Forum: From Six to a Billion

Forums, Councils, and Campfires

Forums aren't a new concept. We can trace their history back to 1951. We can find roots way before. But as modern society evolves, each new stage seems to accelerate Forum growth. Why? Let’s go backwards from today to understand the drivers of Forum’s growth and how the concept started.

Start with Tomorrow - A Billion

The International Facilitators Organization website proclaims the goal of getting “One Billion People in Peer Groups by 2053.” Why? Why do they think it is so needed now? We got the founder, Mo Fathelbab’s take: See this clip of Mo explaining why he’s made this his community’s mission: 

“Societally we’ve gotten into trouble lately by generalizing. We assume, if you are from wherever, you’re like everyone else from that place. And you and I know that isn’t the case. When you generalize a whole class of people into any characterization that is less than positive, and hordes of people start to believe that, we’ve got a problem. If people can be in these groups and see that the person across the table who's seemingly completely opposite, who they might have hated because they've been taught or raised to hate that category of people, you get to know this person as a human being, and all that stuff melts away.”

A billion people who have learned to avoid the temptations of generalizing “the other,” who are good at building trust together, could go a long way towards a peaceful, thriving, planet. 

Science fiction? Can we get to a billion? Is it possible? “I’ve trained 30,000 people in 30 years. If we can get 330 people to do this work for 30 years … The math adds up. But, are there ingredients beyond facilitation needed to create Forum alchemy? We’d argue that shifts in the world are behind the acceleration of growth. Let's next take a look at the state of Forum today. 

Today - A Few Hundred Thousand

Forum participation, if you count its cousins, is in the hundreds of thousands today. Almost all of YPO’s 38,000 members are in Forums. The Forum-based Entrepreneurs Organization has 17,000 members.  Vistage counts 45,000 CEOs and some other leaders who work for them, all in their version of Forum, called groups.  Chief, which places its women executives into “core groups”, exploded to this size three years after founding, and got a unicorn ($1B valuation). We count almost 100 other smaller forum-based communities, and to help everyone sort through them, we’ve created a “Forum-Finder” on the resource section of our website.

Two-thirds of these communities in our Forum-Finder are targeted at CEOs. But this is changing, unlocking Forum growth. In 2012, Sheryl Sandberg hired YPO Forum Facilitator Sue Hesse and enlisted a team of YPOers to design “Lean-in Circles” based on Forum,  and now reports over 100,000 circles globally in 184 countries.

This “who” is starting to move past CEOs.  That’s because the “why” is changing: the world itself has grown big; there’s a tsunami of information, and we’re in casual contact with thousands of people. Forum provides a deep human connection with a few. Forum-mates curate the world for each other, and provide a level of authenticity, openness, and trust that you can’t get anywhere else. This is an essential ingredient to human development and well-being, and in the modern world, it is scarce. In a world of technology, people are investing time in Forum to cut through all the technology and knowledge, and have more quality time with humans.

This is new: backing up, the origins of Forum were more about knowledge being scarce and exclusive, not abundant.

Councils to Forum - the O.G. Six

Here’s my take on how Forum started.

In the late 1940s, Bob Nourse was leading his family business in Milwaukee, WI. It failed. He thought other CEOs would avoid that fate if they were able to bring their problems to peers for help. So he tried an experiment, talking six non-competitive friends into a confidential meeting for “sharing their true concerns and getting relaxed enough to admit that they had problems.” (video) They first met in 1951. Bob called it “The Executive Council” (TEC). I spoke with Fred Chaney, the first TEC chair on the West Coast, who is still chairing the 7th ever TEC. Fred’s take: “With all the complexity of business, it was impossible to do a good job without help, and the best help is not a consultant, it is a group of peers.”

This formula worked so well that it became Bob and then Fred’s careers, growing “The Executive Council” (TEC). Later, TEC would become Vistage. Along the way, Fred joined YPO. And Fred shared the council format with the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO) in 1987.

YPO Invents Forum

YPO first convened in 1950 at the Waldorf-Astoria in NYC. Like Bob Nourse, YPO founder Ray Hickok found himself in charge of the family business (Hickock Belts in Rochester, NY) when his dad died suddenly. He started YPO to get help: scarce knowledge from men and women aged 38 to 43 who were also running big  “industrial companies.” It started as a social club with chapter events and galas. According to Pat McNees’s “YPO: The First 50 Years” it evolved by “palace revolution" to have more and more learning events - seminars, conventions, multi-day ”universities.” In 1954, in the first YPO Harvard Business School program, 8-10 YPOers were housed in bedrooms around a living room and worked together on cases.  65 years later, CircleSpace would build on this to create HBS’s “Virtual Living Group” program.

There were some early hints of Forum. Openness was core from YPO’s start. There was a balance of social and learning, as well as business and personal. YPO’s many chiefs “saw ourselves more as facilitators” than as “administrators, supervisors, managers or directors.”

Some Forum-like groups began, like the “Marathon” group of eight YPOers who met regularly for 35 years, for several days of learning and problem-solving in locations warmer than Boston. In the fifties, YPO regularly hired National Training Laboratories to run “sensitivity” training workshops. These “T-groups” were one of the “first hot human relations-oriented fads after the war.” But YPO stopped them by the mid-sixties: they elicited dramatic love/hate reactions, with one report of a nervous breakdown after a T-group. At the same time, some New England members were creating “Phantom Boards of Directors” to help with specific problems.

In McNees’s YPO history, actual Forum, as we now know it, shows up towards the end. With Fred Chaney’s guidance, YPO and TEC member “Jiggs” Davis in Northern California first tried the format in YPO in 1975. Almost instantly, Forum grew grassroots. It was a perfect fit. Unlike TEC, YPOers were all peers. Forum process avoided the dramatic direct confrontations common in T-groups; no more nervous breakdowns. Unlike TEC, YPO’s Forum always blended personal and professional. As member Maurice Mac put it, “You can have your Harvard case studies, this is the real world.” At this point, YPO had grown big and lost the original intimate sharing and deep personal relationships. Forum restored that.

Initially, YPO tried to match similar businesses, and pair family business, professional managers, and entrepreneurs in the same groups. They discovered that random diversity worked better. The importance of a strong moderator became clear. By 1982, the Center for Organization Development was hired to run formal moderator training. In 1987, the YPO Forum Committee began working with the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, a controversial and leading-edge organization that pushed the development of Forum further into “whole-person” explorations. There were more lessons and evolution as YPO globalized, and this “very North American” concept encountered Latin American and Asian cultures. Spouse Forums and Young-Adult Forums sprang up. Today, Forum is YPO’s highest-ranked member benefit, with almost all YPO members in Forums.

From the Past to the Future

To be fair, Forum kinda goes back to telling stories around a campfire. There’s a lot of ancient wisdom about small groups. All the books on Forum reference Ben Franklin’s “Junto”, aka “Leather Apron Club” in 1727, or  Napoleon Hill’s espousing “Masterminds” 200 years later, and then writing a chapter about them in his 1938, “Think and Grow Rich.” In 1946, an enterprising insurance salesman at Northwestern Mutual started his “ Top O’ The Mornin’ Study Group,” and study groups became a massive phenomenon across the life insurance industry. CircleSpace has worked with study groups, too. There are many, many more.

To sum up, Forum is a modern implementation of ancient wisdom. And from Mo, and all of us here at ForumSpace, we’re thinking it is exactly the practice we need to build the modern society we’re hoping for.