by which people
track their own stack. But this is a small group thing.
This is not a and this is a people who
know each other and know how to do the balancing
(28:02):
that we're talking about about making sure everyone gets heard.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Yeah, And I think part of this also it's important
to remember, is like this is like one oh one.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Oh yeah, sorry, as an advanced scale.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
Kind of And I'm introducing some things that are probably
more advanced than one on one, like like like they like, okay,
figuring out why someone is uncomfortable talking on a like
this person wants to talk, doesn't feel comfortable to and
if you ask them, they will say something. And this
person doesn't feel comfortable talking because they don't want to talk.
That's kind of a more advanced thing. Fair enough, I
guess we should talk about hand gestures here, which is
that okay, over the course of these beings one of
(28:33):
over the course of like movements, one of the things
that is built up is hand gestures because they can
be a very effective way of, you know, someone expressing
something without having to talk over someone else. This is
I don't know, this is the one on one. I'm
not going to teach hand gestures because everyone has different ones,
and there are some that are pretty universal. But like
(28:57):
the number of different gestures I've seen for like direct
response mm hmm and ship like it's the thing that
like like hand gestures can work and can be really
fish Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
See you're doing one of the head you're doing one
of the.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Make a triangle your hands. Fuck, I forgot about point
a process. Oh no, well so there's all of this
very very complicated stuff. It's not that complicated, but like,
like point up process sucks like that, she's actually complicated.
I'm actually derailing again. I'm so sorry. This is an example.
If there was a facilitator in this call, they would
be making me shut up. That's what's happening. Yeah, no,
but but but this is actually like this this this
(29:31):
is this is the one time I've ever wished there
was like videos you could see the hand gestures because
like the thing about this, right is once you are
good at meetings, and like if you have people who
do this and you talk about what the hand gesters
are beforehand, that's also important. You can't even if if
you're very good at meetings and you're still listening to
this episode for some reason.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
I mean, I don't know it.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
It's a good episode, but like, you can't assume that
everyone knows what your hand gestures are. Yeah, and sometimes
people have different hand gestures for different things. Sometimes you
have contextual hand gestures for like like there are like okay,
like you're if you are trying to meet in the dark. Yeah,
your your hand gestures don't work, right. This is also
stolen from another friend, right, Like sometimes you need to
(30:11):
use snaps for that because so that you can hear, right.
Like what all of this is to say that, like
the stuff with hand gestures, it can make your meetings
a lot more effective. This is the thing you can
do if everyone in the group understands how they work.
I'm not going to be like teaching you sets of
hand gestures here because I can't guarantee that any gesture
I teach you will be the one that people use.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
Can I can? I though, like speed run the concepts
of some of them, because I think they are useful
to understand. Yeah. Yeah, because it's hard to imagine when
you imagine meetings. I think about this a lots. I
write meetings into fiction, which is a very hard thing
to do and make them entertaining because they're also hard
to be entertained and by when you're in them, unless
they're contentious. But there are certain things that you learn
derail meetings. And there are ways in which by using
(30:54):
hand gestures you can avoid having more people speak. And
the single most important and common one is a way
of saying I agree, and so that way people when
they really want to say something but they're not on
stack and they get really frustrated, they can do that
hand gesture, which you know is very easy to make
fun of. You know, when I was coming up, it
(31:14):
was twinkle fingers, where you waggle your fingers, and then
we were like punk, so we did metal fingers instead,
which was literally the same thing but reverse. It's kind
of like the look that you do when you like,
really like music, and it's actually sort of like mimicking
playing a guitar. And so that's a very important concept.
And sometimes people use snaps, although sometimes people prefer non
audio and other people prefer audio.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
Yeah, yeah, and and and so's that's likely and that's
that's posture.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
While I was talking about like.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Like that's that's dependent on who's in the room and
what the room is, and.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Like, but I think that a I agree without needing
to say anything is essential. Yeah, Yeah, that's a good one.
Other ones to just know of is that there are
things like people will say like, please move this along.
It's a way of saying, hey, facilitator, please shut this
person up usually or can we talk about something else.
There's ones that are direct response, which is saying I
(32:05):
would like to jump stack because this person has just
insulted the honor of my family or whatever, and it's
up to the facilitator to decide whether to do these.
Another one is point of process, which is saying like, hey,
I actually don't want to talk about the thing we're
talking about. I want to talk about how the meeting
is going. Meetings get real meta and it's real frustrating anyway,
So it's worth knowing that this is part of the technology.
(32:28):
It seems cringey from the outside, but like are other options.
I mean, there are other technologies about decision making that
people have developed, but like actually living democratic lives in
which we all have a say in our decisions sometimes
means that we go to meetings and we can actually
kind of learn to I'm talking shit on meetings, but
that's Meetings are also a ways to get to know
(32:50):
your friends and express yourself and get things done.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
Yeah, you know, as much I've been talking about being boring,
like I've had things that were technically organizing meetings that
were like some of the most transformational experiences in my
life totally because me and a bunch of people who
you know, a bunch of people are really close to me,
like came together and we figured out how to do something,
and there is a beauty there that is and this
(33:13):
is personal to why it's hard to talk about these things,
right because like the technical process of it, like the
technical description of what we're saying, is at the same
time being used to do something that can only be
described instead of poetic terms. Yeah, Like, the the actual
experience of like you and a bunch of other people
coming together to do something and figure out how to
(33:35):
do it and fucking doing it is it is a
transcendent act of creation.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
And these are like you know, yeah, like it doesn't
like the fucking hammers and shovels and like fucking slide
rules that you use to construct something don't look very
pretty and then at the end of it, you've built
something together and it's beautiful.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Yeah. No, it's it's the other side of the coin
of the first time you watch the police run away
from you. Yeah, it is a way of coming together
with other people to accomplish something and make something powerful
is meetings. And it is also it's interesting because we
talk about how men will often take up too much
space in meetings. This is not a universal thing anytime
we say this kind of thing, but it is actually
(34:17):
often feminized labor because it's this invisibilized labor that happens
behind the scenes that is not as sexy, right and
is about just actually hearing people out. It is like
conflict resolution speed run. Anyway, I accidentally went off on
the meta of meetings also.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
But no, it's good. Well, and I think there's an
important thing here too, because like we're talking about the
politics of like meetings themselves, right of like the you know,
the actual political angle of what it means to have
a democracy where what democracy means you make decisions together. Yeah,
and this is something There's also a very important actual
(34:55):
procedural meeting note here, which is that one of the
things you will learn over the course of doing meeting
is that a lot of times people wage battles over
the content of political ideology in the form of fighting
over how a meeting works. Yeah, totally, And you can
see this everywhere from like your fucking local organizing meeting
and people yelling about who's on stack or whatever all
(35:17):
the way up to like, you know, when like when
like the Democrats are saying that, like like in Congress
that like the parliament the budget parliamentarian won't let them
like raise the minimum wage.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
That's what they're doing.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
They're using an argument over procedure to like disguise the
fact that what they're really arguing about is like it
is an actual political argument. Yeah, but this is also
a thing where like the way you structure a meeting
is political. It doesn't seem like it, right, But you
can have a meeting where, you know, it's like the
fucking plenipotentiary meeting of like the Executive Committee of I
(35:52):
don't know, the People's Congress, the Chinese Companies Party or whatever.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
Those are not the right words. I'm on five hours
of sleep.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
But you can have a meeting where it's like, yeah,
the way the meeting works is one guy stands out
there and he gives a speech and he tells everyone
what to say, and then everyone votes yes. Yeah, that's
the way you can do a meeting, right, And that's political,
and it fucking sucks, and We're trying to teach you
how to do a meeting where you know, we do democracy,
where everyone comes together and we like do a thing. Yeah,
and we will get to more roles next week. This
(36:19):
was originally planned to be one episode. It is not
one episode. It is now two episodes. But the upside
is that we solved a bunch of the fundamental logistical
problems about how to build a free society. So stay
tuned for that, stay tuned for more roles you want
in your meetings. And yeah, it's been It can happen here,
and thank you Mark for coming on the show.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can now find sources for It Could Happen here
listed directly, an episode descripts.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
Thanks for listening,
All media welcome. It could happen here.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
A podcast that is in many cases about organizing. I
AnGR host Mel Wong and with me is one of
the most experienced organizers I know, Margaret Kiljoy.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Oh no, hi, I'm a little out of practice, but
I have done it a lot.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
You know, Margaret says this and also has been doing
shit for like one bazillion years, and this is, this
is and I will say this. The sign of you
that you are running into a good organizer is when
you talk to them about their organizing and they immediately
start downplaying it.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
That's when you know that you haven't catched a good organizer.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
If they started immediately going I'm the best fucking organizer
in the world, run like hell, this is an asshole
who sucks someone who's like, ah, like I did this
a million years ago, I'm not good at it and
it didn't matter and blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Very good organizer, thank you. Yeah. I remember once I
went to a thing wait that was put on and
there was this, uh they were kind of turfy people
who are coming through and we didn't totally know that
right away, and their pitch about why they were such
a good experienced organizers, as one of them was like,
and this person has been organizing for more than three years,
and it was just like, Okay, every person you are
(01:18):
giving this talk to has done this for at least
three times as long as that. And don't get me wrong,
if you're listening and you've been organizing for three years,
you've learned a lot. I'm not trying to tell you
you're bad organizer. You might be a better organizer and
someone's been doing it longer, but don't use that as
your selling point anyway. That's very funny.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Yeah, So okay, this episode, we were asking you a
very very important question. Okay, you want to change something
about the world. I don't know what that thing is
that is up that is for you to determine. The
question that you need to be asking is are you
organizing because you want to feel cool? Or are you
organizing because you want whatever you're doing to fucking work?
And if you want you're organizing to work, literally, no
(01:58):
matter what it is. You actually need to listen to
this episode and you need to have some rudimental knowledge
of the thing we are about to talk about, because
if you do not, your organizing will fail. If you
cannot do this, the thing we're going to talk about
in this episode, If you cannot do this, everything else
you know, all of your experience, all of your knowledge,
all of your passion, all of it is fucking useless
(02:19):
because the actual work of organizing is incredibly unglamorous. It
is un sexy, a lot of it is very time consuming,
a lot of it is not cool. It is you
sitting there and talking to a bunch of people. Yeah,
and if you want your movement to succeed, you have
to be able to do this kind of like groundwork,
logistical work, because if you don't, it won't work. So
(02:42):
what we are going to teach you the very very
very very basics of in this episode is a social
technology that has been developed over the course of literal
centuries of movements.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Right.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
This is something that has been passed down and refined,
like through generations and generations of organizers. I mean, I
could do a genealogy of this. A lot of the
modern stuff sort of came through the Quakers, moved through
the civil rights movements, moved through the anti war movements,
moved through like in Vietnam, moved to a whole bunch
of other movements like to be passed down to you today.
This is a complicated social technology. It does not sound complicated.
(03:16):
If you do not know how to do this, it
is impossible to try to replicate on the fly. And
that is we are going to explain to you the
very basis of how to run a meeting.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Yeah, I really like this way of phrasing it that
it's it's a technology, Like it's a way of applying
ideas to get something to happen. Even if a lot
of it is instinctive, there is an art to it,
but like, yeah, no, there's stuff you can like learn
and apply and it's Yeah, technology is a good way
of framing it.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Yeah, And it's one of these things where you know,
you can kind of if you don't know how to
do this and you have people, you can kind of
sort of maybe approximate something that is a little bit
functional and the moment it runs into a stress point,
it will collapse completely. And this is a thing that
like you know, I have talked to I have done
(04:07):
a lot of these. I have talked to a lot
of people who've done this. I have like I have
been in rooms of people knew how to run meetings.
I've been in rooms people didn't know how to run meetings.
I have talked to a bunch of people who have
been in rooms who don't know how to run meetings,
and like there are rooms of people with collectively hundreds
of PhDs and because nobody in the room knew how
to fucking run a meeting, complete disaster they're organizing didn't work.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Yeah, right, you have to be able to do this.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
And it doesn't really matter, you know, we're not going
to get that much into like what mechanism are using
to make decisions because this is this is like even
like a layer below that, and so this is not
that you can use it, you know, regardless of whether
you're doing consensus and like, you know, like and I
think that like, if you're trying to make a decision
as a group, right and you're trying to get everyone
to want to do the thing and do it, I
(04:51):
think that some version of consensus is a good idea.
But this can be for a sort of just like
a you know, like a majority of world democratic process,
whatever process you were using to decide things. You need
some kind of structure thing there otherwise it's just not
going to function like none of it will.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
What's wild to me is that it's almost like the
important thing is that there is a structure. There's so
many different structures you can use. Like when we come
at this, I don't actually know I'm the podcast idiot
on this episode and me is going to explain something,
but like there's a lot of different ways to do this,
and the important way, the important thing is is that
you do one of them. Like there are ways that
I think are better or worse, right, but you do
(05:31):
actually need to create a structure and move forward with
that structure in order to get anything done, which is
the whole secret of organizing. Like that is what organizing is.
Is you actually have to say, not only do I
want something to get done, but I'm going to figure
out the steps by which to get that done. And
it also applies to metians.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
Yeah, yeah, and like that kind of undergirting thing of
figuring out how how you're going to do it, right,
Like that that's the part of organizing that as you're saying,
it's like nothing works without it, because it is like
of what organizing is, and otherwise you were just saying
things into the wind. And admittedly my job is to
say things into the wind. So I hope you do
it so like, you know, I have a little bit
(06:09):
of respect to that. But also you need to have
some way of getting other people to do things.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Yeah, it's like a when you sit around with your
friends and like, oh, someone should do this. No one's
actually named someone. Yeah you know, I mean somewhere, there's
a non binary person somewhere. But shout out to someone.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Yeah, if you're listening to someone, congratulations, you're a master
level troll. But like my friend, don't ask their name was,
don't ask. It's great anyway, whatever, but someone needs to
get something done. And if you leave a thing being like,
oh someone should do this, you didn't organize, you have
to say, yeah, this is what following people are doing. Yep.
(06:48):
Also shout out also to everyone who has been in
meetings with me and are like Smark, I'm insufferable in meetings.
I try really hard, but anyway, whatever.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Oh god, okay, okay. So this largely is going to
be like how to run a meeting?
Speaker 1 (07:04):
What a one.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
We're going to start at like zero zero zero, which
is you need a place to meet, and that place
to meet has to be accessible to everyone who's trying
to go to the meeting. This is a thing that
people screw up a lot. It is not that hard
to find the place as accessible for everyone to go.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
You can do this.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
There are lots of places you can have meetings, depending
on how sensitive the meeting is, you know, how formal
and formal it is. I've done meetings and restaurants and
meetings and bars of them in libraries, people use churches sometimes,
like queer centers, union halls, parks.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
I want to shit talk bars really quickly. Yeah, I
don't think bars is a great idea, but I don't
think it's accessible to people who are under twenty one,
and I don't think it's accessible to people who have
problems being around drinking. That said, they happen there, and
I'm not trying to say you're bad for having had
meetings there, but I just want to say that, yeah,
Bars is one that like people go to a lot.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
And like, yeah, there's definitely issues with it, right, But
I don't know, like you can have them people's houses.
Sometimes you can like go into like a mesa or
whatever and you can go have am meeting there. You
can get people to just like go out somewhere and
do it.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
You know, I don't know like you.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
You are capable of thinking of lots of places where
you can have meetings, but you actually do need to
have a location. And this is actually again I've talked
about this before, but it's like one of the organizing
things that is actually really important is like knowing how
to get a room for a meeting or get it
room for something to happen. You have to be able
to do this. This is like zero o zero, like okay,
you know, okay, so you've now achieved this, and congratulations,
(08:35):
you clowns have now achieved a location. I am going
to stick a provisional thing in here, which is this
is this has jumping the gun a little bit, but
I need to put in here. Do not use Robert
rules of order. One of the things you will be told,
and if you have been in organizations before, a lot
of them use the thing called Robert rules of Orders,
(08:56):
which is this old, like incredibly allaborate set of parliamentary procedures.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Do not use them. They suck.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
And this gets into before we can even talk about
what a meeting is right and how you do it.
You really really do not want your meetings to get
bogged down in everyone having to learn one million lines
of parliamentary procedure. And this is a problem for any
meeting technology that you use, because they all do involve
(09:25):
a little bit of technical stuff because you have to
get people to be able to do things okay, But
one thing with Robert Tools of Order is that like,
it's like hundreds of pages, right, and in those hundreds
of pages are the recipe for one asshole to derail
your entire meeting by doing a whole bunch of unhinged
parliamentary shit. I have seen this happen. It sucks. This
(09:47):
is something that you can technically do in any meeting structure.
But the more pique the rules of the meeting are,
the easier the shit is to do and the harder
it is to be Like please stop.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
Yeah, you have to have a a certain amount of
flexibility in the way that you do things because every system,
it's the problem with law as a concept, right, is
every system can you can find loopholes. And anyone who's
been in a lot of meetings has seen people learn
how to abuse the process in order to get their
position to win by making everyone else too tired to
(10:21):
continue or to use up all of the space in
the room, or you know whatever. But I think that, yeah,
this idea that the rules that are used in your meeting,
I think that a very a good facilitator, which is
something that I tend to believe in for meetings, is
capable of explaining the process in such a way that
(10:43):
even when a lot of people come who are not
familiar with the process, they will leave familiar with the process. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Yeah, like to that sort of end, if you need
a like, okay, we need a written procedure thing, the
thing I would recommend is called Rusty's Rules of Order,
which is an unbelievably paired down version of Robert Rools
of Order that was like specifically developed to be used
not in like union circles, in activist circles. And it's
(11:11):
like the total PDF of it is twenty five pages.
That makes it sound way longer than it actually is.
Like several of those pages are like a glossary, and
like the cover, it's very easy to read. It's easy
to understand if you have to use a like this
is a formalized procedure. Do Rusties, don't do Roberts, This
is just a I need to do this before we
say anything else, because a bunch of people are going
(11:31):
to push you to use this and it sucks. So
having gotten that out of the way, we can now
get into okay things from meetings.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
I was supposed to make a joke about at the
top of all this. I'm sorry everyone. Everyone has been
waiting for me to make this joke. I'm certain, but mio,
which one of us is going to keep stack during
this meeting so that we know who can talk products
and services support this podcast?
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Are gonna keep stack and we're gonna go to the
right the foot Now.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
We are back, and I really just want to say,
as timekeeper, I'm a little bit upset about how much
time that those ads used during the meeting and if
we can not fucking damn it.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Okay, we will explain what a stack is and what
time is in a second. However, comm so things you
need to do at the very start of a meeting.
You need to take like two minutes to do this,
but you need to explain how the meeting fucking works,
and you need to assign everyone roles, and you can't
assume that everyone who is going to be in this
(12:41):
meeting understands how the rules work, like you cannot. And
there's something I've run into is like you can't assume
that everyone understands what your hand signals are, or even
just basic like everyone has been in a thing before
and understands what a stack is, right, you can't assume
that unless you know everyone in the room. And more
than that, like unless you know everyone's love experience in
the room and you've been in meetings with them before, Like,
(13:02):
you can't assume the level of knowledge that everyone has.
And I have watched these processes not work because people
just did that and then a bunch of people in
the room were like, what the fuck is going on?
So you need to at the start of the meeting
explain how the meeting is going to work, like at
least a little bit. It doesn't have to be super formal.
This can be like fucking two minutes of like we're
gonna have a stack blah blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
And for anyone just say, you know what we're saying
right now, we'll explain stack. More. That is the order
in which people talk. It is a way of like
keeping track of the line of who's gonna talk when.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Yeah, I'm realizing this explanation is jumping around a little bit.
But you need to make sure that everyone understands how
the meeting is supposed to work, and you know, usually
that's really quick. Sometimes someone will just not know something
and then okay, you explain it to them and that's
like fine and chill, and like, I don't know. I
remember being a little tiny baby anarchist and like not
knowing anything and going to my first meeting and like
(13:51):
people were talking about restorative justice and I was like, Hi,
what's your storative justice. I'm like a little tiny child,
I don't know anything. And they explained it and it
was like chilling, good and you can just do this
and it helps people feel included and yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
Totally okay.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
So general meeting facilitation things you need. You need one
an agenda. An agenda is what the fuck are you doing?
And generally speaking, secondarily, you want to try to have
time planned out because one of the one of the
failure modes of a meeting is the meeting goes for
fucking thirty hours and everyone's miserable. So you generally want
to have an agenda that has what you're going to
(14:27):
talk about and then kind of guidelines roughly for how
long you think it'll take to talk about the thing.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
We'll get more into that in a second. Sometimes people
create the agenda beforehand. Sometimes you start you set the
agenda at the beginning of the meeting, but like you
do want an agenda so people know what you're doing, and.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
It should be similar that everyone can see a whiteboard
or like I guess in a zoom meeting notes or
a dock that everyone has open. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Yeah, you want to make sure everyone has it, okay,
And this is the point where we need to talk
about roles. So part of the technology this right and
the stack is a big piece of technology to keep
track of who's talking. But a big part of what
the technology of this is is a bunch of roles
that you assign people and that ideally everyone rotates through
(15:13):
so you learn how to do all of them, and
so to prevent people from sort of concentrating power by
like monopolizing one role. So the first role we need
to talk about, and this is I don't know if
the big one is the right one, but this is
the one that I think people know kind of. I
don't know if intuitively understand is the right word, but
like this is the one that there are usually versions
(15:34):
of in a meeting, and a lot of those versions
are bad.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Is a facilitator?
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Yeah, so okay my explanation of what a facilitator is,
and Margaret, I'm going to ask you for yours too,
because I don't know. So, as a facilitator, your job
is to like point to the agenda and go, okay,
we're talking about this. Your job is to move people
through discussions. Your job is to try to get people
to a consensus on what you're doing. And your job
(15:57):
is to stop people from giving speeches. And this is
I'm gonna take a little digression here, which is, Okay,
we've been talking about way's meetings fail, right. Number One,
no one can go to it. That's way meeting fails. Two,
you don't have an agenda and everyone it just goes
off the rails and no one has any idea what
you're supposed to be meeting about. Three, and this is
(16:18):
a huge one, is that one of the biggest ways
of meetings fail and I have seen this in every
single context I have ever worked in, is that someone
and it is usually a dude it's almost always a dude.
It cannot be a dude, but it's usually a dude
just keeps talking and keeps talking and keeps talking and
will not shut the fuck up, and nothing gets done
because the entire meeting is one hour of this guy
(16:39):
just yabbering.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
And one of your most important jobs as the facilitator,
and this is genuinely a huge part for social technology
of the structure of meetings is to make sure that
your meeting is not one person talking. Yeah, this is
why this exists.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
And you know, if you want to get into the
sort of dire this right, if you do not stop
all of your meetings from being one annoying guy talking,
your projects will fail.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
You must do this.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
This is the one thing here that is like, you
absolutely positively must get this guy to stop talking.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
I think that the important thing to think about a
facilitator is that most people come from a background of
assumed authoritarian politics, assumed politics where someone is in charge.
Even our democracies are built around this idea that you
elect someone to tell you what to do. When we
talk about meetings, we are talking about building bottom up structures.
(17:37):
Even when we later I think will end up talking
maybe a different episode or something about larger structures you
can build up out of these sort of local assemblies
and meetings. The idea is that everyone is empowered, and
so because we're really used to this competitive decision making
around who is in charge, we struggle a little bit
adapting to egalitarian meetings and also to consensus isn't the
(18:01):
only way to make decisions, but people struggle with consensus
because they'll think of that at meaning one hundred percent
vote where everyone votes for the same thing, and that's
a mistake. And so we think of the facilitator accidentally
as the leader, and they are a leader in the
sense of a whatever. You could use the word leader
in a lot of ways, and some of them are
positive and not authoritarian, and so in that context they
(18:22):
are leading people through the meeting. But they are absolutely
not only not the decision maker, they are less the
decision maker than everyone else. Choosing to be a facilitator
of a meeting is choosing to go in and say
I'm not actually even going to push for my side
unless you are in a like tight knit enough group
(18:42):
where everyone knows each other and everyone kind of knows oh,
in this group, Margaret's opinion is always going to be this,
and so and Soo's opinions always going to be this.
If you know people really well, you can kind of
still be both facilitator and a participant. But by and large,
when you are the facilitator, your job is to help
the decision form. It is to help take what people
(19:04):
are saying and say, Okay, this seems like what we're saying.
Is this the Is this the proposal? And not say
I think this is the proposal, but say is this
the proposal? And yeah. It is to keep people on track,
and every meeting is gonna have different I really like
a strong facilitator. I really like someone who's going to
shut me up. I really like someone who's like, yeah,
(19:25):
that's not what we're talking about right now. And it's
hard because your feelings get hurt, like especially for example,
someone says a joke and then someone else is a
joke and then you're the third person and you say
the joke too, and the facilitator's like, yeah, that's enough
of that. We got to keep going. You're the third
person who said the joke, and you're like, why am
I getting yelled at? And the other two people didn't Yeah,
and that's the wrong way to look at it. We're
(19:46):
not yelling at anyone. We're trying to keep things moving forward.
And you're absolutely right also about the people grandstanding. And
you know, a particular habit that men often have, especially
since men, is that they'll come in and be like,
they'll listen to what someone else says and then repeat
it louder and then be like yeah, yeah, right, and
as if it's their idea and they don't even realize
(20:08):
they're doing it. It's kind of cute. But there's a
lot of that you can learn about yourself by going
into these meetings and learning about your own habits and
what you've been and culturated to do. And it shouldn't
be about shaming people around this as long as people
are able to like kind of get called in and
listen to it. And one of the things that I
think when you teach the meeting, at the beginning of
the meeting, you also explain some of this social stuff
(20:31):
and you say, like, you know, we believe in a
step up, step back thing. If you're someone who generally
feels comfortable talking in large groups, we invite you to
step back a little bit, and if you're not someone
who generally feels comfortable expressing your opinion in groups, we
invite you to step up. Do you know what also
needs to learn to step up? Is I actually think
we don't get enough advertising in our lives. I think
(20:52):
that the people who are afraid to take up space
are the people who pay a lot of money. Physical
block a physical block. All right, babe, isn't consensus. Here's
ads we are back.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
I think this saucer, you know, as we've talked about
sort of in some way, in a lot of ways,
like how important the role the facilitator is. This is
a role you need to rotate because that is a role.
It's like those are skills that everyone needs. Like if
everyone knows, did you just do the hand I did?
Speaker 1 (21:36):
I did? I don't know whether people still do it
metal hands versus twinkle fingers.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
Sorry, okay, this is completely Unfortunately podcasting is an audio medium,
So all of you just missed me losing my mind
because Margaret, Margaret did one of my hand signs for agreements.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
I was like, shit, God, damn it. Okay, we're talking
about meetings that just came naturally.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Well, well, we'll get the hand signed, but like you know,
you actually do you all of these things should be
road hitting and you should be teaching everyone to be
able to do all of the facilitation roles because a okay,
there's there's lots of reasons for this, right one. Facilitation
in particular can be kind of dangerous because there's a
real risk of someone who is facilitating deciding that they
(22:21):
are the leader and they're going to steer how everything
goes and they're going to make their decisions. And by
rotating that around, it becomes a lot easier to not
have that happen. And also, doing a role makes you
a more active participant in the meeting. A lot of
times it depends on the role obviously, but like it's
a way to get people to keep everyone.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
Engaged in a thing. That's a good point. Thank you. This.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
I stole this from my friend who is going to
remain nameless. But if you're out there, I love you.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Your friend's name is nameless, I understand. Yeah, friends saying
this the nameless child to somewhere there's someone whose name
is the whole last kid and anyway whatever, anyway, okay, okay, yeah,
But the other thing about it, right is the more
everyone knows about these skills, the more effective of a participants,
and the more effective you can be making decisions in
(23:08):
the meeting.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
Like that, the more everyone understands how the process works
and knows how to do it and knows how to
because like being in a meeting and being in community
with other people and making decisions together is a skill,
and we don't have it. There's this great David Graeber,
the anthroologist, David Graeber, who actually spent a lot of
time like writing about these meetings in a way that
doesn't usually happen.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
As like as as an anthropologist.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
Yeah, yeah, as an anthropologist, right, because he was both
both an activist and an anthropologist. And he has this
great line where he says Americans are great at communism
and terrible at topocracy, which is that they're really really
good at like doing things each according to their need
and from each according through ability. Like if you try
to organize a barbecue, everyone can do the things through
the barbecue, but no one knows how to make decisions together,
(23:51):
because that's a skill. And the more you're rotating through
all the roles and the more you understand how everything works,
the more you understand, you know, how to do the
facilitation stuff of like getting everyone to figure out what
the thing that they want is and how to express
that and how to like how to work together. The
more you understand that as like a person who's not facilitating,
(24:11):
the more you can understand like how to actually do democracy.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Yeah, and it rules. And it's also the fact that like,
if you are indispensable to your group, you've actually failed
your group. Yeah, especially when you're talking about stuff like activism,
that has a certain risk. If you are the only
medic in your affinity group, that is a problem because
if you get arrested, now there's no medic. If you're
the only facilitator who is a very skilled facilitator, what
(24:37):
happens when you're sick or in jail and you all
have a very intense meeting that you have to do,
and you need a skilled facilitator. Not that everyone needs
to be equal in all skills within in a given group,
but you need to learn to If you are very
good at something, your job is to make someone else
very good at it too.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
That's the thing both for meetings on the way it
was explained, same me, and this is a more kind
of I don't know what term be't used for, but
it was taught to me as your job is to
organize yourself.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Out of a job. Yeah, totally, okay, So.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
We're going to move on to the second roll, which
is the stack taker. So okay, the stack. This when
I first started talking about this is as a social technology,
the thing I specifically meant was the stack, and then
eventually I was like, no, it's actually the whole process is.
But the stack very very simple invention, but if you
don't have it, it's a disaster. The stack, as we
(25:32):
said before, is just literally a list of names of
who's going to talk in what order. Someone raises their hand,
they could add to the stack.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
That is very simple. It is also absolutely crucial to
making sure a meeting runs at all. Most groups tend
to use some variation of what's called a progressive stack,
where you know, this is part of we were talking
about earlier, like step forward and step back, But when
you're compiling a stack, you want to have the people
who speak less in front m M. And this works
(26:01):
sort of in two ways, right. One is it's okay,
so if there's someone who's not like a cis white dude,
and who is trying to say something, you probably want
them to say something because they are less likely to
be the one who says something. Yeah, just because of
the way that sort of whiteness is structure, because of
the way that like masculinity structure, because of the way
that these things work. So you want to give opportunities
(26:22):
to speak to people who like don't usually get heard.
And then also if someone just like hasn't been talking
in a meeting and they want to say something, and
that's also a part of the sort of facilitation. And
sometimes I know this is the thing that like a
role that I've seen passed out between a bunch of
different roles, and I guess everyone kind of has a
responsibility to do this. But if there's someone in a
(26:44):
meeting who has not been saying anything, it's generally a
good idea to be like, hey, are you okay? And
also like more important lead to some extent than there
are you okay? Of like what do you think about this?
Speaker 1 (26:56):
Yeah, although I do think that there's a little bit
of a like some people don't want to specifically be
called on in that way, and so that's kind of
a like learning to read the room skill definitely about
when you want to encourage people to step up versus
other people are like, no, I don't have anything particular
to say, and I don't want to get, you know,
singled out. I think that in smaller meetings sometimes the
facilitator can keep stack. Larger meetings, that's a terrible plan. Yeah,
(27:19):
it's large meetings. You need to you can't. Yeah, I've
been put to be during it. Yeah, because you need
someone keeping track of who's raising their hands when and
things like that. Sometimes you're actually even writing the stack
on a whiteboard so people can see yeah, yeah, you
look a piece of paper. Yeah. I have been in
meetings that sort of self facilitate fairly effectively in smaller groups,
where a thing that people can do is if they
(27:40):
have a thing they want to say, they hold up
one finger and they keep that finger up, and if
someone else is something that they want to say, they
put up two fingers, and then if someone else is
something they want to say, they put up three fingers.
And so you can have this method by which people
track their own stack. But this is a small group thing.
This is not a and this is a people who
know each other and know how to do the balancing
(28:02):
that we're talking about about making sure everyone gets heard.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Yeah, And I think part of this also it's important
to remember, is like this is like one oh one.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Oh yeah, sorry, as an advanced scale.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
Kind of And I'm introducing some things that are probably
more advanced than one on one, like like like they like, okay,
figuring out why someone is uncomfortable talking on a like
this person wants to talk, doesn't feel comfortable to and
if you ask them, they will say something. And this
person doesn't feel comfortable talking because they don't want to talk.
That's kind of a more advanced thing. Fair enough, I
guess we should talk about hand gestures here, which is
that okay, over the course of these beings one of
(28:33):
over the course of like movements, one of the things
that is built up is hand gestures because they can
be a very effective way of, you know, someone expressing
something without having to talk over someone else. This is
I don't know, this is the one on one. I'm
not going to teach hand gestures because everyone has different ones,
and there are some that are pretty universal. But like
(28:57):
the number of different gestures I've seen for like direct
response mm hmm and ship like it's the thing that
like like hand gestures can work and can be really
fish Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
See you're doing one of the head you're doing one
of the.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Make a triangle your hands. Fuck, I forgot about point
a process. Oh no, well so there's all of this
very very complicated stuff. It's not that complicated, but like,
like point up process sucks like that, she's actually complicated.
I'm actually derailing again. I'm so sorry. This is an example.
If there was a facilitator in this call, they would
be making me shut up. That's what's happening. Yeah, no,
but but but this is actually like this this this
(29:31):
is this is the one time I've ever wished there
was like videos you could see the hand gestures because
like the thing about this, right is once you are
good at meetings, and like if you have people who
do this and you talk about what the hand gesters
are beforehand, that's also important. You can't even if if
you're very good at meetings and you're still listening to
this episode for some reason.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
I mean, I don't know it.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
It's a good episode, but like, you can't assume that
everyone knows what your hand gestures are. Yeah, and sometimes
people have different hand gestures for different things. Sometimes you
have contextual hand gestures for like like there are like okay,
like you're if you are trying to meet in the dark. Yeah,
your your hand gestures don't work, right. This is also
stolen from another friend, right, Like sometimes you need to
(30:11):
use snaps for that because so that you can hear, right.
Like what all of this is to say that, like
the stuff with hand gestures, it can make your meetings
a lot more effective. This is the thing you can
do if everyone in the group understands how they work.
I'm not going to be like teaching you sets of
hand gestures here because I can't guarantee that any gesture
I teach you will be the one that people use.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
Can I can? I though, like speed run the concepts
of some of them, because I think they are useful
to understand. Yeah. Yeah, because it's hard to imagine when
you imagine meetings. I think about this a lots. I
write meetings into fiction, which is a very hard thing
to do and make them entertaining because they're also hard
to be entertained and by when you're in them, unless
they're contentious. But there are certain things that you learn
derail meetings. And there are ways in which by using
(30:54):
hand gestures you can avoid having more people speak. And
the single most important and common one is a way
of saying I agree, and so that way people when
they really want to say something but they're not on
stack and they get really frustrated, they can do that
hand gesture, which you know is very easy to make
fun of. You know, when I was coming up, it
(31:14):
was twinkle fingers, where you waggle your fingers, and then
we were like punk, so we did metal fingers instead,
which was literally the same thing but reverse. It's kind
of like the look that you do when you like,
really like music, and it's actually sort of like mimicking
playing a guitar. And so that's a very important concept.
And sometimes people use snaps, although sometimes people prefer non
audio and other people prefer audio.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
Yeah, yeah, and and and so's that's likely and that's
that's posture.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
While I was talking about like.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Like that's that's dependent on who's in the room and
what the room is, and.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Like, but I think that a I agree without needing
to say anything is essential. Yeah, Yeah, that's a good one.
Other ones to just know of is that there are
things like people will say like, please move this along.
It's a way of saying, hey, facilitator, please shut this
person up usually or can we talk about something else.
There's ones that are direct response, which is saying I
(32:05):
would like to jump stack because this person has just
insulted the honor of my family or whatever, and it's
up to the facilitator to decide whether to do these.
Another one is point of process, which is saying like, hey,
I actually don't want to talk about the thing we're
talking about. I want to talk about how the meeting
is going. Meetings get real meta and it's real frustrating anyway,
So it's worth knowing that this is part of the technology.
(32:28):
It seems cringey from the outside, but like are other options.
I mean, there are other technologies about decision making that
people have developed, but like actually living democratic lives in
which we all have a say in our decisions sometimes
means that we go to meetings and we can actually
kind of learn to I'm talking shit on meetings, but
that's Meetings are also a ways to get to know
(32:50):
your friends and express yourself and get things done.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
Yeah, you know, as much I've been talking about being boring,
like I've had things that were technically organizing meetings that
were like some of the most transformational experiences in my
life totally because me and a bunch of people who
you know, a bunch of people are really close to me,
like came together and we figured out how to do something,
and there is a beauty there that is and this
(33:13):
is personal to why it's hard to talk about these things,
right because like the technical process of it, like the
technical description of what we're saying, is at the same
time being used to do something that can only be
described instead of poetic terms. Yeah, Like, the the actual
experience of like you and a bunch of other people
coming together to do something and figure out how to
(33:35):
do it and fucking doing it is it is a
transcendent act of creation.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
And these are like you know, yeah, like it doesn't
like the fucking hammers and shovels and like fucking slide
rules that you use to construct something don't look very
pretty and then at the end of it, you've built
something together and it's beautiful.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Yeah. No, it's it's the other side of the coin
of the first time you watch the police run away
from you. Yeah, it is a way of coming together
with other people to accomplish something and make something powerful
is meetings. And it is also it's interesting because we
talk about how men will often take up too much
space in meetings. This is not a universal thing anytime
we say this kind of thing, but it is actually
(34:17):
often feminized labor because it's this invisibilized labor that happens
behind the scenes that is not as sexy, right and
is about just actually hearing people out. It is like
conflict resolution speed run. Anyway, I accidentally went off on
the meta of meetings also.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
But no, it's good. Well, and I think there's an
important thing here too, because like we're talking about the
politics of like meetings themselves, right of like the you know,
the actual political angle of what it means to have
a democracy where what democracy means you make decisions together. Yeah,
and this is something There's also a very important actual
(34:55):
procedural meeting note here, which is that one of the
things you will learn over the course of doing meeting
is that a lot of times people wage battles over
the content of political ideology in the form of fighting
over how a meeting works. Yeah, totally, And you can
see this everywhere from like your fucking local organizing meeting
and people yelling about who's on stack or whatever all
(35:17):
the way up to like, you know, when like when
like the Democrats are saying that, like like in Congress
that like the parliament the budget parliamentarian won't let them
like raise the minimum wage.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
That's what they're doing.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
They're using an argument over procedure to like disguise the
fact that what they're really arguing about is like it
is an actual political argument. Yeah, but this is also
a thing where like the way you structure a meeting
is political. It doesn't seem like it, right, But you
can have a meeting where, you know, it's like the
fucking plenipotentiary meeting of like the Executive Committee of I
(35:52):
don't know, the People's Congress, the Chinese Companies Party or whatever.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
Those are not the right words. I'm on five hours
of sleep.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
But you can have a meeting where it's like, yeah,
the way the meeting works is one guy stands out
there and he gives a speech and he tells everyone
what to say, and then everyone votes yes. Yeah, that's
the way you can do a meeting, right, And that's political,
and it fucking sucks, and We're trying to teach you
how to do a meeting where you know, we do democracy,
where everyone comes together and we like do a thing. Yeah,
and we will get to more roles next week. This
(36:19):
was originally planned to be one episode. It is not
one episode. It is now two episodes. But the upside
is that we solved a bunch of the fundamental logistical
problems about how to build a free society. So stay
tuned for that, stay tuned for more roles you want
in your meetings. And yeah, it's been It can happen here,
and thank you Mark for coming on the show.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can now find sources for It Could Happen here
listed directly, an episode descripts.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
Thanks for listening,
It Could Happen Here News
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James Stout
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Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
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Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.