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How NOT to Hold a Public Meeting

Beatrice Briggs

A few years ago, during a visit to Brazil, I accompanied a friend to a community meeting in the town hall. The announced purpose was to set up committees to work on implementing, at the local level, a comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations System, governments, and major groups in every area in which human activity impacts on the environment.

The mayor and his wife were present, plus assorted members of his administration, representatives of some environmental NGOs and several executives from a local bank that was co-sponsoring the meeting.

It was a textbook example of how NOT to hold a public meeting.

Among the errors:

• Room set up that inhibited face-to-face communication among the participants. The auditorium was filled with more than twice as many chairs as people, arranged in straight rows, facing the presidium.
• Air conditioning set on "high" – freezing!
• The only “agenda” was written on a scrap of paper, kept in the pocket of one of the bank representatives.

What was missing:

• Name tags and introductions.
• Refreshments, other than water.
• Breaks.
• Timekeeping. A keynote speaker (a university professor), scheduled to "contextualize" the discussion for 30 minutes, spoke for over an hour. Only in the last ten minutes did she say anything even remotely related to the topic.
• Process ground rules.
• Impartial facilitation (see below).

Finally, after over two hours of mind-numbing boredom in a freezing room, the discussion began about how to set up the working committees for the action plan – and all hell broke loose. Some of the citizens wanted a greater voice. The mayor wanted one person in charge. The keynote speaker accused the bankers of having a commercial interest. Two of the bankers were trying to facilitate, but after they were attacked they began participating in the discussion. The mayor and the professor interrupted whenever they felt like it. At least half of those present people never said a word to the whole group, but engaged in much animated, noisy side discussion. A flip chart was standing in the corner of the room, but no one used it to capture the ideas that were flying around. Finally, in the midst of much yelling, a date was set for a future meeting and one of the banker-facilitators shouted "Adjourned!" – and that was that.

Afterwards, I encountered the bankers outside the hall. They asked me if meetings were the same in Mexico. One of them laughed and wrote the whole mess off as being "our Latin blood." I politely commented that I thought the root of the problem was lack of effective facilitation, not some genetic condition. The thought that public meetings like this happen every day, all over the world, fills me with despair – and renewed commitment to improving our “meeting culture.”

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