Exercise

Open with What It Felt Like

Time: About 10 minutes added
Format: One presentation
Responds to: Hyper-Rational
Disclosure: None required

A presentation opener that puts two minutes of feeling ahead of every fact.

Why this exercise

For one presentation, the presenter opens with two minutes on what the situation felt like before any facts. Clarifying questions about the facts wait until the feeling has been heard. Hyper-Rational treats feelings as data to process later; this puts them first, briefly, on purpose.

A room heavy on Hyper-Rational is a pleasure to present to and a hard place to be heard. The questions are sharp, the frameworks arrive fast, and the situation gets modeled before it gets felt. Nobody is being cold — the room genuinely believes it is helping, and by one measure it is. But the presenter walks out with a better analysis of a problem no one actually sat inside with them.

This exercise doesn't argue with the analysis. It just changes the order. Feeling first, for two minutes, with the facts held at the door — so that when the analysis arrives, it has something human to be about.

How to run it

Before the meetingThe moderator briefs the presenter: open with two minutes on what the situation has felt like to live inside. No background, no numbers, no ask. Where it sits in the body, what it does to sleep, the moment it was worst. Two minutes is longer than it sounds — that's part of the design.
The openingThe presenter speaks. The room listens in silence — no clarifying questions, no notes passed, no "just quickly." If the presenter drifts into facts, the moderator lets the first drift go and gently redirects the second: "That's the situation. What did it feel like?"
The presentationAfter the two minutes, the presentation proceeds exactly as the forum normally runs it — context, facts, the ask.
Questions, in their placeClarifying questions come where they always do, after the presentation. By then the room is asking about a person's situation, not just a case.
One debrief beatAt the close, the moderator asks the room one question from the debrief list below. Five minutes, no more.

What to watch for

Thoughts dressed as feelings

"I felt like we were mispositioned" is a thought wearing a feeling's clothes. The tell is the word "like." A feeling fits in a word or two — dread, relief, shame, flat. The moderator's nudge: "And what did that feel like?"

The room's urge to fix

Somewhere around ninety seconds, someone's pen will start moving toward a solution. The moderator holds the silence. The exercise is two minutes of not fixing — for some rooms, the hardest two minutes of the year.

The presenter who can't start

Some presenters go blank when the facts are taken away. That blankness is not failure — it may be the most honest data point of the night. Thirty seconds of silence inside the two minutes is allowed to just sit there.

Debrief questions

What did you hear in the first two minutes that the facts alone would never have carried?
Where did you feel the pull to start solving — and what was that pull like to sit on?
Did the questions after the presentation change? How?

First draft — under revision.

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