A quality delibéeration is not just “another conversation”. A few lessons learned with clients over the past few years

It is not uncommon for a client to approach us with a clear request: “We want to create a moment of constructive dialogue with our community.” But as discussions progress, the brief often becomes more specific—or rather, more limited: “Give people room to talk,” “Don’t overcomplicate the design,” “We just want people to exchange ideas freely.”

This expectation is entirely understandable. It reflects a healthy skepticism toward overly rigid, heavily facilitated processes that can stifle participants’ intelligence and agency. Yet it often rests on a fundamental misunderstanding: the confusion between deliberation and conversation.

The confusion is natural. In everyday life, some of our best collective decisions emerge from informal discussions over coffee, team lunches, or spontaneous conversations in a hallway. Most of us have experienced a moment when an unplanned conversation turned out to be decisive.

There is also a strong cultural dimension, particularly in countries such as France: a deep appreciation for free speech, rhetoric, and lively debate. The assumption is often that a skilled conversationalist does not need a methodology—they simply need intelligence, good intentions, and availability.

And then there is the fear of the opposite: the formal, cold, bureaucratic meeting where no one dares to speak because everything is over-structured. Negative experiences of this kind often push decision-makers toward informality.

The result: when they hire an expert in constructive dialogue such as Dreamocracy, some clients imagine they are hiring a benevolent master of ceremonies—someone who simply keeps the conversation flowing and lets the magic happen.

One person (usually a man) speaking, three others checking their emails, and one person (often a woman) listening. In short, a typical discussion.

Why Deliberation Is Not Simply Conversation

Even an excellent conversation follows implicit rules inherited from our social habits. And those habits systematically reproduce the same biases.

The dominance of certain voices

In any unstructured group, roughly 20–30% of participants generate 70–80% of the contributions. This is not a matter of bad intentions; it is simply how group dynamics tend to work. Extroverted personalities, informal hierarchies, and self-appointed experts naturally occupy more space—often at the expense of the most relevant perspectives.

Uneven consideration of arguments

A good conversation does not guarantee that all viewpoints will be explored with equal depth. Some positions receive disproportionate attention, not because they are stronger, but because they are voiced by people who are more comfortable speaking, hold greater authority, or simply happen to be more present that day.

The absence of shared information

Deliberation, in the fullest sense of the word, assumes that participants have access to a common base of information. Conversation, by contrast, begins with each person’s assumptions and perceptions—often incomplete and sometimes contradictory—with no built-in mechanism for correcting or enriching them.

The pressure of apparent consensus

Unstructured groups tend toward a false sense of harmony. Difficult issues are avoided. Participants align with the most influential individual. Doubts remain unspoken. The outcome may resemble agreement, but genuine consensus has not been achieved.

At Dreamocracy, after more than twenty years of practice and hundreds of processes facilitated across Europe and beyond, we understand deliberation as an intentional design. It does not leave groups at the mercy of their habits; it creates the conditions in which collective intelligence can genuinely emerge.

James Fishkin identified five conditions that distinguish genuine deliberation from a low-quality exchange. Image credit: Macarena Arellano, 2018, Wikimedia Commons.

Designing a deliberative process is not about making an exchange more complicated. Quite the opposite: it is about removing the invisible frictions that prevent people from thinking and expressing themselves freely.

At Dreamocracy, our design work is guided by a few key principles.

1. Structure as little as possible—but in the right places
We do not intervene in the content of discussions. We intervene in their architecture: who speaks to whom, in what sequence, with what information, and over what timeframe. A well-placed constraint can create more freedom than it limits.

2. Calibrate structure to the context
A group of peers who know one another well and collectively understand a topic does not require the same process as a diverse assembly meeting for the first time to address a difficult decision. We do not apply one-size-fits-all methodologies. We diagnose first.

3. Build spontaneity into the design
The most powerful deliberative moments we have facilitated included open spaces, informal transitions, and opportunities to pause and reflect. Spontaneity is not the opposite of structure—it is often its reward when the structure has done its job well.

4. Evaluate systematically
We assess whether minority voices were heard, whether decisions truly reflect the group rather than its dominant members, and whether participants leave feeling they have genuinely contributed. This is what distinguishes a good process from one that merely appears to be good.

We can move beyond the equivalent of a “pub chat.”

Among the formats we most frequently recommend for motivated communities and highly autonomous groups is Open Space Technology (OST).

At first glance, OST appears to be the ultimate informal format: no predefined agenda, no designated speakers, no scheduled panel discussions. Participants themselves propose topics, create discussion groups, and move freely between sessions according to the “Law of Two Feet”: if you are neither learning nor contributing, you have a responsibility to go somewhere else.

Yet OST is one of the most demanding formats imaginable—for both facilitators and participants. It is built on complete trust in collective intelligence and on the radical empowerment of every member of the group. When used in the right context, it can generate a richness and depth of outcomes that even highly structured formats struggle to achieve.

Its power lies precisely in the fact that it appears simple. And because it appears simple, it requires expert guidance to be introduced at the right moment and with the right group.

We see it regularly. When we propose formats such as OST—or, more broadly, approaches that place greater responsibility in the hands of participants—some sponsors experience a degree of anxiety.

• “What if people go off in every direction?”
• “What if the important issues are never addressed?”
• “What if a few participants dominate?”
• “What if highly militant groups took over?”
• Etc.

These concerns are understandable. They often stem from past experiences with meetings that lost focus, or from organizational cultures where control is associated with safety.

Our response is always the same: empowerment is not the absence of structure—it is a different kind of structure. One that trusts participants rather than trying to protect them from themselves.

Several convictions guide our work with cautious clients:

• Community members understand their challenges better than anyone else. Giving them ownership of the agenda is often the best way to ensure that the real issues are addressed.
• Fear of things “going off track” often reflects an implicit distrust of the community itself—a distrust that participants perceive and that undermines the quality of dialogue, even in highly controlled formats.
• Letting go of control over the process is often what allows organisations to retain control over what truly matters: the quality of decisions and collective ownership of those decisions.

We support this process of letting go. We do not impose it.

Our relationship with clients is itself a form of constructive dialogue, and it follows the same principles.

We listen, genuinely. Every organization has its own culture, history, internal political constraints, and unique communities. A process that delivers remarkable results in a mid-sized European organization cannot simply be copied and pasted into a professional association or a local government. Our first expertise is diagnosis.

But we also invite our clients to listen to us. 20 years of practice and hundreds of deliberative processes across political, social, and organisational contexts in Europe and beyond generate knowledge that we do not keep to ourselves. When we recommend one format over another, raise concerns about a risk, or propose a structure that may initially seem counterintuitive, we do so on the basis of accumulated experience that we can explain and substantiate.

For us, the ideal client relationship is one of co-design. The client brings knowledge of the context; we bring knowledge of the process. Neither is sufficient alone. Together, we have every chance of designing a deliberative experience that delivers on its promises.

When a community gathers to deliberate, it carries a powerful expectation: that the experience will be different. Different from ordinary meetings. Different from circular discussions. Different from decisions that have already been made behind closed doors. Fulfilling that promise is at the heart of our work.

Doing so requires more than goodwill and a pleasant meeting room. It requires intentional design, expertise in constructive dialogue, and a relationship of trust between sponsors, participants, and the team facilitating the process.

At Dreamocracy, we believe that groups are capable of far more than conventional formats allow them to express. Our role is to create the conditions for that collective intelligence to emerge, with as much structure as necessary, and no more.