Just because it’s a casual dinner with friends doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have a closing. A simple, subtle one, like a goodbye chocolate as they walk out the door, can make a difference.

“Tell me about a moment in your early life that deeply influenced you and, in some way perhaps, led you to the work you do today.” But the majority of the questions encouraged the leaders to speak about what wasn’t working: “If you were to say something that was politically incorrect, or taboo, about this process or project, what would it be?” It a

Like openings, though, closings are a moment of power and memory formation. Ending well is a crucial way to cement the feelings and ideas you want your guests to take with them.

“I draw a swimming pool,” he said. “There is a deep end and a shallow end. You can choose whatever end you want to enter. If you want to tell us your deepest secrets, you can. Or you can be superficial, and getting wet means being real, so bring something that is real for you.”

Sadly, themes like these are exiled from so many of our gatherings. Far too many of them, especially more professionally oriented ones, are run on a cult of positivity. Everything has to be about what’s going well, about collaboration, about hope and the future. There is no space for what our guests were telling us they wanted at the dinners: a cha

One of the reasons choosing a general theme works so well is because there is a lot of freedom within that theme to choose the level of depth one wants to take. While we do ask that everyone present participate, we let people decide what and how much they want to share.

What we came to find over time was that the best themes were not the sweet ones, like happiness or romance, but rather the ones that had darker sides to them: fear, Them, borders, strangers. The ones that allowed for many interpretations. The ones that let people show sides of themselves that were weak, that were confused and unprocessed, that were

If guests often bring their stump rather than sprout speeches to events, if they often talk of their theories rather than their experiences, then organizers can succumb to their own kind of phoniness. They insist on keeping gatherings positive, especially when choosing themes. The meaningful gatherer doesn’t fear negativity, though, and in fact cre

Story is about a decision that you made. It’s not about what happens to you. And if you hit that and you get your vulnerability and you understand the stakes, and a few other things, people will intuitively find great stories to tell, and as soon as they do, we know them. We know them as human beings. This is no longer my boss’s colleague. This is