Spending the time asking such questions helps further prime your guests to take chances in the conversation and to listen more deeply than they otherwise might. Getting them to participate in creating the rules, as opposed to just presenting the rules myself, is also a way to begin naming and acknowledging past behaviors at some of their meetings that served to shut people down—behaviors now inspiring the suggestion of new rules to foster new behaviors. It also lends a legitimacy to the rules. It lets the facilitator say: “These are the rules you said you wanted.”
