The purpose of choosing a speaking order (in a go-round for example, or any time you are seeking to harvest thinking from the group) is to encourage contributions from people who might be the least likely to speak up. Here is a general order for that purpose.
- Start with young people (aged less than 21), young people of the global majority first and, within that group, indigenous people first and then immigrants, possibly in order of their class if you know it (raised poor, campesinos and working class go before people from the lower and upper middle class who go next, owning class go last).
- People of the Global Majority (black and brown people) – indigenous people first and then immigrants (meaning that, in the Americas for example, people of Spanish descent go after people with native backgounds.
- White people go last.
Gender is another layer of nuance – LGBTQI people go first, women follow and men go last.
All of this depends on what we know about our group. In longer term groups we will know much more about each other than in short term groups so our ordering can be more refined.
In some groups this kind of arranging can be transparent (you can tell people how you are making the choices and they will appreciate the need to do this rebalancing).
In other groups this approach can restimulate the people who usually expect to get the bulk of the air time in which case the process needs to be used in an informal and invisible way without announcement. That is true of all the tools we have been discussing so far.