A Brief History of Everything

The world keeps changing. So do we.

Many of us have spent the past several years responding to whatever came next: new technologies, new expectations, new risks, new possibilities, new ways of working and making a living. There has been plenty to learn. Plenty to keep up with.

But sometimes another tip, tool, prompt, framework, or leadership hack isn’t what we need.

Sometimes we need to zoom way out.

On this Friday morning, 15-ish of us will explore a much bigger story: how human beings, societies, organizations, and our ways of making meaning develop over time—and what happens when our interior development meets a rapidly changing exterior world.

We’ll draw from Spiral Dynamics, vertical development, integral philosophy, developmental psychology, and other ways of looking at human growth. You can Google these if you’d like, but they’re more fun live, in person, and unrecorded.

I’ll bring some of those ideas into the room. We’ll see what they help us notice.

You’ll walk into a room with a nearly blank wall. It’s six feet high and nine feet wide.

We’ll get coffee. Meet the others. Then we’ll start building.

Words. Images. Ideas. Events. Questions. Connections. Contradictions. Your observations. Mine. Ours.

As the morning unfolds, the wall becomes our shared map.

I’ll bring ideas and structure to help us move. You’ll bring your experiences, questions, disagreements, curiosity, and perspective. Sometimes we’ll talk as a group. Sometimes you’ll think quietly. Sometimes someone will tell a story that unlocks something for everyone else. And sometimes we’ll follow something none of us expected to find.

There’s a trajectory to the morning. There isn’t a predetermined conclusion.

Maybe you’re leading a team and accountable for results, while more of what shapes those results seems outside your control.

Maybe you’re trying to help people do good work through constant communication, shifting priorities, and more information than anyone can reasonably hold.

Maybe you’re building a product, running an operation, making a case for change, or building something of your own. You can see that the technical questions and the human questions keep showing up in the same meeting.

You might manage people. You might influence work without direct reports. Those lines aren’t always as neat as they look on an org chart.

This is for people who feel the complexity of work and want to get a better handle on it—starting with how they see, lead themselves, and work with others. People willing to bring a real question into the room, stay curious about their own assumptions, and learn from someone whose work looks nothing like theirs.

Ambition, achievement, revenue, status, and the wonderfully human question “Okay, but how do I use this?” are welcome, too. They’re part of the story.

Tell your boss you’re spending half a day getting far enough away from the work to see what may actually be shaping it. If you’re your own boss, you can tell yourself the same thing.

We’ll take a sweeping view of human development and bring it surprisingly close to home. Why do people make sense of the same situation so differently? Why do approaches that once worked stop working? What might growth ask of you—or the system you’re part of—when simply doing more isn’t the answer?

You’ll have room to notice patterns that are hard to see from inside the day-to-day. You may even catch sight of the lens through which you’re seeing them. Once you can see a lens, you have more choice in how you use it.

By the end of our time together, you’ll choose a path to explore:

Exterior → Organization, leadership, systems
What do I now see differently about the team, organization, community, or system I’m part of?

Interior → Growth, development, meaning-making
What do I now see differently about myself or the way I make sense of what’s happening?

Whichever path you choose, you’ll form a hypothesis worth testing and an experiment worth trying in your actual context. Then we’ll have some fun considering how movement along one path might create movement along the other.

My hope is that you leave feeling alive, connected, curious, and a little more equipped. A Friday morning won’t settle everything. But a few hours of insight and connection can sometimes change what you notice—and what you do with the rest of the year.

Or send your boss in your place. They may need it more.

Because the room is part of the curriculum.

There are 15 seats, and we’re not trying to fill them with 15 versions of the same person. We’re curating for mix: different ages, kinds of work, perspectives, and levels of organizational responsibility. People inside large organizations and people building something of their own. People who’ve spent years studying this material and people encountering it for the first time.

Every person should have as much potential to contribute to the room as they have to receive from it.

That’s why the first step isn’t registration.