Convening as a strategic capability
Inside Today’s Issue
What the Room is Teaching Me: Cycles of giving and receiving
What I Can’t Unsee: Convening as a strategic capability
A Question to Sit With: Am I helping, or hurting?
Roots of the Work: Change people, or systems?
A Prophecy for Today: The Shambhala Warrior
This newsletter is written from scratch with zero use of AI for writing, editing, or publication. The only use of AI, when used, is to source images when necessary.
I’m writing this week from Florida…
The Great Woman (Adair) and I took an excursion from Ohio (and the kids) to take in the sun, renew, and reflect.
It’s amazing what a shift in environment can do, for perspective, for well-being, for space to create.
Speaking of creating… We’re shifting this newsletter to Substack, to make it more shareable, readable, and useful.
If you find yourself inspired, drop a comment with what resonates, share this with somebody you know would enjoy, or subscribe to stay in the loop.
Thank you to all of you who have given feedback and expressed enthusiasm.
It has kept me going.
I chose to only take one meeting this week: a collaborative exploration with Raj Sisodia and Nilima Bhat around how we could bring their new book, Healing Leaders, more meaningfully to the world.
The meeting, completed just a few minutes ago, was synchronistic, to say the least.
Inspired by it, I’m ending with the Tibetan Prophecy of the Shambhala Warrior. An invitation to consider what these times are calling for.
1) What the Room Is Teaching Me
Over the last few weeks, we led two choreographies inside our xchange Guide Certification: Ask/Give and Circles.
If you aren’t familiar, both create massive value inside a learning community, but in different ways.
Ask/Give is a fast way to help a community match real needs with real offers, helping participants get resourced, relationships to form, and the wisdom in the system becomes visible.
Circles is a repeatable ritual that turns a room into peer coaches. Participants ask for help, offer support, and deepen the supportive tissue of a room.
One of our participants, Diana, was overwhelmed with emotion as we wrapped Circles:
“This experience compels me to acknowledge the spirit of generosity that feels so palpable inside this community, and through this learning experience.”
I reminded Diana: the real magic is in the container that invites generosity to emerge.
Remember: culture follows structure. Which is scalable.
And if you want the underlying principle that makes these choreographies so reliable at building community, mother nature reminds us well…
Living systems thrive through cycles of giving and receiving.
Core lesson to extract:
When we create a container for cycles of giving and receiving, we activate one of the most natural, effective, and reliable sources of healthy community.
2) A Distinction I Can’t Unsee
In the last 10 days, I’ve been in a series of client and community conversations, leadership meetings, conferences, movement-building gatherings, and inner-work trainings.
Across all of them, a pattern is revealing itself:
Organizations are pushing to get a better return on leadership meetings and conferences.
To put 200 senior leaders in a room for 2–3 days, the accounting cost alone (travel, meeting expenses, and wages) will often range between $1–3M.
The real cost is what happens if those leaders don’t have the transformative experience they need to face their most pressing challenges… and to strengthen their capacity to adapt and grow together.
The pressure to deliver outcomes is rising.
For some, this is bad news. Especially for those with only one playbook: speakers + presentations.
But for those who know there’s another way, a key opportunity is emerging:
A core group of change agents can position themselves as a strategic convening partner.
Core lesson to extract:
Conscious Convening is a necessary strategic capability, for every high stakes leadership meeting. It’s not a luxury expense or an optional meeting feature. It’s the intelligent investment of 5% of the overall meeting budget that ensures the return on the other 95%.
3) A Question Worth Sitting With
When we operate from conscious leadership, our awareness of our influence is peaked.
Here’s a question to support that awareness:
Where do I believe I’m being a resource… but I’m actually showing up as a demand?
If progress starts by telling the truth, this one question can unlock real change.
Only from awareness can we pause, notice, and choose a response.
The kind of response that gives life, vs. depletes it, from others.
4) Roots of the Work
A lesson I learned from Margaret Wheatley.
Is it more important to work at the system level… or the individual level?
It’s an unnecessary debate, Meg suggests. Because both are necessary, and connected.
Core Lesson:
In a living system, it’s called reciprocal causality. The parts affect the system, and the system affects the parts.
5) A Prophecy for Today: The Shambhala Warrior
I was reminded this morning that for many of us, the current events of our time are a signal to be informed by.
One source of inspiration for me is the Tibetan Prophecy of the Shambhala Warrior.
There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger.
In that time, great powers have arisen—“barbarian powers,” as they’re called.
Although they waste their wealth preparing to annihilate each other, they have much in common: weapons of unfathomable destructive power, and technologies that lay waste to the world.
It is precisely when the future of all beings hangs by the frailest of threads that the kingdom of Shambhala is said to emerge.
You cannot recognize the Shambhala warriors by uniforms or banners. They are not a special class. They are ordinary people, trained to meet this moment.
Now comes the time when great courage is required of the Shambhala warriors. Moral and physical courage.
Because they must go into the very heart of the barbarian powers, into the corridors of power, to dismantle the weapons.
Their weapons are not weapons as we usually think of them.
The weapons of the Shambhala warrior are compassion and insight.
Compassion, because it lets us stay present to suffering without turning away.
Insight, because it lets us see clearly: what is true, what is connected, what is required.
And the teaching ends with a quiet challenge: the danger isn’t only “out there.”
The danger is that we become so afraid, reactive, or numb, that we forget who we are.
So here’s the invitation I’m holding this week:
Where is one place in your life where you can be a warrior, as my teacher Meg would say, for the human spirit?
Stay Curious,
Jon Berghoff
P.S. I’m hosting our introductory workshop next week. I’d love to meet you there. Bring a friend.
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I’m Jon Berghoff, founder @ xchange. This is a semi-regular, oddly formatted, rarely edited, learning update. If you lead, teach or convene groups, and believe in collective human potential please read, forward, or reply. I love hearing from you.
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