Fishbowl discussions

Also called: goldfish bowl.

Why use this exercise?

Fishbowl discussions allow a group to explore and develop a dialogue or conversation around an issue, from a variety of points of view. Because it involves only part of the group at any given time it allows participants to choose the level of their involvement in the discussion.

How to run the exercise

1. Create a circle of chairs in the centre of your room. Have a bigger circle of chairs around the outside of the inner circle.
    
2. Ask for volunteers to have a discussion on your topic from a variety of perspectives.
    
3. You could allot the initial participants specific roles, such as banana farmer, supermarket manager, corporate executive, consumer.
    
4. Have one more chair than you have volunteers.
    
5. Give the volunteers a discussion topic (something that will provoke a response) and ask them to hold a conversation.
    
6. The rest of the group sit in the outer circle and observe.
    
7. If at any time one of the outer circle wants to join the discussion, they simply occupy the empty chair. At this point someone else must leave the circle. One of the 'groundrules' of this exercise is that there's always an empty chair.
    
8. The discussion continues until you feel it has reached an adequate conclusion.
    
9. If certain roles aren't being represented, feel free to suggest an observer takes them on and joins the inner circle... “No-one's really argued from the point of view of the consumer yet, can someone take that on?”...
    
10. You can pause the action and provide a new topic if need be.
     
11. Bring the observers in at the end and ask them to feedback on the discussion - which arguments were they most persuaded by and why, for example.
     

Time

An exercise like this takes at least 5 minutes to set up and explain. After that, it depends on how deep a discussion you want, and how many topics you want to cover. You'll need at least 20 minutes.

Notes

• It's important to ask for volunteers and make sure the observers know what their role is.
   
• You may need to give the volunteers time to get into role and ask questions about their roles.
   
• You'll almost certainly need to think of strategies to ensure that it's not only the four or five most vocal people that dominate the discussion. There are some ideas in the Variations section below.
   

Variations

There are many ways of using fishbowls. This is just one. Here are some more ideas:

Have the same number of chairs as volunteers and labelling the chairs with a point of view. If someone wants to take over that point of view they simply touch the chair's current occupant on the shoulder and swap places with them (you may need to 'police' this to make sure people respect the protocol and do vacate their seat).

Have a 'groundrule' that a person can only join the inner circle once, or alternatively that they can go back in as many times as they like.

Volunteers can leave the circle whenever they want, 'forcing' an observer to take a seat - there can only be one empty chair remember!

Have a time limit before which new participants can join the circle - in other words ring fencing the first 5 minutes for the original volunteers and then throwing it open to others to join. Alternatively, you could say that all volunteers need to relinquish their seat after a certain time, so that no-one has more than 5 minutes in a role.