Field guide

Learn

Each page covers one territory of the craft and ends where practice begins: the game that drills it. Enter wherever your last conversation went wrong.

Start here if unsure

The Hosting Palette

The fifty-six in-the-moment moves, in nine groups. Everything else on this site orbits them.

Bedrock

Five Working Principles

The answer is the material; shortest question, largest space; concrete before abstract; followed and guided; silence is a move.

First 90 seconds

Openings

Nine ways to enter a conversation at a live edge, and eight ways hosts ruin the entry. Hospitality with direction.

The instrument

Questions

Nine question families, and the repairs that turn weak forms into strong ones. Shortest question, largest space.

The other half

Listening

Nine channels to monitor in any answer — nouns, verbs, time gaps, metaphors, contradictions — and the seven-step follow-up ladder.

The hour

Shape

The eight-phase spine of a long conversation and ten transitions that move between its parts without showing the seams.

Hard mode

The Guarded Guest

Scripts, slogans, charm, and deflection — and the non-adversarial forms that make them insufficient without a fight.

Where you stand

The Host's Position

Seven positions from examiner to witness, ordered by how many turns route through you — with the moves that shift you along the spectrum and the eye-line diagnostic that tells you where you are.

How many

The Size of the Table

What changes at two, three, four, six, nine — channels, airtime, audience — and the thresholds where intimacy, unity, and spontaneity each end.

Reference

Glossary

Every named thing on the site in one alphabet — moves, groups, explorations, games, forms, channels, phases, positions — each linking to its home.