Late in 2024 we ran our most ambitious experiment yet. Working with the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University, we designed an action-research project with 113 internationally-trained teachers, and watched what happened when we replaced small talk with structured, one-to-one deep conversations.
The group mattered. Internationally-trained teachers have often left careers and communities behind in one country to rebuild them in another, retraining, re-credentialing, and starting over among strangers. If anyone understands displacement and the quiet work of belonging somewhere new, it is them. They were not an abstract sample; they were exactly the people the research was about.
We paired participants and gave them real prompts, the kind that move a conversation past “where are you from” and into something that genuinely connects two people. The response was overwhelming and consistent: people valued it, deeply. Again and again, what they said they treasured was the simplest thing, the chance to be properly heard by another person.
That finding became load-bearing. It is one thing to believe a single honest conversation can matter; it is another to watch it land, the same way, across a hundred different people. The structured one-to-one conversation stopped being a feature idea and became the heart of the product.