Over the next four weeks, I’ll write a Notes on Conscious Convening post each week, going behind the scenes on one of partnerships.

My question for you: What deeper insight would you most like me to reveal?

• How to transform high-stakes meetings

• How to unlock the collective potential of a team

• Where the conference industry is headed

Just hit reply. One line is plenty.

Our team has a front row seat, really a backstage pass, to gatherings that are changing what’s possible when people come together. A few examples:

Transformation by Design

Our annual event for our xchange Academy members. I facilitated only about 20% of three days, a notable ratio for me, while members of our xchange Academy, and guests like Yanik Silver, Sachin Patel and Danielle LaPorte facilitated as well.

What I’m learning: The more important I am, the less valuable the business is.

A question to ponder: Where can I step out of the center so others can step in? Where do I have room to trust in others, and what would this make possible?

P.S. We surprised our members by announcing this would be our final Transformation by Design.

Next year, we shift from one... to three in person training events. But these will be intimate, curated (invitation only), and intense.

More to come on this, but our business is taking off, and we need to equip the right guides, to partner with us on the opportunities being generated.

The Conscious Capitalism CEO Summit

This is the room for purpose driven CEO’s to get together each year. This year, on the theme of leading in radical uncertainty. 60% Of the agenda designed as facilitated peer conversations.

When thousands of years of experience are in the audience, the highest priority is to create conditions for collective learning to happen. Not at the breaks, but as the prime time on the agenda.

What I’m learning: In a living system (a group of people), faster learning is the survival skill in times of unending change.

A question to ponder: What becomes possible if we help a community / team to learn faster? What would that look like, sound like, feel like?

Cutco Cutlery

A 75-year-old company in a major leadership transition. 270 managers talked through what to keep, trends to observe, hopes for the future, innovations for collaboration, and action to mobilize. We combined these deeply human dialogues with AI Tools at every table, capturing and representing what we heard... almost in real time.

What I’m learning: There’s a frontier that has hardly been address: where should human connection and conversation be preserved, and where should the technology come in to support.

A question to ponder: Where can we create, strengthen or even repair the health of a system by turning people towards each other? By creating the conditions for listening, at scale? And where does a.i. help accelerate, or hinder this process?

(I have so much more to say on what we are learning here. this is uncharted territory. I’m watching globally revered “a.i. thought leaders” (friends of mine) who are unintentionally doing tremendous harm, by how they are seduced into using a.i. to replace human connection.)

Scaling.com

Our third conference in a year with Dr. Benjamin Hardy and Blake Erickson, turning their teachings from The Science of Scaling and Power Law Strategy into practice. We achieved an NPS score of 90+ for the third straight time. I shared my appreciation for Ben and Blake here.

What I’m learning: When thought leaders discover how to activate their teachings, along with cycles of giving and receiving between their students... an exponential value is created.

A question to ponder: Where can you create the space to shift a learning experience from passive to active, and what courage or shift in belief will this require of you (or others)?

I’ll be doing deeper dives on each of these partnerships in the coming weeks. Curious where your curiosity lies, as we transform the way we come together.

I recently spent three days with the leadership team of Valor Pediatric Health — a mid-size network of pediatric care centers whose work touches thousands of families across dozens of communities.

Most leadership teams invest thousands of dollars per person and days of their most senior people’s time in executive offsites.

The results are not matching the investment.

A survey from MIT Sloan found that only 34% of executive teams report strong alignment on strategic priorities after their annual offsite.

McKinsey puts it even more starkly: fewer than 25% of executives feel their organizations are effectively aligned on strategy and priorities at all.

The corporate retreats market is heading toward $73.7 billion by 2034. Only 17% of companies have a formal system for measuring what any of it actually produced.

The problem is not that leadership teams are not meeting. It is that most of what happens when they do meet is not worth the time it costs.

Face-to-face communication is 34 times more effective than email at generating commitment and follow-through. Most executive offsites spend that irreplaceable time watching slides.

Let’s start with a simple premise, to frame how important this opportunity is:

• Our world is changing faster than most organizations, and leadership teams feel equipped to deal with.

• It’s harder to lead than ever before.

• We need to evolve how our leaders lead, in order to meet increased levels of complexity and uncertainty.

• Leadership meetings — whether small offsites or annual gatherings — are one of the greatest investments of resources, sources of leverage, and opportunities to affect an organization.

Most leadership offsites follow the same script. Fly everyone in. Open a deck. A senior leader presents the state of the business.

Then the next. Then the next.

There’s a strategy session, probably a consultant’s framework on a whiteboard.

Dinner with polite conversation.

Day two, more slides.

A breakout group that produces a list nobody fully remembers.

Everybody played it safe. Now we fly home.

The team spent two days together and barely scratched the surface when it comes to a genuine sense of safety, or honest exploration of conversations that felt like they mattered.

This might feel like a critique, but it’s well recognized. It’s a description of what most leaders have been taught an offsite is supposed to look like. Information gets delivered. Reports get filed. The team returns to work.

But there’s a different model. And it starts with a set of principles that many leadership teams have never been offered.

THE PARADIGM SHIFT

Before I walk you through what we did at the offsite, I want to name the shift in thinking that makes any of it possible. Because without this shift, the techniques are just techniques. With it, they become a fundamentally different way of leading a leadership team.

Principle 1: The wisdom is already in the room

The job of a well-designed offsite is not just to deliver insights to the team. It is to surface the collective wisdom the team already holds. To make it both visible and useful.

Principle 2: Shift from idea consumption to idea creation

Most leadership meetings are designed for information consumption. Leaders present & leaders consume. The paradigm shift is designing meetings where people also create — ideas, visions, solutions, commitments — together.

Principle 3: Optimize for regulated nervous systems

Honesty, creativity, and real collaboration require safety, not comfort. Safety is also what makes our higher creative and collaborative capacities come alive. It results from the structure of how we design and facilitate our time together — not through ground rules or declaration of an honest meeting.

Principle 4: Unlock strengths through Appreciative Inquiry

Each conversation is curated and designed with questions that allow the group to operate from individual and shared strength. This allows problems to be solved more efficiently, new possibilities to come alive more naturally, and increases creativity throughout the process.

This is not abstract.

DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast found that 71% of executives say their stress has surged since taking on their current leadership role.

Only 30% feel they have enough time to lead with the care and strategic thought the role demands.

Leaders do not need more pressure applied at their offsite. They need the conditions that allow them to think at their best.

These four principles are the foundation. Everything we designed at the offsite flows from them. Keep them in mind as you read what follows.

WHAT A TRADITIONAL OFFSITE CANNOT DO

Here is the core problem with slide-based, report-driven leadership meetings.

They are designed for one-directional information transfer. And information transfer is one of the least important things a leadership team needs from time together.

What they most need is to think together. To learn together. To see each other’s thinking in real time. To disagree well. To build something together they could not have built separately.

What we are ultimately aiming for is to tap into the collective intelligence of the group.

None of that happens when people are watching a presentation.

The gap between investment and impact is measurable.

Companies with aligned leadership teams are 2.5 times more likely to outperform their peers on revenue growth.

The design of the experience determines whether collective intelligence gets accessed, or stays dormant.

THE CHOREOGRAPHY UNDERNEATH EVERYTHING

From the start of the meeting, eighteen leaders sat in a full circle — no tables between them, no podium, no projection screen.

For the majority of those three days, no slides, no presentations, no rehearsed reports.

The biggest role technology played: my small Bluetooth speaker for music, which plays a bigger role than you might think.

And we were constantly moving.

Pairs. Groups of three, four, or five. The full circle. And back again.

Every configuration was a designed decision.

We call these conversational choreographies. And the choreography is as important as the content.

Here is the framework we used for almost every conversation. We call it the three stages of an xchange.

Stage 1: Reflection

Before anyone speaks, individuals sit with a question on their own. Reflection is what allows someone to locate what they actually think, before the room shapes what they say.

Stage 2: Small Group Dialogue

From reflection, people move into pairs, triads, or small groups. The size is a deliberate choice based on what the conversation is designed to produce.

Stage 3: Voices Into the Room

Small groups share back to the full team. The form changes: story sharing, theme harvesting, creative vision presenting, or declarations of commitment.

Why we almost always start in pairs

In a pair, two people share equal time. Everyone is fully in the conversation from the first moment. That is an example of an interaction pattern — a condition Woolley’s research identifies as the primary driver of collective intelligence.

But something else is happening at a neurobiological level.

In pairs and other small group configurations, leaders are co-creating an experience that affects their individual and shared chemistry. There are multiple descriptions for what’s happening: co-regulation, social contagion, or the network effect. But beneath it all is something key. The experience of coherence.

We build safety through structure, before we ever expect the group to be honest, brave, or creative.

THE FIVE CONVERSATIONS

Conversation 1: Purpose Stories

The first thing I asked the Valor leadership team to do was reflect, individually, on a single question:

Think about all of your lived experiences here.
Now reflect on a story — a real example —
that stands out more than any other, that reminds
you why the work you do is so important.

Then they moved to high-top tables around the room. Groups of three or four, self-organized.

Each person shared their story.

What came back into the room was more than just a conversation exercise. It was felt by many as a sort of ceremonial opening to our time together.

WHAT CAME BACK INTO THE ROOM

• A leader described a clinic coordinator — sixteen years with the organization — who knew every patient and family by name, who moved through her day as though her job description was simply to care for whoever was in front of her

• Another described clinical staff driving across town on their day off to attend the memorial service of a longtime team member — showing up together because that is who they are

• A leader who had come from a metrics-driven corporate background described his second week: a child had been discharged after a long stay, and the entire floor stopped to cheer. He went home and told his wife: “I’ve never worked anywhere like this.” And something shifted in him permanently.

Most leadership teams never create this conversation. They treat purpose as a noun. A statement. Something static that lives on a wall.

Purpose stops being above or outside the team. It activates through them, through the choice to bring these stories into the room.

Conversation 2: Strengths to Preserve

Considering Valor had just navigated several years of extraordinary change — which would likely continue — there was a felt sense in the room that they needed space to honor what had gotten them to where they are.

No matter how they were going to change or evolve, there was a need to crystallize the qualities that should be nurtured, protected, and preserved. A conversation about strengths was central to this.

After time in working groups, they had a chance to capture and present to each other the strengths they most wanted to honor.

Three themes came back consistently:

WHAT THE TEAM NAMED AS THEIR STRENGTHS

• Human connection — a depth of care and presence that ran from the clinical floor to the executive team

• Active, structured leadership — thoughtful decision-making and real accountability at every tier of the organization

• Growth mindset — “People here truly want to get better at what they do. That drive is a core part of who we are.”

Peter Drucker said the task of leadership is to align strengths so thoroughly that weaknesses become irrelevant.

This conversation does several things at once. It honors history.

It grounds everything in what is real rather than theoretical.

It creates collective pride.

And it answers one of the quietest anxieties in any leadership transition: will what made us who we are actually survive what comes next?

Conversation 3: Lessons Learned

If strengths look backward with gratitude, lessons look backward with honesty.

The question: what has this last chapter taught us?
What should we carry forward?

The Valor team named hard-earned, specific lessons.

About tolerating the wrong behaviors for too long.

About what it means to hold high standards when the pressure is simply to get through the season.

About how quickly institutional knowledge can be lost when the conditions for passing it on are not deliberately created.

Part of what makes these kinds of collective dialogues so important is the validity and buy-in that is inherent in the discussion. All the learning came from their own lived reality. This invites trust in whatever emerges.

The data no one ever disagrees with is their own.

Conversation 4: Future Visions

On the second day, I gave the team a single prompt. I asked them to take it outside, alone, with blank paper and fifteen minutes.

Imagine it is five years from now. The story of this organization
has become an inspiring and shining example of a network
that does well while also doing so much good.
What does that look like? What do you see, hear, feel?

When they returned, they moved into small groups. Not to compare notes, but to co-create. Each group took the raw material of their individual reflections and built something together — a shared picture of a future that none of them had arrived at alone.

Margaret Wheatley, one of the most respected voices in organizational thinking, observed that people support what they help create. Co-creation is not a nice-to-have. It is the mechanism by which ownership transfers from the facilitator to the group.

When the groups presented, they did not share a strategy deck, or a list of measureables.

They shared a story.

WHAT THE GROUPS CREATED

• One group presented a magazine cover — their organization featured in a national healthcare publication. The headline: “How Valor became the beacon of pediatric care.” A lighthouse, they said, among difficult waters.

• Another group acted out a scene: an orientation day five years from now, playing both the new clinicians lining up to join and the families choosing their care provider. The room laughed and filled with pride in the same breath.

What they created was genuinely theirs. No consultant handed it to them. No slide deck prompted it. It came from inside the room.

We are not creating the future to put it on a wall. We are building the practice of creating together.

Conversation 5: Opportunity Areas

The transition from future visions to opportunity areas is one of the most important moments in a strategic conversation like this one.

After the groups had presented their future visions, every person in the room received a single question on a piece of paper:

After sitting with our shared visions of the future,
what do you believe are the single most important
opportunity areas we need to focus on in
order to make that future come true?

Each person answered independently, in writing, and handed their responses in.

We synthesized the responses overnight. What made this moment so striking was the degree of alignment. Eighteen people, working independently, named the same three things.

THE THREE OPPORTUNITY AREAS THAT EMERGED

1. Technology, data, and service — mentioned by 12 of 18 leaders, and surfaced independently in two of the three future vision presentations. The team saw technology not as a threat to their human-centered culture, but as the lever that could extend and scale it.

2. Talent — raising the bar and growing people — named by at least 10 leaders and acknowledged in all three future presentations. The shared conviction: the future they wanted to create would only be possible if they continued to invest in who their people were becoming.

3. Discipline, execution, clarity, focus, and accountability — surfaced by at least 9 leaders. The honest recognition that vision without execution is just a story. The team knew that realizing their futures would require a sharper operating discipline than the one they currently had.

The following morning, we presented the three opportunity areas back to the group. Rather than reading them myself, I asked the leaders who wanted to read each one aloud. The head of technology took the first. HR took the second. Someone else took the third.

In that moment, the opportunity areas stopped being outputs from a process and became something the group owned.

What followed was a two-part ideation process. First, each leader took time alone, in silence, to capture their best ideas in response to a simple prompt for each area:

how might we?

One idea per post-it. Bold and practical. No filtering.

Then we ran what we call one conversation. The three opportunity areas were posted on flip charts around the room. One at a time, leaders came forward, placed their post-it on the board, and told the group what was on it. No discussions. No debates. Just witnessing. The only rule: when you come up, you share what’s on the note. It can’t be a TED talk.

What emerged across the three flip charts was a map of the group’s collective thinking — dozens of ideas, visible to everyone, organized by theme. The room could see its own intelligence reflected back at it.

From there, leaders self-organized into working groups by whichever opportunity area they were most energized to contribute to. Each group had one task: of everything on the table, what are the two or three ideas most worth pursuing, and what would it take to make one of them real?

The groups worked. Then they presented.

Future first. Opportunities second. Ideas from the collective. Then the real work of choosing what to pursue together.

WHAT THREE DAYS PRODUCED

The Valor leadership team left with a shared story about who they are. A set of strengths they named and chose to protect. Lessons they surfaced and chose to carry. Future visions they built together — including a magazine cover nobody in that room will forget. Three opportunity areas they named themselves, with nearly unanimous alignment. And a set of ideas and commitments that came from the room, not from a consultant.

Those outputs were real. And they were not the most important thing.

The most important thing was what the team became in the process of creating them.

A team that has now learned how to think together. A team that has experienced, in their own nervous systems, what it feels like to be genuinely heard by the person across from them. A network caring for thousands of families across dozens of communities — now with a stronger evolutionary advantage than they walked in with.

Glassdoor’s 2026 Worklife Trends report found that mentions of “misalignment” in employee reviews surged 149% year-over-year.

The organizations that close that gap will not do it with better dashboards. They will do it by redesigning how their leaders actually spend time together.

Whatever their future holds, and none of us can predict it, they now have something more durable than a plan.

They have a practice.

And that is what conscious convening makes possible.

P.S. If you design or lead experiences for leadership teams and want to go deeper on conversational choreography, the five conversations, and the science underneath the structure, this is the work we teach at xchange. You are invited to explore what that looks like at xchangeapproach.com.

I want to share a list of the projects we’ve been working on — and some of the lessons that have come from them.

Fifteen examples. Fifteen lessons. Some will resonate more than others.

Reply and tell me which ones you want to go deeper on. The ones that get the most responses will become future newsletters.

1 | Clarke — 300 employees, 80th anniversary

Clarke hired us for the fourth time in eleven years. In 2027, we’ll lead a 300-person Appreciative Inquiry Summit to celebrate their 80th anniversary.

Most companies mark a milestone with a party. Clarke is marking theirs by inviting every voice in the organization to shape what comes next.

The lesson: An organization is a constellation of conversations. The leaders who understand that don’t decide the future in a small room. They design a process for the whole system to find it together.

2 | 280 retreat professionals

We trained 280 retreat professionals — students of world-renowned retreat leader Sheri Rosenthal — on The xchange Approach.

These are people who design transformational experiences for others. And the biggest shift they left with had nothing to do with content.

The lesson: A real retreat isn’t a workshop in a pretty place. It’s a container designed with space to breathe. And the transformation inside that container doesn’t come from expertise — it comes from the right questions, and the space to let them land.

3 | Purposeful Planning Institute — 500 members

PPI is a membership organization of advisors who serve families of wealth and families in business. Seventy percent of their members identified one skill as most in demand: facilitating high-stakes conversations.

We’re now training five hundred of them.

The lesson: The most valuable expert in the room isn’t the one with the best answers. It’s the one with the best questions. The shift from delivering expertise to unlocking shared potential — that’s not a facilitation trend. It’s a new definition of what it means to serve a client well.

4 | Conscious Capitalism CEO Summit — fourth consecutive year

xchange was born in 2015, partly inspired by reading Conscious Capitalism and a chance meeting with Joe Jaworski at a local chapter in Cleveland. Joe became a personal mentor to me and to our members.

Ten years later, we’ve been invited for the fourth consecutive year to design and facilitate their annual CEO Summit.

The lesson: Purpose-driven leadership isn’t a philosophy for good times. At a moment when leading through chaos and uncertainty has never been harder, the CEOs who are navigating it best are the ones anchored to something larger than the business. We get to design and facilitate that room. That is the highest honor for us.

5 | Entrepreneurs’ Organization — 250 facilitators and trainers

EO hired us to train over 250 of their facilitators on how to create transformative experiences online.

Early in the pandemic, we asked ourselves two questions: what was everything great about in-person gatherings that we could translate online — and what might actually be better online than anything we’d done in person?

Six years and 26,000 workshop attendees later, those two questions are still revealing answers.

The lesson: The principles that make an in-person experience transformative transfer online exceptionally well. Precision questions, guided conversation, intentional use of visuals, music, and breakout rooms — together, they can create a level of intimacy that rivals, and sometimes surpasses, anything we’ve done in a physical room.

6 | 67 new certified xchange guides

We graduated sixty-seven new certified xchange guides this year.

These are leadership consultants and facilitators who are building conscious convening as a core capability — not a technique they’ve added to a toolkit, but a discipline they’ve committed to.

The lesson: The shift from consumption-centered meetings to meetings that center on the creation of ideas and connection between people requires more than a new agenda. It requires a whole new skillset. Meeting planners and organizations need to think about having a professional design and facilitation partner — someone with the kind of training these guides have received.

7 | Benchmark Senior Living — 175 leaders, two and a half days

Benchmark’s company purpose is Transformation Through Human Connection. When they found The xchange Approach, they recognized it immediately — this is exactly what we stand for.

For two and a half days, we designed and facilitated their Human Connection Conference. Peer coaching. Values conversations. Storytelling. Collective input on what to preserve and what to build toward.

The lesson: When you bring a room full of leaders together, you don’t need talking heads. The room can become the stage. The participants can become the creators of the most important conversations.

8 | Ben Hardy’s Scaling — 4x attendees, 90+ NPS

Dr. Ben Hardy has sold millions of copies of his books. When he brought his Scaling.com members together for their second live event — four times the size of the first — he chose not to default to presentations.

Instead, over fifty percent of the time was spent on carefully designed questions drawn from his Science of Scaling frameworks, with peers coaching and teaching each other.

The event scored a 90+ NPS.

The lesson: The most valuable content in the room isn’t always on the stage. When you design for the wisdom already sitting in the audience, the experience becomes something people remember — and return to.

9 | Fortec Medical — 150+ senior leaders, fourth year

Fortec Medical is nearly forty years old, founded by Drew Forehan on an extraordinary sense of culture and identity. They are also a continuously high-growth company navigating relentless change.

Every quarter, over 150 of their senior leaders gather online for what they call their Leadership Connection event. In two hours, they share stories that remind them of the nobility of their work, recognize each other for living their values, and reconnect to the purpose that got them here.

The lesson: Culture doesn’t protect itself. Especially during high growth. The organizations that are most intentional about preserving their identity — even remotely, even at scale — are the ones most likely to still recognize themselves on the other side of change.

10 | 37 Conscious Leadership Guides in progress

Beyond our core certification, guides may continue their path to become a Certified Conscious Leadership Guide — someone equipped to design and lead workshops that teach leaders how to lead consciously, especially when it’s hardest to do so.

Thirty-seven are currently on that path.

This work flies in the face of most leadership development. It’s not an intellectual exploration. It’s somatic. It teaches leaders how to regulate their nervous systems under pressure.

The lesson: Nervous system regulation may be the most important personal leadership skill of the future. The guides who can teach it are building a capability most of the industry hasn’t caught up to yet.

11 | 47 guides certifying in Appreciative Inquiry Summits

Our Appreciative Inquiry Summit certification trains guides to lead teams of any size — five to five hundred — through structured conversations and design thinking processes to solve shared problems, shape their future, or capture a specific opportunity together.

Forty-seven guides are three weeks from completing that certification.

The lesson: Competitive advantage is what you’re great at right now. Evolutionary advantage is your ability to keep changing. The organizations learning to think and create collectively — at scale — aren’t just solving today’s problems. They’re building the capacity to solve tomorrow’s.

12 | Benchmark Senior Living — 18 senior leaders, three days

Eighteen senior leaders. Three days. No slides, no technology, no handouts.

Entirely guided through conversation — capturing their story, crystallizing the strengths that got them here, imagining the future together, and identifying the opportunities worth pursuing.

This offsite could have been massages, golf, and big dinners. Nothing wrong with any of that.

The lesson: When you remove every crutch — the deck, the agenda, the expert at the front of the room — and replace them with nothing but the right conversations, something unexpected happens. Strategic clarity doesn’t get forced. It emerges. And it belongs to everyone in the room.

13, 14, 15 | Raj Sisodia + Nilima Bhat, Joe Pine, Danielle LaPorte

This year we hosted online events for Raj Sisodia and Nilima Bhat, co-authors of Healing Leaders, for Joe Pine, author of The Experience Economy, and tomorrow we lead an event for Danielle LaPorte to celebrate her new book, Bless and Release.

None of these are webinars. They are experiential events where the audience doesn’t just hear the ideas — they live them.

The lesson: The old model: earn trust first, then create transformation. The new model: create transformation as part of your marketing, before anyone becomes a customer. The thought leaders who understand this aren’t just spreading their work differently. They’re redefining what it means to launch a book.

The full picture

When I stand back and look at this list, something becomes clear.

These are not separate events. They are data points in a pattern.

Organizations are waking up to something. The way they have been gathering their people — the presentations, the overstuffed agendas, the experts at the front of the room — isn’t working. Not the way it should. Not the way they need it to.

What they’re finding is that conscious convening is not a facilitation technique. It is an organizational capability.

The ones who build it have a different kind of future than the ones who don’t.

Which of these fifteen resonates most with you? Reply and tell me. The ones that get the most responses become the next newsletters.

Stay curious, Jon

I hadn’t pitched anything, described my services or mentioned fees.

I’d just been asking questions.

Questions about their culture, their people, how they thought about belonging inside a large organization, what their gatherings had felt like in the past, what was still missing. Questions that went deeper than what the event was supposed to accomplish, into what they actually wanted for the people showing up.

And then, Dr. Rollin McCraty, long time Research Director at HeartMath Institute® stopped me.

“Jon, every question you’ve asked is one we should be asking. So our only assumption is you actually know how to do all these things. Come lead our global conference next month.”

The Question Is the Demonstration

I think about that call a lot.

What I was doing in those 45 minutes wasn’t discovery. At least, it wasn’t only that.

Every question I asked was drawn from something I knew how to do. I wasn’t asking about opening rituals because I was curious. I was asking because I know what it means to design one that changes the temperature of a room.

The questions were the demonstration.

This is something that took me years to learn. And I still work at it.

Most of us who lead groups for a living walk into sales conversations carrying the pressure to explain ourselves. We’re ready to describe our approach, defend our methods, or justify our fees.

We’ve prepared our answers.

The problem is that a room of executives isn’t looking for your answers. They’re looking for evidence that you understand their questions.

When your questions open something for them, they already know what working with you would feel like.

And there’s almost nothing more compelling than that.

What Gets Built in 45 Minutes

The HeartMath® call didn’t end with them agreeing to hear my pitch. It ended with them inviting me to lead their Global Coherence Conference, 45 days later, in Tulum Mexico, because the conversation itself had given them confidence.

(And before I forget to mention, there are very few organizations whose work is needed more badly than the practices and research created by HeartMath. Never before have we needed to tap our highest human potential, with tools like the ones they offer.)

That outcome of the conversation wasn’t accidental. It came from preparation that most people skip.

Before calls like that, I’ll walk through my questions out loud. In the woods behind my house, or just alone in a room.

I’m not rehearsing answers. I’m rehearsing how to ask.

I’m looking for the question that surfaces what they actually care about. The one that reveals a gap they’ve stopped thinking about.

I do this because, as I’ve said in our community many times, you get one bite at the apple. You get one real chance to land in the right position with someone. The conversation you have before they’ve made up their mind is the most important one.

The quality of the questions you bring to that conversation is where the positioning happens.

Most facilitators I know are extraordinary at leading a room.

Fewer have built a practice of bringing that same quality of attention to the conversation before the room even starts.

That’s the gap. And it’s worth closing.

Stay curious,

Jon

P.S. If this resonates, come experience it in person during our next two-hour intro workshop. It’s an experiential introduction to Conscious Convening, and the best way I know to feel what this work is actually like. Bring a friend. Over 25,000 people from around the world have joined us over the last five years, and I still love every room. Reserve your spot here.

Eighteen senior leaders. A company that had just closed a multi-billion dollar transaction. And on the drive over, I found out there was an email thread going around making fun of the facilitator who might make them sit in a circle.

That was me.

I did not feel confident or ready. I sat with that for a while.

You cannot give a room what you haven’t first found in yourself.

So I walked in and told them exactly how I felt. Three words.

Privileged. Because they were letting me into something that mattered to them.

Aligned. Because what they were trying to build and what we facilitate, those things belong together.

Concerned. Because they had told me they wanted this to be a safe space. And as a facilitator, I had to be honest with them. It is not my job to tell you this is a safe space. How would I know?

Something shifted in that room. Taking a visible risk gave the room permission to do the same. And when the facilitator goes first, that is often what opens the door.

By the end of the first day, one of the leaders who’d been most skeptical read a handwritten note to a colleague out loud. He could not hold back his emotion. Neither could she.

That is what becomes possible when someone goes first.

Here is something that’s changed for me over the years.

The moments I used to dread are the ones I now hope for.

When something goes sideways. When a question lands wrong. When a participant pushes back hard or the room goes somewhere I did not plan for.

High-stakes rooms test all of us in different ways. The room going sideways is not the problem. It is the moment the room wakes up.

When everything is going smoothly, a certain passivity settles in. People are present enough, but not fully alert. The moment something unexpected happens, every person in the room concentrates. Their attention sharpens.

In that window, trust either accelerates or it does not.

What determines which way it goes is not what you know. It is how regulated you are in that instant.

If you’ve done the work when nobody was watching, the reflection, the preparation, the honest reckoning with your own reactivity, then in that moment you can breathe. You can honor what is happening instead of fighting it. You can say, thank you for bringing that in, and mean it.

That is the only way to be ready. You have to have already done the work before you walked through the door.

Process, we can learn. Question design, we can practice. Instructions, we can refine.

Presence is something else.

Here’s what I try to remember. Whatever comes out of your mouth in a facilitated room, make sure it is tethered to some place in your heart.

In practice, that means this.

The families navigating hard conversations. The leadership teams carrying weight they do not always name. The rooms full of people who came hoping something might shift.

They are just humans. And so are you.

Anyone who’s ever given you a room to facilitate has given you something. They’re letting you live your purpose.

When you hold that, something changes in how you move through the room. The care becomes visible. The attention you give each person becomes real rather than performed. And what I’ve found to be true over many years of this work: when you do everything with genuine care and compassion, that will make up for the instruction you fumbled, the question that did not land, the moment that went sideways.

People feel it. They hear it. They remember it long after they’ve forgotten everything else.

Stay curious,
Jon

P.S. If this resonates, come experience it in person. Join our next free two-hour intro workshop. It is our experiential introduction to Conscious Convening, and it's the best way I know to feel what this work is actually like from the inside. Bring a friend. Be ready to engage. Over 25,000 people from around the world have joined us over the last five years, and I still love every room.

Gathering together at a beautiful location, away from their offices..

They closed a major chapter this year. A real one. Years of work, a significant transition, a lot that was hard and a lot that worked.

Today was about harvesting what they want to carry forward.

Before I sent them outside to work in small groups this afternoon, I did something that took about thirty seconds to explain.

I told them who was in each group.

I’d spent more time on that decision than almost anything else I prepared for today.

I have a simple data table I use for this. Names, tenure, department. Before an exercise like this one, I study it.

About a third of this group has been with the company a long time.

A third for three to five years.

A third are relatively new.

I made sure none of those thirds clustered together. I looked for the cross-department pairings that almost never happen on their own.

As we’ve returned to many times in this work, curation is never just a logistical step.

Diversifying which strengths touch upon against other strengths is everything.

As Meg Wheatley taught me years ago, if you want to change the conversation - change who is in it.

And new interaction patterns reveal new truths.

They came back after thirty minutes.

The first group presented two lessons they hoped the company would carry forward. People leaned in when they heard the first one.

Cut the knot.

They explained it simply. Don’t waste time untangling something that just needs to change. Own the change. Build the house you want to live in.

Their second lesson: We need to car pool. You can’t all take separate routes.

These aren’t the phrases you’d expect from a senior leadership offsite.

They’re also not the phrases that get written in a document and forgotten.

They came from a specific group of people, in a specific configuration, given real time to think together.

That’s the part worth paying attention to.

The phrases weren’t planted or prompted. They came from people who don’t normally sit in the same conversation being asked the same question at the same moment.

That’s what curation makes possible.

It’s a question worth sitting with before your next session.

Not just what will we explore.

But who needs to be in conversation with whom for something real to emerge?

—Jon

P.S. Experience our 2-Hour Live Intro to xchange. This is our experiential introduction to Conscious Convening. Bring a friend. And be ready to engage. I love meeting folks from all over the globe at our workshop. Over 25,000 have attended, over the last 5 years. Go here to grab your spot.

What the Room is Teaching Me: Cycles of giving and receiving
What I Can’t Unsee: Convening as a strategic capability
A Question to Sit With: Am I helping, or hurting?
Roots of the Work: Change people, or systems?
A Prophecy for Today: The Shambhala Warrior

This newsletter is written from scratch with zero use of AI for writing, editing, or publication. The only use of AI, when used, is to source images when necessary.

I’m writing this week from Florida…

The Great Woman (Adair) and I took an excursion from Ohio (and the kids) to take in the sun, renew, and reflect.

It’s amazing what a shift in environment can do, for perspective, for well-being, for space to create.

Speaking of creating… We’re shifting this newsletter to Substack, to make it more shareable, readable, and useful.

If you find yourself inspired, drop a comment with what resonates, share this with somebody you know would enjoy, or subscribe to stay in the loop.

Thank you to all of you who have given feedback and expressed enthusiasm.
It has kept me going.

I chose to only take one meeting this week: a collaborative exploration with Raj Sisodia and Nilima Bhat around how we could bring their new book, Healing Leaders, more meaningfully to the world.

The meeting, completed just a few minutes ago, was synchronistic, to say the least.

Inspired by it, I’m ending with the Tibetan Prophecy of the Shambhala Warrior. An invitation to consider what these times are calling for.

1) What the Room Is Teaching Me

Over the last few weeks, we led two choreographies inside our xchange Guide Certification: Ask/Give and Circles.

If you aren’t familiar, both create massive value inside a learning community, but in different ways.

Ask/Give is a fast way to help a community match real needs with real offers, helping participants get resourced, relationships to form, and the wisdom in the system becomes visible.

Circles is a repeatable ritual that turns a room into peer coaches. Participants ask for help, offer support, and deepen the supportive tissue of a room.

One of our participants, Diana, was overwhelmed with emotion as we wrapped Circles:

“This experience compels me to acknowledge the spirit of generosity that feels so palpable inside this community, and through this learning experience.”

I reminded Diana: the real magic is in the container that invites generosity to emerge.

Remember: culture follows structure. Which is scalable.

And if you want the underlying principle that makes these choreographies so reliable at building community, mother nature reminds us well…

Living systems thrive through cycles of giving and receiving.

Core lesson to extract:
When we create a container for cycles of giving and receiving, we activate one of the most natural, effective, and reliable sources of healthy community.

2) A Distinction I Can’t Unsee

In the last 10 days, I’ve been in a series of client and community conversations, leadership meetings, conferences, movement-building gatherings, and inner-work trainings.

Across all of them, a pattern is revealing itself:

Organizations are pushing to get a better return on leadership meetings and conferences.

To put 200 senior leaders in a room for 2–3 days, the accounting cost alone (travel, meeting expenses, and wages) will often range between $1–3M.

The real cost is what happens if those leaders don’t have the transformative experience they need to face their most pressing challenges… and to strengthen their capacity to adapt and grow together.

The pressure to deliver outcomes is rising.

For some, this is bad news. Especially for those with only one playbook: speakers + presentations.

But for those who know there’s another way, a key opportunity is emerging:

A core group of change agents can position themselves as a strategic convening partner.

Core lesson to extract:
Conscious Convening is a necessary strategic capability, for every high stakes leadership meeting. It’s not a luxury expense or an optional meeting feature. It’s the intelligent investment of 5% of the overall meeting budget that ensures the return on the other 95%.

3) A Question Worth Sitting With

When we operate from conscious leadership, our awareness of our influence is peaked.

Here’s a question to support that awareness:

Where do I believe I’m being a resource… but I’m actually showing up as a demand?

If progress starts by telling the truth, this one question can unlock real change.

Only from awareness can we pause, notice, and choose a response.

The kind of response that gives life, vs. depletes it, from others.

4) Roots of the Work

A lesson I learned from Margaret Wheatley.

Is it more important to work at the system level… or the individual level?

It’s an unnecessary debate, Meg suggests. Because both are necessary, and connected.

Core Lesson:
In a living system, it’s called reciprocal causality. The parts affect the system, and the system affects the parts.

5) A Prophecy for Today: The Shambhala Warrior

I was reminded this morning that for many of us, the current events of our time are a signal to be informed by.

One source of inspiration for me is the Tibetan Prophecy of the Shambhala Warrior.

There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger.

In that time, great powers have arisen—“barbarian powers,” as they’re called.

Although they waste their wealth preparing to annihilate each other, they have much in common: weapons of unfathomable destructive power, and technologies that lay waste to the world.

It is precisely when the future of all beings hangs by the frailest of threads that the kingdom of Shambhala is said to emerge.

You cannot recognize the Shambhala warriors by uniforms or banners. They are not a special class. They are ordinary people, trained to meet this moment.

Now comes the time when great courage is required of the Shambhala warriors. Moral and physical courage.

Because they must go into the very heart of the barbarian powers, into the corridors of power, to dismantle the weapons.

Their weapons are not weapons as we usually think of them.

The weapons of the Shambhala warrior are compassion and insight.

Compassion, because it lets us stay present to suffering without turning away.
Insight, because it lets us see clearly: what is true, what is connected, what is required.

And the teaching ends with a quiet challenge: the danger isn’t only “out there.”
The danger is that we become so afraid, reactive, or numb, that we forget who we are.

So here’s the invitation I’m holding this week:

Where is one place in your life where you can be a warrior, as my teacher Meg would say, for the human spirit?

Stay Curious,

Jon Berghoff

P.S. I’m hosting our introductory workshop next week. I’d love to meet you there. Bring a friend.

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I’m Jon Berghoff, founder @ xchange. This is a semi-regular, oddly formatted, rarely edited, learning update. If you lead, teach or convene groups, and believe in collective human potential please read, forward, or reply. I love hearing from you.

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Inside this issue

What the Room Is Teaching Me: evolutionary vs. competitive advantage
Distinction I Can’t Unsee: interaction patterns that unlock collective intelligence
Coming Next: put a woman in charge
Meet up with me: online, or for a VIP day, on the ocean

This newsletter is written, from scratch, with zero use of AI for writing, editing, or publication.
The only use of AI, when used, is to source images, when necessary.

I’ve been loving Joe Pine’s new book, The Transformation Economy.

Some backstory.

At xchange, we stand for what we call The 4 Transformations.

1) We transform and future proof the career of our certified Guides.

2) By showing them how to create transformation with their clients.

3) Through transforming how they lead high stakes gatherings.

4) But all of these start with and require an inner transformation of the guide themselves. A transformation in identity, in beliefs, in values.

So naturally, when Joe Pine, bestselling coauthor of The Experience Economy, published his latest work, The Transformation Economy, I was magnetized to his research.

The core message of his book: the next (and highest-value) stage of business after goods, services, and experiences is transformation.

Companies win by designing offerings that help customers achieve lasting change (in identity, capability, health, performance, etc.), and they can price around the value of that outcome, rather than the inputs.

I’ve even met with Joe a few times over the last month.

We will be hosting a special event for our members and guests, in April.

Keep an eye out.

1) 🌿 What the Room Is Teaching Me

During our recent Guide Certification live experience, our students participated in our Crowdsourcing Choreography.

73 change agents worked together to co-create a set of shared values, and shared visions, as part of their certification experience.

Imagine, in 90 minutes or less, from scratch, a group arriving at a level of alignment that many teams, organizations, and communities will live their entire existence and never experience.

Yes, processes like these invite tension. They should. Yes, learning to think and create together is its own muscle and skill.

And while the friction in co-creating something meaningful is essentially guaranteed, we have to look at the value of inviting voices to think together, to solve together, to create together.

To the untrained eye… these types of group processes are primarily about the outputs. And to be clear, the outputs matter.

When Hagerty Insurance invited xchange to their recent annual leadership summit, marking their 40th year in business, we guided 200 leaders to crowdsource a set of guiding principles, and shared visions.

To inform the next 40 years.

Do those outputs matter? Of course they do.

But after having led companies and communities for over a decade in co-discovering together, the room has reminded me again and again…

…the true value of a process like this, isn’t necessarily the outputs and ideas we generate today, but building our relationships with each other, and our ability to steward complex change… over time.

Core lesson to extract:
It’s not our competitive advantage, at any moment in time, that matters most. The highest value of learning to co-create together… is our evolutionary advantage (our ability to navigate continual change), over time.

2) 🔍 A Distinction I Can’t Unsee

Is there an opportunity for our human processes to be reminded by what we’ve collectively created, with artificial intelligence?

Follow along with me, as a walk you through a three part thought journey:

1. Years ago, Gary Hamel offered a hypothesis, in his book The Future of Management.

He suggested that managers and leaders needed to hold open, three fundamental questions.

(And I’m paraphrasing, as I don’t have the book handy, but the essence of the questions has stayed with me.)

How do we invite ideas and innovation to come from everywhere?

How do we inspire our people to want to bring their highest intelligence, their most creative best selves?

How to increase our rate of strategic renewal?

2. Then, I overlay Gary’s questions with one of the most compelling findings in all the research on Collective Intelligence.

In a paper published in 2010, titled Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups, a profound distinction was highlighted.

I’ve seen hundreds of studies and meta studies that have since validated the essence of this finding.

The conclusion: The primary indicator, the one thing that consistently predicts which groups tap their collective intelligence are the interaction patterns between the group members.

Now, let’s line this up with a third data point…

3) There are multiple theories that suggest everything we’ve created, from a technology standpoint, is both a reflection of our human consciousness, and simultaneously meant to remind us of who we are and what we are capable of.

Let’s consider then, for a moment…

When we look at what a large language model is doing, as it reveals its seemingly infinite levels of intelligence… it has simply multiplied the interactions between data points.

Core lesson to extract:

In all the spaces where we gather. The meetings, the conferences, the communities…
…where we declare that the value is in our collective contributions.

Are we remembering… to create the kinds of interaction patterns that the most modern technologies are mirroring for us?

Are we turning to each other, to learn, to reflect, to co-discover?

Are we designing and leading spaces where the way we spend time, truly allows energy and information to flow through the room?

If we are… we are not only designing human patterns that reflect what emerging technologies are doing, but we simultaneously create the conditions that Gary Hamel wrote about, many years ago.

3) 💬 Coming Next

Our next issue will honor the women who have shaped my career. I was privileged to be interviewed by Certified xchange Guide Tarzan Kay, where she asked me about the woman who have shaped me.

I wanted to be brave, so I sang for Tarzan, acapella, which I’ve never done before.

What song did I sing to her?

Put a Woman in Charge, by Keb Mo.

If you want to be notified when the recording gets released, just reply to this email with “Put a woman in charge!”, and I’ll be sure you get it.

4) Experience xchange firsthand. If you’ve never joined, it’s not a cheesy internet-marketing advertisement disguised as a workshop. Nope. It’s an experiential workshop, with nothing being sold. Of course, we’ll point you in the right direction, if you want to learn about getting certified.

Most of the 25,000 participants have said it’s beyond almost every other workshop they’ve attended, and exceeded expectations.

Want to see for yourself? Come meet me at our next workshop.

Stay Curious,

P.S. The week of March 23rd, Adair and I are with our kids, at an inspiring property, right on the ocean.

We will be opening up applications for a VIP Day for 1 person (or a small group), to come in and work with us during the week. Will share details in next week’s newsletter.

We will only announce this one time, as the applications will likely fill up immediately. We’ve done about a dozen of these over the last few years, and it’s one of the most fulfilling ways to serve.

If you want to be bumped to the top of the list, put a comment stating “VIP”, and I’ll make sure you get the details when we open up applications.

P.P.S. Experience our 2-Hour Live Intro to xchange. This is our experiential introduction to Conscious Convening. Bring a friend. And be ready to engage. I love meeting folks from all over the globe at our workshop. Over 25,000 have attended, over the last 5 years. Grab your spot to join our next live workshop.

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I’m Jon Berghoff, founder @ xchange. This is a semi-regular, oddly formatted, rarely edited, learning update. If you lead, teach or convene groups, and believe in collective human potential please read, forward, or reply. I love hearing from you.

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On Monday, my bonus daughter (a more empowering label than step-daughter) Joy said something to her mother, Adair (my fiancée) that stopped her.

Joy told Adair, she barely remembers her dad anymore.

He passed away five years ago… on Monday.

So Adair wrote a letter to her daughters, to help them remember who their dad was to them.

If you feel moved, you can find it here.

Remembering someone we’ve lost is a reminder of our humanness.
How grief and gratitude can live in the same place inside us.
How love doesn’t leave… it changes form.

And while I’m not looking to compare the sacredness of what Adair did with the work we do at xchange…

…I couldn’t help noticing a parallel.

So much of what we stand for is creating the conditions of a gathering so the room can remember the best of its own humanness.

Not for the sake of it. Because of how badly we need it.

Many of my teachers describe this moment in history as a time when a certain kind of change agent (humans, not bots) will protect and preserve what’s most human — our creativity, generosity, kindness — while the world does a lot of purging and breaking down.

Wisdom traditions and complexity science both point to the same thing: this isn’t a two-year problem, or an election-cycle problem. It’s a multi-generational one.

That’s the game we’re supporting at xchange.

And yes, we can practice in solitude — my breathwork, mantras, and meditation are part of my daily life — but there are creative breakthroughs that only happen when a room is consciously guided.

1) 🌿 What the Room Is Teaching Me

Yesterday I was coaching Jessica, one of our xchange Guide Certification students, mid-way through her 8-week cohort.

She has an awe-inspiring offering that combines wearable technology with leadership training — helping organizations measurably increase their capacity to self-regulate under pressure.

Here’s what I reminded her:

The deeper the transformation you’re selling… the more you have to upend the traditional playbook.

Here’s what doesn’t work anymore:

• Using your pitch deck to do the convincing

• Leading with data and expecting it to change behavior

• Hoping a CEO or a few decision-makers will “buy it” on behalf of everyone else

• Expecting people to trust your proof

Because in today’s world… trust is scarce.

And the people who always ask, “Where’s the proof/data?”
Whatever you show them will be the wrong proof. Bad data.

The data people truly trust, and rarely disagree with, is their own:
Their lived experience. Their perspective. And what they hear from peers they respect.

So here’s what I coached Jessica to do instead:

1. Facilitate a conversation where the room convinces itself (and each other).

2. Surface lived experience as the primary source of data.

3. Offer an “experiential introduction” for their leadership team (60 mins or less) — and near the end, invite the room to rate, vote, or weigh in: Does this need to go further into the organization?

4. Design your pathway in so the very people who would go through the program are the ones saying, “Yes. We want this.”

Core lesson to extract:
The most influential way to sell today is a facilitated way to sell — where the depth of the problem, the desire to change, and the commitment to act comes from the buyer, not the seller.

2) 🔍 A Distinction I Can’t Unsee

Just last week, the Scaling team secured xchange, to facilitate their next member event in April.

(If you don’t know them: Scaling is a powerhouse coaching and training company built around the best-selling book The Science of Scaling.)

I asked their team a simple question:

What’s the #1 reason you want to bring us back?

Their answer was even simpler.

Because the experiences we create take their frameworks, and activate them in the room.

Not by having members consume more information — but through carefully sequenced questions and conversations where the room becomes peer coaches to each other.

More than half the agenda is learning sourced by the audience, from peers, from the room.

Not the unstructured time — not just the breaks, happy hours, or meals.

The prime time. Between 9 and 5.

And it has a compounding effect: when prime time is designed for creation and connection, for belonging and contribution, the unstructured time becomes even more valuable.

Also… not a single presentation or panel is put on stage without a custom-designed question and conversation to help the room extract the full ROI.

But the first reason our approach works with the scaling team… they have been willing to allow their own identity (values, beliefs, etc.) as a convener, to evolve.

Core lesson to extract:
If we want to transform a room, we have to transform the way we meet.

And if we want to transform the way we meet, we have to transform our identity as change agents:

From hero → host
From knowing → asking
From telling → inviting
From controlling → unlocking
From being the expert → unleashing everybody’s expertise
From “the way we’ve always done it” → the courage to reinvent how we gather

3) 🌎 The Future of Convening

What if a transformational gathering could be created using only two types of questions?

No content. At least not in the traditional sense.

(For reference: this is exactly what happens at our annual event, Transformation by Design.)

First: What are the questions the whole room can answer?

Questions that connect people to shared purpose, invite collective learning, and open new visions, innovations, and possibilities.

Second: What are the conversational choreographies where each person can get their individual questions answered?

How do we create a “conversation marketplace” where participants reveal their asks and gives — and we curate experiences, seatings, and groupings so the right people and questions find each other?

This is where convening is going.

And in the world of our clients… it’s already here.

If you want to learn how to do this at the highest level, talk to our team about getting xchange Guide Certified, or hire one of our Guides.

400+ Guides can’t all be wrong when they consistently rate it 9.6/10. And if you care about formal credentials, the ICF recognizes it for 34 continuing education credit hours.

(And yes, organizations like HP, Meta, Google, BMW, Women Presidents Organization, HeartMath, EOS, Stanford Medicine have all brought xchange in. They’re seeing what happens when gathering becomes a technology for transformation.)

4) A chance to experience xchange firsthand

If you’ve never joined one of our live sessions, here’s what it isn’t:

It’s not a cheesy internet-marketing advertisement disguised as a workshop.

Nope.

It’s an experiential workshop. Nothing is sold.

And if you want to learn about certification afterward, we’ll point you in the right direction.

Most of the 25,000+ participants have said it exceeded expectations and was unlike almost every other workshop they’ve attended.

Want to see for yourself?

Come meet me at my next workshop

I’ll stay and connect, answer your questions, and learn from your world. Would love to meet you.

Stay curious,
Jon Berghoff

P.S. Here are 3 ways to get connected with us…

1. Chat w/ our Team. If you feel the call, and are serious about going deeper, talk w/ one of our awesome Alumni Advisors. You can find out which of our offerings make sense for you. Book a Clarity Conversation

2. Experience our 2-Hour Live Intro to xchange. This is our experiential introduction to Conscious Convening. Bring a friend. And be ready to engage. I love meeting folks from all over the globe at our workshop. Over 26,000 have attended, over the last 5 years. Join us at our next workshop. Go here to grab your spot.

3. Get Certified. Our Guide Certification Program (GCP) is only for those whom convening is central to your professional journey. This is an intense learning experience, and a significant financial investment. Here’s what others say about it. And here’s where you can learn about the certification. Our GCP is like learning to become a Michelin Star Chef of group experiences.

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I’m Jon Berghoff, founder @ xchange. This is a semi-regular, oddly formatted, rarely edited, learning update. If you lead, teach or convene groups, and believe in collective human potential please read, forward, or reply. I love hearing from you.

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There are moments when I can feel the work I do, quietly working on me… while I’m still in the middle of doing it.

The past month has felt like one of those seasons for me.

Seventy-three change agents are now three weeks into our xchange Guide Certification. Around the same time, we received word from the International Coaching Federation that our certification will now earn 34 Continuing Education Credits.

That kind of recognition is never the point… but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel meaningful. Mostly because it signals that this work is reaching places it needs to reach.

What feels even more alive right now is something harder to measure.

Over the last few weeks, five global organizations have stepped into partnership with xchange to rethink how they gather, how they develop leaders, and how they build learning communities.

Sitting this close to those conversations, it feels less like business growth and more like watching a necessary reinvention, beginning to shift in real time.

But the moment that has stayed with me most happened in an event we hosted with Raj Sisodia and Nilima Bhat, as they walked us through the seven steps from their new book, Healing Leaders. (Here’s a recording of the interview. Enjoy.)

There was something in that conversation that didn’t just land intellectually.

🌿 What the Room Is Teaching Me

Transformation Through Healing

As Raj and Nilima explored the inner journey of leadership — Know, Love, Be, Choose, Express, Complete, Heal — one line kept echoing long after they said it:

“Hurt people hurt people. But the opposite is also true: Healed people heal people. Healed leaders heal leaders — and their organizations.”

I’ve been sitting with that sentence.

It brought up a question I don’t always slow down enough to ask myself:

Where have unresolved parts of me shaped how I show up… with our team, with our clients, or even with my family?

And right alongside that came another, larger realization:

As someone who supports thousands of facilitators and change agents, what ripple of influence am I helping set in motion through the rooms they’ll hold… and the conversations that will unfold inside those rooms?

Influence isn’t something we occasionally step into.
It’s something we are generating all the time, whether we’re conscious of it or not.

My late friend and teacher, Dr. Danny Friedland, says it simply:

“You cannot not have influence.”

Something I’m carrying forward: Every room is already shaping people. Sometimes the most responsible thing we can do as leaders is notice what we’re bringing into that room before we try to change anything inside it.

🔍 A Distinction I Can’t Unsee

Healing Our Meetings

For years, we’ve talked about our work at xchange as helping transform meetings into meetings that transform.

Lately, another word keeps showing up for me.

Healing.

Not in a dramatic or mystical sense. In a very practical, relational sense.

A lot of what feels broken in conferences, leadership gatherings, and communities doesn’t come from a lack of intelligence or preparation. If anything, most of these spaces are filled with brilliant people.

What’s often missing is a flow.

Flow of honesty.
Flow of perspective.
Flow of energy and information, between people who are still, in subtle ways, protecting themselves or performing roles they think the room expects from them.

When that happens, wisdom gets trapped.

Most experienced conveners understand the importance of strong teaching. I still believe deeply in great teaching.

The challenge sneaks in when teaching quietly replaces asking, listening and hosting space for the room to become the teacher.

We can forget, the real cost of a gathering has almost nothing to do with the budget.

It’s the interaction patterns that never change.
It’s the conversations that almost happen, but don’t.
It’s the creative solutions that live somewhere in the room… but never quite surface.
And the collective impact that is consistently under achieved.

Meetings rarely struggle because people don’t know enough.
They struggle because there isn’t a container created that invites what we do know.

What I can’t stop noticing: Modern science, and indigenous wisdom… say the same thing. When a system (organization, community, etc.) is struggling, the solution is always to create, strengthen, or repair the connections between the parts of the system - the people in the room.

💬 A Question Worth Sitting With

Confronting Truth

When I reached the last pages of , one question followed me out of the book and into the rest of my week:

What truth is my leadership — and my life — asking me to face next?

The answer that surfaced for me wasn’t particularly comfortable.

It was the realization that I’m being asked to share what this work is teaching me more consistently, with more courage… with you and with our community.

I captured this question, along with nine others inspired by the book, in a short reflection you can read here. It’s about a three-minute read.

If the post hits for you, share with your team, your partner, your colleagues. Use these questions to see what can open up.

Sometimes the questions that change us aren’t the ones we rush to answer. They’re the ones we finally allow to stay open long enough to do their work.

Stay Curious,

Jon Berghoff

P.S. If you’re curious what it looks like when meetings truly begin to shift, and sometimes even heal, join me for my next live workshop.

I’m not sure how many more times we’ll offer this experience openly and without charge. If this conversation stirred something for you, I’d genuinely love to meet you inside that room.

And if someone came to mind while reading this, bring that with you.


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I’m Jon Berghoff, founder @ xchange. This is a semi-regular, oddly formatted, rarely edited, learning update. If you lead, teach or convene groups, and believe in collective human potential please read, forward, or reply. I love hearing from you.

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