The front of the room is where we get the Three I's: information, inspiration, and instruction.
If we are trying to pass an exam at college, it is good to listen to the professor who can show us what to focus on.
If we are craving purpose, then it is invigorating to listen to a preacher, or a community, political, or business leader who can remind us of some powerful truths.
If you're trying to fix a leaking valve, the virtual front of the room comes into play, as I found on YouTube. I had a leaking valve in my well pump, and so I found The Amateur's Amateur to help me fix it. Tagline: If I can do this, anyone can! Just what I needed.
So, there is nothing “wrong” with the front of the room. We just need to be aware that its message is limited when it comes to our direct experience and what we want to make out of it.
The front of the room has a hypnotic pull in our culture. The clue in most meeting spaces is that the front of the room is where the technology is. There’ll be a screen, and there’ll be audio. Our job, upon entry, is to place ourselves in alignment with the technology.
Try this. Try setting up a meeting room as a circle of chairs (no tables, no screen on the wall), and then invite your attendees in. They will spend some time in confusion, trying to work out where the front of the circle is.
Why? Because we have learned instinctively that we don’t sit in the front, or — think now of a large conference room — on the stage. We know our place. It’s in the rows of seats (or at circular tables — it’s still the same) facing the stage. Other people, whose voices need to be amplified and attended to, will shortly be populating the stage. But that won’t be us.
One thing is certain about the front of the room: what they tell us there will take us toward the light or will take us away from it.
When we worry about how much “screen time” our children have, or are concerned about how many grown adults only get their news and worldview from a particular news channel, we are describing the same thing. We have sacrificed our aliveness and our individual accountability to whatever the front of the room has in mind for us.
The opposite of “the front of the room” is held in Margaret Wheatley’s phrase (and book title) Turning to One Another.
We don’t turn to one another to fix a leaky valve. We turn to one another if we are curious about developing self-belief, finding authentic community, accessing others’ transparency about their successes and failures, or dealing with complex and opaque situations.
And we do this all in the context of a shared commitment to a better future — even if, when we first turn to one another, we have little idea of what that future looks like or how on earth we are going to get there. But the turning is the critical first action.
Not that we have given up on what we can receive as Three I inputs from the front of the room. But we have chosen to be less dependent on it, and thus have also stepped into a different reality: that it is now up to us. We are the ones who need to find out how to make it work. At that point, we will begin to experience the anxiety — and the joy — that the future is ours to create.
