Thinking together by staying together

Using breakout rooms seems to have become a best practice in most online gatherings. It is often well-intended. The hope is to give people more time and space to speak. 

In large-scale gatherings this makes obvious sense. But we've noticed that many smaller settings use breakout rooms regularly as well. 

From the start, we felt hesitant about using breakout rooms in Yellow. 

Initially, we weren't quite sure why. Something just felt off about it. Three years later, our hunch seems to have borne out. We have only used breakout rooms a handful of times, and rarely with satisfaction. With time, we've begun to understand what our initial hunches were about. 

For one, breakouts mean that several conversations are happening at once. When the group comes back together, there is a cumbersome reintegration process, requiring people to say what they've already said. 

But more importantly, we've realized that Yellow is a process of thinking together with each other.

In most of modern life, there's an implicit assumption that the more you speak, the better your experience of the conversation will be. In Yellow, we've often observed the opposite. The more space there is to listen, the more nourishing the conversation becomes. 

With more voices, there are more opportunities for contributions that resonate or instigate. There's a richer palette of perspectives on offer. And there's more time to sit with what has been said. Instead of pressure to speak, there is an implicit permission to digest and to catch up with yourself as you are affecting and being affected by what's unfolding. 

Naturally, at a certain point the number of people will become a hindrance rather than an enabler of conversation. In Yellow the groups tend to be around 6-15 people, so size is rarely an issue for us. And still, we're careful to not shy away from too large of a collective conversation. 

In a worldview where life consists of separate atoms, molecules, and people, you can only contribute by speaking or by externally manifested active listening. In a more entangled, relational, and interconnected worldview, people's presence and their witnessing of each other are consequential acts. No matter the quantity of someone's participation, our assumption is that each person is contributing by being there. 

It's worth noting that we are still happy to use breakout rooms when appropriate. But in those cases it's based a conscious choice, and not because it's 'what you need to do to break things up’ or ‘to give more people space to talk’. 

Even when listening in silence, people can be eloquent, generous, and thought provoking. By staying together, groups can think together.