The birth story of No Agenda Clubs

Many new readers have shown an interest to this blog, as well as local members to our meetings. Therefore I thought it might be a good idea to tell a short story of the early days of No Agenda Clubs.

I cannot pinpoint a particular date, or even a year, when it began. But I do remember when the name No Agenda Club emerged. There were three of us, Chris Evatt, Jukka Suuniitty and I, all submerged by busy schedules, deadlines, goals, competition, pressure, getting tired,... what I nowadays call the "Yes Agenda Club".

We were all working as consultants, Chris as an entrepreneur, Jukka and I in a large IT-company.
We thought our work-roles were relatively free compared to many others, so why are we experiencing this? And what was most important: why don't we change this, for our own good, and perhaps for the betterment of our customers?

We began our experiment in 2000 or 2001. A very simple test it was: we just reserved half-a-day per month in our calendars (business hours, not weekends or evenings), went to a nice cafe, sat down with no expectations whatsoever.

We had only one rule: no preparations, no predefined agendas, no written material or powerpoints. Just an empty mind, and 100% presence - "close your mobile phone and open your mind" was our motto.

First we just enjoyed the flow, made no notes and didn’t really reflect on what was happening. We just had so much fun and felt so energized that we kept on doing it – I don’t recall any discussion whether we should continue meeting like this or call it off, we just booked more meetings as months went by. Soon we started to call our meetings the "No Agenda Club".

This went on for one or two years. Then we sort of woke up and remembered that this was an experiment - what is happening, have we changed as a result of these meetings, what is the structure or process involved? We couldn’t really define what was going on in the meetings, except that we were receiving energy from an unknown source; three guys enter a room, spend a few hours in an intense dialogue, and leave the room experiencing higher energy levels than they had when the meeting started. This was the most interesting finding, considering the fact that in most of our other business meetings the energy levels developed just the opposite, everyone seemed to get tired in the meetings.

If no-one was getting tired, the extra energy wasn’t being sucked from one poor individual – it had to come from somewhere else. Or were we creating energy through our relations, the way we talked and connected to each other? Did we form an energy channel through our dialogue, through our minds that were connected, or could I say melted into one mind?

And the most important question: If this can happen in a No Agenda Club meeting, why doesn't it happen everywhere, all the time? How could we take this experience to our customers, to start a bigger process than just three guys having fun by themselves?

This is how it started - do you want to hear more? Send in comments and questions, if this makes you curious - even one reply will make me feel telling this story is worthwhile, and I will continue... next time I could tell you how we started our first club in 2003.