Our principles
We didn't start with principles. We started with a conversation, and a decade of Wednesdays taught us which mornings worked and which ones went flat. The five things below aren't rules we wrote down at the beginning — they're what was left after years of figuring out what actually makes a conversation worth waking up early for.
We talk about our own lives, not the news.
We're not a debate club or a group therapy session. Not that there's anything wrong with those! But because you can get them anywhere, and because a conversation about opinions and positions never seems to go anywhere. A conversation about life keeps going. When the world shows up at the table (and it often does), the question isn't who's right about it. It's how each of us is living in it.
How you got here beats what you think out there.
Everyone at the table already has opinions — nobody needs to drive across town at 7 a.m. to collect more of them. So we look for the story instead. Ask someone's opinion and you get their conclusion; ask how they came by it and you get their life. That second conversation is better every time: harder to argue with, more interesting to participate in, and usually a better justification of the opinion than the opinion itself.
You probably won't spot the smartest person in the room.
Every group has a pecking order, whether anyone names it or not. Most sort people up and down; this one only asks whether you're in or out, and you answered that by showing up! Résumés, titles, and credentials matter, but in this room they're beside the point. Nobody's keeping score or pitching; when nobody's performing, people tend to open up. One person lowering their guard gives everyone else permission to do the same — and the people who get the most out of ADC are usually the ones willing to say "I don't know" or "I got that one wrong." Which, it turns out, is contagious.
The lessons travel. The details don't.
Both halves of this principle matter. What someone shares at the table — the names, the details, the specifics of their actual life — stays at the table. But what you learn from it goes with you: into your family, your work, your friendships, the way you treat the next stranger. We'd be lousy company if our time together didn't change anything. So the lessons travel. The details don't.
Phones away. One voice at a time.
One conversation means exactly that — no side exchanges, no table splitting in two, no checking a phone under the table. A dozen or so people genuinely tracking one thread is rare enough that most of us can't name another place it happens. It's also the only way the soft-spoken observation from the far end of the table registers with everyone — and that's the comment that changes the morning more often than not. Being present is mostly about listening with curiosity, not just reloading while somebody else talks. Our most-decent conversations happen when someone asks a question about what was just said instead of steering back to what they wanted to talk about.
We don't recite these principles on Wednesday mornings before we begin, and nobody's ever been scolded for breaking one. They're not prescriptive rules — they simply describe the good mornings. The aim is simpler than the five principles makes it sound: everyone leaves a little more known, a little more interested, and a little more alive.