Back in 2008, we brought an event series to Vancouver called Pecha Kucha Night. The format came from a Tokyo based architecture firm. 20 slides, each auto-advancing after exactly 20 seconds. Six minutes and forty seconds per speaker. Ten to twelve speakers per night. Fast-paced, energizing, designed to share ideas without the drawn out presentations that plagued the architecture and design community.

The first two events were small but managed to sell out. Around two hundred people each at the Museum of Vancouver. 

It took a little bit of encouragement, but we decided to keep going and looked for a larger venue. The Park Theater on Cambie was twice the size and worked well for the next six events. By the tenth, we needed to double again.

A lot happened for us as we completed those first dozen or so events. We began to see patterns form. We began to understand what kinds of talks landed, and which did not. We understood the flow of the night, what was important, what kinds of stories travelled home when people left. Most importantly, we started to notice that people weren't just showing up to watch presentations, they were showing up for each other.

A Culture was Forming

Conversations that started in line would continue for months between events. Speakers from different nights would connect and create new work together. Audience members would approach speakers or each other and those conversations would turn into friendships, partnerships, job offers, even marriages.

It wasn’t so much about the infrastructure of the event as it was about the overall rhythm of the series. People knew that every eight weeks, the city’s creative community would be in the same room. That predictability created a unique culture.

Rituals emerged that we never planned. People arrived hours early for good seats. Staying for hours afterward. Inside jokes developing. Certain types of presentations become beloved or infamous. New attendees get socialized by regulars about what to expect.

We'd created the initial structure. The community was building its own meaning around it.

When I use the term, event host, most people think of the person at the mic, but for Jane and myself and our team, it was so much more. We were outside before the doors opened, talking to people waiting in line. Walking the crowd as it gathered. Hugs, high fives, a lot of hellos. This was our event and we welcomed people into our experience the way you welcome someone into your home.

At some point, that feeling started to morph. The event started to become theirs. Which was exactly what we'd hoped for, but perhaps not prepared for.

The Voice of the Community

As the event series grew, we started hearing from all the relationship types within it.

Champions were few, but wow, were they invested. Feedback after each event. Online documentation. Live Twitter feeds. This event represented who they were and it was like they had found the Fountain of Youth. They took so much pride in sharing the details of what this event was about and why it mattered so much. For an event that had zero marketing budget, these folks were crucial. 

Allies were everywhere. Volunteers who helped with production, people who attended every event and brought friends, participants who treated it as a career milestone. And of course, many, many potential speakers. 

The Skeptics kept us honest. Questions about speaker diversity. Concerns about ticket prices and accessibility. Challenges about whether we were really serving all of Vancouver or just certain groups. 

And there were even a few Critics too, I think. 

When It Became Consuming

By our 25th consecutive sold-out event, we were filling twelve hundred seats every eight weeks. Among hundreds of cities worldwide hosting Pecha Kucha Vancouver was in the top tier for attendance and cultural influence. For several years, it was the most significant creative event in Vancouver.

Yes, the logistics overwhelmed. Speaker selection, venue coordination, sponsor management, volunteer management, marketing, registration, tech rehearsals. None of it was billable work for Cause+Affect.

But that wasn't really the problem.

The real problem was what we were becoming in the eyes of the people around us. We were becoming more well known for the event series than for the work we did in our “real jobs”. 

When people in Vancouver's creative community thought of Cause+Affect, they thought of Pecha Kucha. When they thought of Steven, they thought of that funny guy who hosts it. The “Pecha Kucha” guy. 

I found myself in a role I hadn't really chosen and didn't particularly want: event host, cultural curator, something close to a public figure in a scene I genuinely loved but wasn't trying to lead. There's a particular discomfort in building c-list celebrity status in a direction that isn't authentically yours. The growing recognition felt like it was pulling me away from something rather than toward it.

We loved our community. That part was real. But we were suffering a quiet brand crisis of our own, one that no one outside could see, because from the outside, it looked like success.

We'd built something real. We just hadn't meant it to be the whole answer to "who is Cause+Affect?"

The Conversation We Kept Having

"What if we just gave it away?" Jane asked one evening after another event, when I was questioning the future. We'd danced around this conversation for months. The idea felt simultaneously like relief and betrayal.

"People depend on this," I said. "The community—"

"Will survive without us," Jane finished. "Maybe they'll do it differently. But we can't keep doing this and also do what we're supposed to be doing."

She was right. I knew she was right. And if we were content to build a career around cultural events, it might have been different. But our business needed to focus on our growing brand and communications agency. That was the work that paid the bills.

The Questions That Remain

In 2015, after thirty-eight consecutive sold-out events, we gave Pecha Kucha Night Vancouver away. We didn’t have to look far it turns out. One of our former employees was eager and well prepared. We handed her the keys and walked away.

The space that opened up was startling. But the questions came just as quickly.

Had we abandoned the community we'd built? Should we have found a different model, one where the community could have become more self-sustaining without us at the centre? Or was giving it away actually the right act of stewardship? 

Looking back now, I find myself wondering something I couldn't have admitted at the time: what if we didn't have to choose?

Cause+Affect was built on the belief that authentic identity attracts an aligned community. Pecha Kucha had done exactly that, drawing together thousands who cared about ideas, craft and connection. These were our people. While we saw the overlap as conflict, it could very well have been an opportunity.

But we kept the two things deliberately separate, partly out of a fear of looking like we were monetizing the community. Selling out a space that felt genuinely generous.

What I didn't fully grasp is that the separation may have been its own kind of failure of imagination. We were so protective of the event's integrity that we never seriously asked whether there was a version where both things grew in step. Where the community we'd built and the work we were doing could have informed and sustained each other more honestly.

I don't miss the logistics. I mean that.  But the community? I miss that.

More precisely, I miss the version of it we could actually hold. The conversations in line. The hugs at the door. The feeling of welcoming people into something that was genuinely ours before it became genuinely theirs. 

Maybe we protected Pecha Kucha so carefully that we never gave it a chance to grow alongside us. Maybe the fear of appearing to profit from something generous kept us from fully integrating the two parts of who we were?

Or maybe some things are simply meant to be held for a few seasons and passed on.

I'm still not sure which story is true.

What I do know is that community is a living thing that requires sustained care and recognition that once it forms, it becomes larger than you. 

We built that. We served it as well as we could for as long as we could. And when we couldn't anymore, we gave it to someone who could. Whether that was wisdom or failure, I'm still not entirely sure.

Without it, we were left with a different community. The one that surrounds Cause+Affect. Maybe not as easily defined, but just as meaningful. For that one, the tending has never stopped. This series is hopefully another example of that. 

In my next newsletter, I will share the story of one of our clients who has chosen stewardship for close to twenty years now. They have watched it compound into something no competitor with deeper pockets could replicate. The story of Modo. 

—Steven

P.S. Most of us experience community as participants. Showing up, connecting, leaving energized. Leading one means absorbing all of that energy and converting it into something sustainable. It's the difference between attending the dinner party and hosting it. Be kind to hosts, it can be pretty relentless.