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, stages of human consciousness, and other developmental frameworks. You can Google these if you’d like, but they are way more fun live, in-person, unrecorded.

But this won't be a lecture. We'll use them as lenses.

Lenses for understanding where we've been. What's happening around us. What's happening inside us. And what might want to happen next.

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. Developmental stages. 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 teach.

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 is a trajectory to the morning. There is not a predetermined conclusion.

This probably isn't your Friday if...

Your primary goal is to generate a short-term financial return first thing Monday morning.

We're not going to teach you how to squeeze more from a spreadsheet. And the odds that the person sitting beside you becomes your dream client by Saturday morning aren't particularly high.

But ambition, achievement, networking, revenue, status, and the wonderfully human question "Okay, but how do I use this?" aren't forbidden here.

Quite the opposite.

Those impulses become interesting when we can see them.

They, too, have a place on the map.

Probably not a new five-step methodology.

You may get something more useful.

Perspective.

A chance to zoom far enough out that the urgent becomes a little less tyrannical—and patterns that were difficult to see from inside your everyday life become visible.

You'll explore the idea that every stage of growth—interior and exterior—asks us to transcend and include: to move forward without simply discarding what came before.

And we'll practice doing something particularly powerful:

Seeing not only what you see, but the lens through which you're seeing it.

Because once you can see the lens, you can begin using it as a tool rather than simply being used by it.

My hope is that you leave feeling alive, connected, curious, and equipped.

Not because we've figured out the future.

Because you trust yourself—and the people around you—a little more to meet it.

Tell your boss you’re spending half a day getting far enough away from the work to see what may actually be shaping it.

We’ll use a sweeping view of human development to examine some surprisingly immediate questions: Why do people make sense of the same situation so differently? Why do approaches that once worked eventually stop working? And what does growth ask of a person—or an organization—when simply doing more isn’t the answer?

By the end of our time together, you’ll choose one of two paths:

Exterior → Organization, leadership, systems

What do I now see differently about the organization, team, community, or system I’m part of? What hypothesis does that create—and what could I experiment with next?

Interior → Growth, development, meaning-making

What do I now see differently about myself, my development, or the way I make meaning of what’s happening? What hypothesis does that create—and what could I experiment with next?

Choose one. Then we’ll have some fun exploring how movement along one path might create movement along the other.

You’ll leave with a hypothesis worth testing and an experiment worth trying in your actual context.

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 not selecting for seniority, impressive titles, or people who already know this material.

We're curating for mix.

Different ages. Different kinds of work. Different perspectives. Different levels of organizational responsibility. People building tools and people deciding how they're used. People inside large organizations and people building something of their own.

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.