The Ins and Outs of Crafting Inclusive, Dignity-Centered Meetings

October 5, 2025 By Ari

Participative democracy and a page out of dinner party planning

In her 1987 autobiography, activist Assata Shakur, who passed away last week at the age of 78, reminds her readers, “When you don’t know what’s going on in the world, you’re at a definite disadvantage.”

Although I rarely obsess about the news, I am diligent about keeping current. As Assata Shakur says, I need to know what’s happening in the greater ecosystem around me in order to lead effectively and ethically through whatever challenges the world puts in front of us—especially in recent months, when the winds of change seem to shift direction with startling frequency.

This past weekend, assessing the national onset of autocracy, attorney Jennifer Rubin writes, “We are no longer at a ‘tipping point’ or ‘an inflection point’ … but we still have agency … Let’s get to work.” That work, for me, lines up with the words of theologian Richard Rohr that I keep coming back to: “The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.” Small things, done with dignity and democracy, are how we make the better world so many of us dream of a reality.

Last week, I wrote about why well-run meetings make such a meaningful difference. This week is more about the “how.” Together, the why and the how are far more powerful than most people might imagine. Assata Shakur would often say,

Part of being a revolutionary is creating a vision that is more humane. That is more fun, too. That is more loving. It’s really working to create something more beautiful.

Given how many people still hold strictly negative beliefs about how “bad” meetings are, it might sound strange to suggest that meetings are a way to bring Shakur’s uplifting image to life. I’ve learned over the years, though, that it is indeed possible: We can make meetings into positive, grounded, collaborative, inspiring human interactions—uplifting contributors to the strategic work of our organizations. They can be both inclusive and dignity-centered, becoming, in the process, small acts of resistance to the authoritarianism that Jennifer Rubin warns us about. A great meeting, in this context, makes real what many only imagine. As Assata Shakur writes, “Dreams and reality are opposites. Action synthesizes them.” Making meetings work well is exactly that—a practical way to live out ideals that are widely shared but rarely practiced in the mundanity of everyday work.

Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess master who later became a leader in the resistance to Vladimir Putin, described his experience after finally leaving Russia in 2013 due to fear of persecution for his beliefs: “I experienced for myself that life felt different in a democracy.” Kasparov’s point resonates. Most of us know the drag of having been in a bad meeting. We’ve also, though, felt the difference when dignity and respect fill the room as they can when a meeting is both effective and inclusive.

Kasparov’s point of difference was driven home for me last week when I invited Akin Arslan to the ZCoB huddle I wrote about earlier. Akin is living in Ann Arbor with his wife, Anoush Tamar Suni, an anthropologist and scholar of Armenian studies. The two met in Turkey, where she was doing fieldwork on the early 20th-century Armenian persecutions. About five years ago, Akin—who grew up in the Kurdish communities of eastern Turkey—and Anoush moved to Ann Arbor to be near her family. Like me, he has been inspired by what the Kurdish communities of Rojava are making happen—democratic experiments in self-governance, gender equity, and respect for human dignity—though as a Kurd himself, he of course has a far deeper emotional connection to the shared history, language, and culture as well as the possibilities for the future.

When Akin and I met for coffee earlier in the week, I told him about the upcoming huddle and suggested he would be welcome to join us. He took me up on the offer and sat in the whole three-hour meeting. Later that day, he wrote me a note that reaffirmed my own belief—that small sparks of dignity and democracy can inspire others, and that, as Garry Kasparov says, you can feel the difference in the energy in the room. And that Richard Rohr’s words of “practice of the better” aren’t just emotionally comforting, but a practical strategy for slowly changing our world:

It was wonderful to be part of the meeting yesterday and so inspiring! I’m honestly amazed at the way you’re running the business—seeing that it’s possible gives me real hope for the Kurds, especially those in Rojava. It feels powerful to know there’s an American business inspired by them and actually making it work here. I really believe that your example would inspire and encourage them.

In badly run meetings, which I have certainly been part of (and when I’m not on top of my self-management, certainly made worse by being a suboptimal participant) most people leave feeling disconnected and discontented. There are so many poorly run meetings in the world that many have come to believe this “badness” is inherent in the very form. Dr. Seth Frey, a computational social scientist at UC Davis who studies cooperation and self-governance, highlights the impact that the frequency with which bad meetings are convened in this country has had, in his blog enfascination:

[This] offers a counter-narrative to the modern “meetings are bad; fewer meetings” atmosphere that work culture creates. I think what’s happened is that there has been a change in the meaning of the word “meeting.” … [As] a bottom-up gathering of community members to discuss a matter of shared concern. That is so much different from what the word means today. If I were weaving conspiracy theories, I’d say that part of the project of undermining democracy has been capturing and corrupting the word. I think there’s a case to be made that meeting, not voting, is the fundamental unit of democracy.

When meetings go well, they do far more than move work forward—they create connection, insight, and, at times, a kind of quiet magic. They initiate cooperation, help bring out people’s potential, and open up creative connections. All of which, I believe, is akin to what Akin Arslan experienced last Thursday at the ZCoB huddle.

None of this was clear to me many years ago, when we first started setting up meetings at the Deli in our then-small business back in the early ’80s. Like Dr. Frey points out, I was stuck in a “meetings are bad” mindset. That began to change in a big way when I read Peter Block’s The Empowered Manager in the late ’80s. His statement that “staff meetings are the family dinners of organizational life” transformed how I thought about meetings. Instead of something to tolerate, I started to see meetings as opportunities to come together—to bond, share stories, catch up, honor one another, and support each other’s struggles.

This idea of a meeting as a family dinner came back to me a couple weeks ago when I read the wonderful food writer Samin Nosrat’s piece in the Food Section of The New York Times. She writes about how she hosts a series of weekly dinners that successfully bring friends together to connect and support each other. Her tips on how others might do the same struck me as remarkably similar to what one might do to make a good meeting happen. Nosrat shares,

It took nearly eight months of Monday dinners for me to realize I’d inadvertently built the ritual I’d so craved. … At our Monday dinners, I’ve learned how to share both responsibility and credit. I’ve learned that if I let other people care for me, they will. I’ve learned how it feels to build something sacred with people I love. … Four years in, this ritual and the community that sustains it are at the heart of my life. These friends have taught me what it means to belong. And I’ve finally found the sense of meaning … that I’ve sought for so long.

For anyone who’s only endured poorly run meetings, comparing these dinners to a well-run meeting might sound silly. But I’ve been in many meetings—especially in recent months—where I’ve felt that same sense of meaning.

These are the tips Nosrat shares:

Choose a day and time and stick to it
Choose one location and stick to it
Perfect is the enemy of good
Make it feel holy
Consistency is key
Make room for everyone
Say the quiet parts out loud

I recommend pretty much the same if you’re trying to get a good meeting going—here’s a bit of my take on the application of each in the context of convening a regular business meeting:

Choose a day and time and stick to it. Scheduling meetings here in the ZCoB is not easy—collectively, we’re working pretty much around the clock, and we’re open seven days a week. Which means that picking a time and sticking to it is the only way to really get the meeting going. As Nosrat writes, “Over time, the day will begin to feel sacred.”

Choose one location and stick to it. While moving around does have some upside, it’s generally easier to make a regular meeting happen, I’ve found, in the same spot, so everyone knows where to show up.

Perfect is the enemy of good. Trying to get the ideal meeting to happen is a worthy pursuit, but in reality, we are all human and imperfect. It is more important in my experience that the meeting happens. As Nosrat reminds us knowingly, “This is real life.” Meetings, like any other construct, are a good place to practice continuous improvement. After each ZCoB huddle, the facilitation team diligently gets together to review what worked, what didn’t, and to make plans for what they might want to do differently next time.

Make it feel holy. “Holy” may sound extreme, but I think the point is to add a bit of specialness to the occasion. The point is not to make meetings into religious experiences, but rather to make meaning. A regular meeting can build closeness and connection. A couple of meetings that I’m a part of always open with personal check-ins where participants share how they’re doing in their lives. Sometimes the sharing is simple; other times it’s an opportunity for folks to open up about deeply personal challenges. In the process, it becomes a valued ritual. Nosrat writes, “Whatever it is, it should sanctify the occasion and be something that exists outside the chaos of everyday life.”

Consistency is key. The more we do the meeting, the more we work at it, the better we get. As Nosrat says, “Sometimes, the dinner’s a dud.” Some meetings still suck. Which is a bummer, but hey, teams have bad games. We get up and do it again, hopefully better, the next time. Assata Shakur says, “No movement can survive unless it is constantly growing and changing with the times.” The same goes, I believe, for good meetings.

Make room for everyone. Here in the ZCoB, many years ago, we informally opened most meetings to anyone in the organization who would like to participate; that is still the case today, unless they need to be closed for a good reason (say, HR matters that require privacy). In other words, the default is that anyone can come, unless we specifically decide they can’t. It’s had a huge impact. Most people, of course, don’t attend, but it’s a very different dynamic to opt out than to be locked out. And in a well-run, inclusive environment, people you might not have thought were paying attention begin to participate in powerful new ways. As Civil Rights activist Bob Moses said,

Leadership is there in the people … If you go out and work with your people, then the leadership will emerge.

Say the quiet parts out loud. Learning to have difficult conversations is a skill—one that I will be working on for the rest of my life. (ZingTrain offers a two-hour online class about “Courageous Conversations,” a version of which we teach internally for interested ZCoBbers.) As Nosrat writes, “If the group doesn’t already have a framework in place for honest, judgment-free communication about fairly dividing costs and labor, you must create one.”

Here at Zingerman’s, we have been working at making our meetings more productive, more effective, and more inspiring for probably 30 years now. We rarely get it all right, but we do pretty well. Here are 14 tips that I have gleaned over many years of work in—and on—meetings:

Prepare! The more time I invest in properly preparing for a meeting, the more I get out of it. The late, great Stas’ Kazmierski—who taught us visioning 30 years ago and was co-managing partner at ZingTrain for 15 years—recommended that those running a meeting ought to be spending about two hours preparing for every hour of meeting time.
Write a vision for the meeting. Not just for the next session, but for the series as a whole. Set it for a year or two out so all involved will know where you’re headed and why. This gives every recurring meeting a clear purpose and direction, keeping it aligned with long-term goals rather than just the immediate agenda.
Get clear on norms. How decisions are made, how you decide who speaks, what’s expected of participants, etc. Poet Alina Stefanescu says, “I love thinking about how absences are announced.” Knowing how you will handle regular members’ absence ahead of time makes meeting management much easier—here we use proxies, and also agree that if we’re not present, we’re obligated to go with what the group decides in our absence.
Agree on roles. Our meetings work well, in great part, because someone is always serving as a facilitator. We also generally have a notetaker, and sometimes a timekeeper. Big meetings even have a backup facilitator. The facilitator keeps the group politely focused on the issues at hand and effectively separates content from process. Here we have a whole team of folks who are trained to do that work when we hold large meetings, and they are very good at it! There are concrete skills and techniques that go into the craft of effective facilitation.In the ZCoB, the facilitator is almost never the “boss,” or the formal leader of the group. This immediately distributes power more equitably, letting people speak when invited rather than because of their place on the org chart. Making the facilitator someone who is not in charge is one of the best things we’ve ever done. It boosts the confidence and contribution of someone who might otherwise be peripheral—or absent—and keeps leaders (like me) from unintentionally taking over the meeting. I cannot overstate the importance of the facilitator’s role. The facilitator is deeply committed to getting the group back on course when the conversation starts to drift or meander.
Manage the energy. We have been formally working hard at energy management here in the ZCoB for about 15 years now, ever since we developed our recipe for energy management, adapted from business leader Anese Cavanaugh. Poet Alina Stefanescu captures what it feels like when the energy starts to slip: “I’m haunted by the way sound unravels as a melody falls apart.” Her line is a lovely way to describe those subtle, unspoken shifts that occur when meeting energy begins to go off course. The disconnect can happen in our heads—if I start to disengage from the meeting’s content, what Stefanescu describes is exactly what happens.
Share responsibility for the meeting. In the same way that we do everything else here, we ask that everyone who is in the meeting take 100% responsibility for the meeting. That means even if you’re “just a participant,” you are still responsible for participating, speaking up if things are going well, asking the facilitator to make an adjustment, etc. Assata Shakur writes, “Revolution is about change, and the first place the change begins is in yourself.” Each of us learning to be more effective contributors to the quality of any meeting we’re part of is key to this process.I love Peter Block’s four ownership questions as a helpful framework for what each of us might do to prepare for any meeting we take part in:
- To what extent do you intend to get value from being at this conference?
- To what extent are you prepared to engage personally to achieve this?
- To what extent are you prepared to take risks to learn at this conference?
- To what extent are you prepared to take responsibility for the learning and engagement of others at this conference?
Write a good agenda. Agendas are essential in getting clear on things like “What are the outcomes for each segment of the meeting? Who is running it? What is the prework? Good agenda writing forces you to come to terms with the questions, not the answers. Susan B. Wilson, author of the 2003 tome Gourmet Meetings on a Microwave Schedule and a dozen other books on leadership, writes, “Meetings without an agenda are like a restaurant without a menu.” As the author of The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker puts it, “Figuring out your desired outcome brings focus to a meeting, and it does one more useful thing: It allows people to make better choices about whether they need to be there.”
Be ready to move more slowly than you might want. This has been a hard lesson for an impatient person like me, but the reality I keep learning is that it takes time for clarity to come, for groups to align, and for diverse perspectives to get processed. Authoritarian leaders, it’s true, can announce decisions quickly, but the announcement almost always leads to confusion, chaos, and undesirable outcomes. Moving more slowly, in a mindful and inclusive way, can feel frustrating, but we’ll go much forward far more effectively in the long run. As the folks at the amazing Alabama Chanin say, “Slowness is not delay—it is design.”
Make sure you are clear about the decisions that are made. What exactly did we decide? Who’s responsible for doing it? By when will it be done? Recording these decisions is essential—otherwise, you risk repeating the same meeting next week just trying to remember what was agreed (trust me, I’ve been there. It’s neither fun nor productive). I like leadership coach Amiel Handelsman’s suggestion to have decisions “writ large” on big sheets of paper posted on the wall for everyone to see. It keeps things visible, accountable, and hard to forget.
Practice good listening skills. In my studies of translation last month, I caught this line from poet Eliot Weinberger in an interview in the current issue of The Paris Review: “Every act of reading is a translation, every text is a translation.” Which makes me wonder—is every meeting then a massive work of simultaneous translation? It kind of makes clear(er) why it’s so darned hard to hold a great, inclusive, dignity-centered meeting.At a show at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley last week, Big Thief was performing a new song, “It’s a Beautiful World,” when a heckler interrupted the performance. Lead singer Adrianne Lenker’s response is one I want to learn from. Rather than playing over the interruption or yelling back, Lenker stopped, stood quietly, and got herself centered. After a bit of awkward silence, she began to speak—slowly and gently,I’m just having a moment here. I love you all. I’m listening. And I’m feeling. I’m finding my own words here. I don’t want to speak reactively. I want to hear what you are feeling and make room for your expression, and also deeply speak from my heart. So, I’m taking a moment and I’m not panic-speaking … I’m just grateful that we can be standing in this space shoulder to shoulder in a peaceful way gathering … that’s something special, especially in these heavy times.
Work with positive intention. No meeting will work well if most of the participants do not see themselves as a positive part of a positive get-together. (If people come to a meeting trying to set traps or take everyone else down, it will be tough to stop them—even with the most skilled facilitation.) For me, it means, in part, each member of the group approaches the gathering with positive beliefs and a deep desire to make things work. When standard-issue meetings go awry, it’s often because people come in looking for a fight. In most cases (though not all—see the note about Adrianne Lenker above), they will find it.Here, we work to practice what Peter Block taught me 30 years ago to think of as “Stewardship”—in essence, it means treating everyone in the room, regardless of their formal role, as if they were an equal partner. Block writes,Partnership is so critical to stewardship. It balances responsibility … The questions “How would partners handle this?” and “What policy or structure would we create if this were a partnership?” are the two most useful questions I know in the search for the alternative to patriarchy.For things to work well, we need, I believe, to come in working for collaboration, understanding, uplifting others, and creative ideation—done with dignity in all directions. Sociologist Francesca Polletta points out that two commonly used forms of governance may sound ok, but are actually unhelpful options:What we want here, and what Polletta pushes for too, is “participatory” meetings, of which she writes,Participatory decision-making can build solidarity by pressing participants to recognize the legitimacy of other people’s reasoning.
- “Adversary democracy,” which “assumes that people know their preferences before deliberation begins,” and also
- “Nondemocratic systems,” hierarchically oriented organizations, “which assume that leaders know their followers’ interests better than the followers themselves do.”
Aspire to More Effective Question-Asking. As my business partner Paul Saginaw taught me so many years ago, “When furious, get curious.” Which means we need to flip frustration on its conversational head and effectively ask questions. Peter Block says, “A good question works on you.” In Freedom is an Endless Meeting, Francesca Polletta writes about Civil Rights activist and Highlander Folk School co-founder Myles Horton. She says that in a challenging meeting situation,Horton’s answer was to ask questions. “I use questions more than I do anything else. They don’t think of a question as intervening because they don’t realize that the reason you asked that question is because you know something. … Instead of you getting on a pinnacle you put them on a pinnacle.” Horton described a Highlander director in a workshop who “asks one question, and that one question turned that workshop around and completely moved it in a different direction.”I love what Peter Block says: “When we ask questions that are an invitation to hear each other, something is created. … Good questions can be considered as sacraments of silence.”
Be open to new possibilities. In a truly great meeting, the power of the group exceeds the sum total of people’s individual contributions. As Alina Stefanecu encourages us, we can learn to “imagine defiantly.”
End with appreciations. This is one of the best things we do in the ZCoB! In a nutshell, we end every meeting with at least a few minutes for folks to share heartfelt appreciation of anyone they want to appreciate. Some participants don’t say anything. Many do. It’s magical!

Remember that while the principles in the frameworks I’ve shared here will likely work anywhere, the details will be best worked out by those who will be part of the meeting. Stas’ Kazmierski helped bring the culture of effective meeting management into our ecosystem. During his many years as part of the ZCoB, Stas’ always taught us to “Adapt, not adopt.” Kurdish sociologist Dilar Dirik reminds us of much the same:

Every canton in Rojava has different structures. No commune is alike. The principles of democratic autonomy indeed have universal appeal, however, their implementation requires local proposals, adaptations, and actions.

If we do all this well, it’s remarkable how many good things can come from it. Our organizations get better, the lives of the people who participate are enhanced, and ultimately, the communities of which they are a part become more positive places to be as well. As Francesca Pollitti observes,

Participatory deliberation yields citizens who are more knowledgeable, public spirited, better able to see the connections between their own interests and those of others, and more willing to revalue their own interests.

I’ll leave you with the heartfelt words from our Kurdish huddle visitor, Akin Arslan. We fall short—I’m fully aware—in some parts of our work pretty much every day. Sometimes, though, it works:

Seeing what you and Zingerman’s have accomplished has been inspiring and healing. … You often mention the Kurdish saying “Resistance is life” (Berxwedan Jiyane). You see the hope there; you see the belief there. Thank you for bringing that belief back into my life and making me rethink about it. And thank you for your way of describing anarchism, it’s given me fresh excitement and energy at a time when I really needed it.