I want to tell you about a meeting I facilitated that should have been a retreat.

The organization had just gone through a leadership transition. Staff morale was low. Trust between departments had eroded. The new executive director wanted to bring the team together to rebuild connection and align on a shared vision for the next couple of years ahead.

So they scheduled a two-day in-person planning meeting.

The agenda was packed. Every hour had a deliverable. There were presentations, working groups, breakout sessions with report-backs, and a strategic planning exercise squeezed into the final afternoon. The venue was nice. There were windows and natural light. The food was decent. On paper, it looked like a thoughtful investment in the team.

But by the end of day one, I could feel the room deflating. People were going through the motions. The conversations that needed to happen, the honest ones about trust, fear, what had broken and whether it could be repaired, never found space because the format did not allow for them. Every time the room got close to something real, the agenda, ironically enough, intervened.

The problem was not the facilitation. The problem was not the people. The problem was the format. They needed a retreat. They got a meeting in a nicer building.

The Format Default

Here is something I have noticed over the years of facilitating: most conveners choose their format before asking what the room actually needs. The decision is usually made based on habit, budget, or what the organization did last time. Someone says, “Let’s do a retreat,” “Let’s plan a conference,” or “Let’s schedule a meeting,” and the format is locked before anyone asks the two questions we keep coming back to in this series: What is the intent, and who is being centered?

The result is rooms that are well-produced but poorly matched to their purpose. A conference when a summit would have been more effective. A panel when a fireside chat would have gone deeper. A plenary for 300 when the real work needed to happen in workshops or breakout groups of 20. A meeting when the room needed space to breathe, reflect, and reconnect.

The format is not neutral. It shapes everything: who speaks, how long they speak, what kind of participation is possible, how people connect (or do not), and whether the room can hold what it actually needs to hold. Choosing the wrong format is like writing a speech when the room needed a conversation. The content might be excellent. But the container is wrong.

The Difference Between a Meeting, a Work Session, and a Retreat

One of the most common format confusions I encounter is between these three. They get used interchangeably, and they should not be, because they create fundamentally different experiences for the people in the room.

A meeting is task-oriented. It has an agenda, a timeframe, and an expected outcome. The purpose is to make decisions, share updates, or align on next steps. A meeting can last 30 minutes or a full day, and an extended or multi-day meeting is still a meeting if the pace is packed and the outcomes are predetermined. Calling it something else does not change what it is.

A work session lives between a meeting and a retreat. It is more intensive and focused than a regular meeting, often spanning a half-day or more, and its purpose is production: building a strategic plan, designing a campaign, or developing a budget. The measure of success is output. It is not a meeting because it requires deeper, sustained attention. It is not a retreat because the purpose is to produce, not to connect.

A retreat is designed for spaciousness. It intentionally slows the pace, changes the environment, and creates conditions for reflection, connection, and renewal that are not possible inside the rhythm of a regular workday or environment. A retreat that centers its participants builds in unstructured time, honors the body, and does not fill every moment with programming. The best retreats leave room for the conversations nobody planned, but everyone needed.

The worst retreats are just meetings with candles.

If you have ever been to a “retreat” with a packed agenda, back-to-back sessions, including meals and mandatory fun, and multiple strategic planning exercises or professional development sessions squeezed in, you know what I mean. The organization promised spaciousness, but delivered a meeting in a nicer venue. And the participants in the room could feel the gap between what was advertised and what was delivered.

The Format Shapes the Experience (Whether You Design It or Not)

I wrote recently about the big conference being broken. But the conference is not the only format that defaults to autopilot. The same thing happens at every scale:

The default panel. Five speakers, one moderator, 60 minutes, and a Q&A that gets cut because the panelists talked too long. The panel is the format people choose when they cannot decide what they actually want. It is the path of least resistance, and it almost always centers the speakers instead of the audience. If you find yourself scheduling a panel, ask: Would a fireside chat between two of these people go deeper? Would a facilitated conversation with the audience be more valuable? Would a workshop let people actually practice what the panelists are describing?

The default reception. Cash bar, appetizer table, 90 minutes of unstructured mingling. For people who are natural networkers, this format is fine. For everyone else, it is 90 minutes of standing alone near the charcuterie board, wondering when it is acceptable to leave. A reception that centers its participants would include at least one structured (but not forced) way for people to connect with someone they do not already know. And as Carmen wrote in our last piece, it should be fun.

The default town hall. The elected official or company executive talks for 40 minutes, the audience gets 20 minutes for questions, and the person with the most confidence (not necessarily the most important question) gets the mic. A town hall that centers the community would flip that ratio entirely.

What we have learned is that in many cases, the format was chosen out of habit. And in those cases, a different format would have served the people in the room better.

Three Questions Before You Choose a Format

Before you choose your format for your next convening, sit with these three questions:

1. What does the room actually need? Not what do you want to present, or what did you do last year, or what fits the budget. What do the people in this room need in order to leave differently than they arrived? If they need information, a presentation works. If they need skills, a workshop works. If they need connection, a retreat or a dinner might be right. If they need to make decisions, a work session is the format. The need should drive the format, not the other way around.

2. Does this format match the depth of what you are trying to do? A 60-minute panel cannot rebuild trust. A half-day meeting cannot replace a retreat. A plenary cannot create intimacy. Be honest about the depth of the work and choose a format that can actually hold it. If the format cannot hold the purpose, either change the format or change the expectation, and then make sure you communicate it to the participants.

3. If you took the format away, would you design the same thing? This is the question from our tradition piece applied to format. If you were starting from scratch, with only the people and the purpose in front of you, would you build this exact experience? If the answer is no, you are letting the format dictate the convening instead of the convening dictating the format.

The format is the container. And the container shapes what is possible inside it.

A room that needs space to breathe will suffocate inside a packed agenda. A room that needs depth will skim across a panel with multiple people. A room that needs honesty will perform through a plenary. Not because the people in the room were unwilling, but because the format did not allow it.

I have been in rooms where the content was excellent, and the format was wrong. And I have been in rooms where the content was simple, and the format was perfect. The second kind always produces better outcomes. Because when the container fits the purpose, the people inside it can do what they came to do.

So before your next convening, before you book the venue or design the program or invite the speakers, ask yourself the simplest question: is this the right format for what this room actually needs?

If you are not sure, stay tuned. Carmen and I have been building something that might help.

This conversation is better with more people in the room.

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I used to be a pretty cool DJ for some of the nation’s top political events. DJing gave me all kinds of opportunities to be in big rooms with presidential candidates, politicos, celebrities, and VERY stressed-out staff people with headsets saying things like, “Can we get eyes on the Senator?” It also gave me one of the best educations I have ever had in convening, because when you are the DJ, you are not just there for the music. You are standing in the weird little intersection of the vibe, logistics, ego, production, panic, and performance.

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You see everything—from the front to the back of the house. You observe what the audience is doing and what the staff is trying not to do (which is crash out). You see who planned for the energy of the space, and who thought a panel of seven people with no slides was somehow going to save democracy.

In 2019, two organizations that really knew how to put on an event were MoveOn and Planned Parenthood Action Fund (PPAF). After Greg’s last post on the issues with the big conference format, the former CEO of MoveOn, Rahna Epting, commented on my LinkedIn and sent me a message that took me down memory lane. Imagine, it’s the Pre-Trump era. This is back when political events were trying to get people activated without making them want to fake a family emergency and leave during lunch. MoveOn and PPAF played a critical role in our ecosystem in bringing people together, and in almost all of the events I got to be part of, they made it happen without the room feeling like a hostage situation (which is no small feat).

The Planned Parenthood Effect: democracy, but make it a party!

The first event, We the People, was hosted by Planned Parenthood Action Fund in a theater in Washington, D.C. I was there as the DJ (and I was also on staff at PPAF at the time) with my instructor, DJ Sixth Sense, because I was petrified I would mess up.

The room was electric, and our esteemed host, Kelley Robinson (now president of the Human Rights Campaign), had the floor. Coalition partners everywhere, candidates with their chiefs of staff, and PPAF staff people who actually seemed to know what the hell they were doing, which is always very sexy in an organizing space. The event was political, but it was also fun. Which, frankly, is something too many progressive spaces still treat like a suspicious concept.

Sometimes folks act as if people having fun means they are not being serious enough about liberation, and I reject that.

PPAF understood something simple: if you want people energized, the room has to have energy (not a foreign concept and yet…). If you want them activated, the event itself has to feel activating, and if you want people to believe another world is possible, the atmosphere cannot feel like a mandatory training followed by dry cookies.

While many people hire DJ’s with good intentions, I learned that most people forget the DJ. They remember the speakers, the stage, the program, the candidate with the walk-on song, but they don’t always remember that there is a human being over there literally creating the emotional weather of the room, and probably playing the role of a second host.

PPAF event planners and designers did NOT forget that.

They respected the people behind the scenes, and they understood that energy is not accidental—it is built and adjusted in real time, part of the overall event experience and the strategy for building political power.

The MoveOn Moment: if you stay ready, you ain’t got to get ready

The second event was in 2019 in San Francisco, and I was sooooo excited. A Big Ideas forum featuring major Democratic candidates such as then-Senator Kamala Harris, Senators Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, and Elizabeth Warren —to name a few—and I was geeked to be the house DJ.

This event was polished in a way that actually changed how I thought about convening and event production.

They had every major news outlet (CNN, MSNBC, Fox, you name it), sophisticated production, excellent sound, and a real security team with a plan. They had professional makeup artists (because HD is unforgiving), hairstylists, and a full stage crew managing every detail.

Too many groups are out here trying to produce major public events with one Canva account, two exhausted staff people, and the audacity of hope, but MoveOn was not doing that. They hired the right people, and it created organization and confidence. It invited the kind of room where people could focus on the event instead of trying to survive the lack of planning.

Then, because life loves a test, the planning got tested.

Right before we went on, we did a real security briefing. With all of those candidates, there was a chance someone might try to protest, so we had a simple but serious plan for who would move, who would respond, and how we’d keep the crowd calm.

Then in the middle of the event, while I was on stage minding my own business, watching Karine Jean-Pierre (who later became White House Press Secretary under President Biden) interviewed Kamala Harris about her big idea, and mid-sentence, a PROTESTOR JUMPED ON THE STAGE.

Y’all, I wanted to pass out.

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I didn’t know if it was a hostile takeover or a hippie trying to grab the mic, but I knew in the moment we needed to spring into action—so we did. Karine literally did the best interception of life and protected Vice President Harris. I saw her husband, Doug, and Secret Service run out there faster than I could turn my head, and when I looked into the crowd, all I saw was panic. So I got my act in order, grabbed the mic while all the chaos was unfolding next to me, and used humor and my talking points to calm the crowd down. Between linebacker Karine and my mic check, the audience was at ease-ish.

The room could have easily gone into chaos, but it didn’t.

Not because everybody magically rose to the occasion, because they had a plan, and Karine was incredible. The security team knew what to do. The production people knew what to do, and I knew what to do. The event did not fall apart because the people responsible for holding it had actually imagined that life might happen.

That is not a strategy, and it's a recipe for burnout and disaster.

What both events taught me

These were two very different events. Different vibes. Same truth.

Here’s my hot take: plan your events to be a good time. I know that is controversial in circles where suffering feels like a sign of seriousness, but I stand by it. You can do hard things and still create a room people are excited to be in. You can build power and let people breathe. You can talk about democracy without making the room feel like detention.

And please plan for what could go wrong, because “we will figure it out” is not a strategy; it is a threat. It’s a threat to your staff, your speakers, your audience, and whoever ultimately bears the consequences of your underplanning.

My very humble professional recommendation: if you want to have the best event, hire a DJ. At a minimum, hire someone whose whole job is to care about the energy in the room—because someone should.

Too many events are out here expecting a panel discussion and a bowl of mixed greens to carry the spirit of the people.

That is not enough. Not for power, definitely not for joy, and certainly not for what people paid to be there.

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I have been to a lot of conferences.

Hundreds, probably. In hotel ballrooms and convention centers and university auditoriums. In DC, in Atlanta, in Las Vegas, in Detroit, in cities I only ever saw from the inside of a venue. Two-day conferences and four-day conferences and week-long conferences, where by Wednesday everyone is running on caffeine, carbs, and obligation.

I have keynoted at conferences. I have facilitated at conferences. I have sat in the back of conferences watching rooms of smart, passionate people slowly disengage while a panel ran 20 minutes over, and nobody stopped it.

And here is what I have come to believe: the big conference, as most of us know it, is broken. Not beyond repair. But broken in ways so normalized that we have stopped noticing.

We keep building the same room. And we keep wondering why the most meaningful moments happen outside of it.

The Template Nobody Voted For

If you have been to one big conference, you have been to most of them. The format is remarkably consistent across sectors, across industries, across decades:

Opening plenary with a keynote. Breakout sessions. Lunch (where the real networking happens, but which gets the least design attention). More panels, sometimes with enough speakers to be a conference within a conference. A reception with a cash bar or an open bar, depending on the budget. Maybe an awards ceremony and gala. Closing plenary that half the room has already left before it starts because their flights were booked for early afternoon.

This format has not fundamentally changed in my lifetime. The technology has improved. The production values have gone up. But the underlying architecture of the experience, who speaks, how long they speak, what the audience does (mostly sit and listen), how connection happens (mostly by accident), has remained the same.

Nobody voted for this template. It just got inherited. And because it is the default, it carries the weight of tradition, which, as Carmen and I wrote in an earlier piece, makes it feel permanent when it is actually just antiquated.

What Is Actually Broken

Let me be specific about what I have noticed, because “broken” is a big word and I want to earn it.

The stage is centered instead of the room. Most big conferences are designed for the people on stage, not the people in the seats. The keynote gets 60 minutes. The audience gets a five-minute Q&A. The panels are curated based on who the organizers want to feature, not what the attendees need to learn. The result is a room where the most important people are the ones with microphones, and everyone else is there to receive.

That is not convening. That is a performance. And that is not the only thing broken.

Connection is left to chance. Ask anyone what the best part of a conference was and they will almost never name a session. They will name a conversation they had in the hallway. A person they met at lunch. A late-night lobby exchange that turned into a collaboration. The most valuable thing about bringing people together, the connections between them, is the one thing most conferences do not intentionally design for at all. It just happens in the cracks of the schedule.

The shadow contracts are relentless. We wrote about shadow contracts a few weeks ago, the unspoken rules that run a room. At big conferences, those rules multiply exponentially. Do not leave a session early, even if it is not serving you. Do not skip the plenary, even if you need the time more than the content. Network during the breaks, which actually means perform during the breaks where you may be trying to use the restroom or grab a snack. Be seen at the reception. Stay for the whole thing. These unspoken expectations shape people’s experience more than any session description in the program.

The format assumes one kind of learner, one kind of body, and one kind of energy. Sit. Listen. Process. Repeat. For eight to ten hours. The big conference is built for people who learn by hearing, who can sit for long periods, who are energized by large groups, and who can process in real time. If that is not you, and for many people it is not, the conference was not designed for your participation. It was designed for your attendance.

What 10,000 People on a Ship Taught Me About Conferences

I wrote in our very first Culture of Convening piece about spending time aboard Royal Caribbean’s Utopia of the Seas, a floating city carrying roughly 10,000 people. I keep coming back to that experience because it challenges some of my assumptions about convening at scale.

A cruise ship convenes more people than almost any conference I have attended. And it does several things that most conferences refuse to do:

It gives people choices. At any given moment, there are dozens of things happening on that ship. You can be at the pool, at a show, at a restaurant, at a rock climbing wall, at a fitness class, on an excursion, or in your room doing nothing. Nobody is expected to be in one place at one time. The convening is designed around the reality that 10,000 people have 10,000 different needs, and the answer is not to force everyone into the same room. It is to create enough rooms that everyone finds theirs.

It designs for the body. The ship plans for when people will be hungry, when they will be tired, when they will want to move, and when they will want to rest. The food is available at multiple times in multiple formats. The spaces are designed for different energy levels. Nobody expects you to sit in a ballroom for four hours and then “network” over a cash bar appetizer plate.

It creates shared experience without forced participation. The themed deck party, the evening show, the sunrise yoga: these are shared reference points that give strangers common ground. But nobody is required to attend any of them. The participation is opt-in, which means the people who show up actually want to be there. And that changes the energy of every room.

I am not saying every conference should be a cruise (but imagine if it were?). I am saying that a cruise ship, designed for strangers who never chose each other, manages to center the people in the room better than most conferences designed for communities who already share a purpose. That should agitate those of us who convene.

What Would It Look Like to Redesign the Big Conference?

I am not here to say that we should abolish the conference. People need to come together. The desire for it is real, especially as more workplaces are exploring virtual or hybrid environments. The purpose is real, particualrly when people can agree there is a different energy when you are face to face with others. What I am saying is that the format deserves the same interrogation we have been applying to every other convening tradition in this series.

So here is what I would ask any conference organizer to sit with:

What if the best sessions were designed for 30 people instead of 300? Depth over breadth. Conversation over presentation. What if the conference had fewer sessions but each one was designed for actual engagement, not passive consumption?

What if connection was designed, not accidental? What if the hallway conversations, the lobby exchanges, the lunch connections were treated as core programming instead of happy accidents? What if there were structured (but not forced) opportunities for people to meet the person they did not know they needed to meet?

What if the schedule had breathing room? What if there were gaps in the agenda that were not failures of planning but features of design? Time to process. Time to rest. Time to have the conversation that the last session sparked. Time to be a human in a body that has been sitting since 8 AM.

What if people could opt in instead of being expected to endure? What if attendance at every session was genuinely optional, and the measure of success was not how full the room was but how present the people in it were?

What if the closing plenary was worth staying for? If half your room has left before the closing session, that is not a scheduling problem. That is a design problem. The room is telling you something. The question is whether you are paying attention.

In our very first piece, Carmen and I wrote that the conference is not the ceiling of convening. It is barely the floor.

I still believe that. But I also believe the conference can be more than what it has become. It can be a place where people are actually centered, not just present. Where the format serves the room instead of the room serving the format. Where the most meaningful moment is not the one that happened by accident in the hallway, but the one that was designed with the same intention and care as the keynote.

We deserve better conferences. The people who attend them deserve better. And the only reason we do not have them is because we keep choosing the template over the people.

The template is not sacred. The people are.

This conversation is better with more people in the room.

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Do you prefer to listen? No problem!

When Greg and I first started convening people professionally, we had to bring together about 400 progressive, BIPOC, queer, and newly radicalized college students for a legislative and leadership conference affectionately called Leg Con. This was a legacy conference, and we absolutely could not mess it up.

We held it at the bougiest hotel in D.C. at the time, L’Enfant Plaza, with maybe $200,000 to our name. We were flying students in from across the country and fighting over every line item you can imagine. Should we pay extra for the projector? How are we getting people from three different airports? Can we afford plated dinner, or is it box lunches again? Who’s willing to speak for free, because we were definitely not paying honoraria.

We were fundraising constantly, trying not to lose every nickel before the conference even started. And even with every financial obstacle possible, we were still trying to make every dream we could come true. That’s the part I keep coming back to.

What the cuts actually reveal

Most organizations do not treat the budget as a creative challenge. They treat it as a list of reasons they cannot do what people actually need, or they let a hotel contract dictate the program’s design, like the constraints showed up first and the dream had to fit inside them.

The budget becomes the excuse, the conversation killer, and the place where the dream goes to die.

And I think budgets tell on us.

Greg wrote about this in his piece, “If You Can’t Feed the Room, You’re Not Ready to Convene It.” He was right that people use budget as an excuse not to provide real food, access, and care— and I think it goes further than that.

When we focus more on the budget than on people’s experience, we betray our own values. We say we care about accessibility, then language access gets cut because it’s hard to project the need. We say we care about belonging, then travel support and childcare quietly disappear. We say we want people to feel welcomed, and somehow everyone still ends up eating the same dry chicken under fluorescent lights (you know exactly what I’m talking about!!!)

So maybe the real question isn’t what we can afford. Maybe it’s why we aren’t pushing harder for what people deserve.

I know what some of y’all are thinking: Carmen, your day job is at a multi-billion dollar foundation. Fair. But I thought this way when we were scraping together $200,000 and praying the receipts would work out. I thought this way when I was a broke college student turning a bag of chips and some queso into a Super Bowl party. Start from the experience people deserve, marry that to what’s actually in the bank, and get honest and creative about what’s possible. We can usually meet in the middle.

Will we have to make concessions? Of course. Will every dream get fully funded? No. But that’s different from starting with defeat.

One of the best convenings I’ve ever been to

Brook Kelly-Green hosted it when she was at the Ford Foundation. I was consulting on the project. She wanted to bring together political women of color leaders who had intense jobs and needed real room to breathe, but also real work to do.

They chose Tamaya Resort in Albuquerque. Close enough to reach, far enough away that people had to actually arrive, and they did.

facilitated, and it was the first time I saw someone marry vision with structure that beautifully. Brook had a clear vision. Katherine Granger, the program designer, kept a sharp eye on the budget. They were budget-conscious, but they stayed open to possibility. The budget wasn’t running the room before people even got there.

Because they started from possibility, the space opened up. Rest, real food, an unforgettable landscape, thoughtful programming. The relationships that came out of that gathering were real. You could feel something had unlocked between leaders who hadn’t connected like that before.

This is what I want more people to understand: a good convening budget isn’t just about discipline. It’s about imagination.

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Six ways to design from possibility (before you look at the spreadsheet)

1. Start with the purpose. Before you cut a single line item, get clear on what this gathering is actually for.

2. Start with what success should feel like. If this works, what shifts? What becomes possible that wasn’t before?

3. Name what you’re trying to unlock. What needs to connect, deepen, or align because people gathered in person?

4. Connect it to the bigger strategy. If the convening is disconnected from the larger picture, the budget will usually reflect that confusion.

5. Tell the truth about last time. Pull your last three debriefs. What keeps working? What keeps getting missed?

6. Center the experience people deserve first. Food, accessibility, language access, comfortable rooms, easy travel, childcare. Start there. Then look at the money. Then get creative. Then ask who you know, what partnerships exist, and what can bend without breaking the soul of the thing.

Our job as conveners isn’t to kill the dream in the name of being practical. Our job is to make possibility real.

Your convening budget is telling on you. It tells what you protected, what you rushed to cut, and whether you funded the people's experience or just the look of the event.

People always know the difference.

Every budget has limits, but that’s not the real story. The real story is what did you do with those limits? What did you fight for? And what did you let go?

The question isn’t whether your budget has limits; it’s whether your imagination does.

So tell me: what’s one line item you’ve fought to protect, even when it would have been easier to cut it?

Drop it in the comments; I want to hear the real ones.

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I need you to think about the last convening you attended where someone asked you to fill out a dietary form.

Now think about whether what you wrote on that form actually showed up on your plate.

If you are pescatarian (like me), vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, halal, kosher, diabetic, or allergic to something that could send you to the hospital, you know exactly what I am talking about. You filled out the form. You were specific. You showed up. And then you watched a catered lunch arrive that had one sad option for you, or no option at all, or an option that required you to go find someone, explain your needs again, and wait while everyone else ate.

And then someone asked you to be fully present for the afternoon session.

This is not a catering problem. This is a convening problem.

The Logistics Lie

There is a lie that lives inside most convening planning processes, and it goes like this: the program is the convening, and logistics are just the stuff around it.

The program is the keynote, the panels, the workshop or breakout sessions, the facilitated discussions. That is the “real” work. The logistics, food, space, temperature, accessibility, are treated as operational details. They get handed to a different team. They get a smaller budget. They get less attention. And when money gets tight, they are the first things cut.

But here is what I have learned from years of facilitating: a person whose needs are not being met is not present. They are managing. They are calculating. They are spending energy figuring out how to get through the day instead of engaging with the content, the people, or the purpose of being there.

You cannot ask someone to bring their full self into a room that did not plan for their body.

“What Do You Need?” Is Not the Same as Meeting the Need

I want to name something that I see constantly in convening spaces: organizations will ask participants what they need. They will send a pre-survey. They will include a dietary section on the registration form. They will ask about accessibility, about pronouns, about mobility, about accommodations.

And then they will treat the answers as a logistical checklist instead of as convening design.

There is a difference. A logistical checklist says: we asked, we noted it, we will try to accommodate. Convening design says: the needs of the people in this room are shaping how we build this experience from the start.

When dietary needs are an afterthought, the message is: we planned the convening, and then we tried to fit you into it. When dietary needs are part of the design, the message is: we planned the convening around the people who would be in the room, and that included what they need to be nourished, sustained, and present.

That is a fundamentally different orientation. And the people on the receiving end can feel it immediately.

It Is Not Just Food

Food is the most visible example, but this pattern runs through everything:

The room temperature that is always set for the person who runs too warm, while half the room sits in sweaters they brought because they know from experience nobody will adjust it. The conference venue with beautiful programming on the second floor and no elevator for the person who uses a wheelchair. The 8 AM start time that assumes everyone has childcare, transportation, and the kind of morning schedule that allows them to be bright-eyed before coffee.

The convening that asks for pronouns on the registration form and then never uses them. The event that promotes itself as “inclusive” and then schedules the welcome reception at a bar, without considering who that excludes: people in recovery, people whose faith traditions do not include alcohol, people who simply do not feel safe in that environment.

Every one of these is a moment where someone’s access was treated as separate from the program. And every one of these is a moment where someone in the room learned that their needs were less important than the convener’s plan.

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The Budget Tells the Truth

I have sat in enough planning meetings to know where organizations actually put their money. And I have noticed a pattern: the budget for the stage is almost never the line item that gets cut.

The keynote speaker gets their full fee. The AV setup gets funded. The branded materials get printed. The photographer gets booked.

I have heard people say: “We need to trim the food budget.” Or: “Can we do boxed lunches instead?” Or: “Do we really need to accommodate every single dietary restriction?”

What that tells the people in the room is clear: the production matters more than you do. The image of the convening matters more than your experience of it. People will spend to look good. There will be cuts to save where they think you will not notice.

But people always notice. They notice when the budget was designed for the convener’s goals instead of for the participants’ needs. They notice when the stage gets funded and the food gets cut. They may not say it out loud, but they carry it. And it shapes whether they come back.

What Centering Actually Looks Like in Practice

If you are designing a convening and you believe in centering the people in the room, here is what that looks like when it comes to the so-called logistics:

Ask early, and mean it. When you send the pre-survey, do not treat dietary and accessibility questions as formalities. Treat them as design inputs. If someone tells you they are gluten-free, that is not a note for the caterer. That is information that should shape your food planning from the start.

Budget for the people, not just the program. Before you book the keynote or speakers, ask yourself: have I budgeted enough to feed everyone in this room well? Have I accounted for accessibility? Have I planned for the physical comfort of the participants, not just the visual presentation of the event?

Stop separating logistics from goals. The goal of your convening is not just what happens on stage. The goal includes whether people can actually be present. If half your room is hungry, uncomfortable, or calculating whether the building is accessible, you have not met your goal, no matter how good the panels or content were.

Follow through without being asked. When someone’s dietary need shows up on their plate without them having to ask for it again, that is a belonging moment. It says: we heard you, we planned for you, you do not have to advocate for your own basic needs in this space. That is centering.

I have written before about calm as a strategic advantage, about helping leaders move from reactivity to regulation and from pressure to purpose. But regulation is not possible in a room that has not met your basic needs. Purpose is hard to find when you are hungry, cold, or trying to figure out whether the building has a bathroom you can get to or use.

Logistics are not the stuff around the convening. They are the foundation of it. And the way you handle them tells every person in the room exactly how centered they actually are.

So before you finalize your next agenda, ask yourself: have I planned for the people, or have I planned for the show?

Because the people will remember which one you chose.

This conversation is better with more people in the room.

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The Room Was Already Alive

One of the things I love most about Black spaces is that we know how to take something ordinary and make it an event.

A beauty shop. A barber chair. A church basement. A front porch. Give us somewhere to gather, and we will bring rhythm, commentary, laughter, style, and at least one person who knows everybody’s business but still somehow feels trustworthy.

My whole life, I have been getting my hair done. Braids, relaxers, curls, wraps, pin curls. If I added up the hours I have spent in a salon chair, it would be a gazillion.

And what I know for sure is that going to the salon was never just about hair.

It was a ritual. A world. A room that already knew itself before I walked in.

Usually, my mother would drop me off. I went to the same place my sister went to, which made me feel cool immediately. You got greeted when you came in. You got seen. You got folded into the life of the room before you ever sat down.

That matters.

More Than a Service

Stylists are never just stylists. They are therapists, aunties, truth-tellers, witnesses, and some of the greatest storytellers our communities have.

There are things I have told Wesley, Cheryl, Fela, Leila, and so many others that I have not told just anybody. Heartbreaks. Reinventions. Tiny revolutions. All of it spoken out loud while somebody stood behind me with a comb in one hand and a strong opinion in the other.

By the time I got out of that chair, I did not just look better. I often felt better.

Those older salon spaces were alive. Five to ten chairs going at once. Somebody is under the dryer. Somebody is arguing about politics. Somebody is laughing too loudly. And in the 90’s, somebody might be selling CDs, bootleg movies, or whole plates in the middle of all of it.

It was commerce, beauty, gossip, care, and culture all happening at once.

That was part of the point.

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What These Spaces Know

Long before I had language for convening, I was learning from spaces like that.

They taught me that people gather differently when the room already has rhythm. When greeting is part of the culture. When waiting is not dead time, but part of the experience. When the space feels lived-in rather than staged.

That is a convening, even if nobody would have called it that.

It is also why I think we are far too narrow when we talk about gathering as if it only counts when there is a registration link, an agenda, and a bad hotel muffin.

Some of the best lessons about how people actually come together live in the spaces we rarely study, and almost never fund.

Not Perfect, Still Powerful

I do not want to romanticize these spaces.

They are not perfect. They are not automatically safe for everybody. Some people have experienced barber shops and salons as refuge. Others have experienced them as painful, exclusionary, or uncomfortable. Even that is part of the lesson.

Because these spaces make visible what every convening holds, spoken and unspoken rules about who belongs, who is centered, who gets corrected, who feels safe, and who has to translate themselves just to participate.

That is why they matter.

Not because they are flawless. Because they are real.

What Tradition Carries

The barber shop. The salon. The stoop. The porch. The church basement.

These were never just places to pass time. They were places that passed something down.

They taught us how to enter a room and how to be received. How to listen for the rhythm. How to hold somebody’s story with care. How to laugh in the middle of hard things. How to be seen before we had the language to ask for it.

That is what tradition can do at its best. It can carry love, memory, and a way of being together that outlives the people who first taught it to us.

Long before many of us ever sat in a conference room, we were already being formed in spaces that knew how to hold us.

And maybe that is why they still matter so much.

Because some of our first lessons in belonging did not come from institutions.

They came from the places that knew our names, our people, and the sound of our laughter before we ever knew how to name what it meant to belong.

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Not wrong because someone had died. Wrong because the service had almost nothing to do with the person who passed. The music was not their music. The words were not their words. The format followed a template that had been used a hundred times before, for a hundred different people, and it showed. The family sat in the front row watching a ceremony that honored a tradition more than it honored the person the tradition was supposed to be for.

And then we have both been to a funeral that felt right.

One where the program was built around who that person actually was. Their humor. Their music. Their contradictions. The room felt lighter, not because grief was absent, but because the person at the center was present in every choice. The tradition had been reshaped to serve the people it was for, and the result was a room full of people who felt like they could grieve and had actually said goodbye.

Same format. Same type of event. Completely different experience. The difference was whether the tradition served the people or the people served the tradition.

That question is at the center of everything we are writing about in this season of the Culture of Convening.

The Tradition Trap

In our last piece before our reflection conversation video, we wrote about shadow contracts, the unspoken rules that run a room without anyone naming them. But there is another layer that is, in some ways, even harder to address: the spoken traditions that everyone can see or feel, that everyone follows, and that nobody questions.

These are the ones that come with history. With emotional weight. With the sentence that most of us have heard before: “We’ve always done it this way.”

The annual gala that no one enjoys and requires too much capacity but no one will cancel. The all-staff meeting format that has not changed in a decade even though the staff has turned over three times. The icebreaker that makes half the room cringe and the other half disengage. The conference plenary that runs 90 minutes because it always has, not because anyone has ever checked whether 90 minutes is what the room needs.

These traditions persist for a specific reason: they are familiar. And familiarity feels safe. Even when it is not working, it is known. And for the people responsible for convening, known is easier than new or how some may describe as uncertain.

But here is the question we keep coming back to: Who is the tradition actually serving?

If the answer is the institution, the convener, the funder, the board, or “the way we’ve always done it,” then the tradition is not serving the people it claims to center. It is serving itself.

Three Signs a Tradition Has Stopped Serving the Room

Traditions do not announce when they stop working. They just keep happening while the room quietly adjusts around them. Here are three signs we have learned to watch for:

1. The tradition centers the convener instead of the convened. We wrote in an earlier piece about the birthday party that stops being a convening the moment it becomes about the parents instead of the child. The same thing happens in organizational settings all the time. The Executive Director or CEO’s opening remarks that run 45 minutes. The retreat format designed around what leadership wants to communicate, not what the team needs to process. The annual dinner where the program is built for donors and sponsors, not the community being celebrated. When you notice that the tradition is oriented toward the people running the room rather than the people in it, that is your signal.

2. People comply with the tradition but do not connect through it. There is a difference between participation and presence. If people are going through the motions (sitting through the plenary, raising their hand during the icebreaker, clapping at the end) but the energy in the room says something else entirely, the tradition has become a performance. The real convening is happening somewhere else: in the hallway, at the coffee station, on the walk to the parking lot or back to the hotel rooms. We wrote about this in our very first piece. The non-conference spaces are often where people are actually authentic. That should tell us something about the conference spaces.

3. The tradition has not been revisited since the people changed. This is the most common one and the most forgivable. A tradition gets established when a particular group of people is in the room. It works for them. Time passes. The people change. But the tradition does not. And because nobody wants to be the person who questions something that “has always worked,” it keeps going, serving a room that no longer exists.

Redefining Is Not Discarding

We want to be clear about something: we are not anti-tradition. Traditions hold communities together. They create rhythm. They carry meaning across time. Carmen’s church community, which she wrote about earlier in this series, is built on traditions: the welcome song, the prayer list, the different ambassadors who create multiple entry points for belonging. Those traditions work because they are alive. They are practiced by many people. They evolve as the community evolves. They center the people who come through the door.

The problem is not tradition itself. The problem is when a tradition becomes static. When it stops being a living practice and starts being a locked format. When “we’ve always done it this way” becomes a reason to keep doing something that no longer serves the people it was created for.

Redefining a tradition means asking: who are the people in this room today, and does this practice still serve them? It means being willing to keep what works, revise what does not, and let go of what has become more about comfort than care.

It means involving the people being centered in the process and decision.

A Practice for Interrogating Tradition

The next time you are planning a convening that includes a tradition, whether that is an annual event, a recurring meeting format, a standard opening ritual, or anything that carries the weight of “we’ve always done this,” try sitting with four questions:

1. When was this tradition created, and for whom? Understanding the origin helps you understand whether the original purpose still applies. A tradition created for a team of 12 may not serve a team of 60. A format designed for one generation of leaders may not land with the next.

2. Who benefits from this tradition today? Be honest. Is it the participants? The leadership? The institution’s sense of continuity? The person who designed it and does not want to let it go? Sometimes the answer is all of the above, and that is fine. But sometimes the honest answer reveals that the tradition is serving a much smaller group than the room it occupies, and that is not enough to build an impactful convening.

3. If you were designing this from scratch for the people in the room today, would it look like this? This is the question that unlocks everything. If the answer is no, you do not have to throw the tradition away. But you do have to be willing to redesign it and evolve. And ideally, you redesign it with the people it is supposed to serve, not for them.

4. What would it cost to change this, and what is it costing not to? Change has a cost. It takes energy. It risks pushback. It can feel like disloyalty to the people who built what came before. But keeping a tradition that no longer serves the room also has a cost. It is just quieter. It shows up in disengagement, in turnover, in the gap between what people say in the meeting and what they say after it, and in some cases, if they will engage and be present in the future.

The tradition of coming together is worth fighting for. That is why we started the Culture of Convening. But fighting for it means being willing to look honestly at the traditions we have inherited, to ask whether they are still serving the people they were built for, and to redefine them when they are not.

Because a tradition that centers the institution instead of the people is not a tradition. It is inertia. And the people in the room deserve better.

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Every room has rules.

Some are spoken. Start at 9. End at 5. Mute when you are not talking. Stay on agenda. Hold your questions until the end.

And then there are the other rules. The ones nobody says out loud, but everybody is somehow expected to know anyway.

Who gets to speak first. Who can interrupt and still be seen as brilliant. Who has to be polished to be taken seriously. Whether disagreement is welcome, or only welcome if it comes wrapped in a smile and offered by the right person. Whether the room wants honesty or just affirmation with a little texture.

Most of us know these rules before anyone names them, and over time, we feel them.

That is one of the reasons we have been thinking so much about tradition, because every room inherits something. A rhythm. A power structure. A way of moving. A set of expectations about what is normal, what is respectful, what is allowed, and what will cost you.

We have come to believe that one of the most important jobs of a convener is not just to gather people. It is to surface the rules of the room before those rules start quietly governing who gets to belong.

I learned about tradition in at least three different ways.

The first was through family.

In my family, one of the traditions my sister Keeya created was that greeting cards had to be read out loud. Not skimmed or silently smiled at and set aside. They must be read out loud.

It is one of my favorite family traditions because it is small, but it carries so much. It is a sign of love, joy, and respect. It says: somebody took the time to write these words, and we are going to take the time to honor them together. My sister has passed on, but the tradition is still here. Her children know it. I know it. My mom knows it. When we are together, and somebody opens a card, we already know what comes next.

Read it out loud.

That is what tradition can do at its best. It can carry memory. It can carry belonging. It can make love visible and teach people how to be together.

The second way I learned about tradition was through work. Lord knows I have had enough jobs to learn it well.

I came into so many roles thinking I was about to make big change, only to get stopped at the door by a set of rules nobody had written down. Rules about how to move, who to talk to, who not to talk to, what was really up for discussion and what absolutely was not, who could challenge something directly and who needed to be more careful. It was like every organization had a handbook they forgot to print, and the consequences of not knowing it were very real.

I will never forget one of my jobs at the AFL-CIO, when we hosted the Martin Luther King Jr. Civil Rights Conference. I came in with all kinds of ideas for how I wanted to shift the conference, freshen it up, and make it better. In my mind, I was being thoughtful and strategic. In reality, I was walking into a tradition that ran much deeper than my first round of ideas.

That conference carried history all the way back to A. Philip Randolph. It carried people’s labor, memory, and legacy. What I learned was this: if I wanted to change that space, I could not just come in with good ideas and a strong opinion. I had to go back to the people who built that space and created the conditions for us to even be there. I had to understand what the tradition meant to them. I had to gain trust before I could ask for change.

That lesson has stayed with me.

Because not all traditions are bad. Not all inherited practice is stale. Some traditions are sacred. Some are stabilizing. Some hold the story of how we got here. But some traditions also go unnamed for so long that they stop serving the people in the room and start serving only the people who already know how to win there.

That is where the spoken and unspoken rules come in.

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Every room has what I think of as a shadow contract. An invisible agreement about how people are expected to behave before anyone says a word (we learned this through The Empath Leader Book). The written agenda tells you what is supposed to happen. The shadow contract tells you how you are expected to survive it.

Sometimes the spoken rule is: “We want honest feedback.” The unspoken rule is: Do not embarrass leadership.

Sometimes the spoken rule is: “Bring your full self.” The unspoken rule is: As long as your full self is calm, concise, and easy to manage.

Sometimes the spoken rule is: “This is a dialogue.” The unspoken rule is: The decision has already been made, but we would love your thoughtful participation.

Sometimes the spoken rule is: “We are family.” The unspoken rule is: Do not name harm in front of outsiders.

That is what makes this work so important, because people who do not know the rules of the game are always playing at a disadvantage. And too many conveners hide the ball, whether they mean to or not.

That is why the third way I learned about tradition mattered so much to me.

At The Management Center, they use a tool called Preferences, Traditions, and Requirements. When I first encountered it, I had a real aha moment, because it gave language to something I had felt in my body for years.

Preferences: This is how I like to do it. Traditions: This is how we have done it, and it means something to us. Requirements: This is non-negotiable.

That tool is so simple, and so clarifying, because too often teams treat preferences like requirements, traditions like facts, and requirements like they are somehow optional depending on who is in charge that day. No wonder people are confused.

Naming those distinctions matters. It helps people understand what is flexible, what is inherited, and what truly has to stay in place. It helps teams make decisions with more honesty. It helps newcomers get oriented without having to learn everything through discomfort. It helps leaders stop acting like clarity is a luxury, and honestly, it is one of the kindest things you can do in a room.

The job of a convener is not just to set the agenda. It is to create conditions where people understand enough about the room to participate with dignity. It is to name what is expected, examine what is inherited, and question the rules that only work for insiders.

That does not mean every rule has to go, and it does not mean every tradition should be broken open just because somebody new arrived with fresh ideas and a Google doc. Some traditions are worth keeping. Some are worth protecting. Some are how communities honor the people who came before them. But even then, the work is still to name them.

There is a real difference between inviting people into a room with tradition and inviting people into a room full of traps. The best conveners know the difference. They know that written rules create structure, but unspoken rules create culture. They know that what is invisible often has the most power. They know that if you want people to participate fully, you cannot keep the real rules tucked behind the curtain and then blame them for not knowing the script.

Every room has rules. The question is whether you are willing to surface them, examine them, and decide on purpose which ones deserve to stay.

That is part of what it means to convene differently.

What is one unspoken rule in a room you lead or regularly sit in? Drop it in the comments. We read every one.

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I came up in rooms that rewarded speed.

In my early twenties, I was deep in the student organizing and politics world, later serving as President of the United States Student Association in the Nation’s Capitol. Over the 16 years I lived in Washington, DC, I built alongside people who believed that if you moved fast enough and fought hard enough, the world would bend. The rooms I learned in were urgent. The agendas were packed. The stakes were real. And the measure of a good meeting was whether everyone left with a clear assignment and a deadline.

I was good at those rooms. I could facilitate a contentious plenary. I could hold a vote in Robert’s Rules of Order. I could keep a room of hundreds of people on a timeline. I was efficient. I was focused. I was useful.

I was also, if I am honest, performing.

What the Movement Gave Me

I owe the movement in ways I am still discovering. It gave me my political education, my understanding of power, my sense of purpose. It introduced me to people who changed my life, including Carmen, whom I met in those exact rooms and who is now my best friend, co-founder, co-creator, and one of the people I trust most in this work.

Carmen and I tell a story about the early days. We were at a meeting in DC, and I kept using the word “guys” to address the room. Someone slid me a note: “Check your privilege.” Three words on a piece of paper. It stopped me cold. Not because I was offended, but because I realized I had been in rooms my whole life where certain language was accepted without question, and no one had ever asked me to consider its impact.

That moment did not just change my vocabulary. It changed my orientation. It was the first time I understood that how I showed up in a room mattered as much as what I accomplished in it.

The movement gave me that. It gave me accountability. It gave me community. It gave me Carmen. And it gave me the raw materials I would eventually need to build something different.

But the movement also taught me some things I had to unlearn.

What I Had to Unlearn

I had to unlearn urgency as a default setting. In those spaces, everything is urgent. Every meeting is critical. Every timeline is compressed. And after enough years in that rhythm, your nervous system starts to believe that calm is the same thing as complacency. That slowing down means you do not care enough.

That is a lie. But it took me a long time to understand it.

I had to unlearn the idea that a well-run room is a tightly controlled room. I had been trained to manage energy, redirect tangents, and keep things “on track.” But whose track? Whose definition of productive? I started to notice that some of the most important things said in the rooms I facilitated were the things I had been trained to call “off-topic.”

I had to unlearn the performance of strength. As an openly gay Filipino man, I had learned early that certain rooms required a specific kind of presence. Confidence. Sharp. Unshakable. I could do that. But the cost was that I was performing a version of leadership that left no room for the rest of me. For the parts that were tender. For the parts that needed to sit with something before responding. For the parts that wanted to lead from stillness instead of volume.

I had to unlearn all of that. And in the space that opened up, something else became possible. What became possible was a different kind of leadership.

Calm as a Strategic Advantage

I did not arrive at this phrase overnight. It came from years of practice, of therapy, of paying attention to what happened in rooms when I changed my own energy before trying to change anyone else’s.

Here is what I noticed: when the facilitator is regulated, the room regulates. When the person holding the space is not performing urgency, the people in the room have permission to slow down. And when people slow down, they say what they actually mean. They listen differently. They make better decisions.

Calm is not passive. Calm is not disengaged. Calm is a decision. It is the decision to hold steady when the room gets hard, to breathe before you respond, to trust that the silence after a difficult question is not a failure but an opening. It is the decision to bring your regulated nervous system into the room as an offering, not because the room is not hard, but because it is.

This is what I mean when I say I want to help leaders move from reactivity to regulation and from pressure to purpose. It is not a slogan. It is a practice. It started with me. And will always start with me.

Filipino and Queer Joy. Full Presence.

There is something else the movement did not teach me, something I had to find on my own: the right to bring my full self into the room.

My personal brand, if you want to call it that, is grounded in Filipino and Queer joy. That is not a tagline. It is a commitment. A commitment to bringing fullness, authenticity, and embodied presence to every space I enter. Because for most of my career, those parts of me were the parts I was asked to leave at the door.

The organizing rooms I grew up in were brilliant at fighting for justice in the abstract and sometimes terrible at making space for all the identities of the people doing the fighting. I learned to lead with my strategy. I did not always feel safe leading with my culture, my queerness, my softness, my joy.

Heart-centered convening changed that for me. When I shifted from running rooms to holding them, I discovered that the parts of myself I had been hiding were actually the parts that made me a better convener. My ability to sit with emotion instead of managing it. My instinct to honor what is unspoken. My belief that a room should feel like it was made for the people in it, not in spite of them.

Those are not liabilities. Those are qualifications and, frankly, should be the baseline.

The Room I Am Trying to Build

Carmen wrote last week about the kitchen table, about the room that shaped her before she had any language for what convening was. I carry a version of that too. My kitchens looked different, sounded different, smelled different. But the lesson was the same: the best rooms are the ones where you can be whole.

That is the room I am trying to build now. Every time I facilitate. Every time I design a convening. Every time I sit with a leader who is trying to figure out how to bring people together in a way that does not break them or the people they serve.

I am not the facilitator I was in my twenties. I am slower. I am quieter. I listen longer. I hold more space and fill less of it. I let the room breathe.

And honestly, the rooms (and me) are better for it.

The Beltway taught me how to run a room. The journey since then taught me how to hold one. And the difference between those two things is, I think, the entire point of this work.

This conversation is better with more people in the room.

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I grew up in the kitchen.

Not near it. Not passing through it. In it.

The kitchen at my grandmother’s house. The kitchen at my mother’s mother’s house. The kitchen at my father’s mother’s house. My mother’s kitchen. My father’s kitchen. And honestly, in just about every home I have ever loved, the kitchen was where the real life of the house lived.

Not the living room with the good furniture. Not the room that was supposed to stay clean. The kitchen.

I remember the smell of chicken frying in a cast-iron skillet, which is still one of the most reassuring smells I know. I remember learning how to make pancakes with my mother’s mother, Alma, and feeling like getting to help was the smallest promotion in the world. I remember my father’s mother, Joyce, teaching us how to bake bread, which felt less like cooking and more like participating in something old and sacred. I remember cleaning chitlins around the holidays with my mother, which may not sound magical to everybody, but to me, it is memory, labor, lineage, and family.

The kitchen held all of it.

Before I ever knew words like facilitation, belonging, or convening, I knew the kitchen. I knew that people came there for more than one reason. They came to cook, yes, but also to talk, think, watch, learn, confess, celebrate, cool off, and be near somebody. In my house, the kitchen was also where homework got done because it had the brightest light. It was where hair got pressed for special occasions, with a straightening comb heating up on the stove and all the tenderness, care, and very specific kind of childhood discomfort that came with that ritual. It was where you got the news. It was where you got corrected. It was where you learned.

The kitchen was not just a room.

It was an ecosystem.

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And it had rules. There was a way to move in the kitchen. A way to help. A way to stay out of the way. A way to know when somebody needed an extra hand and a way to know when they absolutely did not. There were tools that mattered, appliances that had stories, and dishes that meant something because they had belonged to somebody before they belonged to us. Even when it looked casual, it was not. It was curated. It was practiced. It was alive.

And maybe that is part of why I still think so much about the kitchen when I think about how people come together now.

Because the kitchen understood some things long before conference centers did.

The kitchen understood that preparation is a form of care. If you are making a big meal, you do not just wander into it with vibes and optimism and hope your way to a full table. You need ingredients, timing, tools, and a plan. You need to know what needs to start early, what can wait, and what cannot be left unattended for too long unless you want to ruin the whole thing. There is rhythm to it. There is sequence. There is intuition. There is a plan, even if nobody wrote it on a flip chart.

The kitchen also understood that a room can do more than one thing at once. It can be practical and sacred. It can be a workplace and a refuge. It can hold hard conversations and soft landings. It can feed people in more ways than one.

That is one of the reasons I get irritated when organizations start cutting the budget for snacks, drinks, or shared meals as if food is extra. As if nourishment is the decorative part of gathering. As if people have not always come together around food. As if a plate is not sometimes the first thing that tells your body you are safe here.

Food is not beside the point.

Food is part of the point.

Food is one of the oldest ways human beings say, I thought about you before you got here.

And maybe that is what the kitchen taught me most clearly. That gathering is not just about what gets said. It is about what gets felt. It is about whether the space has been prepared in a way that lets people arrive fully. It is about whether there is warmth in the room, whether literal or emotional. It is about whether people can come in carrying what they carry and still find a place to set something down.

I did not know then that I was learning how to convene.

I just knew the kitchen felt different from every other room in the house. It had purpose. It had movement. It had memory. It had a center of gravity. People were always coming toward it. Even when they had no reason to be in there, they ended up there anyway.

That feels important to me now.

Because I have spent so many years in professional spaces where people act like convening begins with an agenda, or a registration page, or a microphone, when some of our earliest lessons about bringing people together came long before any of that. They came from watching the people in our families make something out of what they had. They came from learning how to be in the room. They came from seeing that care and structure are not opposites. They belong together.

The kitchen table was my first convening.

It was my first lesson in preparation, rhythm, welcome, correction, care, and lineage. And honestly, when I think about the rooms we are trying to build now, I think a lot of them would be better if they remembered the kitchen.

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Let’s say the quiet part out loud: most people who convene other people enjoy being at the center of the room.

We know this because we’re two of them.

There’s a version of convening, a dominant one, where the facilitator is the main character. They set the tone. They control the energy. They ask the questions and decide when the answers are sufficient. They’re the ones people thank at the end. The room rises and falls on their performance.

Real talk: That’s not convening. That’s a one-person show with an audience that was told it was participatory.

The Centering Problem

Here’s the pattern we see over and over: a convener designs an experience based on what they think the room needs, filtered through their own lens, informed by their own comfort, and shaped by their own expertise. The result is a room that reflects the convener’s worldview, not the lived reality of the people inside it.

This isn’t malicious. It’s human. When you’re responsible for a room, you default to what you know. And what you know is yourself.

We’ve watched a CEO open a “listening session” with a 20-minute keynote about their vision. We’ve seen a facilitator ask the room “What do you need?” and then override every answer because it didn’t match the agenda. We’ve sat through retreats where the person who designed the experience was also the person who spoke the most, asked the most questions, and got the most applause, while the people the retreat was supposed to serve left feeling like extras in someone else’s show.

The centering problem isn’t theoretical. It shows up every time someone designs a room for their own comfort and calls it leadership.

But the people in the room didn’t come for you. They came for themselves: for their own learning, their own connection, their own purpose. And when the convener takes up too much space, there’s less room for everyone else to take up theirs.

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What It Looks Like to Decenter

Decentering the convener doesn’t mean disappearing. It doesn’t mean abdicating responsibility or letting the room descend into chaos. It means shifting your orientation from “How do I lead this room?” to “How do I serve the people in it?”

In practice, this looks like:

Designing with, not for. Before the convening, engage the people who will be in the room. Ask what they need. Ask what they’re bringing. Ask what they’re afraid of. Let the answers shape the design.

Holding space instead of filling it. The convener’s job is to create the conditions for connection, insight, and honest exchange, not to always provide it.

The most powerful moment in a convening is often a silence the facilitator didn’t fill.

Making yourself unnecessary. The best sign that a convening is working is when the room doesn’t need you anymore. When the conversation has taken on its own momentum, the participants are building on each other’s contributions, and your role has shifted from conductor to witness.

Equipping people to convene themselves. If your approach to convening requires you to always be in the room, the approach doesn’t scale and the community doesn’t grow. The goal is to build the capacity for convening in the people you serve and should be centering, not to make them dependent on your presence.

The Ego Work

We’ll be honest: this is ego work. Getting out of the center of a room you built is one of the hardest things a convener can do. You designed it. You prepared for it. You’re the one who will be evaluated on whether it “worked.”

So what does this inner work actually require? It requires sitting with the evaluation that stings and not explaining it away. It requires asking a co-facilitator, “Did I take up too much space?” and actually wanting the honest answer. It requires noticing the moment you’re about to jump in, and choosing not to, because the room is already doing what it needs to do without you.

It requires letting go of the version of yourself that needs to be needed in the room.

But the question isn’t whether you worked. The question is whether the room worked for the people in it.

And that’s a question you can only answer if you’re willing to come out of the spotlight long enough to look around and see who else is in the room.

Over these first five pieces, we’ve defined what a convening is, named why the tradition needs redefining, drawn the line between invitation and belonging, and sat with what we had to unlearn. This is where it all leads: the convener is not the center. The people are.

We started Culture of Convening with a tagline: Redefining the tradition of coming together, where every identity, experience, and perspective belongs.

That redefinition starts with the convener. It starts with us. It starts with the willingness to build a room that doesn’t need you at the center of it, because the people it was built for are already enough.

Get out of the way. The room will thank you.

This conversation is better with more people in the room.

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We came up in rooms that taught us a very specific way to convene, and if we are honest, those rooms taught us a lot about how to move work, hit deadlines, sound smart, and keep the meeting going, while also teaching us a lot about what people had to swallow just to survive it.

Carmen learned it in political organizing, in the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, in campaign war rooms and national convenings where the agenda was tight, the stakes were high, and the measure of a good meeting was whether you left with a clear-ish action plan that may or may not ever get implemented, but at least everybody could say they were there when the plan got made. The tradition was urgency, efficiency, and a kind of grind culture that made people say things like “sleep is for the weak” as if being tired were a leadership competency. In some rooms, the message was simple, we do not have time to feel things because we have work to do. In others, it was dressed up a little differently, but it landed the same way, because you could spend three whole meetings talking, analyzing, defining, debating, and wrestling over language, and still walk out without the one thing people actually needed, which was clarity.

Gregory learned it in labor and nonprofit leadership in D.C., in boardrooms, cohort programs, and facilitation spaces where the measure of success was whether the facilitator maintained control, hit every time stamp, and kept everyone from wandering too far off script. The tradition was structure, polish, and a deep and slightly alarming faith in the strategic planning template, as if the right framework and a backward plan were all that stood between us and transformation. Also, some of those rooms barely gave you snacks, and asking people to be vulnerable when they are hungry is honestly its own kind of organizational dysfunction.

And to be fair, those traditions did produce results. They moved agendas forward, created plans, and helped people make decisions. They gave people a sense of momentum, which can feel very close to progress when everybody is busy and the flip charts are full.

But they also left a trail.

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A trail of people who showed up, participated, nodded at the right times, said something smart in the breakout, and still went home feeling unseen. A trail of people who watched beautiful plans get made and then quietly disappear because a room can produce a document without ever producing commitment.

That is one of the biggest things we had to unlearn. We had to unlearn the idea that productive meetings and people-centered meetings cannot live in the same house, as if clarity and care are sworn enemies, or as if strategy gets weaker the moment people bring their full humanity into the room.

What we know now is the opposite. Heart-centered leadership is not the enemy of results — it is often the reason results can actually hold.

The Unlearning

Unlearning is not forgetting, and it is not throwing out every tradition we inherited just because we have a newer language now and a lower tolerance for nonsense. It is more honest than that, and more demanding too, because it asks us to look directly at the rooms that shaped us, understand why those habits took root, and decide which ones still serve the people we are convening, and which ones mostly serve control, ego, or institutional comfort dressed up as excellence.

Here is some of what we had to unlearn.

That the convener’s comfort matters more than the room’s.
We were trained to control rooms, manage energy, redirect tangents, and keep things “on track.” But whose track are we talking about, and who decided it mattered more than what was actually happening in the room. We had to learn that sometimes the most important thing happening is the thing that was not on the agenda at all.

That urgency is the same as importance.
If you have worked in politics, philanthropy, organizing, or nonprofits for more than five minutes, then you already know that everything is urgent until it is not, every email is on fire, every deadline is somehow the deadline, and everybody wants to act like if this does not get solved by 3:00 p.m. the whole earth is going to slide off its axis. But urgency is a feeling, and sometimes it is a tactic, and it is definitely not always the truth. When urgency runs the room, it pushes out the slower work that actually builds something lasting, trust, reflection, repair, and enough honesty for people to say what is really going on instead of what sounds efficient.

That professionalism and humanity are at odds.
We were taught that a well-run meeting is a tight meeting, but sometimes tight is just another word for rigid. Tight can mean there is no room for grief, joy, culture, silence, difference, or the actual body of the person sitting in the chair. We had to unlearn the idea that bringing your whole self into a room is a disruption, when often it is the very thing that makes the room real.

That discomfort is failure.
Some of the most important convenings we have ever been part of were uncomfortable, not because they were poorly designed, but because people were finally honest. We had to unlearn the reflex to smooth everything over and learn instead how to stay with the productive mess long enough for truth to do its work.

What We Learned Instead

What grew in the space left by all that unlearning was not chaos. It was not softness without structure. It was not everybody sitting in a circle with no plan and a lot of feelings.

What grew was a deeper kind of discipline.

We learned that some of the best meetings we have ever been in were the ones where someone finally said the thing everybody else was thinking, and the room changed because the truth had entered it. The best rooms were often the ones where someone cried, or laughed too loud, or admitted they did not know, or named the tension everyone had been politely stepping around.

We learned that care is not fluff, and warmth is not weakness, and making room for people’s full humanity does not dilute strategy, it deepens it.

We learned that the old playbook worked, until it didn’t.

For some people, the old way is still convenient because it protects the ego, rewards control, and lets people confuse polish with impact. But people have changed, and the world has changed, and if we are serious about centering the people most impacted, then we have to admit that many of the ways we were taught to convene never really worked for them in the first place.

We are still unlearning, and we probably always will be, because many of these habits got rewarded for a long time. They made us look prepared, sharp, and in control. But being rewarded for something is not the same as it serving the people we are here for.

And honestly, we would rather be in the mess of redefining than in the comfort of repeating what no longer serves.

That, too, is part of what it means to convene differently.

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You’ve been invited to something and knew, within the first five minutes, that you didn’t belong there.

Not because anyone said anything in particular. Not because someone was rude. But because multiple signals in the room told you before a single word was spoken. The music wasn’t yours. The food was outside of your dietary restrictions. The inside jokes landed for everyone but you. The agenda assumed a shared history you didn’t carry.

No one had to say “you don’t belong here.” The room said it for them.

And so you did what so many of us do. You edited yourself. You calculated what was safe to say. You performed a version of yourself that you felt would make the room comfortable.

That’s not belonging. That’s the cost of being invited without being considered.

It’s the gap between invitation and belonging. And it’s where most convenings fail.

Invitation Is a Door. Belonging Is the Room.

An invitation says: You can come in. Belonging says: This place was built with you in mind.

An invitation is logistical; it’s a calendar hold, a registration link, a seat at the table. Belonging is architectural; it’s the table itself, the height of the chairs, the food that’s served, the language on the walls, the pace of the conversation, and whether the room makes it possible for you to show up as your full self or requires you to leave parts of yourself at the door.

Most organizations are good at invitation. They send the email. They diversify the guest list. They put “all are welcome” on the flyer. And then they wonder why certain people don’t come back.

The answer, almost always, is that the invitation was extended, but belonging was never designed.

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The Small Gestures That Build (or Break) Belonging

We’ve both had the experience of walking into a space for the first time and knowing immediately: I belong here. And every time, it came down to the small things.

A church service where someone walked up, shook our hand, and said “We’re glad you’re here” before we could figure out where to sit. A convening where the facilitator acknowledged that not everyone in the room shared the same context and took 3 minutes to ensure everyone had what they needed to participate fully. A funeral where the entire program was designed around who the person was, not what was traditional, and the room felt lighter for it.

These aren’t grand gestures. They’re design choices. And they communicate something that no welcome speech can: we thought about you before you got here.

Belonging is not a feeling you can mandate. It’s an experience you have to design for.

The Belonging Design Check

If you’re convening people, in any context, we’d invite you to sit with three questions before you finalize anything. We call this the Belonging Design Check, and it’s a framework we’ll be returning to throughout this publication.

1. Who is in this room, and what do they need to feel like they belong here? Not what do they need to attend but what do they need to actually be here? To be present, not performing.

2. What assumptions am I making about shared experience, shared language, or shared comfort? Every room has defaults. Most of them are invisible to the people they serve and glaring to the people they don’t. Name yours.

3. If someone walked in who looked, spoke, moved, or thought differently from the majority of this room, would this space still work for them? If the answer is “I’m not sure,” the design isn’t done.

These three questions won’t solve everything. But they will slow you down in the right places. They’ll surface the assumptions that most conveners skip past. And over time, they’ll change the way you think about what it means to prepare a room for the people who will actually be in it.

The Tradition We’re Building

Belonging is the tradition we’re building toward. Not inclusion as a checklist. Not diversity as a headcount. Belonging as architecture, the invisible structure of a room that tells every person in it: you were expected, you are valued, and this space would be incomplete without you.

That’s the room we’re trying to build. Every time.

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Photo credit: Ulysses Curry

We’ve been in a lot of rooms.

Boardrooms and church basements. National convenings and neighborhood block parties. Strategy sessions with funders and late-night hotel lobby conversations where the real work actually happens. Between us, we’ve spent more than four decades designing, facilitating, and moving through the spaces where movements get built, strategies get shaped, and trust gets earned, or lost, one conversation at a time.

And here is what we know. The tradition of coming together is broken.

Not because people stopped showing up. Not because the work stopped mattering. It is broken because too many rooms are still built around a fantasy of sameness, the same background, the same language, the same comfort, the same way of speaking, processing, and being.

That sameness was never real. It was just centered.

And when a room is built around what is centered instead of who is actually there, people start negotiating with themselves.

Can I tell the truth here?

Can I bring my whole self in here?

Do I need to shrink, code switch, perform, or stay quiet to make everybody else comfortable?

We do not believe that should be the price of participation.

That is why we started Culture of Convening.

We are not interested in a shinier version of the same old room. We are after a different tradition of what it means to bring people together.

A tradition where every identity, experience, and perspective belongs in the room, not as an afterthought, but as part of what makes the room honest in the first place.

A tradition where the convener is not the center. The people being convened are.

A tradition where design goes beyond the agenda and into the actual experience of being human, bodies, histories, nervous systems, grief, joy, culture, power, and difference.

A tradition where care is not fluff, it is strategy—and where belonging is not a vibe, it is structured.

This is not abstract to us. Carmen brings two decades of experience in political strategy, organizational development, and culture shaping. Gregory brings years of coalition building, leadership development, and facilitation, all rooted in joy and treated as a strategic advantage. Together, we have seen what happens when rooms ask people to edit themselves to belong. We have also seen what becomes possible when a room is built with intention, truth, and care.

The difference is not minor. It is the difference between attendance and connection, between participation and investment, and between being present and actually belonging.

Why now? Because people are tired of rooms that conflate control with leadership and performance with professionalism.

And because the pandemic changed something real, people lost some of the social muscle it takes to be in a room together. Many are still walking into spaces carrying more anxiety, more awareness, more grief, and less patience for pretending.

At the same time, a generation of leaders has emerged with different expectations for what a room should feel like. They expect to be seen. They expect their identities to be honored, not managed. They expect more care, more clarity, and more room to be human.

They are right to expect that.

This publication is our response.

Some pieces we will write together, sharing frameworks, tools, language, and questions for people who bring others together for a living or because they simply cannot help it. Some pieces we will write individually, Carmen from the crossroads of strategy, culture and soul, and Gregory from the quiet discipline of holding space and strategy.

All of it is grounded in one belief. The tradition of coming together can be redefined.

And we believe that work starts with belonging, real belonging, structural belonging, felt belonging, the kind people can sense in their bodies.

That is what we are here to explore. That is what we are here to build.

Welcome to Culture of Convening.

Here’s a question we’ve been sitting with: Is going to the grocery store a convening?

Think about it. You’re in a space with other people. You’re all there for a reason. You might even run into someone you know and have a real conversation. But is that a convening?

We don’t think so. And the reason why matters more than you might expect.

A convening is when people come together for a shared purpose. That’s it. That’s the definition. But each word in that sentence is doing heavy lifting.

People come together — meaning more than one person, in some kind of intentional proximity. This can be physical or virtual, but it can’t be accidental. Running into your neighbor at the store isn’t a convening, it’s a coincidence. Calling a meeting with your neighbor to talk about the block party is.

Shared purpose — meaning there’s a reason this is happening, and ideally, the people in the room know what it is. A family reunion is a convening. A staff meeting is a convening. A church or other faith service is a convening. A funeral is a convening. A birthday party is a convening. Even a protest is a convening.

But here’s where it gets interesting. A birthday party can stop being a convening the moment the purpose shifts. We’ve all been to the kid’s birthday party that’s really about the parents: where the guest list, the venue, the aesthetic, the content is all designed to impress other adults, and the child whose birthday it is becomes a prop in someone else’s production. The shared purpose has been hijacked. The person being centered has been replaced.

That’s not a convening anymore. That’s a performance.

The Two Questions That Define a Convening

We’ve come to believe that every convening lives or dies on two questions:

1. What is the intent? Why are these people being brought together? Is the purpose clear, honest, and shared? r is it ambiguous, hidden, or serving someone other than the people in the room?

2. Who is being centered? Whose needs, perspectives, and experiences are shaping the design of this experience? Is it the people being convened or the person doing the convening?

When both answers are clear and aligned, you have a convening. When they’re not, you might have a gathering, an event, a meeting, or a spectacle—but you don’t have a convening.

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Expanding the Map

One thing we’ve been exploring together is how narrow our cultural imagination is about where convening happens. When most people hear the word, they think of conference rooms and hotel ballrooms. But some of the most powerful convenings in our lives have happened in kitchens.

At dinner tables.

In barber shops and hair and nail salons.

On stoops and porches.

At church.

And even on cruise ships.

These spaces have something that most conference rooms don’t: an environment that was built for the people in it, not for the agenda on the wall or in the slides. The barber shop doesn’t need an icebreaker. The kitchen table doesn’t need a facilitator’s guide. The trust is already in the architecture.

Gregory recently spent time aboard Royal Caribbean’s Utopia of the Seas, a floating city carrying roughly 10,000 people: 7,900 passengers and 2,100 crew. None of them chose each other. They came from different countries, cultures, and generations. And yet, from the moment you board, the ship is designed to convene you through multiple environments built for different energies, crew members trained to create micro-moments of welcome, and enough variety that every person can find the room that feels like theirs. A cruise ship isn’t what most people picture when they hear “convening,” but it answers both defining questions clearly. We’ll have more to say about convening at scale in a future piece.

Carmen’s first convening wasn’t one she chose… it was one she was born into. The kitchen in her household was the center of everything. It was where meals were made and stories were told. It was where her hair got pressed and where she learned to listen. Nobody called it a convening, but it had everything our definition requires: people coming together, a shared purpose, and someone being centered, usually whoever needed care that day. We underestimate how much of our understanding of what it means to be together was shaped before we ever walked into a conference room. The kitchen table taught us that a convening doesn’t start with an agenda. It starts with presence.

That doesn’t mean professional convenings can’t learn from these spaces. It means they must.

If we’re serious about redefining the tradition of coming together, we have to start by expanding what counts as coming together in the first place. The conference is not the ceiling of convening. It’s barely the floor.

So when someone asks you, “What’s a convening?”, here’s what we’d say:

A convening is any time people come together with shared purpose, clear intent, and a commitment to centering the people the room is actually for.

Everything else is just a meeting. And maybe one that could’ve been an email.

This conversation is better with more people in the room. If this piece sparked something for you, forward it to a colleague, a fellow facilitator, or that friend who’s always the one holding the space. And if someone sent this to you, welcome. Subscribe so you don’t miss what’s next.