I sat down with Alfredo Karam for a conversation about leadership, culture, and what it actually takes to build the kind of team people don’t want to leave. What started as “leadership that saves lives” turned into “connection that saves lives,” and then into a much bigger conversation about questions, facilitation, AI, and the four states of mind every leader walks into a room and sees. Below is Claude’s close-to-verbatim readable version of the podcast which has yet to be published.
Connection Before Content
Peter Block, who I first heard the phrase “connection before content” from, has a quote that lives rent-free in my brain: “Without relatedness, no real work can occur.” I’d edit it slightly to: “Without relatedness, no sustained real work can occur.” You can absolutely get stuff done by instilling fear or dangling carrots. You just can’t sustain it.
When I was about half the height that I am now, I saw the movie Patch Adams. Robin Williams plays a doctor who heals people through humor and human connection, reaching patients that the smartest clinicians couldn’t. I watched that movie as a little kid and thought, that’s it. I’m going to be Patch Adams. Pre-med, med school, maybe pediatrician.
One chemistry class in college and that plan came crumbling down.
But I was still struck by the idea that connection itself could heal. So I pivoted my entire learning career into a single question: is that real, or is that Hollywood? Is there veracity to the idea that human connection has that strong of an impact?
Turns out, yes. The Surgeon General has talked about the loneliness epidemic. But my work isn’t about loneliness. It’s about all the human flourishing that comes out of connection. Connection creates communication shortcuts, like that scene in Ocean’s Twelve when George Clooney says, “Let’s just do what we did in Panama,” and saves four hours of planning. Connection is what people point to at the end of their lives when they’re asked what made it a quality life. Nobody says it was the price of their car.
That’s the background. I wanted to be a doctor. Didn’t end up working out. Ended up studying learning, design, technology, and psychology. Fourteen years ago, I created the original deck of We! Connect Cards to solve my own problem leading a group of awkward teenagers into connection. Today they’re used in 80-plus countries by 100,000-plus facilitators starting conversations that otherwise never would have happened.
Questions Are Edit Buttons to the Future
Here’s what has me really fired up right now.
Questions are freely available. You can make them up in your head. They take less than three seconds to prepare. And they’re great at allowing us to connect, learn, and exchange information.
But the questions you ask are very literally edit buttons to the future.
In the short term, a question changes the words that come out of someone’s mouth in the next two minutes. In the long term, if you ask a question someone has never really considered before, you’re wiring new neural pathways in their brain. You are very literally editing their brain.
And not all questions are created equal. Take a hospital. You obviously want as few medical errors as possible. So if you walk in as an administrator and ask, “Did anybody screw up today that might have caused harm?” That is a question. But it is not a psychologically safe question. It throws someone under the bus. It makes the speaker look bad for ratting somebody else out.
Now consider the same hospital, the same intent, but a different question. Solo or anonymous: “Was everything as safe this week as you would like it to be?”
Same goal. Two completely different futures. The second one very much changes lives. And sometimes saves them.
This is one of those simple shifts that doesn’t cost anything, doesn’t require new software, and doesn’t need a consultant. Just better questions. If you want a starter set of these, grab our free printable conversation cards and book excerpts and try a few in your next meeting.
A Hospital Story Worth Putting on Your Wall
The first place I came across this research from Johns Hopkins was in Priya Parker’s book, The Art of Gathering. If you haven’t seen this study, it should be on a poster on your wall.
Researchers tried a number of interventions to reduce medical errors and deaths. One of them was simple. Before each surgery, the entire team stood in a circle. The tech, the anesthesiologist, the surgeon. Everyone. They went around and shared three things: their name, their role in the surgery that day, and any concerns they had for this particular surgery.
That was it.
In that group, medical errors and deaths were both reduced by over 30 percent.
The number of times somebody accidentally sewed up gauze inside a patient went down. Not because anyone’s skill changed. Because the group had a check-in. They got on the same page. They looked each other in the eyes and said, “we’re in this together.” Everyone expressed concerns on an equal playing field.
That last part matters most. The tech had the same authority and voice in that moment as the surgeon. That’s what makes it work. Otherwise, you’re on a construction site with a new hire who doesn’t feel comfortable speaking up because their job is at threat. You need everyone to feel as safe as possible to point out the things that might cause an accident.
This isn’t soft. This is connection that saves lives.
Leader as Facilitator: To Smooth the Process Of
The first and most compelling definition I’ve ever come across for facilitation came from Microsoft Word, of all places. I’d type the word, right-click, and the synonym would drop down: “to smooth the process of.”
For me, that’s also what’s required of a leader. What does it take to smooth the process of the change you are trying to create?
So I think a leader-as-facilitator is somebody who walks into a room and isn’t thinking, “what can I say to them?” or “what information can I share?” They’re asking, “how can I invite this group’s perspective in? How can I make sure everybody feels safe enough to be heard?”
And below the skill of facilitation sits something deeper, which is being a connector. That’s not a skill set with five bullets. It is a way of being. It’s being at a family holiday dinner, seeing two relatives about to start fighting, and walking over with the right way of being to calm the situation down without saying a single particular word. There’s an energy exchange that happens between people. It leaks out of our skin.
The most profoundly impactful leaders are deeply in touch with who they are being, because everything after that follows in line.
Two Ways to Run Your Strategy Meeting
Here’s the practical contrast.
Old-style command-and-control kicks off the annual strategy meeting like this: “Here’s the strategy. Go implement it. Do it or you’re fired.” Simple. Familiar.
A leader-as-facilitator kicks off the same meeting like this: “I’ve put the annual strategy in front of you. Take 10 minutes. Circle everything that strikes you as especially important. Underline anything where you’re thinking, ‘should we really be doing this?’ Then we’re going to spend 15 minutes discussing what you circled and what you underlined.”
Do you feel the difference?
In that 25 minutes, you’ve created more culture than most companies create in a year of culture transformation work. Because you didn’t issue orders. You said, “what do you think? I value your thoughts. We are here together.”
The Latin root of the word intent means “to stretch.” Like a rubber band. A goal sits inside one person’s head. An intention stretches across a room and pulls people together. So when you frame a meeting, frame an intention that includes what your people care about, not just what you care about.
If you want help designing meetings people actually want to be in, this is exactly what we teach inside The Contribution Method.
Don’t Bring Me Problems: An Eagle Scout Story
I emceed a TEDx event recently and one of the speakers told a story that stuck with me.
He was a scoutmaster taking middle schoolers camping. The kids kept asking him and the other scoutmaster questions: “Where’s the firewood?” “Where’s the flashlight?”
The two leaders made a quiet agreement. For three hours, they were going to repeat every question back, verbatim.
“Where’s the firewood?”
“I don’t know. Where IS the firewood?”
The kid would walk off, look around, find it, and bring it back to the fire. Three hours of this. The kids solved every single one of their own problems.
Now compare that with the most famous management phrase of the last 30 years: “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.”
I get the spirit. Empower people to solve their own problems. But in practice, that phrase is damaging. Sometimes people bring you a problem because they genuinely don’t know the solution. Sometimes they bring you a problem because they want to connect. They don’t expect you to fix it. They want you to witness it.
A facilitator isn’t annoyed when someone brings them a problem. They redirect like a traffic cop. They smooth the way. They actively look for what roadblocks need to be cleared so the person can solve it themselves.
I’m learning this lesson at home. My wife brings me a problem and she does not want me to swoop in and fix it. She wants me to witness her in the moment, sit with it, hear it, and feel like I got her by the time we walk out of the conversation. I think this is the executive’s hardest skill. We’re too fast-minded, too busy, too on to the next thing to actually stick around long enough to witness someone in the moment.
AI, Slow Productivity, and the Real KPI of the Next Decade
This whole conversation gets ten times more pronounced in the age of AI.
You can create a ridiculous amount of output in a single spoken prompt. Schedule the event, design the logo, draft the website, all in one go. But if you haven’t paused long enough to make sure that’s actually where you want to go, you have fast activity, not slow productivity.
My late co-founder and co-author Will Wise used to say it this way: “Efficiency is the enemy of connection.” It does not mean connection slows things down. It’s actually the opposite. But if you try to be efficient through a connection, that is what creates people quitting after six months because they hate working for you. That is a six-month replacement cost for the sake of moving 90 seconds faster.
A few years before ChatGPT exploded, Reid Hoffman asked Sam Altman a question. When AI is doing most white-collar work, and robotics catch up to do the rest, what will we be left with? Sam said, “I suspect connection and recreation.”
I do think AI will replace a lot of roles. There will be nothing left to do. So here is the question I want to put on the table:
What if “AI gave me back time to connect” became a real KPI for organizations?
If the promise of AI is freed-up time, how much of that time are we redirecting into the only currency people actually remember at the end of their lives, which is connection? Because if we just fill it with more transactional output, we will repeat the email-and-phone era. The promise was more time. The reality was more inbox.
The choice is ours. So is the prompt. Imagine walking into a meeting with five executives, with the AI in chair number six, and you start the meeting with this prompt: “Can you do everything we were going to do in this meeting and give us three questions to connect with each other and strategically map out what’s ahead?” That is a cool idea. Whether it happens is a choice.
The Four States: Critic, Consumer, Contributor, Connector
In every organization I’ve ever stepped into, I see people in one of four states of mind. These are not labels of people. They’re states. We move between them.
State 1: Critic. Totally comfortable pointing out what’s wrong with the world, uninterested in doing anything about it.
State 2: Consumer. Passively scrolling through work. Head down for fear of getting cut. Show up. Cruise. Collect a paycheck. If you tend to live in either of those two states, the next five years are going to be hard.
Above the line, above a choice point, you enter the land of the contributor. State 3: “The world is not happening to me. I have all sorts of choices in how I respond and react.”
And one level up from contributor is the connector. State 4. These are people who are hubs of contribution. They walk into a room and see the potential of what could happen, and then they get really skillful at facilitating, or smoothing the process of, that possibility. They’ve spotted all the contributors. They’ve figured out a way to invite the critics and consumers to step into the land of contribution.
Peter Block and I share an idea: let’s retire all leaders and replace them with connectors. Same people. Different label. Different identity. Different way of being.
If you want to develop this muscle, we host the Connectors Summit every December. It’s a live experience where facilitators, trainers, and leaders come together to practice, connect, and reset for the year ahead.
How You Can Help Build 50 Million Conversations
Toward the end of the conversation, Alfredo asked me a great question: how can his audience help us reach our North Star of creating 50 million conversations over the next 10 years that otherwise never would have happened?
The freest, lowest-effort answer first: remember that the questions you ask are edit buttons to the future. That’s free. As you walk or click into your next meeting, hold that thought, and you will start a conversation that otherwise never would have happened.
If you want help making connection easy: I give away most of our stuff. Printable versions of the cards, book excerpts, all of it. One page, one email trade, no pressure. Grab the free tools here.
And if you’re ready to bring a tool home: there’s the original We! Connect Cards (conversations that matter), the Future Focused We! Connect Cards (conversations that create a more compelling tomorrow), and the book Ask Powerful Questions I co-wrote with Will Wise.
Three takeaways I’ll leave you with from the conversation:
Leadership that saves lives. Connection that saves lives. Questions that save lives.
Want to go deeper? Register your interest for the Connectors Summit this December, a live experience where facilitators, trainers, and leaders come together to practice, connect, and reset. And if you lead meetings, sessions, or trainings, register your interest for The Contribution Method this spring, a live masterclass where you’ll learn to design sessions people actually want to be in.
