Let's flip the conference panel discussion

"The Craft Scotland Conference 2014" (CC BY 2.0) by Craft Scotland

Virtually every conference has a panel discussion where a number of decision makers and experts discuss the main themes of the conference. It is a good opportunity to hear these experts state their positions and hopefully engage in a lively and stimulating debate. However although there is interaction on stage the audience is seldom involved apart from a handful of questions from those who dare to speak up. We get to hear their ideas and arguments but how can they get to hear the audience's perspectives? There is an enormous amount of experience and expertise in the room that the panel members would learn a lot from hearing. Politicians and policy makers need to learn more about practical grassroots experience and thereby gain deeper insights into the issues they need to address. To do this, I think we need to flip the panel discussion.

One way could be for the panel to announce a few key questions (one at a time) and ask the audience to work in small groups and write answers on a collaborative document. After a few minutes everyone in the hall has hopefully contributed to the discussion and then the panel could comment on the answers. Then repeat the procedure as necessary. A lot of the session would be fairly silent as the participants write and confer but the activity level will be much higher than in a normal panel discussion. Another idea that would work in a smaller conference where there are quite a few decision makers, is to divide the participants into groups, send them to smaller group rooms and assign a small number of decision makers to each group. The experts' role would be to simply ask questions, let the group discuss and take notes of the answers. The experts would therefore focus on listening. At the end the panel could comment on what they had heard from the discussions.

By using methods like this we can harvest ideas from all participants and give extremely useful input to the invited experts that they would never get from a traditional set-up. The conference could therefore become a greater learning experience, even for the invited guest speakers.