From Nervous Breakdowns to the Four-Step Exploration

In the 1950s, the Young Presidents' Organization hired facilitators from the National Training Laboratories to run T-groups — encounter-style sensitivity training rooted in the work of social psychologist Kurt Lewin. T-groups were embraced by corporate America, major universities and the U.S. military. (Batista, "A Brief History of T-Groups," 2018)

YPO stopped using T-groups by the mid-1960s. They drew strong love/hate reactions, and there was one report of a nervous breakdown after a T-group. (Hoffman, "Forum: From Six to a Billion," ForumSpace, 2025)

The invention of the modern forum

In 1975, with the guidance of Fred Chaney, the first TEC (now Vistage) chair on the West Coast, YPO and TEC member "Jiggs" Davis first tried the forum format in YPO in Northern California. The format avoided the dramatic direct confrontations common in T-groups. (Hoffman, "Forum: From Six to a Billion," ForumSpace, 2025; Davis obituary, Piedmont Exedra, 2022)

The Four-Step arrives

The methodology continued evolving. In 2014, YPO introduced the Four-Step Forum Exploration, a new presentation process that, in YPO's words, "retains all of the best parts of the traditional presentation model, while adding opportunity for greater return on the forum experience." (YPO, Four-Step Forum Exploration FAQs, 2014)

The history of forum is a history of calibrating a dial. Too much safety and nothing happens. Too much intensity and people break. The modern forum sits in the narrow band where the dial is set precisely high enough to be transformative and precisely low enough to be sustainable — month after month, year after year.