Essay 3.4 | Not Always the Answer
A senior leader once put the problem in beautifully human terms. If a sales kickoff lands on your daughter’s birthday or near Mother’s Day, he said, it “better be freaking good.”
That line stayed with me because it cuts through the romance of gathering. Yes, events matter. Yes, shared time can do things email, dashboards, and videos cannot. But every gathering asks people to give up something else: family time, travel energy, attention, money, recovery, work time, sleep, or the quiet they needed more than another ballroom.
That is why the answer cannot always be “hold the event.” The dose makes the poison. A medicine can heal at the right amount and harm at the wrong one. Gatherings work the same way. Too little human contact can leave people disconnected, unseen, and unaligned. Too much gathering, or gathering without a worthy purpose, can exhaust the very people you hoped to inspire.
A purposeful event begins with discernment. What are we trying to accomplish? Does it require people to be together? What would be lost if we did this another way? What would be gained? Are we asking people to travel because human presence matters, or because the calendar says we always do this?
Sometimes the right answer is a large gathering because the work requires emotion, trust, identity, ritual, and shared memory. Sometimes the right answer is a smaller gathering, a virtual session, a regional roadshow, a written update, or no gathering at all. The courage is in matching the tool to the need rather than treating events as reflex.
This matters because gatherings carry moral weight. When people say yes to an event, they rearrange their lives around our request. If the experience is meaningful, they may thank us for it. If it is not, they may not complain, but the cost is still real.
Events are not always the answer. But when they are the answer, they deserve to be made well enough to justify what they ask of people.
Acts of Humanity: The Power of Purposeful Events — releasing August 11, 2026. Learn more or pre-order at actsofhumanitythebook.com. #ActsOfHumanityTheBook
