A salon for your leaders

90 minutes · Up to 12 people in person, 8 online · No presentations

The story of the salon

In 18th-century Paris, the engine of intellectual life was the salon. In drawing rooms and grand houses across the French capital, the leading figures of the day gathered to converse, to share ideas, experiences, and perspectives, to try to make sense of the most pressing issues of their lives in an atmosphere that was both convivial and serious.

Salons were among the most important things in Parisian life. They were regularly attended by Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau; by Adam Smith and David Hume; even Americans like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were frequent and enthusiastic participants while they lived in Paris. Later came Chopin and Proust, and in the 20th century Picasso and Hemingway, all passionate salon-goers.

Paris is one of the high points of a long historical tradition. Some 2,400 years ago, Plato wrote about a dinner where friends drank wine and argued about the nature of love; and the ancient civilisations of China and India had their own gatherings, where scholars, artists, and poets mingled and kings came to discuss social, cultural, and eternally human questions.

The New Philosophy Salon stands proudly in this tradition, adapted for our time. It is a space to think with other people, to really listen; a space for giving important questions and innovative ideas the time they deserve but so rarely get.

Why a salon

Where can you actually think together with other people now? Not perform, not present … not try to look impressive … but just openly, sincerely think with other smart people?

A salon gives your leaders ninety minutes of exactly that. The thinking is real and rigorous - it is the opposite of the junk food of the endless feed.

Just that is incredibly valuable. But the salon does even more. It's designed to engage heart and mind together, so people leave both intellectually nourished and emotionally connected.

It is the change of pace an offsite needs: different from presentations and workshops, and still real work. It can be used to address a specific question or theme, or to open minds and bring people together at the start of the offsite, or at the end where it functions beautifully as a way to synthesise the prior work and send people home with something real to remember.

How a salon works

Before the salon, everyone receives a short text: a philosopher, a poet, a strategist, something chosen specifically for the group and the occasion. Nobody has to read it beforehand. On the day itself the text is printed, so there is something in your hands that isn't a screen.

We start by setting the time apart. Phones are switched off, screens are closed down. We do what we need to do to arrive.

And then we turn to the text. The work proceeds in four steps.

1. First reading: listen. Someone reads the text aloud. You don't try to understand all of it; you notice the words and phrases that stay with you.
2. Understand. We gather what stayed with people and work at understanding the text itself, before anyone gives an opinion. This is what makes a salon more than an interesting conversation in a café.
3. Second reading: listen to your life speaking back. The text is read a second time. Now you listen for what in your own work and life answers it.
4. Think together. Real questions come into the room, and we think about them together, in the light of the text.

The method is based on very old foundations. For some fifteen hundred years, monastic communities have practised lectio divina: one short text, read aloud slowly, listened to rather than skimmed, and allowed to speak to the life of the listener. The salon keeps the practice and leaves the religion behind. It is explicitly secular: the texts are non-religious, and the only things asked of you are attention and goodwill.

A sample salon: Plato on AI

In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates tells a story about the invention of writing. The god Theuth brings his new invention to King Thamus and presents it as a gift to memory and wisdom.

The king is not convinced. Writing, he says, will make people forgetful: they will rely on marks outside themselves instead of remembering from within, and they will seem to know a great deal while knowing very little.

We read the passage slowly, work out what Thamus is really worried about, and then turn it on ourselves: what does the text say to us about our worries and hopes with respect to AI?

The precise questions vary from salon to salon, because these emerge from the people present. But the underlying method is constant - we put the text into conversation with our current concerns, and we use disciplined thought to help us make progress on the things we care about.

Setting it up

A salon needs very little - the less the better, in fact, because some of its power comes from simplicity.

• The room: a circle or a single table, never rows facing a front. If you can, a different room from the main sessions, without screens. Comfortable chairs and tea help more than you'd think.
• The group: up to 12 people in person, 8 online.
• The rules of the room: phones away for ninety minutes, full presence, and nothing is recorded.
• The text: I choose it with you and send it in advance. In person, everyone gets a printed copy; online and hybrid, people print their own.
• Where it fits: to open an offsite, between sessions as a change of pace, to close it with a shared synthesis, or at the heart of an executive dinner.
• Format: in person, online or hybrid.