Circle / The Way of Council

An ancient meeting form gathered into modern shape by two parallel lineages: the Way of Council (Ojai Foundation, Zimmerman & Coyle, 1980 onward, codified 1996) and The Circle Way (Christina Baldwin & Ann Linnea, PeerSpirit, 1994 onward, codified 2010). A center, a rim, a talking piece, a guardian, and three principles plus three practices that make a different kind of speech possible.

1. What it is

Circle is a meeting form that has gathered human beings into respectful conversation for thousands of years. People sit in a circle around a center. A talking piece passes from hand to hand. Whoever holds it speaks. Everyone else listens without interrupting. When the speaker is done, the piece moves on. Leadership rotates. Every chair holds equal voice.

In its most disciplined contemporary form, Circle has two living lineages running side by side. One is the Way of Council, codified at the Ojai Foundation in California in the 1980s and 1990s, drawn from Indigenous talking-circle practices that the foundation's elders had been sitting with for decades. The other is The Circle Way, designed by Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea at PeerSpirit in Washington State starting in 1994, a structure they extracted from years of practice and offered into corporate, nonprofit, healthcare, and community settings. The two lineages share more than they diverge. They share a center, a rim, a talking piece, a guardian, a check-in and a check-out, three principles, three practices, and a deep insistence that the structure of the meeting itself is what produces the change.

Circle is not a discussion format and not a workshop technique. Practitioners describe it as a container, a hosted space, a way of being together. The container's job is to make a different kind of speech possible. People say things in Circle they would not say in a normal meeting, and they hear things they would not otherwise hear. The form does most of the work.

The method scales. Circles of three, five, eight, twelve, twenty are common. Beyond about thirty, the talking-piece pass takes too long, and practitioners typically split into smaller circles or move to other Art of Hosting methods. A Circle can run for fifteen minutes (a daily check-in, a closing of a meeting) or for several hours (a council on a community decision, a healing council after a loss). The same form holds across the duration.

The shorthand most often used in practitioner literature is simply Circle, capitalised, to distinguish it from the geometric shape and from the many other practices that use circular seating. When people say "we did a Circle yesterday," they are usually pointing to a session that included some version of the components below: a welcome, a check-in, a talking piece pass, a guardian, a check-out.

The method belongs to the Art of Hosting family of participatory methods, alongside Open Space Technology, World Café, ProAction Café, and Appreciative Inquiry. Among these, it is the deepest container, the one practitioners reach for when the room needs to be present to itself before any other work can happen. It is also the method most often used to open and close gatherings that use other methods in the middle.

2. Where it came from

Circle has two clearly documented modern lineages. Both honour an older one.

Indigenous lineage. The talking circle is documented across First Nations and Indigenous traditions in North America, Africa, the Pacific, the Middle East, and Northern Europe. The Center for Council, the contemporary nonprofit that grew out of the Ojai Foundation's work, names ancestors that include Veche (Slavic), Satsang (Hindu), Ho'oponopono (Hawaiian), Daré (Zimbabwe), Fambul Tok (Sierra Leone), Ibitaramo (Rwanda), Diwan and Loya Jirga (Islamic), Farbrengen (Yiddish), and Quaker Devout Listening Circles. Benjamin Franklin observed Iroquois Talking Circles in the 1740s and wrote about them, calling what he saw "the council." The English word descends from Anglo-French cuncile and Latin concilium, meaning a gathering of the people.

This older lineage matters because the modern practitioners who codified Circle in the late twentieth century did not invent the form. They documented it, structured it, named its components, and gave it a vocabulary that could travel. The honouring is part of the practice.

The Way of Council, Ojai Foundation, 1980 onward. The Ojai Foundation was a retreat and learning centre in the Topa Topa Mountains of California that hosted decades of seminars with teachers and elders from across wisdom traditions. Joan Halifax brought Circle to Ojai when she became director in 1980, having encountered the practice in her years of work with Indigenous teachers. Over the next two decades, Jack Zimmerman and Gigi (Virginia) Coyle carried the practice forward, sitting with Native elders including Wallace Black Elk, Grace Spotted Eagle, and Arvol Lookinghorse, and with teachers from many other traditions including Joanna Macy, Joseph Campbell, Thich Nhat Hanh, Robert Bly, Pir Vilayat Khan, and others. The Way of Council was codified and published in 1996 as a book of the same name by Zimmerman and Coyle, revised in 2009. The Ojai Foundation closed as a residential retreat centre in 2017, and the work continued through the Center for Council, which had launched in 2014 as a fiscally-sponsored project of Community Partners in Los Angeles.

The Center for Council has since carried the practice into law enforcement (LAPD POWER training), incarceration (the Council Reentry Program), healthcare, education, and mental health professional training. It maintains a Certified Council Trainer cohort and runs public workshops worldwide. The lineage stays attached to its ancestors, and Center for Council teachers regularly name the elders whose practice they are carrying.

The Circle Way, PeerSpirit, 1994 onward. Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea founded PeerSpirit in January 1994 from Linnea's home on Whidbey Island, Washington. Baldwin had published Calling the Circle: The First and Future Culture in 1994. The two of them spent the next twenty-five years teaching Circle in the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, refining what they called "a lightly structured group process" into the form documented in The Circle Way: A Leader in Every Chair (Berrett-Koehler, 2010, with co-authors Linnea, and translated into German, Korean, and Dutch).

Baldwin and Linnea's work moved Circle into corporate boards, nonprofit organisations, religious congregations, healthcare administration, and educational settings. In 2016 they transferred the work from a founders-held to a community-held model, and PeerSpirit's Circle Way resources moved to TheCircleWay.net, which is now stewarded by a network of more than 600 practitioners worldwide. The practitioner community has continued to evolve the form.

The Art of Hosting integration, 2000s onward. Circle joined the Art of Hosting core methods curriculum in the early 2000s, when AoH was forming as a community of practice in Europe, North America, and elsewhere. Practitioners like Toke Paludan Møller, Monica Nissén, Chris Corrigan, Tenneson Woolf, and Caitlin Frost taught Circle alongside Open Space, World Café, and ProAction Café in three-day AoH trainings. The PeerSpirit version is the one most commonly taught in AoH because of its tight, transferable structure.

The intentional community lineage. ZEGG in Germany developed its own Forum practice in 1978, which is a related but distinct method (more about that in section 5). The wider intentional community sector adopted Circle through its overlap with AoH, with PeerSpirit, and with the Restorative Justice movement. Findhorn, Damanhur, Auroville, Tamera, and many ecovillages now use Circle in some form, often blended with their own indigenous practices.

The shape of all this is one form, multiple lineages, all pointing back to the same insight: that something specific happens in a room when people sit in a circle around a center and pass a talking piece, and that this something is worth protecting from the drift of ordinary meetings.

3. How it actually works

Circle has a precise procedural form. The PeerSpirit Circle Way handout, which Baldwin and Linnea released under Creative Commons and which has been translated into many languages, names seven components. The Way of Council adds different language but keeps the same architecture.

Set-up. A room with chairs arranged in a circle, no tables in the way, with a clear center. An object or set of objects in the center: a candle, a bowl, flowers, stones, a piece of cloth, or items contributed by participants. Whatever feels right and reflects the intention. The center is not decorative. It is the focal hub that holds the rim together.

Component 1: Intention. Before the circle gathers, the host names the intention. What is this circle for? A team meeting? A community decision? A healing council? A storytelling evening? The intention shapes who is invited, how long the circle meets, and what kinds of outcomes are expected. Without a clear intention, the circle becomes a chat.

Component 2: Welcome or start-point. Once people gather, the host begins with a gesture that shifts attention from social space to council space. A moment of silence. A reading. A song. A bell. The shift is felt, not announced. Practitioners describe it as the moment when the room becomes the room.

Component 3: Establishing the center. The host points to the center, names its objects, and reminds the room that the center holds the intention. People may add their own objects. The center is what people speak to when they are not speaking to each other directly, the place where the conversation is held even when no one is talking.

Component 4: Check-in. A talking piece passes from person to person around the rim. Each person speaks briefly: who they are, where they arrive from today, what they bring to this circle, sometimes a story or image. Check-in does heavy lifting. It moves the room from individual heads into shared space. It surfaces what people are carrying so they do not need to carry it alone for the next two hours. It is also the first practice round of speaking with intention and listening with attention.

Component 5: Agreements. The host reads or co-creates a short list of agreements. The PeerSpirit canonical four are: hold stories or personal material in confidentiality; listen with compassion and curiosity; ask for what you need and offer what you can; agree to a guardian who watches the energy and timing. Many circles add or modify. The agreements are read aloud, not assumed. They name the cultural floor.

Component 6: Three Principles and Three Practices. This is the philosophical heart of Circle and the part most often skipped by people who think the form is just "sit in a circle, pass an object." It is not.

The three principles:

• Leadership rotates among all circle members. No one chair holds power.
• Responsibility is shared for the quality of the experience. It is not the host's job alone.
• Reliance is on wholeness, sometimes named as "spirit" or "the larger field," rather than on any personal agenda. The room as a whole knows more than any one person.

The three practices:

• Speak with intention. What in this moment is worth saying? What is in service of the intention?
• Listen with attention. Notice what is being offered, not what you plan to say next.
• Tend the well-being of the circle. Watch your impact. Make room for voices that have not yet spoken. Slow down when needed.

These six lines are read or summarised at the start of every formal Circle. Practitioners memorise them. They are the operating system.

Component 7: Three Forms of Council. The body of the circle uses three forms, sometimes in sequence, sometimes in alternation.

• Talking piece council. The piece passes from hand to hand. Only the person holding it speaks. Everyone else listens. The piece can pass once around (every voice once) or several rounds. It collects voices, slows the conversation, and protects against interruption.
• Conversation council. The piece is set in the center. People speak when moved, in normal conversational rhythm, but with the disciplines of intention and attention still operating. Used when reaction, interaction, and new ideas are needed.
• Reflection or silent council. The room sits with a question in silence. Each person reflects on what is occurring or what needs to occur. Used when the energy is moving too fast, or when the group needs to realign with intention.

A skilled host moves between these three forms during a session. The talking piece sets the tone. Conversation lets ideas combine. Silence lets depth gather. Knowing when to switch is the craft.

Component 8: Guardian. One member of the circle volunteers to hold the role of guardian. The guardian's job is to watch the energy and process of the circle, not its content. The guardian carries a gentle noise-maker, often a small chime or bell. When the guardian senses the circle has lost its way (someone has been interrupted, the energy has thinned, someone needs more time, a topic has drifted), they ring the chime. The room pauses. A breath. The guardian rings the chime again and names what they noticed. Anyone else can also call for a pause. The guardian role rotates between meetings.

The guardian is the single most important structural feature of Circle. It is what allows the form to self-correct without anyone having to act as a teacher, a referee, or a boss. New circles often skip the guardian. They learn quickly why it exists.

Component 9: Check-out. At the close, the talking piece passes around the rim once more. Each person briefly says what they take with them, what stays in their heart and mind, or what they are leaving behind. Objects placed in the center earlier are picked up. The room returns from council space to social space.

Component 10: Farewell. A closing gesture, parallel to the welcome. A few words, a moment of silence, a bell, a song. Circle has been called and now releases.

Time envelope. A standard Circle runs from sixty to one hundred and twenty minutes. A team check-in Circle can be twenty to thirty minutes (welcome, check-in, brief work, check-out). A community council on a hard topic runs two to four hours. Longer than four hours, with the same group, the form fatigues; practitioners break to other methods or call multiple Circles across days.

What you take home. A different felt sense of the room. A list of agreements made and named. Often, decisions arrived at by consent or by a sense of wholeness rather than by vote. A practice. The practice deepens with repetition.

4. Where you can see it work

Circle is one of the most widely deployed Art of Hosting methods, and the corpus of practitioner-documented uses is large. A non-exhaustive sample.

Center for Council, Ojai Foundation lineage, 1980 to present. The Ojai Foundation hosted Circle for 35 years on a 40-acre wilderness property in California. Center for Council has carried that work into:

• POWER training for the Los Angeles Police Department (Practicing Officers Wellness Education and Resilience), now run as a multi-day curriculum for officers, drawing on Council practice for trauma resilience and de-escalation. Partnership funded under the Law Enforcement Mental and Physical Wellness Health Act grant.
• Council Reentry Program for incarcerated and recently-released individuals, a multi-year program that runs Council circles inside and outside prisons. The associated book Leaving Prison Behind (Center for Council, multiple authors) collects participant essays.
• Healthcare professional training, including residency programs and hospital staff teams.
• Education, with programs in K-12 and higher education contexts.

PeerSpirit / Circle Way, 1994 to present. Baldwin and Linnea's twenty-five-year teaching cycle reached:

• Health care administration, particularly hospital senior leadership teams.
• Religious and church administration, including congregational health programs.
• Nonprofit boards.
• Environmental and community re-visioning processes, including a long-running thread on bioregional governance.
• Education, including the reform of K-12 classroom practice.

The 600+ practitioner community at TheCircleWay.net continues to expand the application range. Recent threads include corporate strategy circles, community climate councils, and online Circles via Zoom.

Art of Hosting trainings, 2000s to present. Circle is one of the four core methods (with Open Space, World Café, ProAction Café) taught in every standard three-day AoH training, of which there are several dozen per year worldwide. Several thousand facilitators have learned the form this way.

Restorative Justice and Circle Process, 1990s to present. The Mediators Beyond Borders International and the wider Restorative Justice movement use Circle Process in schools, criminal justice, and community conflict. Kay Pranis's The Little Book of Circle Processes (2005) is the canonical practitioner text in this lineage.

Indigenous and First Nations practice. Circle continues to be a living indigenous practice, distinct from the modern codifications, and held in trust by First Nations elders, healers, and community leaders. Modern practitioners from PeerSpirit, Center for Council, and AoH consistently honour this lineage and work in relationship with it where invited.

Intentional communities. Findhorn (Scotland) integrates Circle with its own attunement practices for daily morning meetings. Damanhur (Italy) uses Circle alongside its constitutional decision processes. Auroville (India) uses Circle in working group contexts. ZEGG (Germany) and Tamera (Portugal) use their own Forum practice, which differs from Circle (see Section 5) but shares the circular form. Many smaller ecovillages adopt PeerSpirit Circle directly through AoH or GEN trainings.

Corporate adoption. Berrett-Koehler's translation of The Circle Way into business contexts has reached executive teams at organisations including Patagonia, REI, Buurtzorg, and several Berrett-Koehler authors' own consultancies. Online programmes by Circle Way facilitators run quarterly for corporate cohorts.

Online adaptations, 2020 onward. When the COVID-19 pandemic pushed facilitation onto Zoom, Circle adapted with surprising fidelity. The center becomes a shared image on screen. The talking piece becomes a name passed verbally ("I pass to Maria"). The check-in and check-out hold the energetic frame. Practitioners report that online Circle is harder than in-person Circle but still functional, and that the talking piece discipline is what saves it from collapsing into an ordinary video call.

The pattern across these deployments: Circle is durable, portable, and surprisingly easy to teach. It is also surprisingly easy to do badly. The procedural form holds the cultural form. Skip the components and the practice flattens into a ritualised meeting that happens to seat people in a circle.

5. Where it gets confused or contested

Circle is widely loved by practitioners. The published critique base is thin, and most of what exists comes from inside the practitioner community as a series of refinements and warnings. The substantive tensions:

Circle vs. Forum (ZEGG / Tamera). This is the most common confusion in the intentional community sector. They are different methods. In Circle, everyone sits at the rim and the talking piece passes between equals. In Forum, the community sits as witness around the edge and one person at a time stands in the center to express what is true for them, often supported by a facilitator (the "leader") who mirrors and reflects. Forum is theatrical, exposing, and emotionally direct. Circle is conversational, equalising, and held by the talking piece. Forum was developed by the Bauhütte community in 1978 (the predecessor of ZEGG) and now lives at ZEGG, Tamera, and within the Findhorn Foundation. Circle has the Indigenous and PeerSpirit lineages described above. Practitioners often use both, in different contexts, on different days, but the methods are not interchangeable. Forum is for emotional and interpersonal truth-telling. Circle is for shared decision-making and reflection.

Cultural appropriation concerns. Circle's modern practitioners draw heavily on Indigenous talking circle traditions. The Center for Council, PeerSpirit, and most AoH teachers explicitly honour the lineage and work in relationship with First Nations and Indigenous elders. Even so, practitioners regularly debate whether modern, often white-led, codifications of Circle constitute respectful borrowing or quiet extraction. The honest answer is that it depends on the practitioner's relationship to the lineage, on whether elders are paid and credited, on whether the practice is being sold or shared, and on whether the modern form makes room for Indigenous teachers to lead. The issue is alive and unresolved, and good practitioners hold it actively rather than waving it away.

The "talking piece is sacred" trap. New facilitators sometimes pick up the form as ritual without the discipline. A talking piece that is treated as sacred but used in a meeting that has no agreements, no guardian, no check-in or check-out, is just a prop. The PeerSpirit guidelines insist that the components work together. A circle without a guardian fails. A circle without agreements drifts. A circle without a real check-in stays in head space. The form is whole or it is not the form.

The "we already do circles" pattern. Many organisations and communities believe they are practising Circle because they sit in a circle for meetings. They are not. Sitting in a circle is a seating arrangement, not a practice. Circle has a procedural form, named components, and a cultural floor. Practitioners visiting these organisations report that introducing the actual practice often feels disorienting at first because the existing "circle" is doing something else.

The slowness critique. A talking-piece pass with twelve people takes twelve speaking turns. If each person speaks for two minutes, that is twenty-four minutes for one round. For organisations used to rapid-fire decision-making, this can feel unbearable. The practitioner answer is that the slowness is the work. Things get said in talking-piece pace that do not get said in rapid pace, and the room's quality of attention changes when interruption is structurally impossible. Whether an organisation is willing to make that trade is a strategic question.

The "leader" question. In Circle Way, leadership rotates and every chair holds equal voice. In organisations with formal hierarchies, this can produce an awkward fiction: the CEO is in the circle as one voice among many, and then the meeting ends and they are still the CEO. Practitioners have a range of answers. Some hold that Circle is appropriate for some kinds of work (sense-making, planning, reflection) and not for others (operational decisions with formal accountability). Others hold that the experience of equal voice in Circle changes how the CEO leads outside Circle. Both can be true. The point is that Circle does not abolish hierarchy; it suspends it for the duration of the meeting.

Format-as-routine. Communities that adopt Circle as a daily practice eventually report that the form goes stale. The talking piece becomes ritual without depth. The check-in becomes routine. The principles stop being read aloud. This is the same drift that affects every long-term practice; the answer is the same answer: refresh the intention, rotate the host, vary the form, sometimes stop doing Circle for a season and pick it up again with new energy.

The method's design has held up across four decades of modern codification. The tensions are real but practitioner-level. The core insight, that a center and a rim and a talking piece change what becomes possible to say in a room, has not been seriously challenged in the published literature.

6. How it shows up in the archive

The ToGather archive's grounding for Circle is mixed. The method shows up in interviews indirectly, alongside related practices that share its circular form. The clearest archive cross-references:

Tamera and the Forum lineage. Five published interviews from Tamera (Sabine Lichtenfels, Bori, Joshua Gottenko, Uri Ayalon, Aida Shibli) describe Tamera Forum, which is structurally distinct from Circle but shares the circular geometry, the intention-setting, and the witnessed-listening discipline. Joshua Gottenko's interview describes how Tamera moves between containers depending on whether the work is interpersonal (Forum) or operational (other formats). Tamera also uses Circle directly in working groups and team meetings. The published Tamera Forum entry on the Living Library names the distinction.

Auroville and team-level practices. Three published Auroville interviews (Johnny, Renana, Peter) describe the working-group meeting culture, which uses circular seating and rotating facilitation but does not name "Circle Way" or "Council" by those names. The cultural floor is similar; the explicit codification is not.

Findhorn (in adjacent literature, not yet in published archive interviews). The Findhorn Foundation has used both Forum and Circle for decades, woven with its attunement and meditation practices. Sharon's archive does not yet have a published Findhorn interview, but the GEN-Europe and CLIPS networks document Findhorn's adoption of these practices.

Feytopia and the Art of Hosting lineage. Sharon's Feytopia fundraising facilitation brief (March 2026) names Circle as one of the methods a participatory facilitator picks between, alongside Open Space, World Café, ProAction Café, and Appreciative Inquiry. Feytopia's 1500-square-metre château main hall has hosted Circle gatherings during community weekends and trainings. Six Feytopia interviews (Jess, Mathieu, Lucy Foster, Shelby McAuliffe, Poli, Amy Van Doren) describe a culture fluent in participatory practice, with Circle as part of the working vocabulary.

Midburn and the Israeli regional Burner lineage. The Israeli regional Burner event founded around 2011 and ongoing uses Circle informally in many of its planning crews and in post-event integration sessions, drawing on the wider Burning Man cultural floor, which has long incorporated Circle practice. Sharon's Midburn co-founder lineage informs the entry's read on how Circle travels in the post-2010 European and Israeli intentional community sector.

The wider Art of Hosting practitioner network in the archive. As more interviews describe their facilitation practice, Circle's archive grounding will deepen. As of 2026-05-10, the practice is documented through its surroundings (Forum, working-group meetings, AoH method-selection logic) more than through direct first-person accounts of running Circle.

The honest framing: Circle's archive grounding is real but indirect. The method is part of the cultural DNA of the post-2010 European intentional community sector, and the archive's interviews carry it implicitly even when they do not name it. Future interviews on facilitation practice will sharpen the grounding.

7. Living examples and entry points for community builders

A community builder reading this entry is probably asking: when would I use Circle, and how do I run my first one? Here is the practical answer.

1. The trigger. You have a group that needs to slow down and listen. The questions on the table are big enough that rapid-fire conversation will not do them justice. Possible cases: a team that is not really hearing each other; a community that needs to make a hard decision together; the opening or closing of a longer gathering; a debrief after a difficult event; an annual reflection moment; a regular weekly check-in for a leadership team. If the room is in conflict and emotionally hot, consider Forum or a trained facilitator. If the room is project-shaped and action-oriented, consider ProAction Café. Circle is for presence, listening, and shared sense-making.

2. The room. Eight to fifteen people in a circle of chairs, no tables. A center with a candle, a bowl, an object meaningful to the group. A talking piece chosen with care: a stone, a feather, a small object passed from hand to hand. A bell or chime for the guardian. Take the seating arrangement seriously. The form is the practice.

3. The pre-brief. A short note before the gathering names the intention, the time envelope (sixty to ninety minutes is a good first run), and the basic agreements. Include a sentence on the talking piece practice so people are not surprised when an object passes around the room.

4. The opening. Begin with a moment of silence or a short reading. Light the candle. Name the intention out loud. Read the agreements. Name the three principles and the three practices. Pass the talking piece for check-in: each person briefly says who they are, where they arrive from today, what they bring.

5. The body. Use talking-piece council for the first round of the substantive question. After the first pass, set the piece in the center and open to conversation council. If energy dissipates or someone is interrupted, pick the piece up again. If the room is moving too fast, call for silence. The host's job is to feel the energy and switch forms. Trust the form.

6. The guardian. Ask one person to volunteer as guardian before you start. Give them the chime. Brief them: ring once to pause the room, breathe, then name what you noticed. Anyone can ring the chime. The role rotates next time.

7. The closing. When the substantive work is done or the time is up, pass the talking piece for check-out. Each person briefly says what they take with them. Pick up objects from the center. A short farewell gesture. Release the room.

8. The repetition. Circle is a practice, not a one-off. It deepens with repetition. A team that runs Circle weekly for three months will be a different team. A community that holds quarterly councils will know things about itself that no other format reveals.

Entry points for further learning. Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea's The Circle Way: A Leader in Every Chair (Berrett-Koehler, 2010) is the cleanest single book. Jack Zimmerman and Virginia Coyle's The Way of Council (1996, revised 2009) is the foundational Ojai Foundation text. Kay Pranis's The Little Book of Circle Processes (2005) is the Restorative Justice introduction. The Center for Council and TheCircleWay.net both run public workshops and online programmes. The PeerSpirit Circle Guidelines PDF (Creative Commons, available free) is the one-page reference most facilitators carry into a first session.

One caution. Circle is a deep practice, not a quick technique. If you run it as a meeting trick, it will not work. If you run it as a discipline, it will reward you for years. Take the form seriously, name what you do not know, work with a teacher if you can, and let the practice teach you.

8. Companion frameworks and what to read next

Circle sits inside the Art of Hosting family and links outward to several adjacent methods and frameworks.

Tamera Forum (Bauhütte and ZEGG, 1978; carried at Tamera). The witnessed-disclosure practice. Read this as the relational and emotional counterpart to Circle: where Circle equalises voices and slows the room, Forum surfaces what is hidden by putting one person at a time in the center. Communities typically need both.

Open Space Technology (Harrison Owen, 1985). The self-organising agenda method for groups of any size. Read this as the conversational counterpart to Circle: Open Space generates content, Circle gathers and integrates. Many gatherings open and close with Circle and use Open Space in the middle.

World Café (Brown and Isaacs, 1995). The rotating-table conversation method. Read this as the cross-pollinating counterpart to Circle: World Café moves voices between tables to gather collective insight, Circle holds voices in one container to gather depth.

ProAction Café (Leoprechting and Baeck, ~2005). The action-oriented blend of Open Space and World Café. Read this as the project-work counterpart to Circle: ProAction Café turns conversation into commitment, Circle turns conversation into shared sense-making.

Sociocracy 3.0 (Priest, Bockelbrink, David, 2015). A modular governance pattern library. Read this as the operational layer underneath Circle: S3 holds the organisation week to week, Circle holds the room moment to moment.

Reinventing Organizations (Frederic Laloux, 2014). A developmental framework. Read this for the Teal stage's principles of self-management, wholeness, and evolutionary purpose. Circle is one of the practices that supports these principles in daily team life.

Theory U (Otto Scharmer, 2007 and 2018). A change framework about how groups sense emerging futures. Read this for the longer arc that Circle sits inside: a Circle session can be one move within a Theory U journey.

Restorative Justice and Restorative Circles (Kay Pranis and others, 1990s onward). Read this for Circle adapted to harm, accountability, and reconciliation. The Pranis tradition extends Circle into criminal justice, schools, and community conflict.

Quaker meeting practice (1650s onward). Read this as one of the oldest continuously-practised circular meeting forms in the Western tradition, with which Circle Way explicitly aligns. The Quaker emphasis on devout listening and waiting in silence parallels reflection council.

Indigenous talking circle traditions. Read as much as is appropriate for your relationship to these lineages. The Center for Council, PeerSpirit, and AoH all maintain reading lists. Begin with First Nations elders' published work, listen more than you read, and seek relationships with teachers if you intend to practise the form yourself.

The reading sequence we recommend for community builders is: PeerSpirit Circle Guidelines first (the one-page reference), then Baldwin and Linnea's The Circle Way (the field manual), then Zimmerman and Coyle's The Way of Council (the deeper philosophical context), then Pranis's The Little Book of Circle Processes (the Restorative extension). Sit in a few Circles before reading too much; the practice precedes the theory.

9. Sources

The references below are the canonical practitioner sources we consulted while writing this entry.

• Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea, The Circle Way: A Leader in Every Chair (Berrett-Koehler, 2010). Available at PeerSpirit Bookstore.
• PeerSpirit Basic Guidelines for Calling a Circle. The Creative Commons one-page reference.
• The Circle Way (PeerSpirit). The PeerSpirit page describing the lineage and current stewardship.
• TheCircleWay.net. The community-held home of The Circle Way, with practitioner directory, resources, and trainings.
• Jack Zimmerman and Virginia Coyle, The Way of Council (Bramble Books, 1996; revised 2009). The Ojai Foundation lineage's canonical text.
• Origins of Council (Center for Council). The Center for Council's documentation of the lineage and ancestors.
• What is Council? (Beyond Us & Them / Center for Council). The Center's contemporary practice description.
• Kay Pranis, The Little Book of Circle Processes (Good Books, 2005). The Restorative Justice canonical introduction.
• ZEGG Forum (transparent communication). The ZEGG Forum primary source, included to clarify the distinction from Circle.
• Circle Process (Mediators Beyond Borders International). The contemporary RJ practitioner framing.
• Sharon Avraham, "Art of Hosting and Open Space, for tomorrow," ToGather Flagship internal brief (March 2026). The facilitation lineage context for this entry.