The World Is the Workshop

I’ve learned some of my greatest lessons about people in places I never would have called a classroom.

Not in the traditional sense, at least. Just the world, doing what the world does when you are paying attention: teaching.

When I say The World Is the Workshop, I mean that some of the most important lessons I’ve learned about life, leadership, business, belonging, and people have come from being out in the world. From culture. From language. From food. From history. From innovation. From being the outsider. From needing help. From watching people build, adapt, gather, remember, and create meaning in environments I could never fully understand from a distance.

One of the places that taught me the most was Moria Refugee Camp.

There is no way to romanticize what I saw there. It was devastating. People had been stripped of what looked like everything: home, safety, stability, privacy, comfort, and so many of the basic things many of us move through life expecting to be there.

But everything was not gone. Even in the middle of devastation, people still carried culture, language, skill, memory, creativity, and dignity.

I remember an Afghan family making bolani, a stuffed flatbread filled with potatoes, herbs, and vegetables, taking what they had and using it to create something familiar, useful, and needed in the middle of an environment that had taken so much from them. I also remember a separate coffee stand, built from scraps, that I would pass on the way up the hill to the office.

At the time, I don’t know that I had the language for what I was seeing. Looking back, I see it for what it was. That was entrepreneurship. That was innovation. That was resilience. That was people seeing a need, recognizing what they still carried, and using what they had to serve the environment they were in.

Not innovation in the shiny, pitch-deck, buzzword-heavy way we normally talk about it, but innovation under constraint. Innovation with dignity. Innovation rooted in culture, memory, skill, and survival.

And that is the kind of lesson the world will teach you if you are paying attention.

It is also part of why I keep thinking about the World Cup differently. The World Cup is one of those rare global moments where connection, identity, belonging, pride, grief, joy, and heartbreak all become visible at the same time.

I remember living in Mexico and walking past an Argentinian restaurant down the street. A match was on, and the place was packed. Not just inside either. People had stopped on the sidewalk too.

So I stopped.

I don’t remember every detail of the match. I don’t even know for sure if it was the World Cup. But I remember the feeling. The excitement was electric. For a few minutes, that restaurant was bigger than a restaurant. Culture, pride, identity, and belonging had spilled out onto the sidewalk.

Through food. Through language. Through flags. Through songs. Through sports. Through memory. Through each other.

That is what I am paying attention to.

Because when people gather around something bigger than themselves, something becomes visible. Belonging becomes visible. Identity becomes visible. Connection becomes visible. And sometimes, the absence of those things becomes visible too.

That matters far beyond a match.

It matters in our workplaces. It matters in our teams. It matters in our leadership. It matters in the way we build culture, design learning, welcome people into rooms, and decide who gets to feel like they belong once they are there. Because people do not stop needing connection when they walk into work. They do not stop needing to feel seen, known, respected, or included just because they have a title, a badge, a laptop, or a calendar full of meetings.

We can call belonging a soft skill if we want to, but disconnection has receipts. It shows up in how people work, how much they trust, how willing they are to contribute, how long they stay, how much of themselves they bring into the room, and whether they believe there is actually room for them there.

At the end of the day, I believe people do their best work when they are connected. Connected to themselves. Connected to each other. Connected to the work. Connected to the purpose. Connected to something that reminds them they matter.

That belief sits underneath so much of my work as a facilitator, coach, consultant, and learning strategist. Whether I am designing training, facilitating a workshop, coaching a leader, or helping an organization make difficult content more human, I am always thinking about connection.

• How do we help people understand themselves better?

• How do we help them understand each other better?

• How do we make space for different cultures, communication styles, lived experiences, assumptions, questions, and ways of seeing the world?

• How do we make learning feel less like information being delivered and more like meaning being made?

That is the heart of The World Is the Workshop.

Over the next few weeks and months, I’ll be sharing reflections from the World Cup and from my own travels through the lens of human-centered leadership, belonging, culture, communication, and connection. Some reflections will be about sports. Some will be about travel. Some will be about work. Most will probably be about people.

Because that is the through-line.

The world is full of lessons about how people gather, build, adapt, misunderstand, repair, welcome, exclude, remember, lead, and belong. Most of those lessons are not hidden. We are usually just moving too fast to notice them.

So this is my invitation to slow down and pay attention with me.

To the matches. To the moments around the matches. To the stories we carry from the places we have been. To the cultures that shaped us. To the people who made room for us. To the times we had to learn something the hard way, and the ways connection changes what becomes possible.

Because sometimes the best workshop is not in a conference room.

Sometimes, The World Is the Workshop.

Where has the world taught you something about people that no formal training ever could?