It’s hard to talk about climate change. It brings up questions that seem impossible to answer and unpleasant feelings we’d rather avoid. In some of our first meetings we kept getting off topic. Even though we’d come out that evening specifically for the purpose of talking about how climate change was affecting us, at times it felt like we were relieved to change the subject.
It’s hard as a facilitator to judge how long to allow the conversation to wander and when to pull it back. So we’ve come up with a strategy that gives all members of the group some responsibility for staying on track. That’s to use a version of the Pomodoro technique. The Pomodoro Technique is a method for aiding concentration by working in 25 minutes sessions with a short 5 minute break between sessions. Despite what some blogs claim there doesn’t appear to be any scientific evidence behind the 25 minute intervals, but it works well for our purposes. The deal is we focus on our activity for 25 minutes, resisting any distractions or off-topic conversations, then we have a short 5 minute break to refill our coffee cups before starting the next activity. I’ve got Pomodoro timer app on my tablet so everyone can see our time ticking down.
We’re using the timer together with two other techniques. A hand signal that any member of the group can use if they feel we might be wandering off-topic, and clear descriptions of activities so people can gauge how much we’re trying to accomplish in the given time, and clear instructions at the start of activities. For example, “we’re going to talk about hope in the next 25 minute segment. First we’re going to take a moment to think about why hope is important to us, and take it in turns to briefly describe that to the group. Then I’ll read a quote from a climate scientist and writer and we’ll use the rest of the time to respond and discuss. So let’s take just a minute to complete the sentence ‘hope is important to me because…’
Not everyone liked being able to see the timer.