The Circle Meeting Planner is a tool to support your planning process for circles + other meetings or gatherings. You'll find the Circle Meeting Planner tool here, and below is a video overview of the meeting planner as well as the video transcript. The Circle Meeting Planner is view-only; save a copy or download to create your own editable and adaptable version. A view-only PDF is also available here.

For another visual planning tool, see this Prep for Your Circle PDF.

Captions are available - just click the CC icon on the video player above. You can also click here to watch on YouTube.

Video transcript:

Welcome to this video overview of the Circle Meeting Planner. The outer rim of The Circle Way components wheel is personal preparation, hosting, and invitation. It's where we begin to plan our circles, but what often happens is we jump to the end and plan the agenda. But participatory meetings result from design and preparation. We often say that 80% of the work happens long before the meeting, and the meeting agenda itself is the last thing we design.

This tool comes from a bigger body of work known as the Chaordic Stepping Stones from the Art of Hosting community. “Chaordic” being a word blend between chaos and order, and chaordic can be about creating just enough structure for generative, participatory meetings. Now, I'm using the term “meeting” throughout this video overview, but this planner can be used for a wide variety of reasons: a client meeting, a team check-in, decision-making meeting, a bigger project or initiative, a celebration gathering, and more. A friend of mine even used this to plan her wedding!

So first, how to use this Meeting Planner tool.

It has a series of nested planning questions followed by a table for your detailed agenda plan. It can be scaled: you might work through the planning questions and the detailed design plan over several meetings for bigger or more complex meetings or sessions. Or you might complete your planning very quickly in one go. It's always better to work through the planning questions and the agenda plan in collaboration with others. Maybe convene a small design team or some thinking partners. You might not answer all the question categories, and it's also not necessary to answer all the sub-questions. Those are just there to be able to draw from. But, the more complex the session, probably the more thorough your planning will be. It's also not intended to be a checklist or a linear process. It's very iterative what you learn through some of the planning questions will shift and influence and change what you have already unearthed through previous planning questions. This tool can also be woven with your own skills, strengths, and cultural practices and teachings, and be further strengthened by the deeper power analysis and anti-oppression frameworks that you bring. There are lots of opportunities to enhance this. It's meant to be an adaptable tool.

While I update this video from time to time, it always feels immediately out of date as my practice and language continues to evolve. So I offer this in its imperfection and incompleteness.

Well, let's dive into the planning questions we begin with need. Need helps to understand the context, what's happening around us and the folks at the meeting or session is for. Why is it important to do this work or have this conversation right now? Who is most affected by this work? Ask them what's needed, and can the work be led by those most affected, so they aren't just consulted? If you're hosting a circle for youth, maybe have some youth involved in the planning and pay for their time and efforts.

We flow from the need, that surrounding context and landscape, to the purpose. Purpose gives the focus the direction for this particular meeting. One of my favorite questions to help listen into the purpose is “What do we hope this meeting will do, inspire or create?”. Purpose offers a north star in your planning to help ensure that what you do is aligned with the purpose. And just enough clarity around the need and the purpose helps us invite others into the conversation.

Which brings us to people who need to be involved in the session. Who are the participants? What are their unique needs, interests and perspectives? Who wants or should be there but can't? And what are the barriers that might get in the way of them participating? Whose voices are typically heard or listened to or included, and who's are not? Also look at where is the power, including who is making the decisions or influencing the use of resources and the results. Is it a white dominant space, and what might be needed or helpful for the cultural safety of those who are Black, Indigenous and People of Colour participating? What other power asymmetries are present?

Thinking about the people and these questions helps you better understand the need and purpose as well as prepare you for some invitation efforts. And also under people you can think about who the hosting team should be or shouldn't be. Does the work call for the session to be visibly led and hosted by those who are Black, Indigenous, People of Colour as well as queer, trans, Two-Spirit? Or is an intentional mix important to support the work and each other? It might be an Indigenous and non-Indigenous hosting team, disabled and non-disabled hosting team, or intergenerational mixes that include youth and Elders or gender-diverse hosting teams. All good questions under the people category.

We move along to harvest, and harvest is the ways we make our work and learning visible, so it's alive,  that it continues to inspire people, ripple out and sustain the work and what might come after. We're not planning a meeting, we're planning a harvest. So what do you want to harvest, those outputs that you hope to have at the end? What do you want people to remember and feel when they come away from this meeting?

I often think about the harvest as, on one part, the tangible. So what do we want to have in our hands by the end? They might be decisions or recommendations or questions that help inform the next phase of our work. But harvests can also be intangible. What do we want to have in our hearts or how do we want to feel at the end? They might be relationships togetherness, clarity, passion, renewal for the work ahead, leaving more community than when we began. Often the tangible harvests get over-prioritized, and the intangibles are just as valuable. It's also important to bring in diversity of the forms the harvest might take through considerations like song or different art forms, language … shift away from only valuing the written word.

Principles: How we meet and work is as important as the what of our work, and principles help us articulate that how even if they are sometimes a bit aspirational. The way we meet is a model of the future we want to create. What is the participant experience we want to create? Whose experience and comfort are we prioritizing - those furthest from equity and justice? And whose discomfort or unsettling do we need to encourage? How can we centre well-being in how we work together? Awareness of the pull of the white supremacy culture characteristic of productivity. What are some unique ways of working together, being together that we want to bring to this?

We can envision how people will be interacting and working together during the session... what it feels like, what it sounds like, what it looks like. These principles will guide many of the planning decisions that you'll make and can also help us reground when things wobble.

The previous planning questions so far start to give us clues or ingredients for a high-level concept for our meeting. It's not the final agenda, but rather just a beginning sketch of maybe your time buckets, your start time, your breaks, your end time. Creating a first draft or sketch of what the work might look like, the lightest structure - like how much time do we have, and is that right sized for our purpose, the principles, and harvest? 

Here you also want to start thinking about different processes and activities that might work well in the time available. You might draw from different conversation methods along with circle, including honoring different cultural ways of getting business done. So in one example, this meant starting with a meal and a song together as part of the work. And to check how ableism is creeping into the ideas. How can we create space where disabled folks, neurodivergent folks can more fully participate for online or hybrid circles?

Also, here is where we want to think about any technology constraints or needs: might be internet bandwidth, or access to comfortable and quieter places that people can call in from, different vision or hearing needs, different language translation needs, privacy concerns. And this is also where you can highlight other important practices that might be specific and unique to your circle; cultural practices like inviting Elders to be part of your gathering, trauma or healing-informed approaches, how you might invite cultural representation by asking people to bring music, instruments, artifacts, or poems that reflect their identities, heritage, ethnicity. Non-verbal practices may also be important to weave in like journaling, drawing, colouring, movement, breath work practices that support resettling our nervous system. Dominant culture often focuses on head space, and we can be deliberate about bringing in more of our full selves; the wider ways of knowing and being.

The Circle Components question: here you can weave in various aspects of circle practice to support your meeting. It's not about needing all the components in place or describing all of them, but the more complex or high tension your session, the more components you may want in place. You might think about what customized agreements you'll need, or if you're going through a full agreement creation process with the group. If you'll use a centre and what it might be, who will Guardian, what gentle sound-maker you might use to call for a pause, what kind of talking pieces you might use or ask others to bring. And for online circles, you might also think about how you want to use the chat function or practices around videos (off or on), any recording approaches that align with confidentiality and privacy needs.

Onto space and logistics. The space might be physical or online or hybrid, and making some choices about what will work best and support folks for being able to show up and participate as fully as possible. Some of this you've been tending to likely all along your planning questions, but it's helpful just to go a little bit deeper around the space and logistics with these questions. For online circles, not everyone has access to stable or higher speed internet or a computer or a quiet place to Zoom in from. Not everyone is comfortable having their videos on due to different socioeconomic, health or privacy factors. So thinking about what different forms of technology your participants have access to and how to work with this range as best as possible for everyone's unique needs and experiences. And sometimes we have to work with what we've got. There might be a giant unmovable table in the room, or you’ve got the squares on a Zoom screen…can still create a circle experience together. What are some ways that you can create an inviting, hospitable space and bring in beauty?

Well, we also need to invite people to the gathering that you are convening. Invitation is a practice. It's a process, not a thing. It's more than just sending the email and it relies on relationships. And here you might think about what layers of invitation are helpful or useful. You might start with a save the date and follow up with some phone calls. Maybe an invitation letter or poster with more invitation on the need and purpose, maybe include questions that people are invited to think about ahead of time. Personal invitation signals to people that their presence is really valued, and you'll learn things from those small conversations with folks that help you plan your gathering. For online circle, you might also have some tech prep sessions or create a buddy system for those that need a little bit of tech support.

On to limiting beliefs. Things rise up - personal or organizational beliefs, especially when we're trying to do things differently. We don't want to build our fears or more of the status quo into our plans, so stay in the stretch. Naming these fears or worries as part of our planning process can help alleviate the fear and the anxiety of the unknown but also illuminate some needs. This can be a good check-in or circle question with the planning team. “What are some fears anxieties we're feeling about this gathering we're planning?” Voicing these fears or worries in our planning process helps us see where we might have accidentally baked them into our design. Maybe we're trying to over-control participants and we can make some wise adjustments.

So, you've spent some time on the planning questions and now it's time to work with all the ingredients to create your detailed agenda flow.

So here we work with you work on the agenda. This is the “detailed table part” from all the ideas and considerations in the planning questions. You can go back to your concept and flesh it out further, expand your detailed process design. Your welcome, your start-point, your check-in, the different activities or conversation methods, check-out and closing, your end-point. The questions - designing the questions that activate the conversation people are in together, and any script or guiding notes.

And your detailed agenda will also include your harvest or documentation plan, if tangible harvests are needed, want to hand the pen over to everyone where possible. This hands over the power of what gets noted, recorded and harvested, including some individual harvest opportunities so voices aren't getting lost in the whole. The more a harvest is co-created, the more it is co-owned. For online circles you can invite people to co-create the harvest with you using various online harvesting or document tools like shared Google Docs or Slides that they can type in, Jamboard or Miro or Menti and more. And of course, creating your agenda doesn't mean that everything will unfold according to plan but all of the insights from the planning process will help guide you when you need to adapt in the moment.

Well, this brings me to the end of this overview of the circle meeting planner tool. Encourage you to experiment with it, play with it, add some of your favourite planning questions, improve it and make it yours. Thanks for journeying along with me and have a great rest of your day.