When students asked me how I chose the seating plan, they were disappointed to learn the simplicity of the criteria. (They suspected that I used some complex psychological method.)
There are two basic approaches to seating people on a course. The first is to have them sit next to somebody they know, and the second is to have them sit next to somebody they don’t know.
One of the advantages of a residential course is the opportunity to meet people with different backgrounds. To foster this, I often arranged the seating so the students sit beside someone they don’t know.
If the course intends to do team building, I would have the participants sitting in their natural work groups. This situation is one of the few times I would have managers and their people in the same group. Having a manager and one of that manager’s people on the same course can make it difficult for both parties to act naturally.
Before deciding on the seating plan, you must have some student data. The registration forms have information which indicates whether the participants know each other. Look to see whether they work in the same location, are part of the same organisation or work for the same manager. Although this approach is no substitute for local knowledge, it does have a high success rate. Without this data, a random seating plan is as good as any other. Having the students sit in sub-group order considerably helps the logistics (and the trainer’s memory).
If you know the students well enough, you may be able to avoid potentially explosive seating combinations. In practice, predicting the interactions of 20 people is just too difficult to get right. Having too many criteria makes it impossible to find a suitable seating plan.
One of the problems with traditional U-shaped seating plans is that participants are essentially sitting in one row and will only get to know the people on either side of them — or only one other person if they are sitting at the end of the “U”. One way round this is to change where people sit after the end of each session so that after a number of sessions they have sat next to everyone in the group.
The following seating plans have been designed for groups of 3 to 22 people so that when the number of people in the group (N) is even, everybody sits next to everyone else just once when the number of sessions is half the number of people in the group (N/2). When the number of people in the group is odd, Everyone will meet in (N+1)/2 sessions, but you will also get some repeats.
