I assumed the main reason for doing something like that is to get people engaged and actually thinking about ideas
I don’t know what motivations people usually have, but I also feel skeptical of this vague “activation” theory of change. If session leads don’t know what actions they want session participants to take, I’m not optimistic about attendees generating useful actions themselves by discussing the topic for 10 minutes in a casual no-stakes, no-rigour, no-guidance setting. I’m more optimistic if the ask is “open a doc and write things that you could do”.
I would do a meeting of people filtered for being high context and having relevant thoughts, which is much more likely to work.
Yep, the thing you’ve described here sounds promising for the reasons Alex covered :) I realise I was thinking of the conference setting in my critique here (and probably should’ve made that explicit), but I’m much more optimistic about brainstorming in small groups of people with shared context, shared goals and using something like the format you’ve described.
I’ve run very successful group brainstorming sessions with experts just in order to require them to actually think about a topic enough to realize what seems obvious to me. Getting people to talk through what the next decade of AI progress will look like didn’t make them experts, or even get to the basic level I could have presented in a 15 minute talk—but it gives me me a chance to push them beyond their cached thoughts, without them rejecting views they see as extremes, since they are the ones thinking them!
I don’t know what motivations people usually have, but I also feel skeptical of this vague “activation” theory of change. If session leads don’t know what actions they want session participants to take, I’m not optimistic about attendees generating useful actions themselves by discussing the topic for 10 minutes in a casual no-stakes, no-rigour, no-guidance setting. I’m more optimistic if the ask is “open a doc and write things that you could do”.
Yep, the thing you’ve described here sounds promising for the reasons Alex covered :) I realise I was thinking of the conference setting in my critique here (and probably should’ve made that explicit), but I’m much more optimistic about brainstorming in small groups of people with shared context, shared goals and using something like the format you’ve described.
I’ve run very successful group brainstorming sessions with experts just in order to require them to actually think about a topic enough to realize what seems obvious to me. Getting people to talk through what the next decade of AI progress will look like didn’t make them experts, or even get to the basic level I could have presented in a 15 minute talk—but it gives me me a chance to push them beyond their cached thoughts, without them rejecting views they see as extremes, since they are the ones thinking them!