When I was a girl growing up with four siblings, I created a rotating chore chart so none of us had to do the worst jobs more than our fair share.
I didn’t know anything then about systems, group dynamics, facilitation, or psychological safety. I just knew that when people share responsibility, the structure matters. And with four younger siblings, anything that helped keep the peace was worth trying. My brother still remembers the chore chart — and, more importantly, remembers it was fair.
That instinct has followed me my whole life. In different forms, I have always found myself creating spaces where people could come together, share fairly, listen to one another, and work toward collective understanding and a way forward.
One of the larger expressions of this was in Los Angeles, where I co-hosted consciousness-oriented gatherings that grew to more than 200 people. We had guidelines, agreements, shared expectations, ways to pause and redirect the conversation, and an intentional focus on making room for different voices.
Throughout my professional career, the pattern continued: bringing people together around shared work, difficult questions, competing priorities, and the need to find a way forward.
Today, I have more language, training, and tools for what I now recognize I have been practicing for decades: creating spaces where people can tell the truth, hear one another, make meaning, clarify what matters, and move into action together.
I call that work Gathering.
Why Purposeful Gathering Matters for Teams
A gathering is not simply a meeting with a better agenda. At its best, it creates a human field where people can step out of the speed of daily work long enough to notice what is actually happening in the system around them.
That matters in any period of change, and it feels especially relevant as organizations work out what AI will mean for their businesses, their teams, and the way work gets done. Technology can give us more information and more capability. It cannot, by itself, create trust, shared understanding, or wise judgment.
One finding from the Chief + Harris Poll research on women leaders and AI is especially relevant here:
83% agreed, “I learn more from conversations with my peer leaders about AI than from traditional training.”
That is a remarkable number, but it makes sense to me. The people inside organizations are encountering the questions before most formal training can catch up with them. They are testing tools, discovering where AI saves time and where it creates more work, figuring out what needs verification, encountering uneven adoption, and trying to understand what all of this means for people and culture.
When those experiences can be shared in a thoughtful room, people do more than exchange tips. They learn from one another’s context. Someone names a tension another person has also been feeling. One organization’s experiment becomes useful information for another. A concern that seemed individual begins to reveal itself as a wider pattern.
I have seen this repeatedly in the WRISE workshops I have facilitated. The value does not come only from the material I bring into the room. Much of it comes from creating the conditions for the intelligence already present in the room to become visible.
The Container Influences the Outcome
That does not happen automatically. A useful gathering needs a purpose, a container, and enough structure for people to know what kind of conversation they are entering.
For the workshops I facilitate, I begin with a small set of room agreements. What is said in the room stays in the room, apart from wider learnings that can be shared without attribution. People share at the level they are comfortable. We keep contributions concise so that more voices can be heard. We do not record the session. We exercise no judgment. We show up fully. And I invite people to relax and enjoy themselves.
Those agreements may sound simple, but together they establish something important: this is a different kind of space. Participants do not have to perform expertise. They can listen as well as speak. They can say, “We haven’t figured this out yet.” They can disagree without the conversation becoming unsafe.
My Systemic Team Coaching® training has added another useful practice to this work: agreeing in advance that the facilitator may call a “time-out” when it would help the group.
A time-out might be used to reflect a pattern back to the room, ask the group to notice how the conversation is unfolding, hear from people who have not yet spoken, refocus limited time, or move a promising thread of discussion somewhere it can be explored more productively. The important point is that the permission is established before the intervention is needed.
That prior agreement changes the experience. The facilitator is not suddenly policing the room or cutting someone off. The group has already contracted for help noticing its own process. The intervention is in service of the work everyone came to do.
Listening to the System, Not Just the Loudest Voice
One of the gifts of a facilitated gathering is that it can reveal information ordinary meetings miss.
A leadership team may come in believing it has a prioritization problem and discover that people are actually working from different assumptions about what success means. A group may appear resistant to a new initiative when the deeper issue is capacity. A few strong voices may be shaping a decision while important perspectives from elsewhere in the system have not entered the conversation at all.
This is where facilitation becomes more than keeping the agenda moving. The work is to listen to the whole system: what is being said, what is not being said, where energy changes, what patterns repeat, and which stakeholders or realities may be absent from the room.
It is also one reason I developed the Permission to Bloom Team Energy Barometer. Before asking a team to carry another major priority, it is important to understand the relationship between the demands being placed on that team and its capacity to meet them.
The Barometer gives teams a simple way to identify their capacity for the work as Depleted, Strained, Guarded, Steady, Resourced, or Energized, and to see what support could help move the needle. That data does not replace business metrics. It adds the lived experience of the people responsible for producing the results.
Once that picture is visible, a different conversation can become possible. A motivation issue may turn out to be a capacity issue. Poor execution may reveal conflicting priorities or broken handoffs. The group can work with what is actually present instead of what leaders assume is present.
Peer Learning, AI, and the WRISE Leadership Forum
This fall, Abby Hopper and I will bring this approach into two sessions at the WRISE Leadership Forum in Chicago: one with C-suite executives and another with senior strategic leaders.
Our subject is AI, enterprise leadership, and the future of clean energy organizations. We will bring context into the room, but the sessions are intentionally designed around peer exchange rather than a long presentation. We want to hear what leaders are actually encountering inside their organizations, where AI is creating value, where implementation is getting stuck, and what leadership practices are helping teams move forward.
The Chief + Harris Poll finding makes the case for that design beautifully. If leaders are learning this much from one another, then part of our job is to create a setting where that learning can happen with more intention.
After the Forum, we plan to create an anonymized executive briefing that captures the patterns, challenges, practical ideas, and leadership wisdom that emerge across both rooms. I am excited about that because it extends the value of the gathering beyond the people who were able to attend.
A well-facilitated conversation can become a form of real-time listening for an organization or an industry. It can reveal where people are struggling, where practices are emerging, and where leaders may need to pay attention next.
How to Create Better Facilitated Team Conversations
You do not need a formal workshop every time a team needs a better conversation. Some of these practices can be brought into ordinary leadership meetings, planning sessions, off-sites, or cross-functional discussions.
Begin by being clear about why the conversation deserves to happen together. Establish a few agreements that support candor and participation. Decide in advance how the facilitator or meeting leader can intervene if the group gets stuck, loses focus, or needs to hear from different voices.
Then pay attention to the conversation as a living system rather than simply moving through agenda items. Notice where the energy changes. Notice what keeps resurfacing. Notice what people may be protecting or avoiding. Give the room enough time to make meaning before forcing a conclusion.
Three questions are often enough to keep a gathering grounded: What matters most here? What are we seeing or learning that we could not see alone? What do we want to do with that insight now?
Not every gathering needs to end with a five-point action plan. Sometimes the most useful outcome is shared understanding, repaired trust, a decision everyone can stand behind, or clarity about the next conversation that needs to happen. But something should be different when people leave than when they arrived.
Gathering as a Doorway
I have come to see Gathering as a doorway in my work.
It creates space for leaders and teams to step out of the normal current of work and see the system more clearly. It gives people permission to contribute what they know, including what may be difficult to say in the usual meeting rhythm. It makes room for connection, but connection in service of something: clearer purpose, better decisions, stronger working relationships, and movement on the work that matters.
The tools I use now are certainly more sophisticated than the chore chart I built as a girl. The systems are more complex too. But I recognize the same instinct underneath the work.
Bring people together. Create a structure that feels fair and useful. Listen for what is present. Help the group find its way forward.
As AI gives us more ways to produce information, analysis, and answers, our ability to gather well may become an even more important human capability.
Some wisdom only becomes visible when we are in the room together.
