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Simply because of the name, I’ve noticed that people seem to show up differently.
they’re not sure what to expect from a Visioning Lab, and they are curious.
the purpose of priming is to signal to people the tone and mood you’re going for at your gathering.
In many gatherings, your guests will benefit from being carried across a proverbial threshold, leaving the wide world and entering your small kingdom.
Managing this entry is important because none of us shows up as a blank slate to anything.
If you don’t create a passageway into your gathering for guests like these, they are going to be somewhere else in the most crucial moment of your gathering: the start.
After thirty minutes, a gong sounded, signaling that the audience could remove their headphones. Only then did Levit play the opening note.
a passageway that tunes out the prior reality and captures people’s attention and imagination. By doing so, you create a starting line and, even more important, you help your guests cross it as a collective.
Studies show that audiences disproportionately remember the first 5 percent, the last 5 percent, and a climactic moment of a talk.
quit starting with logistics.
Your opening needs to be a kind of pleasant shock therapy. It should grab people. And in grabbing them, it should both awe the guests and honor them. It must plant in them the paradoxical feeling of being totally welcomed and deeply grateful to be there.
making your guests feel like valued members of a club to which they have no business belonging.
After the initial shock therapy of honoring and awing, you have your guests’ attention. They want to be there. They feel lucky to be there. They might well be considering giving the gathering their all.
A talented gatherer doesn’t hope for disparate people to become a group. She makes them a group.
Box is an opening ritual that connects a large team to one another, clears people’s minds, and creates a passageway of sorts into rehearsal.
she’ll look out at the audience and ask, “How many of you can relate to this question?” Or, “Who also wonders about this?” In that simple act, she transforms a one-to-many speech into a collective experience.
Try to embody, with that opening, the very reason that you felt moved to bring a group of human beings together.
the conversations I was part of often remained superficially intellectual, with little realness or emotional risk.
We called it 15 Toasts, after the number of people around that inaugural table,
It is in gathering that we meet those who could help us, and it is in gathering that we pretend not to need them, because we have it all figured out.
Crucible moments, according to George, are challenging moments in our lives that shape us in some deep way and shift our lens on the world. They are stories that define us in our own minds—and that, nevertheless, seldom come up in the ordinary course of conversation.
we all wear masks, and that while masks have uses, taking them off can allow for deeper connection, shared growth, and more fruitful collaboration.
Many gatherings would be improved if people were simply asked for their stories.
“A moment a story works is usually a moment of vulnerability,”
Story is about a decision that you made. It’s not about what happens to you.
This is no longer my boss’s colleague. This is a real person who had heartbreak.
Your friends and family know who you have been, and they often make it harder to try out who you might become.
Strangers, unconnected to our pasts and, in most cases, to our futures, are easier to experiment around. They create a temporary freedom to pilot-test what we might become, however untethered that identity is to what we have been.
we asked the group to share a story, a moment, or an experience from their life that “changed the way you view the world.” Then we added the clincher: It had to be a story that no one else at the gathering knew.
If you are hoping to help your guests be more real, you need to be real yourself.
While we do ask that everyone present participate, we let people decide what and how much they want to share. And this level of choice is the difference between people being game for the evening and people resenting
“I draw a swimming pool,” he said. “There is a deep end and a shallow end. You can choose whatever end you want to enter.
I am often called in by gatherers who are looking for greater authenticity, but who are more interested in spice and heat than warmth and fuzziness.
The skilled gatherer knows not only how to make people share and connect, but also how to make things fruitfully controversial.
The group was suffering from what many of us suffer from: a well-meaning desire not to offend that devolves into a habit of saying nothing that matters. They were not getting ideas out into the open.
The responsible harnessing of good controversy—handling with structure and care what we normally avoid—is one of the most difficult, complicated, and important duties for a gatherer. When it is done well, it is also one of the most transformative.
Good controversy helps us re-examine what we hold dear: our values, priorities, nonnegotiables.
good controversy rarely happens on its own. It needs to be designed for and given structure.
bringing conflict out into the open, in a safe, regulated, constructive way.
Sometimes the key to safely bringing in generous heat is to identify the hot spots in a group and then simply organize the conversation around them, protected by some ground rules.
I had learned through a number of one-on-one interviews and conversations ahead of the gathering that the heat they most needed to face was around their identity:
I asked them all to fill out the workbook ahead of time and return it to me, and told them that their answers would be read aloud in the room, anonymously.
What do you need to feel safe here? What do you need from this group to be willing to take a risk in this conversation today?
I bring good controversy to a gathering only when I believe some good can come out of it—enough good to outweigh the risks and harm.
how you end things, like how you begin them, shapes people’s experience, sense of meaning, and memory
The announcement of last call unites the gathering of the bar around the knowledge of the night’s finitude.
Once I can see the conversation petering out after dessert, I pause, thank everyone for a beautiful evening, then suggest we move to the living room to have a nightcap. I give the guests who are tired the opportunity to leave, but both my husband and I emphasize that we’d rather everyone stay.
A last call is not a closing; it’s the beginning of an outbound ushering.
a “checkout” process, asking each person to say just one word about how they were feeling.
A strong closing has two phases, corresponding to two distinct needs among your guests: looking inward and turning outward.
