Somewhere around eighty percent of Americans believe our society has a serious divisiveness problem. Most of us experience that divisiveness not as an abstraction but as a felt reality — in our neighborhoods, our institutions, our public life. We disagree about causes and remedies, but the diagnosis is nearly universal: something is breaking down in how we encounter each other as fellow citizens.
I have spent thirty years as a facilitator, dialogue specialist, and civic engagement consultant working on exactly this problem. What I have learned - and what research on persuasion and deliberative democracy confirms - is that the design of our public meetings is both a symptom of our divisiveness and one of the most accessible places to do something about it.
The default town hall is making things worse. A meeting where mic time goes to whoever arrives first, where the loudest voices define the community's position, and where participants leave having performed their views rather than genuinely encountered anyone else's - that meeting deepens division rather than bridging it. The quieter voices, the ambivalent middle, the people whose experiences don't fit the dominant narrative go unheard, and the group makes sense of its situation with a fraction of the knowledge it actually has available.
The ABC Method - A Better Convening - is a practical framework for redesigning public meetings around four evidence-based interventions: proportional mic allocation based on real-time polling, demographic context that shows the room who is actually present, structured story-sharing that hears from everyone rather than just the mic queue, and small group conversations that shift encounters from performance to genuine human exchange. These are not complicated changes. They are deliberate design choices that any organizer or convener can make before the meeting begins - and research consistently shows they produce meetings that feel fairer, build more trust across difference, and draw on the full collective intelligence of everyone in the room.
Princeton's enduring charge - in the nation's service, and in the service of all nations - has always implied not just individual achievement but the stewardship of civic life. Better meeting design is one modest and practical expression of that stewardship. I am in the stage of my career where getting these ideas into wider practice matters more to me than anything else I could do with what I know.
But I want to be honest about what I am actually hoping for. Making any single meeting better is worthwhile. What I am really after is something larger: a shift in the culture of how we convene -a growing expectation, held by participants and organizers alike, that public gatherings should hear from everyone, surface the full range of experience in the room, and treat collective sensemaking as something worth designing for. Many people have seen versions of these methods work in a meeting they attended - and felt the difference. The gap between knowing what works and actually changing our habits of convening is where this work lives. If the communities, organizations, or initiatives you lead or support are ready to help close that gap - in your own meetings or in the ones you fund and sponsor - I would welcome the conversation.
The free Field Kit and Quick Guide are available at www.thedialoguecompany.com. I am available for facilitation support, team training, and consultation at david@thedialoguecompany.com.