Scaling Conversations. Dave MacLeod
few years after Lee and I met with Jim and saw the beta software, we passed over a million people exchanging thoughts on our newly named platform: ThoughtExchange. We provided a platform for hundreds and even thousands to come together and share their voice to tackle all kinds of problems. I worked with a superintendent in a school district with 30,000 students. While hosting an online conversation on our platform the district officials had surfaced concerns and priorities from nearly 5,000 people. But in one school, in an extremely economically challenged neighborhood in the district, they only heard from about 30 parents. That particular school had hundreds of students, and therefore hundreds of parents. So, maybe 10% of people joined the conversation making decisions about their kids. Not so great, you might think. But here's the thing. I asked the superintendent: How many people from that school historically show up at town hall meetings or parent events? The answer: Between zero and four. But usually, unfortunately, zero. The school tries their best, but no one comes. So, a group of 30 people sharing their ideas sounds pretty good. Those same 30 people, gathered in a virtual room, would be quite a force for change if you could access all of their diverse and independent thoughts: With that amount of support, you have the ability to incrementally improve. At zero you don't. Even with the best facilitator on the planet.
The reason I devoted the last decade of my professional, and much of my personal, life to this software company, and eventually became the CEO, was not because of a newfound passion for software and solving technical problems. Luckily, we have other people in the company who have that. My passion has always been for facilitating ways to draw forth the voices of as many people as possible and to leverage that potential. And the internet is the way to do that. It's more inclusive, more equitable…and safer than any face‐to‐face meeting.
With our new digital working environments—rapidly transformed during the early days of the COVID‐19 pandemic—every organization now has a unique opportunity to leverage the benefit of internet communication to scale conversations. It was a huge change for me, going from a face‐to‐face facilitator, an experiential mountain guide, a workshop creator, into an enabler of internet communication. I missed, and to some degree still miss, the energy of the room and the personalities of the people who would show up, however privileged and homogenous. But to deliver on the mission of bringing many voices to decisions there is only one choice that scales. The internet.
After the murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, Minnesota, people around the world protested to elevate the need to overcome the issues of systemic racism, police violence against Black people, and ultimately to ensure Black Lives Matter. Understanding their responsibility to be an ally and to participate in the dialogue, leaders from across many sectors held special events and scaled conversations on the ThoughtExchange platform. They asked questions such as: What can we do to improve our ability to be an anti‐racist organization and to ensure Black Lives Matter? How can we better support our Black team members? What can our organization do to overcome systemic racism and discrimination? What is on our hearts and minds as we work together to ensure Black Lives Matter? Thousands and thousands of people shared thoughts and considered the thinking of one another as their organizations promised action and deepened their commitment to overcoming racism against Black and BIPOC people. One CEO described the impact of learning from his Black employees as the most effective day of learning so far in his lifetime.
As the CEO of a company that helped these leaders scale conversations with this gravity, I didn't (and still don't) feel satisfied with these achievements: I feel an increased sense of urgency. Hundreds of thousands of people participated in scaled conversations about the health and safety of students, teachers and staff in the pandemic, but millions of other parents did not. Hundreds of leaders scaled conversations to accelerate efforts to overcome racism, and yet hundreds of thousands of leaders did not. Anti‐racism, global pandemics, climate action, LGBTQ rights, gun violence, remote worker mental health…. All of these are issues that require people to join the conversation. Now. It's not a matter of if they join the conversation, it's a matter of how.
More than the narrow goal of growing ThoughtExchange, with this book my hope is to do my part in moving forward a body of work that inspires more research, development, and deployment of conversation technologies to bring people together to solve the most pressing issues in our organizations and on our planet, before we become so divided we blow ourselves up or become so selfish we wreck the planet. With all due respect to those who are working to ensure we can leave the planet and inhabit airless, oceanless worlds…my thinking is we should prioritize efforts down here on this world. It seems worth saving.
The same mechanism that helps revenue leaders increase sales helps public leaders save lives. It's about scaling conversations.
PART I WHAT'S IN A CONVERSATION?
Before I dive into how to effectively leverage our collective conversation strengths and overcome challenges to scale conversations to include hundreds and thousands of people, I'll first explore the components that are required to make a simple conversation successful with a small group—believe it or not, it can be summed up by one thing: Margaritas. After that I will cover the value of scaling that ability. Then, before discussing how to scale a conversation up I will address the attempts leaders make to include voices now and explain why they are typically unsuccessful. This is done through the lens of what people require to successfully converse.
CHAPTER 1 What's a Conversation?
MARGARITA THOUGHTS
A waiter asks a group what they'd all like to drink. First person answers: A beer. Next person: Sure, me too: a beer. Next few people follow suit and order a few more beers. One person orders a glass of wine.
Then, the final person says to the waiter: “A friend of mine said you make one of the best margaritas in town…and since it's the first hot day of summer, I'll take one of those.”
Everyone else at the table considers this critical new information.
Then the first person says: “If it's not too much trouble, I'd like to change my order. I'd also like one of those famed margaritas.”
Second person: “Me too.”
Third: “Yep, me too, and unless I'm mistaken, make it a pitcher so we can just do a round of margaritas?”
The wine‐ordering person is the only holdout. “I'll stick with my wine,” they say.
This type of interaction is at the core of human communication. We share ideas, listen to one another, change our minds at the drop of a hat, and ultimately forget which idea belonged to who in the first place.
“I'm glad I thought to order margaritas!”
“That wasn't your idea, that was mine…”
“Was it?”
In any conversation with fewer than 10 people, this is, in a word, natural. Small meetings create dialogue and interesting solutions surface. A single idea can become the most important idea in a heartbeat. During small focus groups, or in small chats online, discussions take place and people change their views, combine thoughts, explore where there is consensus, and where there isn't. No problem.
But as soon as that group gets larger than 10 what happens? The most frequent thoughts are mistaken as the most important ones. In the margarita example, the waiter would never be able to discover the “margarita” thought with a large group of tens or hundreds, even if they used the highest standard of survey or polling technology. Every survey output, word cloud generator, person paid to codify feedback, and advanced natural language processing algorithm that clusters similar thoughts would do the same thing: Inaccurately emphasize that BEER! and words similar to beer are by far the best and most loved simply because that term was most frequently shared as a “first‐thought‐best‐thought.” When, of course, given the chance to participate in a conversation and consider the thinking of other people, no one in the group above even ordered a beer.
The