Great Meeting Hack to Deal with Interrupting White Guys

[jesse_the_k]

I read the Democratic Socialists of America’s Northern Virginia branch’s meeting guidelines¹, thanks to a Metafilter discussion².

One thing I know is I'm good at running meetings. I’ve herded cats in many contexts, from true consensus to Roberts’ Rules. This brilliant idea stood out from dsa_nova’s suggestions:

Men talking over women is definitely not the way socialist feminism works. To counter ingrained patriarchal behavior, whenever a white male comrade interrupts a person of color or a white woman, everyone should raise their fist.

The goal is surrounding the interrupter by raised fists–not as a precursor to violence, but as a sign of solidarity.

What do you think? Would this be effective? Do you think it would backfire by enraging the white men so notified?

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1. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1V2-YNCRW-Ya2tFzapwLMPMbqWAJZNw4qE40cIWqZti8/edit# ↩︎
2. https://www.metafilter.com/175173/The-socialists-are-coming-The-socialists-are-coming ↩︎

Comments

[satsuma]

I think it'd only work if you've got a group of men who are trying to be better but haven't quite gotten the right habits ingrained yet, so it depends on the group you're implementing it for. It's a very nice mental image though

If you've got any tips on the herding of cats, I'm currently trying to get a group off the ground (meeting structure is apparently Swedish, I didn't pick it, but it's similar to Robert's Rules) & would appreciate any tips you had on the subject :)

It's not easy!

[jesse_the_k]

These suggestions are most relevant to community activities where participants are working towards a common goal.

1. Every agenda item is accompanied with a time limit--and keep to those limits. "We have ten minutes left on this topic and I need a proposal now or we're bumping it to the next meeting."

2. Limit comments to an arbitrary time length (3 minutes is good).

3. Encourage unique comments. "Does anyone have something different to add?" (and when someone begins repeating: "This sounds like Lucy's point. What's different?") People who contribute to the discussion are more highly invested in the outcome.

4. Enlist a co-chair. One of you focuses on the discussion; the other tracks the speaking order, watches the time, and assesses the emotional/body language of participants. Meetings often happen on two parallel tracks: what's explicitly said and what's communicated non-verbally.

Re: It's not easy!

[satsuma]

These are really useful, thanks! We’ve actually already implemented the fourth one, though we arbitrarily named the second position moderator.

Our main problem currently, besides the usual growing pains of a new organization is that a lot of our members come from a tech background (our stated goals are tech oriented, if we ever get to the point of implementing them) and are mostly uninterested in contributing anything besides tech skills, but also don’t want to just hand running the organization over to the non techies, so they complain if we try to say, create a committee to write the bylaws, but also when we didn’t have one, put no work into writing the bylaws (I’m hoping I can resolve this stuff privately with the main instigators and after that it’ll drop off because if not my patience is going to quickly wear thin)

Re: It's not easy!

[jesse_the_k]

Dealing with folks who want input but don't want to do the work is massively frustrating. Instead of soliciting subcommittee members to create bylaws, I think it's easier for one person to borrow an open-source structure, modify as needed, and then propose that. In general, it's easier to react to a proposal than create one from scratch.

I bet the currently-reluctant techies will be delighted by a coherent plan that's been tested in similar projects. Make sure they have the opportunity to modify as needed before adoption.

[luzula]

So are you using Swedish meeting structure without being in Sweden? Is it because it's an international group but the founders are Swedish or something? I am Swedish and use our meeting structure a lot, so I'm just curious about why. : )

Also, if you've never used this meeting structure before, I'd be interested in how you think it works and if there's anything about it that strikes you as odd.

[satsuma]

International group yeah, the person who initially set it up and picked the meeting structure was Swedish but they quit about a week after the first meeting (burnout) so we’re uh, flying by the seat of our pants mostly

Right now we don’t have an experienced chair, so it’s hard to properly evaluate the format, but I think the structures bones are solid, if that makes sense?

[luzula]

Well, if the original person who proposed that meeting format has absconded, then I don't think you have to keep it if you don't want to. I mean, you don't even seem to have bylaws yet, so there's a lot up in the air.

[jadelennox]

Meh. I'd much rather go with either a speaking stick or some other enforcement of no interruptions at all. This would rapidly drive me around the bend, even if I were the one being defended. It seems stressful.

[jesse_the_k]

Good point.

Speaking sticks are my favorite! Do you have a similar tool that works for non-F2F meetings? (partial or total phone meetings, chat, &c).

[jadelennox]

In w3c meetings, we have the meetings by voice but there is backchannel in IRC. there is a little bot in the chat rooms (called zakim) and people who want to speak add themselves to the speaking queue (by typing q+). The moderator can keep track of the people who are in the queue and acknowledge them, and that’s who gets to speak next. Some people can’t be in the chat room (because of conflicts between voice call and their AT, or because they are away from a computer), and it’s considered absolutely fine for those people to break in during an appropriate pause and say “could somebody in the chat room add me to the queue“?

Of course it doesn’t prevent interrupting or bullying, But if there is a good moderator it makes it much easier for them to control the situation.

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks for these details -- I will be deploying them soon.

[magnetic_pole]

I'm with satsuma--I suspect you'd need a group of men committed to doing better but not quite there yet, and a setting in which everyone recognized that this kind of thing had happened before.

Great to read your rules! M.

[jesse_the_k]

Yeah, based on the responses here, I withdraw my enthusiasm.

What appealed to me in theory was spreading the responsibility/awareness around to all in attendance.

[magnetic_pole]

I can see the appeal! I probably have a different perspective, since as a teacher I have to coax my students to talk, where in organizational meetings, all the adults in attendance often have an opinion to share. Give a certain level of trust and goodwill, it seems like a good idea. All to often meetings will go by when we focus too much on the explicit content of the meeting without acknowledging the power dynamics or conventions at play. M.

[luzula]

Hmmmmm. I think I would prefer to have the meeting chair head off interruptions ("Keep to the speaking order and let them finish."), and then at the end, have someone who kept track say something about the statistics of people interrupting, if there was a clear pattern.

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks for this viewpoint, I think my enthusiasm is rapidly fizzling.

Best yet to have the four-roles structure brainwane pointed to at the ADA initiative.

[worlds_of_smoke]

IDK. I'm not too fond of this idea, to be honest. It's a moderator's job to keep the discussion on track. Plus, honestly, if I were male, this would make me much less likely to speak up at all because it would trigger my social phobia and humiliate me. My social phobia would be telling me "The whole room hates you and you just can't figure this out" and shit like that.

I mean, yeah. White men interrupting is a problem, but I'd rather not risk alienating the men who have social phobia.

[jesse_the_k]

Excellent point!

I was excited because it was offloading some work from the moderator to everyone, but the last thing I want to do is reduce accessibility in any meeting.

it depends! and, moderation, facilitation, gatekeeping

[brainwane]

I feel like it depends on how long the meetings are, how many people are in them, how well they know each other, whether they can all see each other easily, and how frequently the meeting participant base changes and includes new people who have to be taught the new rule. I have a vaguer feeling that it would also depend on how much the meeting is about discovery and how much it's about making specific decisions, but I can't articulate why.

One way to address a similar issue is to have a gatekeeper whose role is separate from that of the facilitator (see these four roles for unconference sessions).

Re: it depends! and, moderation, facilitation, gatekeeping

[jesse_the_k]

The four roles proposal is awesome, thank you for the reference.

[adrian_turtle]

The goal is surrounding the interrupter by raised fists-not as a precursor to violence, but as a sign of solidarity.

I'm not a white man, so my perspective may be different. But a sea of raised fists LOOKS like a precursor to violence. I thought that was part of the point. It's not always clear how immediate the violence will be. It's not always clear where it will be aimed. (Somebody in the crowd is talking about how awful ICE is, and lots of people raise their fists...that's probably a general desire to stand behind the speaker and fight ICE, even if nobody quite knows how and ICE is not in the room.) But I don't think a crowd of raised fists is a good substitute for skilled moderation.

[jesse_the_k]

Great point! Thanks.