One Day. Ten People. No Slides. What The Room Intensive Actually Does

What a one-day Room Intensive in Vienna is, who it is for, why there is no agenda or slide deck, and how it differs from a leadership workshop or a retreat.

Ten people, one day, in Vienna, in a circle, with no slides and no agenda.

That description makes some people lean in and makes others assume it is going to be insufferable, and I understand the second reaction completely. So this is an honest account of what the day actually is, written for the person trying to work out whether it is worth their time and money, rather than as a pitch.

Why there is no agenda

An agenda tells everyone in the room what is supposed to happen, which means everyone can spend the day tracking whether it is happening, and the tracking is itself a way of not being present.

More practically: an agenda decides in advance what the day is about. But what a specific ten people need on a specific day is not knowable in advance, and the moments that make these days worth running are almost always the ones that could not have been scheduled — the thing somebody says at hour four that reframes the whole room, which no agenda would have made room for.

The lack of structure is not an absence of preparation. I prepare considerably. It is that the preparation goes into being able to follow what is actually in the room rather than into a plan that has to be delivered regardless of what shows up.

Why no slides

A slide makes everyone an audience. An audience is a posture of receiving, and the whole point of the day is that nobody is receiving — everyone is contributing, including me.

Also, honestly: the material does not need slides, and a slide deck in a day like this is usually there to manage the facilitator's anxiety rather than to help the room.

Why ten

Small enough that everyone speaks and nobody can hide behind the group. Large enough that the room contains genuine difference rather than becoming a conversation between three people.

Below about eight it starts to feel like a group therapy session, which is a different thing that I am not qualified to run. Above about twelve, a proportion of the room becomes spectators, and spectators change what the participants are willing to say.

What actually happens during the day

The first hour is mostly people establishing, carefully, that they are fine. This is predictable and I no longer try to rush it, because the performance of being fine is exactly the material, and watching a room do it collectively is often the first time participants notice they are doing it at all.

Somewhere in the second or third hour, usually after somebody has said something more honest than they planned to, the register of the room changes. That shift is the actual product of the day. Everything before it is the price of admission, and everything after it is the work.

The rest of the day is what becomes possible once a room has stopped performing: people saying the true version of a situation they have been describing in a managed version for months, and — this is the part that surprises participants most — hearing their own situation described more accurately by a stranger who has a different job in a different industry.

Who it is for

People who are functioning and know something underneath is not right. That is the core group, and the day is built for them.

People in a transition they have not told many people about, or have not fully admitted to themselves.

People who have done a lot of professional development and have noticed that none of it touched the actual thing.

Who it is not for

Anyone looking for a framework to take back to their team. There isn't one, and a day spent hoping for one will feel like a waste.

Anyone in acute crisis. This is not clinical care, I am not a therapist, and the honest answer for someone in that situation is that they need something else first. I say so when I see it, before taking anyone's money.

Anyone attending because their employer sent them. It does not work under those conditions and I would rather say that plainly than take the booking.

On the format's constraint

One day rather than three, because a day is what I can deliver fully present and a three-day retreat is not — my own energy limits are real and I build around them rather than pretending otherwise. That constraint turns out to serve the work: the compression means the room has to get honest faster, and it does.

Vienna because that is where I am, and because travelling to something is part of what makes people arrive ready for it.

The Intensive runs a small number of times a year, ten people at a time, by waitlist. See the next edition →