Where were you on September 11th, 2001? This coming Friday, it would’ve been 25 years since 9/11. If you are old enough to understand what was happening, you probably remember exactly where you were. It’s hard to forget.
Everyone knows the towers came down. Everyone knows a memorial stands there now, in the middle of some of the most valuable real estate in Lower Manhattan. What most of us never think about is the space in between. How do you decide what gets built on ground that emotional, and that valuable, without tearing a city apart in the process?
I didn’t know that story myself until a few weeks ago, at the Victoria Forum. Today’s story comes from the very first thing I saw there: a documentary that opened the forum, called 9/11: Reclaiming Ground Zero.
New York tried the obvious route first. Town halls. They were a mess. Grief, anger, and property value don’t sit well together in a room with no structure, and the meetings were loud and bitter.
So the city brought in AmericaSpeaks, an organization founded by Carolyn Lukensmeyer, to design something different. On July 20, 2002, more than 5,000 people showed up at the Jacob Javits Convention Center for one day of structured facilitation. Family members who’d lost someone. Neighborhood residents. People who’d flown in from as far as Afghanistan. Every income level, every political stripe, every generation, all in one room.
Instead of a microphone and a stage, they used tables. Ten to twelve people at each one, guided by a trained facilitator, talking and listening in equal measure. Their input fed into a system in real time, so the whole room could watch where agreement was actually forming.
By the end of the day, the group had rejected every one of the six redevelopment plans on the table. That’s not a footnote. That result sent officials back to the drawing board, and it helped shape the design that stands there today.
But the number I keep coming back to isn’t the plans that got scrapped. It’s this: people who walked in believing no one would listen to them walked out saying they’d been heard.
That’s the real lesson. Democracy, done badly, is a microphone and a line of angry people waiting their turn. Done well, it’s a designed process, one that gives structure to grief and disagreement instead of letting them run the room.That is the power of professional facilitation.
I think about that as a leader, and honestly, as a parent too. The habit we may have fallen into in a hard conversation, at work or at home, is to let the loudest voice or the most senior title decide the outcome. What that room in 2002 proved is that when you build real structure for people to speak and be heard in equal measure, you land somewhere sturdier than any decision one person could hand down alone.
That’s part of why we hold a family meeting every month at home. One hour, phones away, everyone gets a turn to say what’s working, what’s not, and what needs to change. It’s not about who talks loudest or who’s the parent in the room. It’s about actually being present, being heard, and listening to each other without the usual distractions.
That’s whole-person leadership too. It’s not only how you run a meeting. It’s whether the people at your table, at work or around your kitchen table, walk away from a hard conversation feeling like their voice actually mattered.
Where in your own life, at work or at home, could you use a little more structure and a little less shouting?