In every room I’m facilitating, I move the chairs around. Sometimes it’s minor, just a rounding of the edges. Other times it’s a face-lift — removing podiums, collapsing tables, etc. Early on in my career, I was hesitant to ask clients for permission to do this. I thought, what an obnoxious demand. For what? Better sight lines?
Nowadays, I’m unabashed and unembarrassed. I recognize that most corporate and academic spaces reproduce an atomized, hierarchical economy of ideas. The worker bees sitting politely, staring at the wise leader, the one who has all the answers. These days, it’s likely there’s a massive screen behind him, too, which really has all the answers. What I believe now, what I have developed conviction around, is that re-arranging a space is a way of proposing a different way or being together.
In small autonomous groups, for example. Or in one big circle.
The architecture of the space suggests something, both overtly and subliminally, about the organization of our attention. Of our power. Will this be a room wherein power will be consolidated, or shared? Spread, or sharpened? All shapes have their purpose, of course, but increasingly I believe that if I’ve been invited to make a real impact, I need to optimize the space for that impact.
What I also believe is that, the way bodies are distributed throughout a room makes certain kinds of conversations possible, and prohibits others.
I know the sorts of conversations I want to elicit in our workshops. Not always the content or direction, since that’s where participants themselves become co-authors, but certainly the texture and contours. Creating the shape of the room, then, becomes a way of encouraging the shapes of those particular conversations.
It’s physical. It’s emotional. And for me it’s become essential.