Broke our book club's 3-month slump with a single rule change

My group had 7 straight meetings where nobody finished the book, and the conversations were dead within 20 minutes. I suggested we pick our next 3 books by ranked choice voting instead of the usual free-for-all, and it actually got people engaged again. Has anyone else tried changing up the selection process to fix low participation?

2 comments

2 Comments

riverowens24d ago

Wouldn't ranked choice voting just let the loudest people still control the result?

beth_ward8010d ago

Riverowens beat me to the punch on this, but honestly the loudest people in my group are the ones who never finish the book anyway so their ranked choices were all over the place. The real trick was making people submit their picks before the meeting so nobody got talked into something they didn't actually want. I also made the mistake of suggesting we read a 600 page biography as one of the three books, which probably helped kill the slump by giving everyone something to mock me for. Sometimes having a clearly terrible option in the mix makes people care enough to vote against it, which is basically how I got us to read a collection of short stories instead.