Certain members of my friends and family circle make fun of me tease me because I often rearrange the chairs at social, public and business gatherings.
My beloved sister got a bit irked by my penchant for chair moving last month when, 20 minutes before her party started, she came into her living room to see me adjusting her furniture arrangement. “That looks terrible! It’s off balance!” she protested.
But I invoked my older sister status my PhD and told her that I knew what I was doing. I would have explained myself, but it can be difficult to articulate just why a big square of 14 seats is not as good as 3 rounded clusters of 4 or 5 seats.
How we sit is how we interact.
Most people walk into an empty room and look for symmetry or pattern in the seating arrangement, but not me.
I look for the dynamics those empty seats might create. If I don’t like what the chairs predict, I move them. I don’t want the room to look good; I want the room to work for the people who will fill it.
Many people don’t realize how much the physical structure of a room influences interaction. They don’t understand how to arrange chairs so that conversation is easier. And, they rarely think about how people might be clustered in small groups so that they can hear each other and make real, authentic connections.
I’ve realized that I often do my rearranging covertly, without asking for anyone’s permission, simply because explaining my reasons takes too long. But now I’ve discovered a lovely list of five reasons why circles (and curves, and clusters) can be so effective at fostering honest and authentic communication.
5 ways that moving chairs helps us lead
Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea, authors of The Circle Way: A leader in every chair, have summarized 5 of their important insights from “The Circle Way” their framework for facilitating shared leadership and shared engagement, at the BK Communiqué Author Lists Blog.
I won’t snitch BK’s content by reposting the full list hear. But let me tempt you to go to their post by sharing my favorite reason:
3. Meeting in circle is a sort of a contained treasure hunt. The wisdom we need is in the room, and the only way to truly gather it, think about it, and make decisions based on it, is to hear every voice. Who has the question? Who has the answer? Who knows the next piece? What creative idea will be heard from an unexpected source?
Baldwin and Linnea also have a website, PeerSpirit, where they offer us a downloadable set of guidelines for using circles to facilitate authentic communication.
Like Dotmocracy, Linnea and Baldwin’s Circle process is a straightforward tool that can transform colleagues’ interactions in ways that elicit new ideas, increase enthusiasm, build relationships, and nurture commitment to an important goal.
Be a leader. Move some chairs.
Drag one of them over here, and smush those two together, and viola, people can hear each other. People can make eye contact. People can lean back and laugh without falling away from the energy. People can challenge each other and nudge each other forward.
Pull up a chair, and we can really work together.
See also:
Tools for Authentic Organizations: Dotmocracy
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The end of “business as usual”
Progressive organizations, organizations with a change-oriented purpose, need to put their values into practice as they go about creating change. Otherwise, they will not act authentically and they will reduce their own power.
I am an organizational identity and reputation scholar with a PhD in leadership & organizations. I research, write, teach and consult with organizations about the relationships between organizational identity, actions, and purpose. See the 
