The takeaway: don’t spend hours designing seating plans, give people instructions and trust them to figure it out. (For workshops. For weddings and other social things, I dunno.)
For a recent strategic workshop I spent too many hours curating groups of participants with the following data:
- I had about half the participants who responded yes, and the other half were maybes or no response, who might or might not turn up on the day.
- I had a mix of local authority, health, and a catch-all “everything else” of other sectors (about a third of each, skewing a bit more towards health numbers).
- I had participants from across the 6 counties in North Wales, but only partial information provided about their counties, so quite a lot of guesswork remained.
I made even groups of: confirmed attendees, potential attendees, sector representation, and geographical area (to the best of my ability based on the available information).
I made sure that I could cluster groups 1+2, 3+4, 5+6 and 7+8 if none of the unconfirmed participants turned up, and the supergroups would have the right number of people for a productive conversation, and the mix of sectors and (possibly) region.
I also made sure all the Sarahs didn’t end up in the same group OR supergroup.
I wrote out a colour-coded chart that included symbols for the speakers and the core team, and directed people where to sit when they arrived. We did have to cluster into the supergroups.
Somehow I still ended up with a table of pretty much 100% Conwy people.
But cross-sector, so that was something.
Next time I think I’ll let people choose where they sit. 😀
One more thought: Because of the audience we thought they wouldn’t know who else was in the room enough to do their own sorting – but it’s Wales, everyone knows everyone, they totally would have. And even if they didn’t, I could have build it in as a first icebreaker task!
Photo by Ceba Solutions on Unsplash