Why twelve
Twelve is what the table seats. Past about that number an evening stops being one conversation and becomes three or four running at once, and the people at either end spend the night talking only to their neighbours. Franklin's rule was twelve members of twelve different trades, which is why the group has to be bigger than the table: eighteen trades operate within a few kilometres of here, and a standing twelve could never cover them.
It also means most people are waiting at any given time. The group is larger than the table, and each dinner is composed from it.
Franklin's Junto
In 1727 Benjamin Franklin started a club in Philadelphia called the Junto. It had twelve members drawn from twelve different trades, met on Friday evenings, and expected every member to arrive with questions. Franklin forbade the words certainly and undoubtedly on the grounds that they close a conversation down, and asked members to say I conceive or it appears to me in their place. He described the aim as inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute or desire of victory.
The Lunar Society, fifty years later, capped itself at around fourteen and met on the Monday nearest the full moon so that members could see their way home afterwards.
The four rules
Read out at the start of every dinner.
- Nothing leaves the table with a name attached. We use the Chatham House Rule in its actual wording: participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker, nor that of any other participant, may be revealed. Everyone agrees to it aloud, every time. Most people at the table run a company, and a good deal of what they know is only worth saying if the rule holds.
- Speak from your own experience, not from advice. Say what happened to you and what it cost, and leave other people to work out what to do about their own situation. Once nobody is handing out advice, nobody is performing expertise either, and the evening stops producing lectures.
- Everyone gets the same airtime on the main question. Round the table, and timed. Left to itself a table gives most of an evening to whoever is most comfortable talking. Timing it means the host never has to interrupt anyone to fix that.
- Nobody sells anything, and that covers the host, the guests and any sponsor. No pitches, no slides, no round of introductions that turns into one, no mailing list afterwards and no attendee list circulated.
The questions
Franklin's Junto read a standing list of questions aloud at every meeting, and members were expected to have thought about them before arriving. The list below is that one, adapted for a district where most people run a company and very few of them know each other.
- Has anyone you know of failed in business here lately, and what do you understand the cause to have been?
- Has anyone thrived, and by what means?
- Has any capable person arrived in the district since we last met?
- Do you know of anyone who has lately started out on their own and deserves a hand?
- Is there anyone whose acquaintance you want, that somebody here could arrange?
- What do you have in hand at the moment that is weighing on you?
- In what way could the people at this table help you with it?
- Is there anything amiss in the way these evenings are run?
Two or three of them in an evening, chosen in advance, so there is time to answer properly.
How often, and where
A few times a year, in or near Aphrodite Hills, somewhere that can seat one table properly. The date gets fixed once enough people have confirmed. Each table is put together from the wider group, weighted towards trades not already in the room and people who have not been for a while.
What it costs you
Nothing. There is no membership fee and no ticket, and dinners are at present unsponsored and paid for by the host.
That will probably change. The likely arrangement is that a firm whose work overlaps with the room, in company formation, banking, tax or immigration, underwrites an evening. If it happens, it will be said out loud at the table, the sponsor will sit under the same four rules as everyone else, and nobody will be pitched. The sponsors page sets out the terms, and the one other way money could ever change hands here.
How an evening runs
The host opens with the numbers, running through what the business landscape shows: how many companies operate within a few kilometres, what they do, and how little connection there is between them. That comes before anyone is asked to talk about themselves. Two or three of the questions follow, round the table and timed.
At the end everyone is asked the same thing, which is who else belongs here, and gives one name. Anyone proposed gets discussed with the people who were there before an invitation goes out, so the table has a say in who joins it.
What this is not
There are no thirty-second introductions, no obligation to bring business to anyone and no attendance requirement, which makes it a poor referral group and a poor chamber of commerce. Anyone who wants a steady pipeline of local referrals would do better with BNI, which runs a Paphos chapter built for that.