You’re not the only one who isn’t sure.

The people who came to the first Campfires were carrying more than they could say at work. They wanted peers rather than a speaker. They were tired of leadership theatre.

All of that held.

What I hadn’t expected was the thing people said most often afterwards, in nearly the same words: relief at finding they weren’t the only one privately unsure, about AI above all.

Most of them hold rooms of their own — a team, a board, a class — and are working out how to feed them. That’s who this is for.

If you already have somewhere to be unfinished, you don’t need this. If you don’t, you might.

You arrive with a situation you can’t see the whole of. Nobody can. From where you stand you see one wedge of it clearly, and the rest is guesswork — which is what the people beside you would say about their own wedge.

Campfire puts you in a ring.

You’ll say what you can see from where you stand. You’ll hear what others can see from where they stand. Nobody in the ring has the whole picture, and nobody has to pretend to.

You’ll leave with one better question, with a verb in it, to take back to the rooms you hold. Two weeks later, one question comes back from me: did the conversation happen?

Every Campfire starts with your embers.

Before the gathering, a recording reaches you: a conversation made for this Campfire, with a guest who sees the tension from somewhere you don’t. Not a briefing. A thoughtful exploration—left unfinished—of the thing that drew you near.

You listen in your own time. You might highlight what speaks to you. Shared tensions emerge.

It sparks what follows. At Campfire, nobody starts cold.

It does a quieter job too. Of everyone who hears it, it finds the people with real energy for this one.

That’s who ends up in the ring.

Most of us perform a lot.

We perform confidence to our teams when, inside, we feel something less. We perform calm in meetings where we are anything but calm. We perform certainty for the board, equanimity for the people who work for us, having-an-answer when really we are still searching.

It is not a bad thing. The leader walking into a difficult town hall performing confidence releases their people from anxiety long enough to think clearly. Performance, in the right doses, is part of what it means to take responsibility for others.

And yet.

Over time, the performance stops being a tool and starts being a habit. Then, perhaps, an identity. We can forget what it feels like to not be performing. The performance, run long enough, runs even when no one is watching.

The company of other people is what triggers most of our performing. But the right room can quiet it. Can bring forth our own honest reckoning.

Campfire is that room.

Everyone in the ring is there because someone who’s been there before vouched for them, or because they wrote to me. Senior, from different worlds, carrying similar weight. With a stake in the topic.

Nobody comes as an audience.

If you want to get in: ask someone who’s already been to vouch for you, or write me a line or two.