I have dedicated my whole career to collective work — working all over the world, in many different situations, investing deeply in my own development to build my capability in this field. It has given me a profound sense of fulfilment and a belief in what humanity can do when we create the right conditions for ourselves.
And yet, I keep being shocked by things I come across.
Last year, after moving house, I hosted a small gathering for my neighbours. As we sat in my kitchen over tea and coffee, I came to realise that these people — some of whom had lived on my road for over 30 years — did not know each other. None of them had exchanged more than a nod before meeting in my kitchen.
I was asked to facilitate a meeting for the marketing team of a huge multinational technology company. Most members were in their thirties, all working remotely across the world. In one-to-ones, they spoke of their commitment to the team and the work. But in the meeting itself, something felt off. They were super-nice to each other, spoke with energy — and yet nothing of substance was being said. Certainly nothing that risked disagreement. It was as if they were performing a version of connection, something you would find online, rather than actually connecting, even though they were in the same room.
A leader in a large organisation told me he felt his team were like children. When I asked him to say more, he told me they lacked what he called the basic skills ‘we learn over the kitchen table, in our families’.
A colleague told me she is working with a leadership team that lack the most fundamental meeting skills — the ability to connect, converse and collaborate on even day-to-day things.
A client lost her mother and was expected to carry on working as normal through her grief.
These moments sit with me. They confront me — because when I set out on this journey, I told myself a story that I was part of a movement. In 1999, when I co-founded Meeting Magic, there were very few facilitators coming into organisations and only a handful of firms worldwide dedicated to facilitation. I watched that grow. I watched facilitation become normalised, and I told myself this movement was helping to build a society of people with greater ability to hold their own needs alongside others’,to connect as humans, to work through differences, to be more together than apart.
So I find myself confronting a harder truth: that the transactional, hyper-individual nature of the world seems to be winning. We are living through a crisis of loneliness. The fundamental relational skills that make up the social fabric of our communities and organisations seem to be missing. And the forces acting against people connecting across boundaries — the social norms, the speed, the performance culture — make it genuinely hard for people to be well together.
And yet. My hope for humanity remains.
Because alongside these confronting experiences, I also have spaces in my life where I can be myself, with people who are different from me — where I can connect, converse, collaborate and learn. These are the spaces that give me energy. That keep me going.
For some time, I have been asking myself how best to be of service to the world right now, in this moment. Over the years Meeting Magic has run open training programmes on many different aspects of group work and facilitation. What has always made these programmes come alive is the people in the room — the diversity of experience, the shared commitment to something human. The possibility of what we can learn together is always greater than what any one of us brings alone.
So I am doing an experiment. I want to find out whether there is an appetite to learn — really learn — how to connect, converse, collaborate and grow together. We are developing a suite of open programmes to be launched in September. I hope my hope is not misplaced.