Forum exercise
Lifelines
Plot the moments that shaped your life. Then step back and see the pattern.
Why we do it
Purpose
For the presenter
- The act of creating it is revealing - you decide what mattered, what to include, what to leave out. You tell YOUR real story.
- What are broader patterns? What drives change? When one line goes up, what happens to the others?
- The future extension forces a real question: What do I ACTUALLY want?
For the audience
- Context for everything that comes after - when someone presents a challenge, you hear it against their whole life
- Seeing someone's vulnerabilities makes you more willing to share yours
- You can ask better questions because you know the backstory
For the group
- We move from people who meet monthly to people who really know each other
- We can call back to lifeline moments when they're relevant - "this sounds like that pattern you mentioned..."
Before the meeting
Create your chart
Plot pivotal moments across your life on a timeline - turning points, moments of choice, losses, surprises, times you were most or least yourself. Y-axis: How it felt at the time, OR how you see it now.
Consider:
- Extend your timeline backward (parents' context) or forward (where you want to be, what would make you proud looking back from 80)
- Track multiple dimensions as separate curves (financial, relationships, spiritual, work, etc) - then notice how they interact.
- Choose honesty over polish. Include the moments that actually shaped you, not just the ones that are easy to tell. You decide what you're ready to share.
- Watch out for the early-life trap: spending 6 min on your childhood
- Format is wide open: hand-drawn graph, spreadsheet chart, photo collage, multiple slides, Prezi - whatever tells your story
Submit your copy 48 hours before the meeting.
▾ Blank template (PowerPoint) Type on it, or print it and draw by hand.
Examples
By hand
In a spreadsheet
Several lines
At the meeting
Present your chart (30 min each)
- 8 min — Walk us through your lifeline
- 12 min — Group questions and observations
- 5 min — Each person shares themes they noticed
- 3 min — Your reflections on the feedback
- 2 min — Name something to explore in a future deep dive
Everyone presents in the same meeting.
As an audience member
Ground rules
- Curiosity over advice — ask, don't fix
- Patterns, not prescriptions — what do you see, not what would you change
- Presenter owns the follow-up — they choose what to explore
- Everything stays in the forum, including the chart
Timing
When to do it
The full version belongs early in a forum's life, at a retreat or a long meeting, with charts prepared ahead and thirty minutes for each person. There is also a short version for when a new member joins: ten minutes to draw in the room, five to eight to share. Bob Halperin, the founder of HBS Alumni Forums, recommends a lifeline whenever a new member arrives. The group hears the newcomer's story, and the newcomer sees how the group tells its own.
For moderators
Running it
The exercise mostly runs itself. Three parts are yours.
Who goes first
The group calibrates its depth to the first chart it sees, which makes the first share worth treating as the model: honesty and openness shown rather than described. In a group doing this for the first time, the moderator is usually the one to model it. It does not have to be — any member willing to go there can set that calibration — and in a forum that has drawn lifelines before, there is no particular reason it should be you.
Set the container in sixty seconds
Say four sentences before the first chart: confidentiality is absolute; we share experience, not advice; you choose your own depth and nobody is owed more; this is not therapy and we're not equipped to be. Then start.
Hold the timer, and hold the silence
Cut people off at eight minutes, kindly but firmly. The pacing problem is always the same: too long at the start of a life. And when someone gets emotional, don't rush to fill the silence or move them past it. Let them decide when to continue.
Where it comes from
The lifeline reached HBS Alumni Forums through YPO, where a version of it has been in the forum canon for decades and is sometimes called the grandfather of retreat exercises. It has close cousins elsewhere: the "river of life" used in facilitation and participatory work, the life-story interview in narrative psychology, the crucible work in Bill George's True North, and structured life review in gerontology. They arrived independently at the same instinct — that a life becomes legible when you draw it.