Designing for engagement and impact: Chart the emotional arc
How can we reshape the way we design and facilitate interaction for more engagement and impact? Focusing on an event’s emotional arc from the start will help.
The last few years, I’ve been designing online workshops to help people solve big problems. Before COVID-19 hit, I designed group-work sessions, like many of my colleagues, for in-person work. I’ve worked with parents, children, staff in international governmental organisations, CEOs, entrepreneurs, policy makers and researchers — all of them inspiring participants and guests.
Earlier this year, I designed and facilitated a two-hour hybrid workshop in Paris with 40 in-person and 70 online participants spread out across the world. We had 34 countries represented across 20 time zones. Our participants spoke 20 languages. I wrote the playbook for the session’s exercises and prepped four people to run the on-the-ground facilitation (in four separate break-out sessions), set up the room, and made sure my brave new facilitators had the materials, knowledge and support they needed to confidently create space for creativity and collaboration. I ran the online facilitation simultaneously from another room.
It is fair to say that that event was ambitious.
I was warned repeatedly, from the moment I arrived the morning of the event — to just minutes before starting the after-lunch session — that I would “get no engagement” from the online participants. I might need to rethink my plan.
Let me backtrack.
Many of us in design thinking, design sprinting, facilitative leadership and so on have tools and conceptual structures and plans. Heck, anyone who works with groups at all, will likely have a plan, even if it’s a few bullet points in one’s head or on a napkin (including parents working with children!). Take meetings (either personal or professional). Ideally, they’ll have a start and end time, an objective, some needs to be met (I usually ask my teen son, “Empathy or strategy?” early on in most spontaneous “What do you think?” sessions), some expected outcomes and next steps. (I’d love it if more meetings had clear next steps, wouldn’t you?)
So, we all have a plan of some kind.
I was in a course earlier this year with Alwin Put on facilitative leadership. He started the course off by asking us how we design our workshops/experiences. Some of my fellow facilitators started with the mission and the vision, the objective and the outcomes. Some spoke with the client to get clarity on their needs. Some paid particular attention to the exercises and timing. Some thought about how to bring the greatest disruption or the greatest engagement (using, for example, “trigger questions”). Some thought about the storyline (or narrative) of the workshop (I love this one; if you want to know more, I highly recommend reading Alwin’s book, Captains of Leadership).
I felt like the odd one out.
I do those things, yes. And, I also tend to play with physical objects when I’m designing a new workshop.
But I also spend quite a lot of time thinking about the emotional arc of a gathering. I learned some years ago, from reading Priya Parker’s work, that the arc actually starts with the invitation to the event, and not at the event itself.
… [t]he invitation is full of opportunities for … priming language … the purpose of priming is to signal to people the tone and mood you’re going for at your gathering. — Priya Parker
From the invitation, we have opportunities, even pre-event to sculpt the emotional arc (Priya’s “tone and mood” from above). Will the meeting/workshop/visioning lab (whatever you name it — and again, naming is important) be discovery-oriented, decision-oriented, playful, creative, serious, output-driven? The event’s purpose will determine the language we use to frame it, and thus how we invite, prepare and support participants (or players, guests or, again, whatever they are named, and naming is important) in terms of how they show up and engage.
I’ve always been curious about the emotional arc, a personal approach I use when I started designing group interactions. I am likely not the only one to be curious about and committed to exploring the emotional arc in event design, but as I discovered in Alwin’s course on facilitative leadership, it’s not yet common practice.
What inspired the emotional arc?
Many years ago, over the course of a decade, I regularly sat in large conference rooms in Paris with delegates from 30+ countries, listening to them debate and/or defend privacy policy or online taxation, biotechnological advances or digital rights. The meetings usually lasted several days and discussed upwards of 12 topics.
A few years ago, and for two years running, I found myself in conferences on climate change with Prince Albert of Monaco and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, alternating between speaking English and French. Despite the inherent interest the topics held for the participants in all of the meetings and conferences above, I was struck by the arcs of the gatherings, which went invariably like this:
Yes, peak excitement terminated in loss of energy and attention: that’s what happened.
Experiencing such loss of energy and attention myself over the years—witnessing important discussions between some of the world’s movers and shakers, of all things — I told myself there had to be a better way. We were losing the energy and impetus we started out with only to have people fly back home drained and worn. Furthermore, all that enthusiasm and energy fizzled into dry summary records and limited action. Of course I understood that delegates returned to business as usual, that they had day jobs to turn to. We’d have been fired up for an hour or two during a two-day meeting, and that somehow was — or had to be — enough. But did it?
How could we reshape the way we designed and facilitated interaction? How could we design for engagement on the ground and impact at home? That’s when I started experimenting with the emotional arc.
Why an emotional arc matters
I, and likely you, have observed the following time and time again in working with humans in group and individual settings:
1. Emotions affect thinking. Brain research shows that when humans experience high emotion, their ability to find solutions or think creatively can be shut down.
This observation is supported by neurological research:
Neural circuits responsible for conscious self-control are highly vulnerable to even mild stress. When they shut down, primal impulses go unchecked and mental paralysis sets in.
This is obviously important when a group needs to generate solutions quickly, think critically or creatively, or even make an important decision. The event designer will need to intentionally avoid or reduce stress at such points in an event. On the other hand, s/he might intentionally create stress to “disrupt” well-rehearsed thought patterns or feelings of being “stuck”.
2. Emotions create, drive and drain energy, depending on the emotion and its intensity. For example:
- A feeling of belonging and inclusion often leads to collaborative, link-making energy.
- A feeling of sadness often leads to pensive, reflective energy.
- A feeling of anger can positively lead to active, assertive energy if managed well.
- A feeling of happiness can and often leads to creative and constructive energy.
It seems obvious, thus, that one might wish to be cognizant of and design for optimal emotional arcs.
If we’re looking to co-create or collaborate on a difficult mission, for example, designing for an arc that commences with inclusion (a sense of belonging), moves to reflection (felt in the body as sadness), moves gently to collaboration (via the emotions of curiosity or joy) and ending with a desire to act (calling on a sense of justice) might be worth considering.
This is one example of how I’ve experimented with intentionally designing a gathering by first plotting its emotional arc.
What the emotional arc does
An emotional arc helps us plot the energy and creative capacity and/or potential in a group.
It allows us to leverage human emotion to create the conditions for creativity, enable the human mind to strategize and construct, and smooth the way for humans to bond and connect.
An emotional arc is a tool to render event design intentional in terms of inspiring humans to make links, think outside traditional paths, create new combinations and/or commit to action — or whatever it is we are responsible for helping groups do.
It also helps us design gatherings in such a way that a group’s natural energy peaks and dips are considered.
How to plot an emotional arc
To plot an emotional arc, I ask myself three sets of questions:
- What kind of emotional arc is needed to accomplish the gathering’s goals? Do we need a constant calm, reflective energy so people can think? Do we need variance — moving from calm to chatter to explosive to chatter to calm? Do we need to end on a high, inspiring activity afterwards or in quiet solitude as each person internalizes his/her commitment going forward? Figuring out the kind of emotional arc we need is not always easy, as it should align with and support the gathering’s goals.
- Where should the emotional arc take the group and how will we get there? What do we need at the end? What will we need to do to get there? What emotions will we need to be in touch with to best inspire and sustain ourselves in thought or action — all the way up to, and after, the end of the gathering?
- What is the emotional arc’s shape? Where will we want the most energy? The least? Should it be flat, should it slowly build, do we want our participants to feel a range of emotions, experiencing a range of moves to act, to speed up, to slow down, to stop? Where will there naturally be a lull — what do we need to do to respect and work with the lull(s)? There are so many possibilities, and each event, with its particular participants or guests, will have its own needs. For me, it is important to start by drawing the shape of the emotional arc for the gathering — before thinking about any of the exercises or discussion moments I will build into the event/meeting/session.
Once you have the emotional arc, what do you do?
Once I have the general emotional arc of a gathering, which for me begins to act as the event’s frame, I can start to play with slotting in mindsetters/ice breakers, energisers, connecting exercises, movement, the use of colour, the element of surprise, using music (or silence) or providing toys/physical objects at different times in the event, depending on what the arc calls for.
I’ll think about what leads up to breaks and how the arc will be supported when participants return from breaks. I am also intentional around the use of solo, small-group and whole-group work and energy.
The important thing is to be intentional in the design, paying close attention to what it is we’re hoping to inspire or create the conditions for, and then identifying the emotion that will help our guests (or participants) experience, perform, think, collaborate, co-create, act (as the experience designer, you’ll know what is needed most and when) at their very best.
Then? Then? I prototype the event, test it with a few willing volunteers, check to see if the exercises and use of the tools above actually lead to the emotions I’ve plotted — and, importantly, to the actions, outputs and outcomes we’d set at the beginning. Finally, I check that the actions, outputs and outcomes are consistent with the event’s purpose. If things are off, I iterate. And they are always off (!), which ultimately makes for better event design.
It may sound complicated, but it is actually a lot of fun, designing for engagement and impact from the beginning.
Oh, and guess what. That Paris event where I was kindly warned we’d get no engagement? Yes, I’d used my schematic above, and indeed, focused on the emotional arc. I’d prototyped, tested and iterated the event design. On the day, it could have gone all wrong. But it didn’t. We had record engagement and within six months, the output we’d designed for.
Other resources
- Alwin Put’s Captains of Leadership and workshops
- The Art of Gathering, by Priya Parker
- Jackie Colburn’s excellent weekly resources for facilitators and leaders
- Designing with Audacity — Focus on Big Picture and Finesse the Details, a blog post from North Star Facilitators, which gets into some of the nitty gritty (and more big picture) of workshop design
If you’d like engagement and impact be a regular part of your gatherings, let’s work together. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Even better, let’s talk.
