By Bill Lennertz, AIA

Last week I conducted an in-house training with Dan Burden, a seasoned charrette veteran with the consulting firm Glatting Jackson. Dan proposed what was to me a radical idea: let the people facilitate themselves. Dan regularly runs small table exercises at public meetings like the ones described in previous NCI newsletters. NCI has always promoted the use of consultant (or, on occasion, trained volunteer) table facilitators, or design leaders. Dan reports that sometimes people are best left alone and that when you direct the exercises from the front of the room and let people facilitate themselves at tables there is better participation and less conflict. The idea is that without the facilitator as a potential target for complaints, people are quicker to get down to the tasks at hand. They may also be more likely to draw. 

Each method clearly has its trade-offs. NCI values the role of the design leader/facilitator as a way to educate people, and most importantly, as a means for charrette consultants to develop relationships with community members. The design leader/facilitator is most valuable during vision exercises where design is more prominent. Perhaps the best use of the self-facilitation method is for existing conditions mapping or values exercises.Self-facilitation during table exercises may also be most applicable for highly volatile political environments. In all cases, it is important to balance participation at each table by asking people to sit with people who they don’t know or by randomly assigning seating as people enter the room.