The night before the dinner, I had trouble sleeping. Why did we invite all these people? What if it doesn’t go well? What if no one speaks? What if the theme doesn’t work? I was worried about the actual conversation, the one part I assumed I could not shape ahead of time. I felt there was too much riding on our ability to facilitate a complicated conversation among fifteen strangers. And while we had spent so much time mastering every other detail down to choosing the opening welcome drink, we hadn’t given much thought to the actual structure of the conversation. We were winging it. I wanted
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