The outer neutral space can be a physical setting, like a venue, or it can be a tradition of family dinners or a book club or a series of letters or a recurring event. Physical or not, it should feel like a relationship or a shared purpose that can stand the test of time. After all, isn’t this exactly what the churches, companies, and institutions that are most meaningful to us really are—an inviting, long-lived, neutral space that allows people to come and go? When you’re a member of these spaces, you become a part of them and absorb their rituals, scripts, and norms.
We should pay as much attention to the way we nest spaces within one another as to the contents of the spaces themselves. The quality of the fruit of disagreement that comes from a conversation relies as much on paying attention to who is not there, and who should be invited to join, as on the content of the disagreement directly.
