Notes from a village hall

Record scratch; freeze frame… yes, it’s me, John, in the King Edward Hall in Lindfield last night. You might be wondering how I got here - well, let me take you back a few months…

Back in June this year, I went to my first screening of the People’s Emergency Briefing in Haywards Heath, hosted by a local group called Fairer World Lindfield.

It is a shortened version of a National Emergency Briefing which was held in November 2025 in London, attended by 1,200 politicians and leaders from business, culture, faith, sport and the media.

The People’s Emergency Briefing is like the Gogglebox version of that day; a 50 minute film with Chris Packham sitting on a sofa with people (both famous folks and normal folks) watching the briefings and reacting, discussing and swearing (I’m looking at you, national treasure Jennifer Saunders).

They are asking communities to host screenings. Which is how I ended up at the screening in Haywards Heath.

After the film stopped, there was a conversation held in the room, as suggested by the facilitator guide. I asked a few questions, and offered some perspectives gained from the last three years of STEPS Collective activities.

Little did I know there were some folks from Lindfield Parish Council in the room, who later asked me if I would host their screening.

I had by that point already signed up to the Design Declares! screening of the film, hosted at Nesta and facilitated by Tony Elkington. I went along to that with a keen eye for what might work in the conversation afterwards. When we were all asked to commit to doing something afterwards, I promised I would share my facilitator notes and approach from the Lindfield screening.

So this is what we did in Lindfield, with some links to the resources we designed to help people discuss and commit to things we could do locally.

Cards. Of course.

Given there were nine experts each giving a briefing about a key area, I wanted to use cards to help small groups of people discuss precisely what they’d heard after the event.

(Those of you who have been following me for a while will know how valuable we find cards in our practice).

Using the briefing notes from the National Emergency Briefing site (a summary of the key issues and solutions from each expert’s talk), I design two sided cards - one side with the issues, the other with some solutions.

You can download all the design files for free here on the Smithery site - for printing at home, sending to a printer, or using with online whiteboards.

The method I wanted to use for facilitation was ‘The Diamond Nine’, as taught to me by Debbie Penglis and Peter Hyman years ago when we worked with School 21 on our Time Capsules from the Future project with The Royal Society.

It’s a beautifully simple idea. You have nine things. You discuss as a group, and put the most important of those things to you at the top.

Then the two next most important. Then the next three, two more, and finally the least important one goes to the bottom. That is not to say it is unimportant. It is just the least important of those nine.

The reasons for using this at our People’s Emergency Briefing were as follows.

Firstly, even in the 50 minute film version, there is a lot going on.

Asking the audience in a local screening to react to all of it makes some pretty big assumptions about what they’ve managed to retain. Having simple summaries in front of them is a useful prompt for discussion.

Secondly, having these prompts as cards allows people to move around and prioritise, making informed judgements on which go where when making a rough map of the priorities as they seem them.

We captured pictures of all the diamond nines from each table, which we are going to use to create a grouped set of priorities later in our wrap-up. This will give Lindfield Parish Council a useful read on which things a room of the people they represent would set out as their priorities (e.g. every group had Nature in their top three)

Thirdly, one of the main things that the film asks communities to do is write to their MP to get them to support showing it as a national TV event. Now, our MP (Alison Bennett) is already signed up to this campaign, which is great! But it means we had to think of what else we wanted people to do.

When people turned over the top three cards in their diamond, the facilitators asked them to either think about solutions there we could:

1. apply locally as suggested

2. use as inspiration to inform a locally relevant idea

3. combine two or three solutions across cards that brought together two or three connected issues

Finally, we asked people to fill in a Commitment Card that they could take home and put on the fridge, or somewhere else visible.

The card is fairly simply: the first part starts ‘We could’, and the second part starts with ‘So I will…’.

We wanted people to write their own articulation of the ideas the group was discussing, and then take them home with something they will personally do to start it. Time will tell what happens next!

One thing we do know is that Lindfield Parish Council now has ten decks of the cards to use as a community resource, so other groups can ask to borrow them for their own screening.

As I mentioned before, you can download all the design files for free from the Smithery site.

If you are running briefing, want to, or know of someone else doing one, please do send them this over.

You can see an album of pictures from our event too, if you want to see more of the setup.

Finally, do get in touch if you have any more questions.

John V Willshire
24th October 2026