Most Essential Second Renaissance Readings

Research and Sense-Making
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There is a certain author in this forum who is demanding attention for his work. Is it worth the time and effort of Second Renaissance participants to allocate their reading time in that direction? To establish a baseline of which authors and works are most vital for cultivating Second Renaissance points of view. I asked Gemini to suggest a reading list. Of course, this list is very debatable! Feel free to add or subtract suggested titles as you see fit!

Query:
If a reader completely accepts the arguments in the Secone Renaissance white papers, which 10 authors are most essential to such a reader who wishes to make progress towards the goals outlined in the white papers?

Response: If a reader fully internalizes the core thesis of the Second Renaissance—that our global polycrisis is rooted in the foundational worldviews of modernity, and that a collective shift in consciousness, inner development, and systems thinking is required to transition to a regenerative future—the following 10 authors are essential for moving from theory to practice.

These thinkers bridge macro-historical analysis, systemic philosophy, and the practical cultivation of new “developmental spaces.”

1. Systems Theory & The Metacrisis

Daniel Schmachtenberger

  • Why they are essential: Schmachtenberger is a foundational voice in defining the metacrisis—the underlying generator of our interconnected global crises. His work focuses on shifting away from rivalrous, win-lose game dynamics and designing “Phase Shift” social architectures.

  • Core contribution: Frameworks for systemic design, existential risk mitigation, and the collective intelligence required to navigate civilization-level transitions.

Donella Meadows

  • Why they are essential: To move toward a regenerative future, one must understand how to shift complex systems. Meadows’ seminal work on leverage points provides a masterclass in where to intervene in a system—noting that the highest-leverage interventions are at the level of mindsets and paradigms.

  • Core contribution: Thinking in Systems and the concept of “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System.”

2. Metamodern Philosophy & Cultural Paradigms

Hanzi Freinacht (Daniel Görtz & Emil Ejner Friis)

  • Why they are essential: Writing under this collective pseudonym, these thinkers outline metamodernism as a deliberate political and cultural stage that succeeds postmodernity. They argue that the structural complexity of a society cannot outpace the psychological and emotional maturity of its citizens.

  • Core contribution: The Listening Society and Nordic Ideology, which advocate for “prototopia” and the institutionalization of psychological development.

Jason Ananda Josephson Storm

  • Why they are essential: The Second Renaissance requires dismantling the rigid, disenchanted assumptions of modernity. Storm provides the academic and philosophical toolkit to move past both modern dogmatism and postmodern nihilism, mapping out a “metamodern” approach to knowledge.

  • Core contribution: Metamodernism: The Future of Theory, which reconstructs concepts of knowledge, value, and reality for a post-disenchanted world.

3. Inner Development & Vertical Maturity

Robert Kegan

  • Why they are essential: Paper 4 emphasizes “Developmental Spaces” for inner growth. Kegan’s pioneering research in adult developmental psychology shows that human beings can continue to evolve through distinct stages of mental complexity, shifting from a “socialized mind” to a “self-authoring” and, ultimately, a “self-transforming mind.”

  • Core contribution: The Evolving Self and In Over Our Heads, which detail the psychological architecture needed to process modern systemic complexity.

Thomas HĂŒbl

  • Why they are essential: A core tenet of building a wiser future is addressing the unhealed, systemic traumas that distort collective behavior and drive reactive technology adoption. HĂŒbl focuses on collective trauma integration, showing how inner healing directly translates to social coherence.

  • Core contribution: Healing Collective Trauma, offering practical frameworks for attunement and restoring systemic flow in fractured communities.

4. Macrohistory, Technological Power, & Civilizational Evolution

Peter Turchin

  • Why they are essential: To shape a second renaissance, one must understand the structural-demographic cycles that cause societies to collapse or integrate. Turchin’s work in cliodynamics uses mathematical modeling to analyze deep historical trends, elite overproduction, and social cohesion.

  • Core contribution: Ages of Discord and End Times, providing a data-driven look at civilizational leverage points and historical instability.

Kojin Karatani

  • Why they are essential: Moving beyond a purely economic analysis of history, Karatani examines the shifting “modes of exchange” (from tribal reciprocity to state plunder, capital commodities, and eventually to a collaborative association). His macro-historical view helps conceptualize what a post-capitalist, post-nation-state paradigm actually looks like.

  • Core contribution: The Structure of World History, which offers a systemic blueprint for looking at long-term socioeconomic evolution.

Peter Pogany

  • Why they are essential: Pogany applies thermodynamic concepts to human systems, viewing history as a sequence of global thermodynamic regimes separated by chaotic transitions. His framework aligns perfectly with the Second Renaissance idea of a necessary, inevitable shift in our global operational paradigm.

  • Core contribution: Rethinking the World and Fifth Economic System, detailing how global consciousness shifts are bound to physical and ecological boundaries.

5. Technology & Sacred Authority

Iain McGilchrist

  • Why they are essential: Paper 5 (In Tech We Trust) explores our dysfunctional relationship with technology and how we perceive the world in its image. McGilchrist’s profound research into brain hemisphere asymmetry explains why modern culture has become overly mechanistic, analytical, and fragmented (left-hemisphere dominant) at the expense of holistic, embodied, and relational understanding (right-hemisphere).

  • Core contribution: The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things, which argue for a fundamental restoration of how we attend to the world.

Summary of the Journey Ahead

For a reader looking to act on these white papers, these ten authors create a comprehensive matrix:

  [Systemic Diagnosis]  ──>  [Inner Capacity]  ──>  [Paradigm Architecture]
  Schmachtenberger,          Kegan, HĂŒbl,           Freinacht, Storm,
  Meadows                    McGilchrist            Turchin, Karatani, Pogany

By synthesizing the macro-historical boundaries of Turchin and Pogany with the inner developmental frameworks of Kegan and McGilchrist, a practitioner can begin creating the “developmental spaces” and systemic interventions required to turn the Second Renaissance from a theory into a lived reality.

Which of these specific domains—the psychological growth, the historical cycles, or the systemic philosophy—feels like the most urgent lever for you to explore next?

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Against the baseline above, here is a Gemini review of author’s contribution. For what it’s worth.

To determine if Geoff Dann’s work—specifically his 2025 book The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation and the accompanying framework outlined on his site—adds value or introduces contradictions to a standard Second Renaissance reading list, we have to look at the structural overlap.

The “Second Renaissance” and “metacrisis” frameworks generally focus on a systemic, phase-shift transition of human civilization, integrating complexity science, inner/cultural transformation, and new institutional design to move past the limitations of industrial modernity.

Here is an analysis of how Dann’s concepts align, expand upon, or potentially clash with those goals.

1. What It Adds (Value-Add)

Dann’s text contributes a distinct, unsparing angle to the metacrisis literature, particularly by bridging hard biophysical limits with deep philosophical inquiry.

  • The “Biological Growth Imperative” as a Evolution-Scale Driver: While macrohistory and degrowth texts frequently critique economic growth (GDP), Dann pushes this back to an evolutionary, cellular level. By comparing human civilization to major evolutionary transitions (like the emergence of eukaryotic cells or eusocial insect colonies), he framing the metacrisis as a biological failure to override the growth imperative. This adds deep cliodynamic and macrohistorical depth to a reading list.

  • The “New Epistemic Deal”: In his epistemic framework, Dann attempts a rigid philosophical reconciliation. He simultaneously upholds Epistemic Structural Realism (giving science/ecology absolute privilege over economics) while explicitly rejecting materialism and physicalism to make objective room for consciousness and felt free will. This provides a structured, ground-ruled approach to the “integrative” or “metamodern” science-spirituality dialogue that many Second Renaissance thinkers advocate but don’t always formalize epistemologically.

  • A Critique of “Degrowth” Realism: Dann adds a dose of political realism by challenging current academic degrowth narratives. He argues that voluntary, globally coordinated, democratic contraction is a “game-theoretical fantasy.” This serves as a vital counterweight to more optimistic or purely theoretical transition models.

2. Potential Contradictions with Second Renaissance Goals

While the diagnosis of the metacrisis is identical, Dann’s conclusions regarding the pathway to transition present significant tensions—if not outright contradictions—with mainstream Second Renaissance thought.

The Authoritarian vs. Democratic Axis

  • The Second Renaissance Approach: Most networks in this space place immense value on upgrading democracy, deliberative governance (like citizens’ assemblies), decentralized networks, and avoiding top-down, coercive power structures.

  • Dann’s Counterpoint: In The Metacrisis and Ecocivilisation, Dann explicitly argues that democracy poses “show-stopping problems” for an ecological transition. He highlights China’s authoritarian system—specifically the enforcement of the one-child policy—as a successful, necessary overriding of the biological growth imperative. While he states he is personally attached to Western liberalism and isn’t actively advocating for eco-authoritarianism, he explicitly notes:

    “Ecocivilisation requires that humans are systematically deprived of the right to behave in an ecologically unsustainable manner
 There is no pleasant way to square this circle.”

The Inevitability of Chaos and the Rejection of Globalism

  • The Second Renaissance Approach: There is often an implicit or explicit goal to consciously steward the transition smoothly, minimizing suffering through collective intelligence, global cooperation, and systemic design.

  • Dann’s Counterpoint: Dann views the near-to-mid-term transition as inherently involuntary, chaotic, unfair, and competitive. He asserts that “at the global level the game is already over” and that survival-level restructuring will happen strictly at the sovereign nation-state level or below. He dismisses the idea of a globally managed, equitable wind-down of industrial civilization as a utopian dream.

Summary Verdict

  • Should it be added? Yes. It adds immense value as a “brutally honest” structural analysis. It grounds the metacrisis in evolutionary biology and offers a rigorous epistemic framework that rejects reductive materialism without falling into uncritical New Age thinking.

  • Does it contradict? Yes, on the mechanics of transition. It serves as a stark, realist critique of the highly collaborative, democratic, and globally coordinated ideals often championed in Second Renaissance circles, forcing a confrontation with the uncomfortable geopolitics of a collapsing resource base.

Are you looking to see how his specific breakdown of Western individualism scales against other thinkers on your list, or would you like to dive deeper into his “New Epistemic Deal”?

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One more follow-up. I asked Gemini if someone believed Geoff 100%, what should that person do? See the response below. For what it’s worth, I find this worth discussing. Edward de Bono suggested as three-fold framework for generative analysis: true, false, and interesting. To me, this is “interesting”!

If you completely accept Geoff Dann’s diagnosis and prognosis as outlined across his essays and in The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation, your view of “practical action” must undergo a radical shift.

Because Dann explicitly rejects mainstream “sustainability” (as greenwashing) and “degrowth” (as a game-theoretical fantasy of global democratic cooperation), a practical course of action cannot be found in traditional climate activism, carbon-offsetting, or lobbying for global climate treaties.

Instead, a fully aligned strategy operates on three distinct levels: epistemic integrity, sovereign/local resilience, and evolutionary-scale adaptation.

1. Epistemic Action: Live by the “New Epistemic Deal”

Dann argues that the very first step toward fixing our world’s problems is changing how we think and communicate. To act on this, you must adopt the ground rules of his New Epistemic Deal:

  • Refuse to debate outside of biophysical reality: Stop engaging in political or economic discussions that treat infinite growth as a baseline. Treat growth-based economics as dangerous nonsense and make your intellectual or political cooperation conditional on the explicit acknowledgment of limits to growth and ecological overshoot.

  • Reject reductive physicalism while honoring science: Practice a philosophy that upholds absolute scientific privilege regarding objective reality (Epistemic Structural Realism), while simultaneously validating human consciousness and free will as primary, non-material realities.

  • Uphold epistemic honesty over comfort: Stop participating in the creation of “idyllic dreams” about a smooth, fair global wind-down. Accept that the coming transition will be chaotic and competitive, and speak clearly about these inconvenient realities rather than softening them to fit into polite political correctness.

2. Structural Action: Focus “At the Sovereign Level and Below”

In The Metacrisis and Ecocivilisation, Dann writes that “at the global level the game is already over” and that the post-WW2 global order is dead. Therefore, practical action must shrink its geographic scope while deepening its structural impact:

  • Build localized, redundant survival systems: Because the transition will be involuntary and chaotic, practical action means building hyper-local resilience. This includes securing non-globalized supply chains for food, energy, and water, and establishing robust community networks capable of navigating declining living standards.

  • Prepare for a “Rebalancing of Wealth and Power”: Dann notes that history points to sharp, potentially revolutionary internal rebalancings during civilizational crises. A practical actor focuses on domestic institutional health, preparing to defend or reform national governance structures to handle severe resource contraction without sliding into total collapse or malicious authoritarianism.

  • Preserve the “Hallmarks of the West”: If you share Dann’s personal attachment to Western liberalism, democracy, and free speech, your practical goal is preservation through a “transformative reset.” This means seeking out, designing, or supporting political mechanisms that can enforce strict ecological limits (such as resource quotas or population stabilization concepts) without discarding fundamental human freedoms.

3. Evolutionary Action: Overriding the Biological Growth Imperative

Ultimately, Dann views ecocivilisation as a major evolutionary transition—akin to single cells forming eukaryotic organisms or insects forming eusocial colonies. The practical challenge is figuring out how humans can systematically override their innate biological drives to overconsume and overreproduce.

  • Deconstruct Western Individualism: Recognize that the West’s deep-seated focus on absolute individual rights (to consume whatever we can legally buy, to expand personal property indefinitely) is the core evolutionary roadblock. Practical action involves actively experimenting with and modeling cultural shifts that prioritize collective ecological boundaries over individual consumer desires.

  • Support Hard Enforcement Frameworks: Accept the uncomfortable conclusion that an ecocivilisation “requires that humans are systematically deprived of the right to behave in an ecologically unsustainable manner.” In practical terms, this means moving away from voluntary “lifestyle choices” and instead designing, voting for, and legitimizing strict, legally binding state-level restrictions on ecological footprint.

The Ultimate Directive

For a total adherent to Dann’s work, the most practical course of action is to stop trying to save industrial modernity and start preparing to survive its pupation. This means mentally and physically decoupling from global capitalist systems, anchor-pointing your security and political focus at the national or community level, and relentlessly speaking the unvarnished truth about biophysical limits to build a baseline of collective coherence before the chaos accelerates.

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Hello Robert

Thankyou for providing that AI analysis, which is a fair top-level summary. The most useful part for me to elaborate on is this:

My more recent book (The Two-Phase Cosmology) is purely about cosmology, metaphysics and other areas of philosophy. My previous book, which we are talking about now, was much more about the metacrisis, and specifically about how an acceptance that collapse (to some degree) is inevitable can act as a “reset” – a chance for us to rebuild on better foundations rather than trying to modify the existing system (which is doomed). In other words, the Real Paths to Ecocivilisation was aimed at collapse-aware people – people who already accept that the existing system is doomed, and who currently don’t have any positive vision of the future at all. All they can see is darkness, and many of them think humans are probably headed for extinction.

However
so long as people are willing to accept realism, I am not demanding that they also accept that collapse is going to play out in one specific way or another. None of us has a crystal ball, and the future is going to be chaotic. The essential thing to understand is that even if some degree of collapse is unavoidable, there is still an enormous difference between the best possible outcome and the worst. And so long as that remains true, then there is a moral obligation on us to at least try to aim for the best and avoid the worst. We must not stop thinking (which is what the “we’re all going extinct” people have done). Our decisions still matter.

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This topic seems very apt, and the sources noted by Robert serve to refocus things.

My feeling is that, as a society, we suffer at the moment with an over-abundance of information. First with the Internet, now with AI. What is the solution?

It could be a movement more to relational communities, akin to the salons of the first renaissance. Where instead of links and long blocks of text, people instead sit together and discuss. I suppose that was the founding intent of this forum. Still, without some kind of real in-person interaction, I am unsure how it can overcome the 'information overload issue.

Real communication is also not just dependent on writing and language. One can receive far more qualitative information by sitting under a tree, listening to the wind, or partaking in a group exercise.

I also remember how, even when attending circles of discussion, there would always be one, sometimes more, who’d talk a great deal. They would dominate the group, make people lose interest, and cause frustration. Some sessions there voice would represent 90% of what was said. One solution we had to that was the classic talking stick method.

All the greatest teachers and wisest people I’ve met in life have as much listened as talked. They are humble, curious, and create the space to question their own logic and ideas.

Can that attitude be cultivated? I don’t think exclusion of those who don’t adopt it is the way. At the same time, there should be balance. Otherwise a group simply becomes a projection space for someone, or an echo chamber.

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Some things must necessarily be excluded if humanity is to have any sort of future worth having. We are constrained by reality.

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AI very certainly is game-changing for information and knowledge management. It is also redefining what will be understood as “getting an education”. I like your “salon” approach. Descriptively, that’s been my game for about 4 years now. About 4 years ago, at peak “woke”, I got a belly full of CRT, gender studies, decolonization theories, etc. and wanted better foundations. I realized that just yelling “science, science, science!” into the rooms I was in was not going to get anywhere. My first impulse was to return to graduate school (in my late '60s) and work towards a Ph D in integrated studies (or something like that). Thankfully, that was pragmatically unfeasible. But in the process of exploring that possibility, I also ran into the liminal web. That, in effect, led to one salon after another - online fora, web calls, conferences, eventually face-to-face local community. To me, this may be the new normal for what serious “education” really looks like.

There is zero doubt in my mind that the endgame for education - no matter the format - is human development. AI is here to serve human cognition, contrary to the tech lords like Zuckerberg who see that the other way around. So what is AI good for in a human-centric world? Lately, it’s striking me as the ultimate reference librarian, available 24 x 7 in my home office, with access to some large percentage of the world’s literature. For contrast, as a student in the 70’s and 80’s, I worked in university libraries and was involved with maintaining draws full of 3x5 cards for topical search of the books, organized by Library of Congress on physical shelves. Access to a given title was limited by library hours, library privileges, collection extent, check out status, etc. It did not prevent education (and term papers typed on IBM Selectrics!), but it was a different world.

In the new AI-assisted system, is it worth reading and even owning the physical books? For me it is. Of the top 10 list Gemini gave me, I own at the least 10 of the book titles, covering 7 of the authors. I do not own books by Schmachtenberger, Meadows, and HĂŒbl, but I have engaged with their content online. So it resonates to me that all these authors are relevant to Second Renaissance. That said, I’d say the reading list as a minimum is like constellations in the night sky. It’s useful for orientation. Even if one does not love all these authors (I don’t especially love Schmachtenberger, and I have reservations about Freinacht), one needs to be aware of all these positions and to engage with the problem spaces they address.

To borrow Wilberian lingo, I see AI as driving the green-to-teal transition at scale. The biggest difference between green and teal is that teal is far more organized and far more flexible in its approach. Teal can deploy any cultural source material tactically (traditional, modern, postmodern, metamodern, etc.), whereas green is hung up on cancelling offensive content and building little safe spaces for like-minded people. The coherence of teal is open-ended, however, and allows for extension in interesting directions. Somebody else might come up with a different “top 10” list for 2R that might as good, or even better. Fine with me. What I’m after here is coherence, not creeds, canon, and a curia.

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Yes, albeit online interactions could also be ‘infiltrated’ by AI - we are not a long way from virtual/AI programmes attending online forums and being unmistakable for human. It already happens when the videos are off. So I see the future in offline spaces, perhaps accompanied by some supportive online element.

So what is AI good for in a human centric world? Lately, it’s striking me as the ultimate reference librarian, available 24 x 7 in my home office, with access to some large percentage of the world’s literature.

Indeed, it is very useful and can be a positive for many areas of humanity. It has already helped in scientific and medical research. Like any technological advance, the danger is in how humans choose to use it, not so much its creation per se.

In the new AI-assisted system, is it worth reading and evening owning the physical books? For me it is.

Likewise - I find it much easier to absorb and embed information from a printed book. This may come from simply disliking using computers or screens. I think there is something in the concept of this technology (particularly smartphones) having responsibility in reducing human attention spans, ability to concentrate, to fact check, and reduce vocabularies. Physical books and even information from computers may serve to counter this, to some degree (especially the former), but in my opinion the real difference would be through physical interaction, experiences, nature immersion and utilisation of aids that are known to expand consciousness and breakdown cemented worldviews.

I’d say the reading list as a minimum is like constellations in the night sky. It’s useful for orientation. Even if one does not love all these authors (I don’t especially love Schmachtenberger, and I have reservations about Freinacht), one needs to be aware of all these positions and to engage with the problem spaces they address.

Absolutely.

Teal can deploy any cultural source material tactically (traditional, modern, postmodern, metamodern, etc.), whereas green is hung up on cancelling offensive content and building little safe spaces for like-minded people.

I’ve noticed there is a tendency in online groups (and perhaps any group over time) to drift towards the green. Reddit immediately comes to mind. It might be in the nature of human organisation for this to happen. Then, when it reaches a critical phase, the group fragments and others are formed in the teal - to use your lingo. So the question would be: how to keep 2R from following the same path?

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That’s my current pragmatic problem space in a nutshell. There are clearly “teal” types in and around Second Renaissance (and other liminal web spaces), but no one I can think is nearly as serious as I am about taking “second tier” to scale. I just got done writing a book about the likes of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Thomas Watson, Tim Berners-Lee, Grace Hopper, etc. Inventing the gizmo is one thing. Getting it out to the public at mass scale is something else. To quote Jobs “true artists ship”.

A paradox that occurs to me is scale is going to need a certain degree of ruthless leadership in the mode of the tech bros. It’s also going to need a self-effacing quality of getting petty personal ego out of the way (rather unlike a few of the famous names from book above). When I put out things like a “top 10 list” of 2R readings, it’s fine with me with the next 97 comments in that thread are about how much I suck. There is no such thing as bad publicity!

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Your Metacrisis and Ecocivilization seems to fit in with this body of work:

All of this is “realist” in some sense or another of that word. 2R skews in an idealistic direction - both in preferring optimistic scenarios and in imagining thought and culture can fundamentally transform society. At my core, I agree with that also (otherwise I would be off somewhere else), but I also fully understand that matter-energy is stubborn stuff and we can’t just wish our way to global harmony.

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Yes all of that is realist in some sense, but the situation is deteriorating rapidly and much of what you quoted is now out of date. Especially with respect to climate change. Two factors have emerged in the last decade or so.

The first is that climate change is happening significantly faster than most climatologists had been predicting – we’re somewhere near the worst-case scenario in terms of the physical processes. The reason for this is not a mystery: scientists have been under political pressure to avoid being honest about how bad things are, so there has been a systematic tendency to under-estimate the risk.

The second is that the facade that there is any real political commitment to stop climate change has now completely disintegrated. When push comes to shove, no nation on Earth is going to leave economically-viable oil or gas in the ground, and the COP conferences have descended into pure farce. We are not going to significantly limit climate change, because all that the politicians are actually willing to do is slow down our usage of fossil fuels. Nobody is willing to limit the final amount of CO2 that goes into the atmosphere.

That situation makes collapse inevitable even on its own, but in fact it is just one aspect of much greater ecological crisis I simply call “the Eco-apocalypse”. The real questions now are about how we try to keep hold of the best of 2500 years of Western cultural development, how we maximise our chances of surviving the worst of what is to come, and most importantly of all we must learn from the mistakes so that when civilisation is eventually reconstructed, we do not repeat them. This is the core purpose of my work. I am saying that we need a total rethink of Western civilisation, starting with its cultural and intellectual foundations. This is why regrounding realism is so important.

Perhaps the most fundamental difference between myself and 2R in this respect is that 2R sees postmodernism as a stage that everybody has to go through, and that the new paradigm must be found by “pushing through” or “building on” postmodernism, whereas I am saying that the only way we can reground realism is to go back to the originating mistake: Kant’s assumption that Newtonian physics was the final version of physics. Once that is done, postmodernism ceases to be a platform to be built on, and anti-realism can be banished once and for all.

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I think that ultimately there’s only one to one communication, maybe 3 people. It doesn’t mean that it can’t be in a group setting. From my experience you can’t build a meaningful discourse by injecting 10 seconds of thinking into the conversation every 10 minutes. On top of that is what you mentioned - dominant voices enjoying listening to themselves while everyone else is bored to death.

BTW - I think that our research calls are really good in that respect for the given format :slight_smile:

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Agreed. When online calls get large, breakout rooms are needed to maintain participant interest. Same thing for large in person meetings. There need to be small group formats from time to time to maintain engagement.