Crowding and leaping
Knowing when to add and when to take away
Ursula Le Guin* sings the benefits of crowding and leaping when writing stories.
I’m going to explore that here and find inspiration for those of us who design and host meetings and workshops.
In a beautiful evocation of crowding, Keats tells poets to “load every rift with ore.” Le Guin talks of “not wandering into irrelevancies; keeping it interconnected with itself, rich with echoes forward and backward. Vivid, exact, concrete, accurate, sense, rich: these adjectives describe a prose that is crowded with sensations, meanings and implications.”
Le Guin’s stories are full of moments. But how does she avoid overcrowding?
The answer is leaping.
“What you leave out is infinitely more than what you leave in. There’s got to be white space around the word, silence around the voice, listing is not describing. Only the relevant belongs… in revising, consider what merely pads or repeats or slows or impedes your story, and cut it. Decide what counts, what tells, and cut and recombine till what’s left is what counts. Leap boldly.”
Crowding and leaping in our workshops and meetings
Recently I’ve been in many meetings about AI. They were well-intentioned but earnest and teacherly and dense. There were a lot of slides. We started in the usual places, and we ended up in predictable places.
But others were different. In one, a fictional but plausible board scenario forced participants into real decision-making, giving them a structured entry point (investment, ethics, or governance) that quickly exposed the complexity of AI adoption.
It anchored discussion in roles, stakes, and trade-offs, rather than abstract technology, helping people learn how to have the conversation about AI, not just understand it.
Another was hosted by our friend Marigo Raftopoulos. She got participants into AI by making them build a tangible, simplified “AI system” (a Tiny Robot) using constraints, task, touchpoint, experience, and bugs so they learn through doing rather than abstract discussion. It surfaced biases, distributed agency, and forced teams to grapple with real design trade-offs (including risks) in a low-stakes, collaborative setting, making AI feel accessible and concrete.
These meetings were crowded in Le Guin’s sense; dense with genuine uncertainty, with much at stake, and fresh thinking required. And they leapt over an enormous amount of scaffolding that turned out not to be needed.
So let’s ask ourselves, again and again: What are the live materials we crowd our workshops with? What can we trust people to leap with us?
In her book Steering the Craft, A 21st Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story.
PS For regular readers of Radical Acts, in case you were wondering, Viv McWaters & Johnnie Moore are brilliant editors & they kindly shaped this piece. Claude can’t crowd or leap the way they do.