You know the panel I mean. Four people on a stage, agreeing with each other in slightly different words, nodding along, running down the clock. Nobody says the real thing. Nobody is at risk. You leave with a business card and not much else. Yuck.
Agree to Disagree is the opposite of that.
The format is simple. Four people from completely different worlds sit at a table. They get difficult statements, blind, and for each one they pick a side and defend it in the room. The audience votes too, agree or disagree, on every statement. It is a roundtable. Nobody is safely up on a stage. The room is in it with them.
Here is what happened the last time, and why the format matters more than any one insight it throws up.
Venture Café Warsaw had just hit 250 Thursday gatherings. They handed me the panel and let me do whatever I wanted with it. So we put something genuinely uncomfortable on the screen: inclusivity is a trap, a strong community is defined by who you reject, not who you accept. Agree or disagree, in public. Then defend it.
But five minutes before any of that, before a single controversial word, the whole room made one agreement together. Give people the benefit of the doubt when they are figuring something out in public. No judgement. That was the floor we all stood on.
Near the end of the night, someone walked in late and told the Iranian man on the panel to check his privilege. Everyone felt it at once. And everyone knew why. She had not been there for those first five minutes. She had not stood on the floor the rest of us built. The person who arrived to defend inclusion had, without meaning to, become the least included voice in the room. Her fight for tolerance came out, well, intolerant.
That is the whole lesson. It is why we keep doing this.
An inclusive room is not one with no boundaries. It is one that draws its boundaries around behaviours, not around people. You engineer the relationship for safety right at the start, out loud, together. Skip that and the social fabric tears. Every single time. We call it relationship design, and it is the quiet thing that makes a hard conversation survivable.
That is what a panel should feel like. Slow nodding, furrowed brows, people looking away and still completely connected to the view they disagree with. Human connection over disagreement is what moves people. Not winning. Not the cleverest line. The connection that holds after the disagreement.
This is why the series lives inside the 5 Spheres of Empathy and not off to the side. Empathy is not agreement. It is holding a perspective that is not yours long enough to actually understand it. Every one of these panels is a room full of people doing exactly that, on purpose, in front of each other. You grow your empathy by growing your perspective. And there are few faster ways to grow your perspective than sitting across from four people who see the world nothing like you do, and staying in the room anyway.
We run these at Venture Café Warsaw most months, and further afield when the right stage comes up. It started at the ASEAN Startup Connect Summit in Phnom Penh, ran on the Leaders stage at Infoshare, and lands at Innovation Week in Prague this October. Alex Firestine first showed me the format. I have not stopped running it since.
The next table is this Thursday, 9 July, at Trend House in Warsaw, part of the Venture Café gathering. Free. Come and take a side.
Want to know when the next one is? Leave your email on the Agree to Disagree page.