#8 - Hump Meeting

In my opinion, Hump Meeting is Chimera's greatest experiment and achievement - an exercise in building trust. Lessons in Chimeristry digs in.

Wednesday

To the German romantics, such as Holderlin
A magnet’s center was neutral and indifferent
Halved repeatedly until no ferrous remained.
The poets would find absence, neither repulsive nor attractive.
They wrote odes to this anti-substance,
To the mundane, prosaic and drew them earthward.
This sentiment now falls weakly upon us.
Just look at the modern week.
Monday dreaded by those enslaved by capital
Friday, celebrated ecclesiastically as TGIF.
Tuesday and Thursday, rhythmically thrumming towards dust.
But Wednesday, the week halved and halved again until no minute remains.
In the apex's sharpest moment, we succumb to the immense, ponderous gravity
A diaphanous brightness in the moment.
Holding on to hope.

 - Ben Wang, 2024

What do gout, peri-menopause, adult play, the culture of a black woman’s hair and decaying friendships, have in common? Absolutely nothing, except that they were all topics that Chimerans have researched, experienced, shared and discussed at our weekly Wednesday Hump Meeting¹. The above subset of topics that we gathered for may not be for the faint of heart, let alone in a work setting. These topics meandered through a landscape of varied and personal journeys that, at times, evoked highly intense opinions, feelings and thoughts. Yet, in the milieu of these quirky and sometimes hushed, whispered or forbidden themes, the results of these meetings led to greater mutual understanding among the gatherers, widening perspectives and deepening curiosity, created what Arthur Aron called the “experimental generation of interpersonal closeness,” and what I would call trust.

I have procrastinated writing about Hump Meeting. The stakes feel precipitous and my writing seems inadequate to document what I believe to be Chimera’s single most meaningful creation. I suspect nearly all Chimerans would agree that this meeting was the most memorable, valuable and impactful thing we did at work, over our invention, successful experimentation or business victories. And at a time when meeting creep, or bad meetings, increasingly infect our schedules, this was both our sole mandatory meeting and the meeting that every Chimeran, and friends like Neema, Sasha, Liz and many others, looked forward to each week.

What is hump meeting?

Gus and I started hump meeting on Wednesdays, right after we hired Jay, Krista and Melissa. Our first slides describing Hump Meeting from March 2, 2016 are here.

Our original intention was to communicate with our team in a fun, connected and transparent manner. We wanted to include company updates, Q&A and beer. Even then, we intuited that we wanted to Chimera to feel like a community and be guided by and devoted to mission. After all we were angry with cancer and we felt the best FU we could give it was by refusing to let its despair overwhelm us.

The earliest version of this deck describing Hump in 2016 included concepts like the Diamond and the horizontal journey along the Kaplan Meier curve. We settled on a rotating set of individually selected presentations and encouraged all teammates to talk about their mission and motivation. This meant that no topic was off limits; it could range from analyzing a paper or book you had read to sharing something you were an expert on. It seemed simple enough, but we could not anticipate what hump meeting would eventually alchemize into.

Our first hump meetings

One of our first meetings was led by Gus who described how he came to ultimately diagnose his own myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS). Having grown up in Marin, Gus was a mountain biker² who would pound out Squealer Gulch in Woodside, CA regularly, when he noticed his time to complete the loop slow. After an aborted attempt to blame his lowered performance on drinking IPAs, he shared with us the harrowing journey of his clinical diagnosis and the dawning realization that his 3q translocation had a devastating prognosis. Gus, regaled us with wit, stoked images of Seattle during his BMT; he spoke of no longer being able to look at an Odwalla without thinking about how mucositis affected all of the epithelial lining between one’s lips and anus. We listened as he quavered through fears of how his looming death would leave his wife and kids, his own legacy would be remembered and whether he would be able to return to the work he loved, unscathed.

Though we knew the end of his Hump meeting story (he would soon be in remission from MDS and, with fervor and joy, start Chimera) it was the intimacy with which he spoke that gave everyone a lens into the thick, viscous interiority of Gus, the human. He touched on our collective human desires: a good life for our loved ones, to be remembered and to be live with hope free of suffering. As he courageously let us peer into him, he set the tone for all of the hump meetings that came after that. I’m not sure he knew exactly what he was doing (he is the son of two psychologists, by the way) but what he did at hump meeting was to build trust with vulnerability. He did this by trusting us to hold his story with affection, empathy and honor. He showed us what it meant to be human and became more human to all of us.

Other presentations possessed less emotional amplitude, but were no less important: there were travelogues to Africa and Uruguay, lessons in salsa dance and craft embossing and guest presentations, including a UCSF nurse who administered CAR-T. At each Hump the attendees were alloyed into teachers and students, all at once. And as the presenter delved into the topic of the week, the audience uncovered, discovered and quarried more insight into one another; what interested them, what motivated them, what tickled them, what made them cry, what answers, and perhaps more importantly the questions, they yearned for. These details were woven into the mycellium of trust, our invisible connection to one another.

Over time (here is an updated slide deck from 2019), Hump crystallized into a pure celebration of trust. The subject of Hump meetings, mission and motivation, personal and collective, became the vehicles to further trust amongst the group. And it worked and it thrived. It was apparent that our team, and our guests, clamored for Hump; it filled an unnamed lacuna. Was it the fun of being together or learning things? Were we all aching for more closeness in our lives? Did the continual affirmation of trust fill a deep need that we didn’t know was missing in our career, or in the rest of our human experiences?

Do we need the gooey, soft, middle of a tootsie pop when logic and efficiency reign at work?

I know many who view work as a necessity: something we do to feel productive and to earn a living. Some will say that work is what we do to facilitate the other parts of our lives, where we find meaning away from our occupation. Others will say that blending the personal and professional leads to extra drama that impedes our professional goals and levies stress.

These points are all valid and they can all be true. But it’s also true that around half the hours awake are spent with people at work. This is significant and begs questions: What are the qualities of connection one has with their colleagues? Are they perfunctory “What did you do over the weekend?” or “How was your kid’s, what was their name again, soccer game?” Do you connect with (former) colleagues solely to network or talk shop? Or are they intimates and friends, who are there to soothe and comfort you when the inevitable challenges of home, life, loss, grief weightily perch upon your back, years after you’ve ceased to work together? Are they the cheerleaders who mentor, offer honest feedback and celebrate your personal triumphs with you? Will they hold your hand?

Despite Gallup’s research³ that “indicates having a best friend at work is strongly linked to business outcomes, including profitability, safety, inventory control and retention,” managers, companies and businesses still opt out of investing in creating community at work. It is ironic that as we face a collective epidemic of loneliness, employers offer up ping pong tables and free snacks as culture rather than help build authentic connection.

Is it a missed opportunity for organizations to invest in tending and nurturing more connectivity in its team?

Yes!!!!

This is a moral and a business responsibility. And to address both axes, there is a right action to take. That decision to do so is summarized in this Do Loop below:

1. Organization invests in ways to build trust

2. Trust enhances connections between colleagues

3. Individuals are more motivated and energized, when they feel supported and not lonely

4. Supported individuals trust one another, connect and cooperate better.

5. Cooperative organizations will compete better against other organizations that don’t have trust!

6. Rinse and Repeat starting with Step 1

Hump meeting was our response to this responsibility. As evidence for building real connections between colleagues, I present a photo from Chimera’s 2019 3-day camping trip to the Trinity Alps. It included family, friends, new interns and dogs. Remarkably I heard not once any talk of work, the oft-used crutch of conversations amongst colleagues. The discussions ranged, instead to the natural beauty, gossip of the attending tweens, coffee preparations and individual hobbies. I think there was some science exchanged but was ecology focused.

Why did hump meeting seem to work?

Despite being scientists, we didn’t have any systematic ways of testing and refuting hypotheses for why Hump meeting was impactful. But from a heuristic perspective, we think there are a few reasons for this:

1. Gathering as a ritual: Since the rise of Homo Sapiens, we have been gathering - around campfires, caves where we painted, collective meals, in board rooms and in the line up at Ocean Beach. This is part of our nature, as social creatures, where decisions, gossip, celebrations and mournings are communed and communicated and serves a foundational human need.

2. Celebrating our commonality in our diversity: We asked our gatherers to share their mission, motivation, curiosity, interests, stories. In doing so it was apparent to see how much we all had in common. Each of these stories added depth to the individual person, like a single splotch or daub of ink on a painting: they might have aspirations of entrepreneurship, love pot throwing, enjoy making their own soap, love to ride horses, play esoteric board games, until each human canvas resembles a Pollock. These stories of human complexity diffuse our oblique and outward identities: our race, our gender, our education, our station at work, such that no single aspect defines us.

3. Honoring and Building Courage: Courage is taking action, even when you are scared. Most people are terrified of public speaking, particularly in a work setting where missteps in the spotlight historically had high consequences. Hump asks all gatherers to be courageous, and collectively, support that courage. Over time, gatherers took greater risks, revealing more and became comfortable with the discomfiting. The result was that the group tackled challenging, “unprofessional,” and deeply personal topics. At hump we created more open-ended forms of understanding and exercised what John Keats called “negative capability.”⁴

4. “It’s not Logical, It’s BIO-logical”: My friend and wonderful speech coach John Bates, asserted that emotional credibility, over reputational credibility, was what was key in drawing audiences in. By establishing your reputational bona fides (e.g. Harvard CEO with 30 years of experience), you push others away, because you may not share these accolades (if one can call Harvard, or CEO, or being old an accolade) much in common. With emotional authenticity, sharing joy, sadness, grief, enthusiasm, you connect with your audience⁵; while details of each situation may be different, the core human experiences and emotions resonate. This is diamond talk!

Alchemy, Jackson Pollock, 1943, Peggy Guggenheim Museum - this is you, a gorgeous painting!

Is Hump just a TED Talk or Nerd Nite?

Hump meeting is just one of many gatherings that are available to all of us. TED talks are wonderful. I thoroughly enjoy them. Here is one about classical music and tone deafness, or the lack thereof. Here is one about the Supreme Court case that invalidated gene patents. Nerd nite is cool too! These, and many other platforms, have commonality with Hump: stories, learnings and celebrations. We learn from them, are moved by them and they are immensely entertaining. I do believe Hump is different in one regard.

Hump is egalitarian - it works because everyone must give it a go. It makes worthy of stage, what experts or tastemakers might otherwise deem. It cleaves to the German Romantic notion of beauty, of the subjective experience of our world. Friedrich Schlegel wrote that romanticism is “to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.” Stories shared at Hump may be simple: about our world or how we choose to engage with it. But by focusing on these humble stories, distilled through the Hump gatherers, our world becomes expansively vaster. I offer an homage, as my boy Rilke wrote, to each presenter:

To Holderlin

To you, O majestic poet, to you the compelling image,
O caster of spells, was a life, entire; when you uttered it
a line snapped shut like fate; there was a death
even in the mildest, and you walked straight into it; but
the god who preceded you led you out and beyond it,

- RMR

Hump Meeting Recipe

In honor of our recent post on Ratatouille, here is our recipe for Hump Meeting:

1. Carve out time during the work day to hold this meeting. Don’t do it during lunch or after work. Demonstrate commitment that this is important and that the meeting time, otherwise useful in getting work done, is an investment in building trust and connection among your team. We liked 4pm on Wednesday (and thus Hump), which breaks up the week and enables the meeting to bleed into the evening, if people desire to remain.

2. Rotate through people and topics. Empower each and every individual to choose and prepare their own topic of interest. Again, allow them to use work time to prepare their presentation or do research on the topic. You’ll be surprised by what you learn, functionally about the topic and about the presenter.

3. The meeting is a gathering. It should be a celebration of being together that is so innate as a human, a social creature. Bring food, and if you want wine or beer. Gus makes some mean cocktails, if you want a bartender! Invite others outside your organization to participate.

4. Encourage exploration, curiosity, generosity of spirit, patience and Shoshin. Some of our best hump meetings have been around topics that were explored together, live, during the meeting.

Expected Results

There will be subsequent posts about some of what we discussed at Hump, but I believe organizations will see certain expected results if they commit to something similar to Hump.

1. Trust will elevate.

2. You will learn a lot, about your teammates and the topics. Presenters will be more comfortable and grow at presenting.

3. Armed with learning 52 new subjects each year, you might just become the most interesting person at cocktail parties.

4. You will be part of a more engaged, more connected, more joyful work place.

5. Your team will be more resilient.⁶

Final Notes

First I need an editor for this post! Thanks for sticking with me on this one and I will likely edit this post again and again.

There’s no magic to Hump Meeting. It requires commitment and a reasonably small investment of time. And an attitude of curiosity. But I believe it is well worth the dedication.

I’ve been asked, how does this scale to larger organizations? It’s a great question that I don’t have a robust answer to, yet. But let’s have a conversation about it in the comments below!

And of course we didn’t do Hump Meeting perfectly. At times, work struggles have sidelined Hump. Nor does Hump protect us from making mistakes. I’ve made errors that have led to less trust in our team. How we execute Hump continues to evolve and we, I, need to reaffirm our commitment to gathering and edifying trust.

Lastly, I was listening to the Cure’s Pictures of You⁷ a bunch while thinking about this post. I thought it was apropos, given that Hump does create many pictures of you. So here’s this:

1. While writing this post, I’ve rethought the term Hump Meeting and am wondering whether Hump Gathering would be better

2. This link goes to a separate hump meeting that Gus did on the origins of mountain biking.

3. The Gallup research was discussed at a hump meeting, no less!

4. “the ability to withstand doubt or uncertainty, remain open to that which is not readily understandable, resist the urge to explain away what we don’t comprehend, and to accept the impossibility of a singular conclusion”

5. This will be a fundamental theme throughout Lessons in Chimeristry. Transactions vs. Connection - and the relationship psychologists, the Gottmans, Directors of the Love Lab, will be featured heavily.

6. During the disconnected and tough early parts of the pandemic, Charlotte, with a Herculean devotion, kept Hump meeting going, via zoom. I think most of us prefer it in person, but Hump meeting was such a welcome demarcation of time when everything else felt so uncertain. Thanks Char!

7. My sister, brother and I listened to the Disintegration CD for hundreds of hours. Heh I just found out I’m not connected to my sister on LinkedIn.