So often I’m called in to help lead conversations about mission, value, and purpose. When, really, the only questions that matter are those that tell us who we are and wish to be.

• How would our organization respond were we to hear all the things that are being said, regardless if they are being said with words or deeds? 

• What does it mean to be a leader at our organization? 

• What does it mean to be grown, a fully actualized adult? 

• How would we feel if our children were to work for the company we’ve created or the team we lead? 

• How has the unsorted baggage of what has happened to us shaped who we are as leaders? 

• When our employees and colleagues leave our sides and our company, what do we want them to say about our time together? 

• What do we believe to be true about the world? 

• What do we, as a community of people working toward a common goal, believe the world needs?

In movement work, I have been facilitating groups to shift from a culture of strategic planning to one of strategic intentions—what are our intentions, informed by our vision?

What do we need to be and do to bring our vision to pass? How do we bring those intentions to life throughout every change, in every aspect of our work?

This often results in groups centering work that doesn’t depend on factors outside of their control (such as funders, or elections, which come and go and should be well used but not directive or debilitating). The clearer you are as a group about where you’re going, the more you can relax into collaborative innovation around how to get there. You can relax into

decentralization, and you want to.

If the vision is only clear to one person, that person ends up trying to drive everyone towards their vision, or at minimum control how everyone gets to the vision. That makes sense,

and it’s so exhausting. Decentralized work requires more trust building on the front end, but ultimately it is easier, more fluid.

2. Invite the right people.

We invite people to meetings for a lot of the wrong reasons—obligation, guilt, representation…even love. The questions to ask when shaping the invitation list are: “Who is directly impacted by this issue?”; “Who is doing compelling work on this issue?”; and “Who can move this work forward?” Inviting the right people means we aren’t wasting time by renegotiating the goals nonstop throughout the meeting and/or managing the dissonance that occurs (righteously in my opinion) when a participant, who shouldn’t be at the meeting, tries to make it worth their time by derailing the process of advancing the stated goals. Everyone should be able to be themselves and move their own agendas in the space if the invitation list is right.

Now, right people doesn’t mean easy people—conflict and difference are often an important part of advancing the work, bringing the real issues into the room. Trust is built when the right people are in the right room, and can bring their opinions and work into a container that advances their individual and collective goals.

4. A living agenda.

Develop a spacious, adaptable agenda so the participants can shape the meeting.

Again, our tendency is to make use of the precious in- person time of a meeting by filling up every minute, from the beginning to the end of the day, with formal session time, creating schedules that are hard to change when new information comes along. These agendas are often burdened by an unrealistic hope, an underestimation of how long conversations may actually take. Most conversations need at least 1.5 hours to adequately cover a basic orientation around the content, identify what is needed, and identify clear next steps. And that’s conservative.

Add an introduction round and you have a two- to three-hour conversation.

A meaningful full group conversation needs roughly five minutes per person. Underscheduling the amount of time a conversation needs means that energy will start to build up as people look for a way to release their thoughts and ideas into the group. Pair this with the power dynamics that often emerge—that some people feel really comfortable talking, and others don’t—and you have a frustrating waste of time on your

on your hands.

Folks are so used to not being heard. So used to not getting their needs met. When people feel heard, the time starts to expand as people move past expressing and start to be able to listen.

5. Listen with love!

The participants absolutely mean to be listening to each other, but their own agendas might fill up their ears with misunderstandings or frustrations. Your work as a facilitator is to listen to the needs of the group, help the participants to be clear to and with each other, and make sure you actually understand what folks in the room need.

Listen to the feedback you request that comes directly, and to the other feedback that flows in from the edges, the participants who need something more…

Taking time to hear the participants in the margins of the agenda can actually help get the event on point. And I can’t count the number of times a disgruntled participant was actually just misunderstanding something that, when clarified, made them a star participant.

There is a conversation in the room that wants and needs to be had. Don’t force it, don’t deny it. Let it come forth.