Too rare and too expensive to leave to chance.
Connection has to be designed in a way that works for the quietest person in the room. That’s when people open up, and the real conversations get easier.
Nobody plans a bad offsite. They just plan the strategy work first.
Your Team retreat happens once a year, if that. You aligned a dozen calendars, paid for the flights, booked the venue, and pulled everyone off their actual work for two days.
Then the agenda got built around the things with owners and deliverables. Someone needed an hour for the roadmap. Finance needed forty minutes. The CEO wanted to present. Time for connection was in there at the start, and it’s the only item nobody has to defend, so it became thirty minutes, then a round of names and job titles.
So the room starts cold.
The new people stand by themselves, staring at their phones.
There are pauses that go on slightly too long.
Everyone is friendly, and nobody is saying much.
During the crucial strategy session, the same three people do all the talking. The person who joined in March hasn’t spoken since introductions. You spend the afternoon pulling teeth, working much harder than you should have to for something a group should offer on its own. Everyone agrees with the plan and you can’t tell whether they mean it.
The real objections show up later anyway.
One-on-one, in a hallway or a DM, from people who had them the whole time.
Connection doesn’t happen because people are in the same building.
It has to be built, with intention, before the strategy work depends on it.
Let’s Build a Campfire Together
The ice in a room is the tension that forms between people who don’t know each other well yet. Crossed arms, avoided eye contact, the pause before anyone answers. It’s armour, and everyone arrives wearing a different amount of it, built up layer by layer from every group that didn’t feel safe. The problem is that the armour protecting them is the same thing keeping them from connecting.
An icebreaker takes a sledgehammer to that. The intentions are good. The result is that something cracks, and people get hurt.
A campfire does something else. Soft heat melts the ice. No cracking, no shattering, just a slow loosening. Tension eases, and people move closer on their own.
But you never start a fire with a log.
You start with something that catches easily, and add heavier material once there’s enough heat to hold it.
Groups work the same way. High-stakes moments don’t come from braver people. They come from better-designed containers.
Tinder
Trust gets earned before the stakes go up. People get time to think on their own first, so those who need to process before they speak aren’t left behind by those who don’t.
Kindling
Pairs and small groups, where the social cost of being seen drops sharply. Saying a true thing to one person is far easier than saying it to twenty. This is where most of the connection gets built.
Logs
Now the whole group steps into something uncertain together. Nobody performs alone, and nobody carries the risk by themselves. The team learns from experience that it can face something difficult and stay intact.
What your team walks away with
→ The new people stop being new
Not just knowing names and roles. Actually knowing each other. What people care about, what makes them light up, what they’re carrying. The kind of familiarity that would take years of monthly check-ins.
→ Every voice gets heard, not just the usual ones
Every person has a way in, even the ones who aren’t naturally comfortable speaking up in a group. Small groups, ways to answer without speaking, and questions that build gradually mean nobody has to perform confidence they don’t yet feel.
→ They ask each other for help
The question that would have gone to an AI chatbot goes to the person who has already solved it. That only happens when asking for support doesn’t feel like admitting something.
→ Commitments they can hold each other to
Each person picks one specific way they’ll show up for the others. That’s what makes it stick. Things they can carry into every meeting that follows.
→ A room that’s ready for the strategy work
When people feel heard early, the conversations that follow are more honest and more productive. This will set you up for better brainstorming, more creativity and better handling of conflicts afterwards.
None of this is the warm-up before the real work. It’s what decides whether the real work goes anywhere.
Case Study
The board that only disagreed after the meeting
A national nonprofit board, twelve people spread across three countries, meeting on Zoom for ninety minutes a month. Ten of those minutes were the check-in. That was the entire relational budget for the year. And their president could feel what it was costing them.
People sat silently through the discussion where it mattered. Then they disagreed afterwards, one at a time, in messages to him. He knew there was more in the room than was getting said, and he had no way to get at it.
On top of that, four new members had joined that winter. Five months on, they still hadn’t found their footing.
The president is a professional facilitator. He could have run the session himself, and he’d have run it well. But he decided to hire me so he could be in it instead, as a member of his own board rather than the person managing the room.
Two hours, entirely virtual, on the afternoon before their strategic planning day. Everyone in that session contributed. By the end, every one of them had named something specific they’d do so the others could show up more fully: make space, give grace, acknowledge each other more often. The president’s own commitment was a listening technique he’d picked up ninety minutes earlier.
The next morning, they did their strategy work with a room that had actually met each other.
Someone on your team is holding something back right now. You probably know who.
About the Facilitator
Hey, I’m Jan 👋
I help leaders and teams create group experiences where no one feels left out, and everyone can contribute. Not through better icebreakers or slicker facilitation tricks. Through intentional design: the small, specific choices that determine whether people feel safe enough to speak and brave enough to say what they actually think.
For over a decade, I’ve worked with organizations to turn crickets into conversations, low engagement into deep connection, and small talk into meaningful dialogue. My expertise is in facilitative leadership — helping you not just run meetings, but create experiences where people feel included, heard, and empowered to contribute.
I’ve designed and led hundreds of workshops, trained leaders across industries, and developed frameworks that help facilitators handle resistance, disengagement, and high-stakes moments with confidence.
The Campfire Method
The full framework behind my work, published July 2026. I wrote this practical guide for facilitators and team leaders who want to facilitate human connection without awkward icebreakers.
Questions you probably have
💵 What does this cost?
Every engagement is scoped on the call, because the design depends on your group. What moves the number: how long the sessions run, group size, in person or online, travel, and whether you want the follow-up.
✋ Could we not just run this ourselves?
You probably could. You know this team, and you’ve probably run sessions like this. But if you’re facilitating, you’re not participating. You’re watching the clock, managing the room, deciding whether to let a tangent run. And you’re the person on this team whose presence in that conversation matters most.
🎒 How do you prepare for our session?
Before I design anything, everyone on your team gets a short video message and three questions from me: What do you hope comes out of this, what worries you about it, and what do you need in order to take part fully.
People tell me things there they will not say in a room, and that’s what the session gets built around. From you, I need one planning call, and help getting your team to answer.
🧤 Is this right for our team?
A good fit if your team is distributed and gathers in person once or twice a year, new people have joined faster than relationships have formed, there’s a reorg or new leadership behind you, you already have an agenda and want the group ready for it, and you’d rather be a participant than the host.
Probably not if you’re looking for entertainment, if you want someone to facilitate your strategy work, or if there’s a conflict between specific individuals that needs mediation.
🙋♂️ Can you facilitate our whole offsite?
Usually not, and usually you shouldn’t want me to. Your strategy content should be led by your own people, who know the business. I design the sessions that make their sessions land, and I’ll help you sequence the days so they fit together.
💻 In person or online?
Either. Never both at once. Most of the teams I work with are distributed, but the gathering shouldn’t be. A room with eight people in it and four on a screen costs more to run properly and still leaves the four on the screen with a worse experience than either group would have had otherwise.
Online is not the fallback. The AEE retreat above was entirely virtual, across three countries and an age range from early thirties to seventies. Different design, not a lesser one.
🚛 What are the logistics?
Group size 8 to 30. Half a day to two days, depending on the group and what the rest of your agenda needs. Toronto and the GTA in person, Europe and the US by arrangement, online anywhere. English or German. Four to six weeks lead time is comfortable, but ask anyway if it’s sooner.
🤨 Our team is skeptical about this kind of thing.
Good. Skeptical teams are easier to work with than compliant ones, because their reactions are honest. Skepticism usually comes from having been through a bad version, and the pre-session questions are where people tell me about that.
📋 Can you train our own people to do this?
Yes, and that’s often the right next step after an offsite.
