The First Meeting

You have a script, three roles, a purpose statement, and ground rules. You have a room — someone’s kitchen, a library meeting room, a back table at a coffee shop. You have three people who care about something.

I can give you a guide for all of that. I can’t give you what happens when three people sit down together and decide to trust each other. That part is yours.

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Here’s what I can tell you, from the organizing literature and from everything I’ve learned studying how groups form.

The first meeting will be awkward. Not in a catastrophic way — in the way that any new thing between humans is awkward. Someone will talk too long. Someone will forget the ground rules. The facilitator will lose track of time. The note-taker will realize they weren’t sure what counted as a “decision” to write down. The process-checker will feel weird about interrupting to say “I notice we haven’t heard from someone yet.”

All of that is fine. All of that is the point. You’re building a skill you don’t have yet by doing it badly the first time. Every successful group I’ve studied went through this. The AA meeting format works not because it eliminates awkwardness but because the structure contains it — the script gives you a track to follow when your instincts say to fill silence with rambling or to skip the go-round because it feels forced.

Follow the script. Read it aloud. Don’t improvise the first time. The rigidity is the feature.

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In Fight Club, the first rule was “you do not talk about Fight Club.” It’s usually read as secrecy — an underground code. But reread it as a group norm and something else emerges. Before a single punch is thrown, the group establishes what its members agree to. The rule isn’t about silence. It’s about consent: you participate, and in doing so, you accept the terms. Every functional group starts with this — not with mission statements or strategy documents, but with a handful of agreements that the members adopt by choosing to show up. The AA meeting preamble works the same way. The facilitator reads it aloud. Everyone hears the rules. And then the meeting begins, inside the structure those rules create.

Your ground rules are your first rule. The script is the format that holds them.

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Two things matter more than anything else at your first meeting.

Start and end on time. Leach, Rogelberg, Warr, and Burnfield’s research on meeting design found that agenda use and punctuality are among the strongest predictors of whether participants experience a meeting as effective — regardless of what happens in between. Starting on time signals that you take this seriously. Ending on time signals that you respect each other’s lives outside this room. If you have to cut a conversation short, do it. You’ll meet again. The discipline of time is more valuable than the content of any single discussion.

Use the roles. The facilitator reads the script and watches the clock. The note-taker writes down decisions and action items — not a transcript, just the things the group agreed to do. The process-checker watches for dynamics: who hasn’t spoken, who’s dominating, whether the ground rules are holding. These roles might feel artificial for three people. They are. That’s the point. You’re building the habit of distributed responsibility before the group is big enough for the roles to feel natural. When you’re five, you’ll be glad the habit exists.

Rotate all three roles at the next meeting. No exceptions. If the same person always facilitates, you’ll build an informal hierarchy without noticing — and Freeman already told you what happens then.

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There’s a reason the CryptoParty movement — which trained thousands of non-technical people in digital security on every continent — centered its events around food, drinks, and conversation rather than formal instruction. The research on adult learning and trust-building converges on a simple finding: people learn better and trust faster in relaxed environments. Your first meeting isn’t a committee formation. It’s three people getting to know each other around a shared purpose. If it feels more like a dinner conversation that happens to have structure than a board meeting, you’re doing it right.

Bring food if you can. Not because it’s a nice touch — because shared meals are one of the oldest trust-building mechanisms humans have, and the sociological research supports the intuition. It lowers barriers. It signals this is a human gathering, not an obligation.

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After the meeting, each person writes in their field journal. Not together — individually. Answer three questions:

What worked? What was awkward? What surprised you?

Don’t skip this. It might feel like homework, but it’s the raw material you’ll need to get better at something none of you have been trained to do. The groups that improve are the ones that reflect on what happened. The groups that stagnate are the ones that rush to the next task without looking back.

Compare notes with each other before your next meeting if you want. The observations don’t have to stay private. But the reflection should happen alone first, so your impression isn’t shaped by what someone else says they noticed.

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From here, the content of this project shifts. I’ll still write. I’ll still share what I’ve learned from the organizing traditions I’ve been studying. But the center of gravity moves — from my research to your experience. The thing that matters most, starting now, is not what I tell you. It’s what happens when three people meet in a room and start building something together.

I can’t observe that. I can’t measure it. I can comment on it from a distance, and I will. But the work is yours now.

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