This story is part one of a series about HRM’s stadium consultation. The next World Café meeting is on Wednesday, November 16 at 7 p.m. at the Halifax Forum.
Promised a stake in HRM’s stadium decision, a relatively small group of people flocked to the Halifax Forum on October 12 as the sun set around 7 p.m. Together they represented less than 0.02 percent of HRM’s 403,000 residents.
This was the first meeting of the Phase 2 Stadium Consultation. Only 70 or so people showed up to offer their opinions. Phase 1 ended back in June, after three public meetings, attended by a total of 93 people. Phase 2, according to HRM docs, is:
“…To provide a detailed vision, preliminary design, possible site, and capital cost in order to ultimately decide whether or not to proceed to develop a stadium for the municipality.”
After one last consultation on November 16, Phase 2 ends December 7 with the presentation of a draft design of the stadium.
As he welcomed his guests, Tim Merry, the host with a warm British accent and microphone asked: “If there’s a stadium, what would the stadium be?”
The question was not “Do you want a stadium?” or “What does Halifax need?” or “What should we do with this money?” His question had an “if,” and that “if” held the assumption that there would be a stadium.
But the host was honest with his guests: “To be clear,” he said, “this is not a collective decision-making process. What we’re doing is inviting the public to influence those who make the decisions about whether we go ahead with the stadium, and if we do, what would that look like, OK? That’s the process we’re involved with: gathering public opinion.”
They’d be using the World Café method tonight, he told them—a method he’d performed countless times. The goal was to find out: “What’s the opinion of this room, rather than of the individuals?” Merry said he wouldn’t talk with OpenFile about the process until the stadium consultation was complete.
World Café Method
The World Café method was created by a small group of businesspeople and academics in California in 1995. The goal of the method, as discussed at the time in Juanita Brown’s book of the same name, was to explore an issue through strategic conversation. Brown, one of the original creators, believed that if people were given every opportunity to explore an issue with open minds, they would gain a richer understanding of that issue.
Ideally, the creators thought, if they asked people genuine questions in an environment that facilitated conversation, and if participants listened to each other with open minds, and if they held diverse perspectives, and if everyone shared and had the chance to share, then an accurate picture of an issue would be attainable. They called this picture “collective wisdom.”
One of the foundations of this knowledge-seeking process is the genuine question, which is any question that does not already have an answer. There should be no assumptions built into genuine questions. They must be open-ended and truth-seeking.
Another fundamental requirement of this method is the diversity of its participants. The people who take part must represent all social classes, ages, races, genders, sexual orientations and backgrounds. Brown believed there was no other way to get an accurate picture of a complex issue.
Fifteen minutes after the consultation began, there were 104 people in the room, including me. Also included in this number were city councillors, the mayor, members of the stadium steering committee, facilitators from the art of hosting community, and a handful of reporters. Together there were roughly 30 people in the room who were not expected to offer opinions.
Only 21 women were in the room. About three quarters of the 104 people appeared to be over 40-years-old. Almost everyone was white. The vast majority of the 104 appeared to come from affluent backgrounds.
Naturally the environment also had to resemble a café, with sheets of paper instead of tablecloths. Oct. 12, it did.
They sat in groups of three to eight around 20 tables, each with several sheets of paper for doodling. Coffee, tea, and water were available at the back wall near the entrance.
Measuring opinion without votes
The World Cafe method would not give every person a vote. It would give them a chance to express their opinions about a stadium in Halifax, but not all opinions would be recognised and recorded. Also, the opinions need not be based in fact, Merry said.
“Speak your mind and heart,” he said in that amicable voice. “We need your brain but also your emotions. Please don’t think that everything you say here has to be backed up by data. You can say things that just are emotional because you feel it. That’s part of the tapestry of people’s opinion. Please bring it.”
To find this tapestry, he said he needed to test the barometer of the room. A question popped onto the screen: “What’s cooking for you and in Halifax around a stadium?” For the next 10 minutes, people discussed.
The room swelled with voices. (You can watch them all here.)
Merry cut off the chatter at the 10-minute mark. “You know it’s a good conversation when everyone ignores me,” he quipped into the mic. At one corner table, a woman kept expressing concerns the stadium wouldn’t fly economically. She was the only dissenter at the table.
The host boomed a new request: “On your table, we’ve put some post-its.” He flapped a green one on his pointer finger, and told them to write their collective thoughts. “What are the three key things you’re hearing? The thing that I’m not looking for is the thing that came out of one person’s mouth.”
At the table in the corner, the woman with the economic concern tightened her lips as the others wrote stadium themes. Her idea wasn’t recorded.
A banner on one wall was the opinion barometer. Facilitators collected post-its from each table, and arranged them on it. A negative post-it went on the cold end. Positive went on the hot end. Plenty landed hot, but many were in the middle, and few landed cold. So, the overall feeling in the room was…warm?
With no voting process or ballot counting, it’s impossible to say what percentage of people in the room actually felt warm toward the idea of a stadium. At that table in the corner, four people were in favour of the idea, and one was against. Councillor Jennifer Watts was there, but declined to offer her opinion.
If at least one dissenting opinion was filtered out, how many more hadn’t reached the barometer? The room wasn’t a representative sample of HRM’s residents; we are not mostly men, or mostly affluent. And the questions asked didn’t comply with the original World Café requirement for genuine questions: no assumptions.
Tomorrow, in Phase 2 of our series on HRM’s stadium consultation, Hilary Beaumont looks at the city’s financial and political investment in the project.
