Kingmaker

I have spent years learning how to run a room. Agendas, timeboxes, retrospectives, liberating structures, the whole facilitation craft. There’s the certificates, and there’s the experience to back it all up.

And still, I kept meeting people who could do something I could not name. A waiter who read my table before I said a word. A hotel receptionist who made a tired traveller feel expected. A host who turned a room of strangers into a table of guests inside ten minutes. None of them had heard of facilitation. They clearly knew something I did not, and nobody in my industry could tell me what it was.

So I went looking for it where it lives: in hospitality.

A philosophical piece about a lost package, a hotel front desk, and a film about dolls. The welcome is the first thing we cut and the last thing we can replace. Somewhere between a delivery van and a pick-up point in a corner shop, my package stopped existing. The tracking page said it had been … Read more

You’ve run the flawless session. Tight agenda, sound structure, good questions. And the room stayed shut anyway. That closed room is the half nobody trained you for. Not the technique (you have the technique). It is the layer underneath: the welcome as a designed act, the room before anyone speaks, your own state as the … Read more

I found the word “hostmanship” during a late-night reading rabbit hole. The kind that starts with a question about psychological safety and somehow ends at 1AM with you ordering a book from a Swedish publisher you’ve never heard of. The book was Gunnarsson & Blohm’s Hostmanship: The Art of Making People Feel Welcome, and the … Read more

We have a ritual, my husband and I. After a meal out, on the walk home or in the subway, we debrief. And not just the food; we especially focus on the service. The way the host looked up when we walked in, or did not. Whether anyone noticed when a glass sat empty too … Read more