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CoLiberation: what happens when we work extraordinarily well together. Like on a basketball team or in an orchestra, when we actually experience ourselves sharing in something bigger than any one present. This is what I call the experience of the Big WE. It’s a corollary to the Big ME experience of self-transcendence. If the Big ME is the ‘peak experience,’ CoLiberation, the Big WE, is like becoming a whole mountain range.

I know I’ve experienced it in games and sports and the performing arts. And, what makes me especially hopeful, I’ve also experienced it in business meetings.

The central experience that led me to write my book The Well-Played Game was, in fact, a game of ping pong between my friend Bill and myself. Let me describe it to you, thereby exemplifying the selfsame example of the kind of experience I hope you will share with us:

‘My good friend Bill was and is so much better of a player than I that there was actually no reason for us to try to play a ‘real’ game. Playing for points was clearly pointless. So, we decided to just see how long we could keep a volley going. It was a perfect challenge for each of us. For Bill, just getting the ball to hit my paddle was an exercise worthy of his years of pongish mastery. After half the night of this, we managed to sustain an almost infinite volley. We actually lost count.’

That’s all that I ask. Some description of a shared transcendence that made you feel just about as big, ME-wise and WE-wise, as you can get. Larger than life. Enlarged by each other’s largesse. Beyond time.

And, corollarily speaking, those exceptional experiences of working together, when we’re really working and really together. As deliciously distracting as the technologies of collaboration may be, when collaboration is it’s at its best, so are we.

I’ve been calling these kinds of meetings ‘coliberating.’ It’s cute, because it almost sounds like something beyond ‘collaborating.’ But ‘liberating’ is only part of the truth. Yes, in deed, those moments in which we have actually managed to free each other from whatever constraints we usually impose on each other, these are truly and actually what you would call coliberating. But there is something beyond CoLiberation, beyond the meeting itself. Some coincidence of selves that undefines the limits of our capabilities. A coincidence having almost nothing to do with the meeting, and everything to do with the human spirit. Shared moments of unusual clarity, vivid communication. Spontaneous combustions of understanding.