The central practice

How to bring a room back to one conversation

Put more than five or six people in a room and the conversation splits. Two people at one end talk about work, three in the middle talk about a trip, and someone at the far end checks their phone. Everyone is talking. Nobody is talking together. When the evening ends, people have had several small conversations and the group has had none.

This is the default for almost every gathering, and most of the time nobody decides it. The room leader who decides otherwise changes what the gathering is.

Why one conversation matters

A group forms when people hear each other. In one shared conversation, everyone learns how the others think, what they care about and what they are working through. That is how a dinner of acquaintances becomes a table of friends, how a family stays close as it grows, and how a board learns to disagree in the room instead of in the parking lot.

Side conversations are pleasant, but they keep people with the one or two they already know. The quiet person, the newcomer and the youngest person at the table get left out first.

The Jeffersonian dinner

The simplest version is the Jeffersonian dinner. The host poses one question to the whole table, and the table answers it together. Nobody talks to their neighbor about something else. The question is open and personal enough to matter, such as: what is something you changed your mind about this year? Each person answers, others ask follow-up questions, and the conversation moves around the table.

It works for twelve people at a dinner party, and it works for a family at a holiday table, a book club after the book has been covered or a team on the first night of an offsite.

How to hold the room together

Set it up at the start. Tell people what you are doing and why. Most will be relieved that someone is taking charge of the evening.

Choose the question in advance. A good question is easy to start answering and hard to finish. Avoid questions with a right answer, and avoid questions that invite a speech.

Go first, briefly. Your answer sets the length and the level of honesty for everyone else.

Give everyone a turn before anyone takes a second one. Then open it up.

When the room starts to split, bring it back without scolding. Ask the side conversation to share what they were talking about, or ask a new person a question by name.

Seat people on purpose. A long, narrow table works against one conversation. A round table, or chairs in a circle, works for it.

In other rooms

In a boardroom, one conversation means the real disagreement is said out loud while everyone can hear it. Ask each director for their view before the discussion starts, so the first strong opinion does not set the direction.

At a family gathering, one conversation means the grandparent, the teenager and the newest in-law each get a turn in front of everyone. One shared question at dinner does more for a family than a full day of activities side by side.

In a peer group, a book club or a discussion group, one conversation is the whole point. A group that fragments has lost the reason it meets.

From Leading the Room, a book in progress by Gerry Morton on how to lead any room where people gather, drawn from twenty-two years in peer groups across Vistage, EO, YPO and TIGER 21 and on boards.