The Balcony and the Dancefloor

The principle of the Balcony and the Dancefloor comes to us from Ron Heifetz, among the world's foremost authorities on the practice and teaching of leadership from the Harvard Kennedy School. It’s a way that you can get your participants to take a more objective view of what’s going on, and to introduce human dynamics and awareness into what might otherwise be a task-oriented discussion. 

The dancefloor represents the content of the conversation. It’s what we’re working on. The balcony are the objective observations about what may be going on in the room: the human behaviors, the things participants notice from time to time. The balcony is how we’re working on it.

It’s a good idea to give your participants this principle for them (and you!) to call a balcony moment.