It Could Happen Here - How to Organize a Meeting (And Stay Sane), Pt. 1

Episode Date: June 30, 2025

Mia talks with Margaret Killjoy about how to actually run a meeting and the role of proper meetings as the tools that build a democratic society. https://libcom.org/article/how-hold-good-meeting-rustys-rules-order Help Primrose & Kim: gofund.me/dda02cc7See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Causo Media. Welcome to It Could Happen, Chira Podcast that is, in many cases, about organizing. I am your host, Mia Wong, and with me is one of the most experienced organizers I know, Margaret Killjoy. Oh no, uh, hi. I'm a little out of practice, but I have done it a lot. You know, Margaret says this and also has been doing shit for like one bazillion years. And this is, and I will say this, the sign of you that you are running into a good organizer

is when you talk to them about their organizing and they immediately start downplaying it. That's when you know that you have encountered a good organizer. If they start immediately going, I'm the best fucking organizer in the world, run like hell. This is an asshole who sucks. If you're someone who's like, ah, I did this a million years ago, I'm not good at it, but I didn't know I had a good matter, blah, blah, blah. Very good organizer. Thank you. Yeah. I remember once I went to a thing, wait, that was put on and there was this, they were kind of turfy people who were coming through and we didn't totally know that right away. And their pitch about why they were such a good experienced organizers is one of them

was like, and this person has been organizing for more than three years. And it was just like, okay, every person you are giving this talk to has done this for at least three times as long as that Like and don't get me wrong if you're listening and you've been organizing for three years you've learned a lot I'm not trying to tell you that you're a bad organizer You might be a better organizer and someone's been doing it longer, but don't use that as your selling point anyway. That's very funny Yeah, so okay this episode. We are asking you a very, very important question. Okay, you want to change something about the world.

I don't know what that thing is that is up for you to determine. The question that you need to be asking is, are you organizing because you want to feel cool or are you organizing because you want whatever you're doing to fucking work? And if you want your organizing to work, literally no matter what it is, you actually need to listen to this episode and you need to have some rudimentary knowledge of the thing We're about to talk about because if you do not your organizing will fail If you cannot do this the thing we're going to talk about in this episode if you cannot do this Everything else, you know all of your experience all of your knowledge all of your passion all of it is fucking useless because the actual work of organizing

is incredibly unglamorous. It is unsexy. A lot of it is very time consuming. A lot of it is not cool. It is you sitting there and talking to a bunch of people. And if you want your movement to succeed, you have to be able to do this kind of like groundwork, the statistical work, because if you don't, it won't work. So what we are going to teach you the very, very, very,

very basics of in this episode is a social technology that has been developed over the course of literal centuries of movements, right? This is something that has been passed down and refined like through generations and generations of organizers. I mean, I could do a genealogy of this. A lot of the modern stuff sort of came through the Quakers,

moved through the civil rights movements, moved through the anti-war movements, moved through in Vietnam, moved through a whole bunch of other movements. To be passed down to you today, this is a complicated social technology. It does not sound complicated. If you do not know how to do this, it is impossible to try to replicate on the fly. And that is we are going to explain to you the very basics of how to run a meeting. Yeah, I really like this way of phrasing it that it's a technology, like it's a way of applying ideas to get something to happen. Even if a lot of it is instinctive, there is an art to it. But like, yeah, no, there's stuff you can like learn and apply.

And it's, technology is a good way of framing it. Yeah, and it's one of these things where, you know, you can kind of, if you don't know how to do this, and you have a group of people, you can kind of sort of maybe approximate something that is a little bit functional. And the moment it runs into a stress point it will collapse completely and this is a thing that like you know I I have talked to I have done a lot of these I have talked to a lot of people who've done this I have like I have been in rooms people knew how to run meetings I've been in rooms people didn't know how to run meetings I have

talked to a bunch of people who have been in rooms who don't know how to run meetings and like there are rooms of people with collectively hundreds of PhDs and because nobody in the room knew how to fucking run a meeting complete disaster. Their organizing didn't work Yeah, right You have to be able to do this and it doesn't really matter You know, we're not gonna get that much into like what mechanism are using to make decisions Because this is this is like even like a layer below that. And so this is not that you can use it, you know, regardless of whether you're doing consensus and like, you know, like, and I think that, like, if you're trying

to make a decision as a group, right, and you're trying to get everyone to want to do the thing and do it, I think that some version of consensus is a good idea. But this can be for a sort of just like, you know, like a majority of world democratic process, whatever process you are using to decide things, you need some kind of structure thing there. Otherwise, it's just not gonna function. Like none of it will. What's wild to me is that it's almost like

the important thing is that there is a structure. There's so many different structures you can use. Like when we come at this, I don't actually know, I'm the podcast idiot on this episode, me is gonna explain stuff to me. But like, there's a lot of different ways to do this. And the important way, the important thing is that you do one of them. Like there are ways that I think are better or worse, right?

But you do actually need to create a structure and move forward with that structure in order to get anything done, which is the whole secret of organizing. Like that is what organizing is, is you actually have to say, not only do I want something to get done, but I'm going to figure out the steps by which to get that done. And it also applies to meetings. Yeah. And like that kind of undergirding thing of figuring out how you're going to do it, right? Like that's the part of organizing that as you're saying, it's like nothing works without

it because it is like half of what organizing is and otherwise you're just saying things into the wind and Admittedly, my job is to say things into the wind So it hope you do it so like, you know, I have a little bit of respect for that But also you need to have some way of getting other people to do things Yeah, it's it's like a when you sit around with your friends and like oh someone should do this No one's actually named someone. Yeah.

You know, I mean, somewhere there was a non-binary person named someone, but. Shout outs to someone. If you're listening to someone, congratulations. You're a master level troll, but like my friend, don't ask her name was don't ask. It's great. Anyway, whatever. But, but someone needs to get something done. And if you leave a thing being like,

oh, someone should do this, you didn't organize. You have to say, this is what the following people are doing. Yep. Also shout out also to everyone who has been in meetings with me and are like, thanks, Mark. I'm insufferable in meetings. I try really hard. But anyway, whatever.

Oh, God. Okay. Okay. So this largely is going to be like how to run a meeting 101. We're going to start at like, 000, which is you need a place to meet. And that place to meet has to be accessible to everyone who's trying to go to the meeting. This is a thing that people screw up a lot. It is not that hard to find the place that accessible for everyone to go You can do this. There are lots of places you can have meetings depending on how sensitive the meeting is, you know How formal and formal it is?

I've done meetings and restaurants and meetings and bars with them in libraries people use churches sometimes like queer centers union halls Parks I want to shit talk bars really quickly. Yeah, I don't think bars is a great idea, but... I don't think it's accessible to people who are under 21, and I don't think it's accessible to people who have problems being around drinking. That said, they happen there, and I'm not trying to say you're bad for having had meetings there, but I just want to say that... Yeah, bars is one that people go to a lot,

and yeah, there's definitely issues with it. But I don't know, you can have them in people's houses. Yeah. Sometimes you can go into a mesa or whatever and you can go have a meeting there. You can get people to just go out somewhere and do it. I don't know. You are capable of thinking of lots of places where you could have meetings, but you actually do need to have a location.

And this is actually, again, I've talked about this before, but one of the organizing things that's actually really important is like knowing how to get a room for a meeting, or get a room for something to happen. You have to be able to do this. This is like zero zero, like, okay, you know, okay, so you've now achieved this, and congratulations, you clowns have now achieved a location.

I am going to stick a provisional thing in here, which is... This is jumping in the gun a little bit, but I need to put in here, do not use Robert's Rules of Order. One of the things you will be told, and if you have been in organizations before, a lot of them use a thing called Robert's Rules of Orders, which is this old, like, incredibly elaborate set of parliamentary procedures, do not use them. They suck. Um, and this, this gets into before we can even talk about what a meeting is, right? And how you do it.

You really, really do not want your meetings to get bogged down in everyone having to learn 1 million lines of parliamentary procedure. And this is a problem for any meeting technology that you use because they all do involve a little bit of technical stuff because you have to get people to be able to do things. Totally. But we think with Robert Fools of Order is that like, it's like hundreds of pages. Right.

And in those hundreds of pages are the recipe for one asshole to derail your entire meeting by doing a whole bunch of unhinged parliamentary shit. I have seen this happen, it sucks. This is something that you can technically do in any meeting structure, but the more opaque the rules of the meeting are, the easier this shit is to do,

and the harder it is to be like, please stop. Yeah, you have to have a certain amount of flexibility in the way that you do things because every system, it's the problem with law as a concept, right? Is every system can, you can find loopholes and anyone who's been in a lot of meetings has seen people learn how to abuse the process in order to get their position to win by making

everyone else too tired to continue or to use up all of the space in the room or you know whatever. But I think that yeah this idea that the rules that are used in your meeting I think that a very a good facilitator which is something that I tend to believe in for for meetings is capable of explaining the process in such a way that even when a lot of people come who are not familiar with the process, they will leave familiar with the process. Yeah, yeah. Like to that sort of end, if you need a like, okay, we need a written procedure thing, the thing I would recommend is called Rusty's Rules of Order, which is an unbelievably pared down version of Robert's Rules of Order that was like specifically developed to be used in like Union circles,

in activist circles, and it's like the total PDF of it is 25 pages. That makes it sound way longer than it actually is. Like several of those pages are like a glossary and like the cover, it's very easy to read, it's easy to understand. If you have to use a like, this is a formalized procedure, do Rusty's, don't do Robert's. This is just a, I need to do this before we say anything else because a bunch of people are going to push you to use this and it sucks.

So having gotten that out of the way, we can now get into, okay, things from meetings. I was supposed to make a joke about at the top of all this. I'm sorry, everyone. Everyone has been waiting for me to make this joke, I'm certain. But Mia, which one of us is going to keep stack during this meeting so that we know who can talk? The products and services who support this podcast are going to keep stack and we're going to go to the right the fuck now. Wow.

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We are back. And I really just want to say as timekeeper, I'm a little bit upset about how much time that those ads used during the meeting. And if we can... God damn it. Okay, we will explain what a stack is and what a timekeeper is in a second. However, comma. So things you need to do at the very start of a meeting.

You need to take like two minutes to do this. But you need to explain how the meeting fucking works. And you need to assign everyone roles. And you can't assume that everyone who is going to be in this meeting understands how the rules work. Like you cannot. And this is something I've run into is like you can't assume that everyone understands what your hand signals are. Or even just basic like everyone has been in a thing before and understands what a stack is. Right? You can't assume that everyone understands what your hand signals are, or even just basic like everyone has been in a thing before and understands what a stack is right. You can't assume that unless you know everyone in the room. And more than that, like unless you know everyone's level of experience in the room and you've been in meetings with them before, like you can't assume the level of knowledge that everyone has. And I have watched these processes not work because people just did that. And then a bunch of people in the room were like, what the fuck is going on? So you need to, at the start of the meeting, explain how the meeting is going to work.

Like at least a little bit doesn't have to be super formal. This can be like fucking two minutes of like, we're going to have a stack, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And for anyone just so you know what we're saying right now, we'll explain stack more. That is the order in which people talk. It is a way of like keeping track of the line of who's going to talk when. Yeah. I realizing this explanation is jumping around a little bit, but you need to make sure that everyone understands how the meeting is supposed to work.

And you know, usually that's really quick. Sometimes someone will just not know something and then, okay, you explain it to them and that's like fine and chill. And like, I don't know, I remember being a little tiny baby anarchist and like not knowing anything and going to my first meeting and like people were talking about restorative justice and I was like, hi, what's restorative justice? I'm like a little tiny child. I don't know anything.

And they explained it and it was like chill and good and you can just do this and it helps people feel included. And yeah, totally. Okay, so general meeting facilitation, things you need. You need one, an agenda. An agenda is what the fuck are you doing? And generally speaking, secondarily, you want to try to have time planned out because one of the failure modes of a meeting

is the meeting goes for fucking 30 hours and everyone's miserable. So you generally want to have an agenda that has what you're going to talk about and then kind of guidelines roughly for how long you think you're going to talk about and then kind of guidelines roughly for how long you think it'll take to talk about the thing. We'll get more into that in a second. Sometimes people create the agenda beforehand. Sometimes you start, you set the agenda at the beginning of the meeting, but like you do want an agenda so people know what you're doing.

And it should be somewhere that everyone can see a whiteboard or like, I guess in a Zoom meeting notes or a doc that everyone has open. Yeah, yeah. You want to make sure everyone has it. Okay. And this is the point where we need to talk about roles. So part of the technology for this, right, and the stack is a big piece of technology

to keep track of who's talking, but a big part of what the technology of this is, is a bunch of roles that you assign people. And that ideally everyone rotates through. So you learn how to do all of them. And so to prevent people from sort of concentrating power by like monopolizing one role. So the first role we need to talk about, and this is I don't know if the big one's the right one, but this is the one that I think people know kind of I don't know if intuitively understand is the right word, but like this is the one that I think people know kind of I don't know if intuitively understand is the right word,

but like this is the one that there are usually versions of in a meeting and a lot of those versions are bad is a Facilitator. Yeah So, okay my explanation of what a facilitator is and Morgan I'm gonna ask you for yours too because I don't know. Mm-hmm So as a facilitator your job is to like point to the agenda and go, okay We're talking about this. Your job is to move people through discussions. Your job is to try to get people to a consensus on what you're doing. And your job is to stop people from giving speeches.

And this is, I'm going to take a little digression here, which is, okay, we've been talking about ways meetings fail, right? Number one, no one can go to it. That's way meeting fails. Two, you don't have an agenda and everyone, it just goes off the rails and no one has any idea what you're supposed to be meeting about. Three, and this is a huge one, is that one of the biggest ways that meetings fail, and I have seen this in every single context I've ever worked in, is that someone and it is

usually a dude, it's almost always a dude, it can not be a dude, but it's usually a dude just keeps talking and keeps talking and keeps talking and will not shut the fuck up and nothing gets done because the entire meeting is one hour of this guy just yabbering. Yep. And one of your most important jobs as the facilitator, and this is genuinely a huge part for social technology of the structure of meetings is to make sure that your meeting is not one person talking. Yeah. This is why this exists.

Yeah. Like... And you know, if you want to get into the sort of dire part of this, right? If you do not stop all of your meetings from being one annoying guy talking, your projects will fail. You must do this. This is the one thing here that is like you absolutely Positively must yeah get this guy to stop talking I think that the important thing to think about a facilitator is that most people come from a background of Assumed authoritarian politics. Yeah, it is assumed politics where someone is in charge

Even our democracies are built around this idea that you elect someone to tell you what to do. When we talk about meetings, we are talking about building bottom-up structures. Even when we later, I think we'll end up talking maybe a different episode or something about larger structures you can build up out of these sort of local assemblies or meetings. The idea is that everyone is empowered.

And so because we're really used to this competitive decision-making around who is in charge, we struggle a little bit adapting to egalitarian meetings and also to, consensus isn't the only way to make decisions, but people struggle with consensus because they'll think of that at meaning 100% vote, where everyone votes for the same thing. And that's a mistake. And so we think of the facilitator accidentally as the leader, and they are a leader in the sense of a whatever, you could use the word leader in a lot of ways, and some of them are positive and not authoritarian.

And so in that context, they are leading people through the meeting, but they are absolutely not only not the decision maker, they are less the decision maker than everyone else. Choosing to be a facilitator of a meeting is choosing to go in and say, I'm not actually even going to push for my side. Yeah. Unless you were in a like tight knit enough group where everyone knows each other and everyone kind of knows, oh, in this group, Margaret's opinion is always going to be this, and so and so's opinions always can be this.

If you know people really well, you can kind of still be both facilitator and a participant. But by and large, when you are the facilitator, your job is to help the decision form. It is to help take what people are saying and say, okay, this seems like what we're saying is this the proposal and not say, I think this is the proposal saying is this the is this the proposal and not say I think this is the proposal But say is this the proposal and yeah, it is to keep people on track and every meeting is gonna have different I really like a strong facilitator. I really like someone who's gonna shut me up. I really like someone who's like yeah That's not what we're talking about right now And it it's hard because you're feeling to get hurt, like especially for example, someone says a joke, and then someone else says a joke. And then you're

the third person and you say the joke too, and the facilitator is like, yeah, that's enough of that, we got to keep going. You're the third person who said the joke, and you're like, why am I getting yelled at? And the other two people didn't. And that's the wrong way to look at it. We're not yelling at anyone. We're trying to keep things moving forward. And you're absolutely right also about the people grandstanding and, you know, a particular habit that men often have, especially cis men, is that they'll come in and be like, they'll listen to what someone else says and then repeat it louder and then be like, yeah, yeah, right? And as if it's their idea. And they don't even realize they're doing it. It's kind of cute. Yeah.

But there's a lot of that you can learn about yourself by going into these meetings and learning about your own habits and what you've been inculturated to do. And it shouldn't be about shaming people around this as long as people are able to like kind of get called in and listen to it. And one of the things that I think when you teach the meeting at the beginning of the meeting, you also explain some of this social stuff. And you say like, you know, we believe in a step up, step back thing. If you are someone who generally feels comfortable talking in large groups,

we invite you to step back a little bit. And if you're not someone who generally feels comfortable expressing your opinion in groups, we invite you to step up. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Do you know what also needs to learn to step up is I actually think we don't get enough advertising in our lives I think that the people who are afraid to take up space are the people who pay a lot of money Sorry, babe is a consensus

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I've never found her and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter.

She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Murderline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no.

Across the country, cops call this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes one, two, and three on May 21st and episodes

four, five, and six on June 4th. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. The summer of 1993 was one of the best of my life. I'm journalist Jeff Perlman and this is Rick Jervis. We were interns at the Nashville Tennessean. But the most unforgettable part? Our roommate, Reggie Payne, from Oakley, sports editor and aspiring rapper. And his stage name? Sexy Sweat.

In 2020, I had a simple idea. Let's find Reggie. We searched everywhere, but Reggie was gone. In February, 2020, Reggie was having a diabetic episode. His mom called 911. Police cuffed him face down. He slipped into a coma and died. I'm like thanking you,

but then I see my son's not moving. No headlines, no outrage, just silence. So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own. Listen to Finding Sexy Sweat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back. I think this is also, as we've talked about've talked about sort of in some way, in a lot of ways, like how important the role of the facilitator is, this is a role you need to

rotate because that is a role. It's like those are skills that everyone needs. Like if everyone knows, did you just do the hand? I did. I did. I don't know if people still do it metal hands versus twinkle fingers. Yeah! Sorry! But okay, this is completely... Unfortunately, podcasting is an audio medium, so all of you just missed me losing my mind because Margaret did one of the hand signs for agreement. That's like shit! God damn it! Okay. Sorry, we're talking about meetings. It just came naturally. Yeah, we'll get to hand signs later. But like, you know, you actually do you all of these things should be road hitting. And you should be teaching everyone to be able to do all of the facilitation roles because

A. Okay, there's a lot of reasons for this, right? One facilitation in particular can be kind of dangerous because there's a real risk of someone who is facilitating deciding that they are the leader and they're going to steer how everything goes and they're going to make their decisions. And by rotating that around, it becomes a lot easier to not have that happen. And also doing a role makes you a more active participant in the meeting a lot of times. It depends on the role, obviously, but like it's a way to get people to keep everyone engaged in a thing. That's a good point. Thank you. This is I stole this from my friend who was going to remain nameless. But if you're out there, I love you.

Your friend's name is nameless. I understand. Yeah, friends name is the nameless child. Somewhere there's someone his name is the old Malas kid. And anyway, okay. Okay. Yeah. But the other thing about it, right, is the more everyone knows about these skills, the

more effective of a participant and the more effective you can be at making decisions in the meeting, like the more everyone understands how the process works and knows how to do it and knows how to, because like being in a meeting and being in community with other people and making decisions together is a skill. And we don't have it. There's this great David Graeber, the anthropologist David Graeber, who actually spent a lot of time like writing about these meetings in a way that doesn't usually happen as like as an anthropologist. Yeah.

Yeah. As an anthropologist, right? Because he was both both an activist and an anthropologist. And he has this great line where he says Americans are great at communism and terrible at democracy, which is that they're really, really good at like doing things to each according to their needs and from each according to their ability. Like if you try to organize a barbecue, everyone can do the things through the barbecue, but no one knows how to make decisions together because that's a skill.

Yeah. And the more you're rotating through all the roles and the more you understand how everything works, the more you understand, you know, how to do the facilitation stuff of like getting everyone to figure out what the thing that they want is and how to express that and how to, like, how to work together. The more you understand that as like a person who's not facilitating, the more you can understand like how to actually do democracy. And it rules.

And there's also the fact that like, if you are indispensable to your group, you've actually failed your group. Yeah. Especially when you're talking about stuff like activism that has a certain risk. If you are the only medic in your affinity group, that is a problem because if you get arrested now, there's no medic. If you're the only facilitator who is a very skilled facilitator, what happens when you're sick or in jail and you all have a very intense meeting that you have to do and you need a skilled facilitator, what happens when you're sick or in jail and you all have a very intense

meeting that you have to do and you need a skilled facilitator? Not that everyone needs to be equal in all skills within a given group, but you need to learn to, if you were very good at something, your job is to make someone else very good at it too. That's the thing, both for meetings and the way it was explained to me, and this is a more kind of, I don't know what term you'd use for it, but it was taught to me as your job is to organize yourself out of a job. Yeah, totally. Okay, so we're going to move on to the second role,

which is the stack taker. So, okay, the stack. This, when I first started talking about this as a social technology, the thing I specifically met was the stack. This, when I first started talking about this as a social technology, the thing I specifically meant was the stack. And then eventually I was like, no, this is actually the whole process. But the stack, very, very simple invention. But if you don't have it, it's a disaster. The stack, as we said before, is just literally a list of names of who's going to talk in what order. So one raises their hand, they can add to the stack. Yep. That is very simple. It is also absolutely crucial to making sure a meeting runs at all.

Um, most groups tend to use some variation of what's called a progressive stack where, you know, this is part of what we were talking about earlier. It's like step forward and step back. But when you're compiling a stack, you want to have the people who speak less in front. And this works sort of in two ways, right? One is it's okay. So if there's someone who's not like a cis white dude, and who is trying to say something,

you probably want them to say something because they are less likely to be the one who says something. Yeah. But just because of the way that sort of whiteness is structured because of the way that like masculinity is structured because of the way that these things work. So you want to give opportunities to speak to people who like don't usually get heard. And then also if someone just like hasn't been talking in a meeting and they want to say something and that's also part of the sort of facilitation. And sometimes I know that this is a thing that like a role that I've seen passed out between a bunch of different roles.

And I guess everyone kind of has a responsibility to do this. But if there's someone in a meeting who has not been saying anything, it's generally a good idea to be like, hey, are you okay? And also like more important lead to some extent than that, are you okay? Of like, what do you think about this? Yeah, although I do think that there's a little bit of a like, some people don't want to specifically be called on in that way. And so that's kind of like learning to read the room skill about when you want to encourage people to step up versus other people are like, no, I don't have anything particular

to say and I don't want to get, you know, singled out. I think that in a smaller meeting, sometimes the facilitator can keep stack larger meetings. That's a terrible plan. Yeah, large meetings, you need to you can't have them both be doing it. Yeah, because you need someone keeping track of who's raising their hands when and things like that. Sometimes you're actually even writing the stack on a whiteboard so people can see. Yeah, yeah, like a piece of paper, yeah.

I have been in meetings that sort of self-facilitate fairly effectively in smaller groups, where a thing that people can do is if they have a thing they want to say, they hold up one finger, and they keep that finger up. And if someone else has something that they want to say, they put up two fingers. And then if someone else has something they want to say, they put up three fingers. And so you can have this method by which people track their own stack. But this is a small group thing. This is not a, and this is a people who know each other and know how to do the balancing that we're talking about about making sure everyone gets heard.

Yeah. And I think part of this also, it's important to remember is like, this is like 101. Oh, yeah, sorry. As an advanced skill. Kind of. I'm introducing some things that are probably more advanced than 101. Like, like, like the like, okay, figuring out why someone isn't comfortable talking on a like, this person wants to talk, doesn't feel comfortable to.

And if you ask them, they will say something and this person doesn't feel comfortable talking because they don't want to talk. That's kind of a more advanced thing. Fair enough. I guess we should talk about hand gestures here, which is that, OK, over the course of these meetings, one of over the course of like movements, one of the things that is built up is hand gestures, because they can be a very effective way of, you know, someone expressing something without having to talk over someone else. This is, I don't know, this is the 101. I'm not going to teach hand gestures because everyone has different ones and there are some that are pretty universal but like the number of different gestures I've seen for like direct response mm-hmm and shit like

It's the thing that like like hand gestures can work and can be really efficient. Yes He you're doing one of the hedges you dig one of the Is make a triangle of your hands process fuck I forgot about point of process. Oh, no There's all of this very very complicated stuff. It's not that complicated, but like like point of process sucks like that's just actually complicated. I'm actually derailing again I'm so sorry this is an example if there was a facilitator in this call they would be making me shut up is what's happening. Yeah I know but this is actually like this is this is the one time I've ever wished there was like videos you could see the hand gestures because like the thing about this right

is once you are good at meetings and like if you have people who do this and you talk about what the hand gestures are beforehand, that's also important. Even if you're very good at meetings, and you're still listening to this episode for some reason, I mean, I don't know, it's a good episode, but like you can't assume that everyone knows what your hand gestures are. Yeah. Sometimes people have different hand gestures for different things. Sometimes you have contextual hand gestures for like, like there are like, OK, like you're if you are trying to meet in the dark. Yeah, your your your hand gestures don't work.

Right. This is also stolen from another friend. Right. Like sometimes you need to use snaps for that because so that you can hear. Right. Like all of this is to say that like the stuff with hand gestures, it can make your meetings a lot more effective. This is a thing you could do if everyone in the group understands how they work. I'm not going to be like teaching you sets of hand gestures here because I can't guarantee that any gesture I teach you will be the one that people use.

Can I, can I though like speed run the concepts of some of them? Because I think they're useful to understand. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it's hard to imagine when you imagine meetings. I think about this a lot because I write meetings into fiction, which is a very hard thing to do and make them entertaining because they're also hard to be entertained by when you're in them unless they're contentious. But there are certain things that you learn derail meetings and there are ways in which

by using hand gestures, you can avoid having more people speak. And the single most important and common one is a way of saying, I agree. And so that way people, when they really want to say something, but they're not on stack and they get really frustrated, they can do that hand gesture, which, you know, is very easy to make fun of. You know, when I was coming up, it was twinkle fingers where you waggle your fingers. And then we were like punk. So we did metal fingers instead, which was literally the same thing, but reverse

the look that you do when you like really like music and it's actually sort of like Mimicking playing a guitar. And so that's a very important concept and sometimes people use snaps Although sometimes people prefer non-audio and other people prefer audio um, yeah, yeah, and and sometimes that's like and that's that's possibly why I was talking about like Like that's that's dependent on who's probably why I was talking about like, that's dependent on who's in the room and what the room is and like, stuff like that. But I think that a, I agree without needing to say anything is essential. Yeah, yeah, that's a good one.

Other ones to just know of is that there are things like people will say like, please move this along. It's a way of saying, hey, facilitator, please shut this person up usually, or can we talk about something else. There's ones that are direct response, way of saying, hey, facilitator, please shut this person up, usually, or can we talk about something else? There's ones that are direct response, which is saying, I would like to jump stack because this person has just insulted the honor of my family or whatever. And it's like, it's up to the facilitator to decide whether to do these. Another one is point of process, which is saying like, hey, I actually don't want to talk about the thing we're talking about.

I want to talk about how the meeting is going. Meetings get real meta, and it's real frustrating. Anyway, so it's worth knowing that this is part of the technology. It seems cringy from the outside, but like, our other options, I mean, there are other technologies about decision making that people have developed, but like, actually living democratic lives in which we all have a say in our decisions sometimes means that we go to meetings and and we can actually kind of learn to I'm talking shit on meetings, but that's Meetings are also a ways to get to know your friends and express yourself and get things done

Yeah, you know as much as I've been talking about to be boring like I've had Things that were technically organizing meetings that were like some of the most transformational experiences of my life. Because me and a bunch of people who, you know, a bunch of people really close to me like came together and we figured out how to do something. And there is a beauty there that is, and this is partially why it's hard to talk about these things, right? Because like the technical process of it, like the technical description of what we're saying is at the same time being used to do something that can only be described in sort of poetic terms. Yeah, like the actual experience of like you and a bunch of other people coming together to do something and figure out how to do it and fucking doing it is a transcendent act of creation. Yeah.

doing it is a transcendent act of creation. Yeah. And these are like, you know, yeah, like it doesn't like the fucking hammers and shovels and like fucking slide rules that you use to construct something don't look very pretty. And then at the end of it, you've built something together and it's beautiful. Yeah, no, it's the other side of the coin of the first time you watch the police run away from you. Yeah. It is a way of coming together with other people to accomplish something and make something powerful is meetings.

And it is also, it's interesting because we talk about how men will often take up too much space in meetings. This is not a universal thing anytime we say this kind of thing. But it is actually often feminized labor because it's this invisibilized labor that happens behind the scenes that is not as sexy, right? And is about just actually hearing people out. It is like conflict resolution speed run. Anyway, I accidentally went off on the meta of meetings also, but. No, it's good.

Well, but, and I think there was an important thing here too, cause like, we're talking about the politics of meetings themselves, right? Of the actual political angle of what it means to have a democracy, where what democracy means is you make decisions together. Yeah. And this is something, there's also a very important actual procedural meeting note here, which is that one of the things you will learn over the course of doing meetings is that a lot of times people wage Battles over the contents of political ideology in the form of fighting over how a meeting works

Yeah, totally and you can see this everywhere from like your fucking local organizing meeting and people yelling about who's on stack or whatever all the way up to like, you know when like when, when like the Democrats are saying that like, like in Congress that like the part, the budget parliamentarian won't let them like raise the minimum wage. That's what they're doing. They're using an argument over procedure to like disguise the fact that what they're really arguing about is like it is an actual political argument. Yeah. And, and, but this is also a thing where like the way you structure a meeting is political.

Yeah. It doesn't seem like it, right? But you can have a meeting where, you know, it's like the fucking plenipotentiary meeting of like the executive committee of, I don't know, the People's Congress, the Chinese Communist Party, whatever. Those are not the right words. I'm on five hours of sleep. But you can have a meeting where it's just like, yeah, the way the meeting works is one guy stands out there and he gives a speech and he tells everyone what to say and then everyone votes yes. Yeah. That's the way you can do a meeting. Right. And that's political and it fucking sucks. And we're trying to teach you how to do a meeting where, you know, we do democracy, where everyone comes together and we like do a thing. Yeah. And we will get to more roles next week. This was originally planned to be one episode.

It is not one episode. It is now two episodes. But the upside is that we solved a bunch of the fundamental logistical problems about how to build a free society. So stay tuned for that. Stay tuned for more roles you want in your meetings. And yes, but it could happen here. Thank you, Mark, for coming on the show. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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