“This is not going to work.”

That was my first thought when I saw the plan for one session at the Braver Angels convention this summer.

One session ran ninety minutes and moved twenty people across the stage to do it. A fifteen-minute talk, then someone else had seventeen minutes, then twenty-five, then two people would come out to dance. Stage would clear, and a piano would roll to the front for a song.

If you run events, or you’re new to this kind of thing, I’m telling you right now, DO NOT do this.

20+ people through a ninety-minute session is how you turn a clean agenda into a two-hour mess. I have watched it happen before.

And then… I watched it work.

Eating crow

I told the organizer the truth afterward. It went something like this:

“I saw your agenda and thought, that’s adorable. You are really cute to think this is going to hold together.”

And for my flippant thoughts about it, I had to eat crow. Because they nailed it. Every handoff landed. The stage cleared on the second it was supposed to.

You could feel how much everyone in that room cared about getting it right. I have drawn a lot of rooms, and I had never seen a group give this much of a damn.

Somebody would come up for a six-minute part you could tell they had waited all year to play. They nailed it and sat back down.

The content matched the care. One speaker was a historian talking about Gettysburg, about a gathering there that grew from six hundred people to a thousand, and about the flame that still burns every morning because people keep finding a way to come together.

Why it held

It came down to one thing.

Everyone in that room cared more about the mission than their own moment in it.

When you care about the thing more than you care about your turn, you don’t steal from it. Going thirty seconds long would have been an affront to the whole point of being there.

Compare that to the way it usually goes.

Somebody gets the mic and thinks, “It’s my time to cook now.”

Thanks for the mic, see you when I’m done, and who knows when that is. That happens when a person shows up for themselves instead of for the thing.

It’s not me time. It’s us time.

I wrote that down in the middle of the event. It is how you run the most complicated run of show I have ever seen.

These were volunteers. Nobody was getting paid to hit their mark.

They did it because they knew it was the right thing, and that belief carried the whole machine.

The stage that should have been chaos ran like a clock. Not because anyone drilled it into them, but because not one of them was willing to take a second that belonged to everyone.

Grateful you are here,

Wade

PS - Another reminder: I'm building a course on how I turn live conversations into drawings at events like this one. If that's a skill you want, get on the list here and I'll let you know when it's ready.