Thinking about thinking tasks

Let's start with a fictional account about a real meeting to illustrate thinking about thinking tasks in the design of community listening activities.

You live in a close-knit neighborhood and recently felt a nudge to learn more about local efforts that impact climate change. Your 3rd grade daughter keeps talking about protecting the planet when she comes home from school. Neighbors have water seeping into their basements and keep saying how unusual it is to have this many severe rain storms. You see efforts to move to renewable energy sources at the local hospital where you work as support staff.

So you make time to go to a meeting hosted by the city. The meeting is part of a community engagement effort. The city wants to hear from residents about what it might do to impact environmental conditions in your neighborhood.

You're new to all of this. And it's a challenge to carve out the time and making sure your partner is available to watch your daughter. But you want to do something.

The people who run the meeting are very friendly. They greet you at the door and make sure to say hello to everyone. You recognize a few folks at the meeting, which is well attended.

The meeting starts off with an overview of what is going to happen during the meeting. It seems pretty clear. The group is going to split up into smaller groups to have discussions around four different topics: housing, transportation, open spaces and city services. Poster boards list specific challenges for each topic area. A facilitator will guide each discussion. Your job is to rotate through all four of the small group areas, discuss, and then vote for which listed challenges you see as the most important.

You go through each station. People have a lot of opinions and many of them have nothing to do with the specific items on the poster boards. You're trying to read the 10 items listed on each board; almost all are about things you know nothing about. Zoning. City funding for open spaces. Designated truck routes. One item on the city services board was about alleys and neighborhood flooding. Is that the cause of flooding in your neighborhood? You're not sure but vote for that challenge as one of your top issues.

For the rest of the poster boards you do your best at voting your priorities based on what seems reasonable, or what you heard folks discussing during your visit to that small group.

Folks seem to be trickling out after they visit each area. So you leave.

What's going on here?

This is an example of meeting designers not thinking about thinking tasks. Of prioritizing their data collection needs over participant experience and needs. It's based on my experience at a real meeting; the character is fictional but the meeting setup and details are true to the actual event.

Let's unpack this.

We might hypothesize that the person attending the meeting is motivated by two needs:

• "I want to learn more about local efforts to impact climate change."
• "I want to be a good neighbor."

The meeting organizers, on the other hand, are motivated by two different needs:

• "We need quantified data on neighborhood priorities."
• "We want to hear how residents experience these challenges."

Now imagine 40 individuals attending this meeting. For the organizers, the motivation and needs remain the same. For attendees, there are a diverse range of motivations. Some may have one specific issue for which they wish to advocate. Some may be well versed in climate issues or city services or open spaces and natural habitat impact on the environment, and are familiar with a number of the challenges listed on the poster boards. Some may simply be first-timers finding a way to be good neighbors and learn something.

But the design of the event declares: The organizers' needs prevail. They control the flow. Attendees comply.

It's a common trap. The output we (the organizers) want is data about how residents prioritize the issues that we (the organizers) define. Voting is one way to get that data. How prepared are participants to make the decisions we ask them to make when voting? In this case, the majority of participants are not well prepared. The challenges and concepts we ask them to judge are complex or unfamiliar to them.

The votes end up being ill-informed choices. If you ask people to vote on something, they will. Are we really gathering meaningful data, then?

Instead we need to explore: Where is the sweet spot between participant knowledge, experience and motivations, and the outcomes we (the organizers) wish to achieve?

That gets us to focus on who we are working with, what experience and insight they might bring to our activity, and how we might adjust the way we think about getting to our outcomes. Voting may be a good data-gathering method but perhaps we need to think more deeply about what folks vote on.

Thinking about thinking tasks also forces us to consider the cognitive effort folks must put into whatever activities we plan. Some tasks take more thinking effort than others. Building small group consensus or co-creating solution ideas are more challenging than recounting routine lived experiences from memory, for example. Dot voting to make a decision can be simple or complex, depending on the voting setup.

Being aware of cognitive effort helps us employ strategies to adapt to the effort required or to reduce unnecessary effort.

What types of thinking tasks may we desire participants to perform? Here are a few I've experienced in various community listening settings:

• Tap into participant memories and share actual lived experiences
• Make a decision
• Brainstorm solution ideas (individually and/or with others)
• Co-create solution ideas with other participants
• Build consensus
• Some mix of the above (i.e., brainstorming and building consensus)

Design guidance

Paying attention to cognitive effort and different types of thinking tasks comes from my years of experience as an educator.

My colleagues and I designed and delivered courses for a professional graduate degree program. Students were all working professionals. We taught using a problem-based design approach; students had to learn both theory and practice and then apply both to solving a real challenge.

Courses were delivered in many formats. Three-hour classroom sessions. Two-day-long face-to-face working sessions. Live online sessions, ranging from one-hour long weeknight sessions to 12 hours delivered over two weekend days (during the pandemic). Self-paced online activities where students did both individual work and collaborated with each other. All of these pieces coming together, week-by-week, during a 10-week-long quarter.

I share this just to note that we had to deal with many different types of constraints while attempting to engage participants in a wide range of thinking activities: brainstorming, decision making, sense-making, reflection, group collaboration, and more.

When doing that you learn quickly to pay attention to cognitive effort and participant experience. Students have different backgrounds and professional experience. Doing things online creates a different type of cognitive effort than doing things in person. Long days are different than 1 or 3 hour sessions.

What I share here as design guidance are the types of questions I've learned, through experience, to ask myself when thinking about thinking tasks:

• What do we know about what participants already know about a topic? Are they new to it altogether? Novices? Expert? All three? This will inform how much we might need to help folks learn before we ask them to do something.
• Do they need to unlearn something - some habit or mental model - before engaging in an activity? Example: If we want folks to share real lived experiences, we might need to break the habit of folks sharing opinions or solution ideas that are not grounded in lived experience.
• How might we reframe a topic, narrow it down, or make it more familiar to keep folks actively thinking? You learn pretty quickly in a classroom to recognize the difference between folks actively thinking and folks you've just lost. Narrowing a topic down is also a way to address the issue of working with folks who are new or novices to a topic.
• How might we build a ladder to get to where we want folks to be when they make a decision or judgment? Build understanding step-by-step until we get to the shared understanding of a challenge upon which to base decision making.
• Based on our experience, how much time do we need to give folks to do this thinking? Do they need practice before they do something? Do they need time alone for thinking? How much time do we really need if there is a small group wrestling with some topic? Small groups need warmup time to get going, and space to tease out full participation.

Undoubtedly, there are more. The trick is to learn how to check your assumptions and learn from your experiences as you try to get folks to really engage their best minds. Focus on what folks actually bring to your activity and search for that sweet spot between what they bring and what you desire as your outcome.

In the meeting setup described at the beginning of this post, this might mean rethinking what types of items that are shared on each poster board and how participants rate them. For example: Limit items to challenges that can be described in a way that connects with real experience - "I often hear truck traffic," "I see neighborhood flooding after storms," "I go to the park (tell me about the last time you went)." Have discussions about frequency of these experiences, their impact and how it affects day-to-day lives. After discussions, folks might rate challenges as "high impact" or "moderate impact."

This means the organizers would have to interpret this input and connect them to policy and practices - zoning, open space funding, traffic engineering. But that is the point: Don't put the policy judgment on folks who are not familiar with policy. Have the policy people do the hard work of crafting policy and practice that creates the conditions for improved neighborhood experience.

Finally: Acknowledge the fact that folks take time out of their busy lives to be good neighbors, or good citizens. If we ask for their time and thinking we should explicitly and repeatedly acknowledge how much we appreciate it, and reinforce the values of civic responsibility.

One more bit of guidance. And it gets to having humility about all design choices you make.

Somewhere along my learning-how-to-teach journey, I came across advice to remember that what you envision in your design changes the moment it meets the folks who experience your design.

"Teach to the class you have. Not the class you designed for."

It's a reminder that we work with real humans, who bring all their humanity with them to whatever event or activity we create. It's not a failure when something happens that we did not anticipate in our design. It's learning.

The photographs which accompany these posts are taken by me, and show different settings and views of Evanston (where I live). It is a visual reminder that this is the most important setting for belonging and contributing to community: our neighborhoods, our cities.

Jeff Merrell - Community Listening © 2026 by Jeff Merrell is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0