The first time I watched a Forum member try to solve someone else’s problem, I saw it backfire in spectacular fashion.
The Experience
A few years ago, I was facilitating a presentation for a Forum that had been meeting for about eighteen months. The presenter, let’s call him Marcus, was wrestling with whether to fire his longtime operations director. He’d laid out the situation: declining performance, broken trust, years of loyalty now overshadowed by missed deadlines and defensive behavior.
The room leaned forward. And then it happened.
One member, a well-intentioned guy who ran a successful manufacturing company, launched into advice mode. “Here’s what you need to do,” he said. “Document everything for the next 30 days, then bring in HR, and terminate on a Friday so you minimize disruption to the week.” He went on for several minutes, mapping out the exact playbook he would follow.
Marcus’s face changed. He crossed his arms. By the time his well-meaning Forum mate finished, Marcus had completely shut down. The energy in the room shifted from openness to defense. Instead of exploring his challenge more deeply, Marcus spent the next ten minutes explaining why that specific advice wouldn’t work in his situation. The presentation never recovered.
Here’s the thing: the advice wasn’t bad. In many contexts, it was solid guidance. But it landed like a hammer when Marcus needed a mirror. He didn’t come to Forum to be handed a decision. He came to think through one of the hardest choices he’d ever faced, and he needed his peers to help him do that on his own terms.
Advice is a gift wrapped in your ego. Experience is a gift wrapped in humility.
Why Experience Sharing Works
The Experience Share format is the most common, and arguably most powerful, presentation style used by Forums. It’s built on a principle that sounds simple but runs against every instinct entrepreneurs have: don’t tell people what to do.
The format works like this: one member presents a core challenge for a set amount of time. Then each person in the group takes a set amount of time to share any relevant experience they have, not advice, not opinions, but experiences. The difference isn’t semantic. It’s structural.
The psychological reasoning behind this approach has roots in what the Entrepreneurs’ Organization calls the Gestalt Protocol. The word “gestalt” comes from German, meaning “form” or “wholeness.” As EO trainer Phil Kristianson explains, gestalt focuses on the self-organizing mind that perceives wholes from incomplete elements, context is key to perception. In Forum terms, this means the presenter is the only one who has the full context of their situation. They’re the only one who can assemble the pieces into a complete picture.
Research on peer instruction supports this. A 2020 study published in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications found that when peers share information rather than direct advice, the less confident person is more likely to internalize and apply the insights. Why? Because advice creates a subtle hierarchy, the advisor knows better, the advisee should follow. But experience sharing keeps both parties on equal footing, allowing the listener to take what resonates and leave what doesn’t.
There’s another reason experience sharing works better than advice giving: protection. As one EO member wrote in Octane Magazine, when members follow Gestalt Protocol, “there are no debates, disagreements or conflicting views on how I should handle my dilemma. I picked up some invaluable points and continued toward a successful resolution.” Advice creates obligation. If someone tells you what to do and you don’t follow it, you’ve potentially damaged that relationship. If you follow it and it fails, resentment builds. Experience sharing eliminates both risks.
As I wrote in an earlier post about why experience sharing beats advice giving: “We aren’t here to slay your dragons for you. We are here to help you build the muscle to lift your own sword so you can slay your own dragons now and forever. Because most of the time, we won’t be with you, but 100% of the time you will be with you.” Giving someone an answer teaches them nothing. Sharing how you faced something similar teaches them how to think.
The language shift is subtle but critical. Advice sounds like: “You should document everything and fire him on Friday.” Experience sharing sounds like: “I had an operations director I needed to let go. What I found was that having 30 days of documentation gave me confidence in the decision, and doing it on a Friday helped me process it over the weekend. That’s just what worked for me.”
The first version tells. The second version offers. The first creates pressure. The second creates possibility.
The Experience Share Presentation Structure
Here’s how to run an Experience Share presentation effectively:
Overview
Total Time: approximately 60 minutes (varies based on group size due to the “3 minutes each” Experience Share section)
Part 1: Coach Sets the Stage (3 minutes total)
The presentation coach, not the presenter, opens by sharing three things with the group:
- Core Challenge: The single most important issue the presenter is facing
- Desired Experience Share: What type of experiences the presenter hopes to hear from the group
- Boundaries: Any scenarios the presenter has said are off-limits as possible outcomes (e.g., “Don’t suggest firing the person, that’s not an option”)
This framing helps the group understand what they’re listening for and keeps the experience shares targeted.
Part 2: Presenter Shares Background (15 minutes total)
The presenter shares the full context of their challenge with the group. This isn’t a business presentation with slides, it’s a vulnerable sharing of where they are and what’s weighing on them.
The presenter should aim to move from the outer situation (facts) to the inner struggle (feelings). Less about what happened, more about why it matters.
Part 3: Q&A from the Group (10 minutes total)
The group asks clarifying questions only, no suggestions, no “have you tried…” questions. Pure curiosity. Ask questions you don’t know the answer to. Don’t lead the witness. The goal is to understand the situation more fully, not to steer the presenter toward a particular answer.
Good clarifying questions sound like:
- “How long has this been going on?”
- “What have you already tried?”
- “How does your spouse feel about this?”
- “How many people are in your company?”
Bad questions (disguised advice) sound like:
- “Have you considered just firing him?”
- “Why haven’t you talked to a lawyer yet?”
Part 4: Experience Share (3 minutes each)
Each person has three ways to contribute to the presenter. Each one is valuable, and none of them is advice.
- Give Your Experience Share Share a relevant personal experience using “I” statements. “I faced something similar when…” “What happened to me was…” “In my situation, I found that…” Stay in the past tense. Be specific. Include what worked and what didn’t.
- Share a Resource If you know of a book, podcast, article, consultant, or tool that helped you with a similar challenge, share it. “There’s a book called X that helped me think through this.” “I worked with a coach named Y who specializes in this.” Resources give the presenter something concrete to explore on their own terms.
- Empathize / Congratulate Sometimes the presenter doesn’t need experience or resources, they need to feel seen. “That sounds incredibly hard.” “I can’t imagine how heavy that must feel.” “I’m proud of you for bringing this to the group.” Acknowledgment is a contribution.
- What you never do: Give advice. No “you should,” no “if I were you, I would,” no “have you tried…” The stop sign is clear: advice disguised as help is still advice.
If you don’t have relevant experience, it’s ok to say so: “I don’t have direct experience with this.”
With 8 members, this section runs about 24 minutes.
Part 5: Presenter Take-Aways (3 minutes total)
The presenter shares:
- Appreciation
- What resonated
- Any new perspectives gained
- What they’re taking away
The presenter is not required to respond to each experience share or defend their position. They simply share what landed.
Part 6: Blind Window (8 minutes total)
The presenter turns away from the group (or turns off their camera if virtual) so they can listen without reacting.
Members share what they observed during the presentation:
- Interesting things the presenter said
- Contradicting statements
- Body language observations
- Metaphors they used
- Absolutes (“always,” “never”)
The format: “I heard him/her/they say [exact words], which makes me wonder [curious question].”
This section, which I covered in detail in The Blind Window Section of a Presentation, often produces the most powerful moments. It’s hard to read the label from inside the bottle, and the Blind Window gives the presenter a chance to hear their own words reflected back.
Part 7: "If I Had This Challenge, I Would..." (4 minutes total)
While the presenter is still turned around, each member briefly shares what they would do if they were facing this exact challenge. This is the one section where members can speak more directly, but it’s framed as what they would do, not what the presenter should do.
The presenter listens without responding, taking notes on anything that resonates.
After this section, the presenter turns back around and the group claps to welcome them back.
Moderator Tips to Make It Work
1. Enforce the Language Protocol Ruthlessly
The first few times your Forum tries this format, members will slip into advice mode. It’s instinct. When someone says “You should…” gently redirect: “Can you reframe that as something you experienced?” Do this consistently and the habit builds.
2. Coach the Presenter Beforehand
Great presentations don’t happen by accident. As I outlined in Pre-Coaching Work for a Forum Presentation, the presenter should work through their Parking Lot items, identify the core challenge, and answer these questions before the coaching session:
- What percentage of this issue is Business / Personal / Family?
- What is the core challenge you want to address?
- What experience share would be most valuable from the group?
The coaching session then helps sharpen these answers. For tips on running that conversation, check out 10 Questions to Use During Presentation Coaching.
3. Protect the Time Box
Experience Share presentations run long when the moderator gets loose with timing. Set clear expectations upfront and hold them. If you have eight members and 20 minutes for experience sharing, that’s 2.5 minutes per person, period. Use a timer. Be the bad guy so the presenter gets the full value.
4. Set Up the Blind Window Properly
Remind members to take notes during the presentation. They should be listening for specific words, phrases, body language, and contradictions. When the Blind Window starts, the observations should be specific and curious, not interpretive or judgmental.
5. Model It Yourself
The best way to teach experience sharing is to do it well yourself. When it’s your turn to share, lean hard into “I” statements. Be specific about your story. Avoid generalizing into advice. The group will follow your lead.
Take Action
Here’s how to implement the Experience Share format in your next Forum meeting:
- For Moderators: Print out the structure above and walk through it with your group before the next presentation. Set expectations around the language protocol before the presenter begins.
- For Presenters: Complete the pre-coaching worksheet with your coach. Be clear about your core challenge and what kind of experience shares you want. The more specific you are, the more relevant the experiences you’ll receive.
- For Members: Practice converting advice into experience. Before your next meeting, take any advice you’d normally give and rewrite it using “I” statements. “You should fire him” becomes “I had to fire someone in a similar situation. What I learned was…”
- For the Whole Group: Debrief after your next presentation. Ask: Did we stay in experience mode? Where did we slip? What can we do better next time?
If you want to dive deeper into presentation formats, I’ve also covered The Debate Presentation Format for decisions with clearly defined options, and The Expedited-Presentation Format for challenges that don’t need a full hour.
Final Thoughts
We don’t come to Forum to outsource our decisions. We come to build the muscle to make them ourselves. The Experience Share format isn’t just a communication technique. It’s a philosophy: your dragons are yours to slay, but you don’t have to face them alone. And sometimes the most helpful thing someone can say isn’t “here’s what you should do” but “here’s what happened to me.”
