When we started to talk about our idea, we soon noticed that "No Agenda" sounded a bit dangerous to many people - how do I explain this to my boss, was the spontaneous reaction. We changed the name into "Leaders Forum", not mentioning that in our mind everyone is a leader, not just the individuals who have that title in their business card, at the moment.
The format was simple - it was a No Agenda Club (once a month, breakfast meeting, casual and relaxed, spontaneous and playful, no expectations) plus a Leaders Forum -ingredient: Chris gave a 20-30 minute talk on something related to leadership. This was just to make members feel safe; the free-flowing discussion was the main idea, and the presentation had a time limit (30 min).
In our 1st meeting we asked whether the members wanted any rules. A silence entered the room, we could sense the surprise - "haven't these guys planned anything in advance?". Well we hadn't, we just invited some interesting people and asked them what would amuse them the most. In other words, we trusted they would bring the essence with them.
"No powerpoints", someone said after a while. Everyone was very happy about this invention. Then the silence fell again - after a while someone said: "perhaps we don't need any other rules, let's move on with this". So we did.
Then we asked the group to name itself, and if they wanted, to write some kind of a purpose statement of our forum. The group wanted to be called "the Goodtimers", since the main idea was to have fun and enjoy the learning journey that was ahead of us.
The purpose statement wasn't born in the 1st session, but took some months to ripen. This is how it looked after 6-8 meetings (I've taken this from the 1st "booklet", where I summarized the findings of Goodtimers 1st six-month period):
Business managers are splitting the reality and then trying to manage this self-created separateness. Since separateness is unnatural, it requires a lot of effort. What supports relationships is working with the oneness. Since organizations are just relationships between people, this also supports organizations. Since oneness is natural, there is no effort. Leaders Forum is a learning process from separateness to oneness.
Who were the members, and how did we find them? We just spread the word, and let the members find us. We didn't want to send invitations to people we knew, we wanted the members to bring people they found interesting - and so the group would be more diverse and surprising. We soon stabilized into 15-20 persons, some members have been regularly in the group since 2003, some have gone and new ones have emerged.
There are some old Leaders Forum notes in http://leadersforumgoodtimers.blogspot.com/ - later we joined all groups into this one No Agenda Club -blog.
So, we started with a slight agenda - Chris gave us talks on topics like "Me-me vs. work-me", "Unlocking the inspiration, energy and genius within", “Visioning”, “Living life fully” etc. At the end of every six-month period we had a "direction-setting meeting" to discuss what had been going on in the previous period and what would we like to explore during the next period. As periods and years went by, No Agenda started to take more space: first we might have a period programme with three predefined topics and three empty No Agenda -slots, and later we started to skip the period planning altogether and trust our improvisation skills. In 2010 we changed our name into "No Agenda Club Turku", since it seemed to better describe who we are.
Any questions or comments? Please ask, I can tell more if you're curious?
Next time I'll tell about the 2nd group - Cagebusters in Helsinki, in 2004.
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