Campfire
A small circle. A live question. The conversation you can't have in your usual rooms.
No stage. No audience. Diverse peers around a question that matters.
Campfires are happening now. Claim your spot, or join the invite list for the next one.
What happens at Campfire
Diverse peers, not an audience
A small circle, hand-curated from different rooms. Every Campfire is sized for real conversation — never a webinar. Everyone in the room is carrying real weight, like you.
A live question
Each Campfire is convened around a question that matters right now — the kind most rooms can’t hold honestly. Not evergreen topics. Live ones.
A provocation that lands honestly
Every Campfire is sparked by a pre-event provocation, custom-made for the event and shared exclusively with its registrants. Expect the unvarnished version of an original thought, offered in peer register, from someone who regularly engages senior audiences.
No stage, no script
A short opening from the Host, then the conversation is yours. Everyone speaks. No one performs. You leave having said things you don’t often feel you can say, and having heard things you don’t usually hear.
The next Campfire
Virtual Deep Dive,
45min + 15min debrief.
Adopting AI is an urgent imperative; adopting AI carelessly corrodes cognition. We urgently need to gain the wisdom to harness this new intellectual horsepower well, so that it enhances—and doesn't undermine—our taste, our judgment, our people.
Format: Deep Dive · 45 min + 15 min debrief
Seats: 6-8
Where: Virtual (Zoom)
When:
- Thu June 4 @ 8:00 ET, 12:00 UTC
- Fri June 12 @ 11:00 ET, 15:00 UTC
- Mon June 15 @ 11:00 ET, 15:00 UTC
- Mon June 15 @ 16:00 ET, 20:00 UTC
How money works at the Campfire: Everyone either puts down a $50 commitment fee or enters the code IWILLBETHERE at checkout to waive the fee. (But if you use the code and don’t show up, you can’t use it again. That’s to protect the space from no-shows.)
Provocateur: Sheldon Fernandez built DarwinAI (acquired by Apple in 2024). He now works at a rare intersection—AI strategist & philosopher—investigating what these new tools are doing to the way leaders (and organizations) think.
Format: Private podcast. Your link will be sent a few days before your Campfire. Listen online or via your preferred podcast app.
Most of us perform a lot
We perform confidence to our teams when, inside, we feel something less. We perform calm in meetings where we are anything but calm. We perform certainty for the board, equanimity for the people who work for us, having-an-answer when really we are still searching.
It is not a bad thing. The leader walking into a difficult town hall performing confidence releases their people from anxiety long enough to think clearly. Performance, in the right doses, is part of what it means to take responsibility for others.
And yet.
Performed long enough, in enough places, the performance stops being a tool and starts being a habit. Then, perhaps, an identity. We forget what it feels like to not be performing. We may even lose access to our own honest reckoning — because the performance, after enough years, runs even when no one is watching.
The company of other people is what triggers most of our performing. It is also the thing that can quiet it. The question is whether a room can be made where the performance can drop.
The Campfire Series is a quest to make that room for each other.
The opening series
We’re convening the first Campfires now — the first, of an ongoing practice.
The goal of this opening series is to discover what produces the most value for a roomful of peers carrying weight together. You are invited not just to attend, but to be part of shaping the practice. Over time, we will develop and test, together, a variety of custom formats to find what serves best, including:
Deep Dive
Participants pre-watch/listen to a private podcast recorded specifically for this event. The session deepens what the podcast began.
Humble Expert Dialogue
An expert-guest brings an unresolved question. The participants contribute to an inquiry the expert cannot complete alone.
Threshold Story
The guest leads with lived experience, not with ideas. The story they share is a threshold moment—the point before resolution, when the outcome was genuinely unclear. Participants are invited to bring their own thresholds.
More Campfires ahead
We’ll be hosting more Campfires in the months ahead. Tell us where to send you an invite.
The research behind this
The series draws on a convening methodology called Basecamp, refined over a decade of work with people doing honest reckoning. Basecamp holds that the most useful conversations begin not with answers, but with the courage to sit with a question — together.
An Invitation
Campfire isn't for everyone. It's for people who —
Are carrying more than they can say in most rooms.
Want peers, not audiences.
Would rather sit with a hard question for an hour than hear someone explain it for twenty minutes.
Are done with leadership theatre.
Believe the most useful conversations are the ones that don't resolve neatly.
If that sounds like you, there’s a place for you at the fire.
