Strangers in a Chateau

I'm living in a castle in Normandy, France for all of August. It’s a coliving community where around 20 strangers live together for the month. Most of the people here are younger than me, many are digital nomads, lots work in tech, and most don't have kids. I am spending a lot of time with people whose day-to-day lives look different from mine.

One of our first nights together, we played a conversation game called Wonderful Strangers. The questions ranged from personal to ethical to the kind that let you skip about six months of small talk.

• Do your fears prevent you from being happy?

• What's something about you that would surprise us?

• Is it ethical to ask people today to sacrifice for the wellbeing of future generations?

• Should adolescents have the right to make autonomous medical choices?

We talked for hours. We didn't all agree, but often someone came at a question from an angle that had never occurred to me. Near the end of the evening, one of the women Tracy said: "That was great. I changed my mind about a lot of things tonight."

I loved that. I genuinely love those moments when something hits me and I think, Oh. I hadn't thought about it that way.

In leadership, part of the value of having diverse teams is hearing things we wouldn't have thought of ourselves, but we're naturally more comfortable with perspectives that align with ours. One of the reasons I spend time with people of different generations and backgrounds is that I don't want my world to get smaller as I get older.

Hearing a different perspective sometimes changes your mind and other times it makes you more certain of what you already believed. 

That night in Normandy, we were just playing a game to get to know one another: we laughed; we asked questions; we disagreed; we got curious.

A good conversation doesn't have to change your position. Sometimes it just makes you think a little harder about why you hold it. Changing your mind isn't the point. Examining it is.