These resources (which include the content from the book, and where appropriate, downloadable tools) are only available to folks who have purchased the book. Get in touch if you’d like access.
Most workshops are truly terrible, and we may as well throw away the agenda
Detailed agendas, careful speaker selections, and rigid schedules reflect an industrial mindset that values predictability over emergence, and this reflects a deep mistrust of groups’ ability to self-organize productively. This mistrust becomes self-fulfilling: Participants learn to wait for direction → “someone else” is in charge → passive audience/active speaker dynamic → decreased engagement → exhausted organizers.
You know this. You’ve felt it.
And anyone who’s attended a conference knows that the most valuable moments often happen in hallways, during coffee breaks, and at dinner—wherever people naturally gather to discuss what really matters to them. (This is true for cities, too, and is a core reason why cities produce more intellectual and social capital than the suburbs.)
So there’s a paradox here: The more tightly we control group gatherings, the more we diminish their value. We need approaches that harness rather than suppress the inherent self-organizing capacity of human systems.