The author is a now-retired senior manager and leader who spent decades inside an international agency, running programmes and emergency operations across regions and sitting through more Geneva meetings than he cares to count. On 6 August 2026, he attended Teach to Reach 16, where people who work for health meet, connect, and learn. This is for colleagues who have spent their careers in institutions like his, the ones most likely to look at Teach to Reach and shrug.
When I say I love it, that’s really true.
It’s not just something I wrote to be polite.
Let me explain why, because the reasons are specific, and I had to open my notes to get them right.
First, everything that wasn’t there
Think of my past in a Geneva international organization.
The first thing I loved was not being asked to give a single comment.
No expert opinion required, nothing.
I loved that I was not the senior staff member who has to give introductory remarks.
I loved the absence of all those things.
The high-level meeting structure – gone.
If you have spent your career in an institution, you know what I am describing.
You know the culture where you have a director who expects your attendance to be documented.
You have to say something, otherwise you weren’t there, otherwise you didn’t do anything.
Teach to Reach removes that.
The framing comes early.
You are expected to contribute, and then, the best way of contributing is by listening.
For somebody like me, that is enormously good.
It is fantastic.
I also loved that I didn’t have to police anybody’s views on [the use of artificial intelligence].
In my old organization that discussion was hysterical, and it was always painful for the audience to sit through.
The production, which is not an accident
Everything that is said, even when it is scripted, feels more genuine than most of the unscripted things I have heard in my career.
That is worth sitting with for a moment, because it is the opposite of what we all assume.
I love that the audience is never given the chance to get frustrated because the slides are shit and the presentation is incomprehensible.
I love that nobody has to start asking, can you send us the slide deck?
The encouragement to download the slides comes proactively, in the chat, before a single person has typed the word “slides.”
The audience doesn’t need to prompt anything.
That was brilliant.
And then I heard: “We have 100 slides”.
Said out loud, with pride.
Not as a threat.
Had I announced 100 slides in my old organization, they would have thrown stones at me.
Here, the content is what the group learned together.
It’s what they shared with each other.
And it’s being given back to the community.
Live, just an overview of the most important findings was shared.
But the point is: it’s the community’s knowledge, and we are giving it back to you, as knowledge you can use.
The part that changed my mind about what this is
Together, we go through the insights, and the recommendations are read out and then illustrated with local knowledge, in their words.
Recommendation 1.2, then the real-world experience.
Recommendation 1.3, then the experience.
The point is for people in the room to think together – and to respond.
That is also excellent.
The dramaturgy of that component is super good.
The pace is excellent.
And it is elementary pedagogy that it lands in visual and audio at the same time.
Time is limited and it goes fast, but even going fast, it works.
I will admit what I got wrong.
I was focusing on content, like a stupid subject-matter expert, listening to every word about substance.
That was exactly the wrong way for me to listen.
I have to drop the attitude.
Why the detail matters more than you think
I had travelled the night before.
I had been working and writing all day.
There is a debilitating heat wave here.
My brain was not in good shape and all my ADHD symptoms were at their worst.
I was exhausted.
And I found myself wondering: has TGLF crafted this exactly to fit what I need?
Because the instructions are extremely detailed.
You go here, you click this, you do that, then the next thing.
That is precisely what works for me when I am tired, or unmedicated, or both.
Even if it wasn’t designed for me, we are planning a course on brain health, where people with that interest and that lived experience will be in the room.
Not everything can be “read this and click there.”
But this pedagogical approach works for a setting directed at people with neurodiversity.
The same care shows up at the end, in how participants are guided to register for the next course, the leadership framework.
I just loved that.
What I would say to a skeptical colleague
I understand the reflex.
I have had it.
From the outside, this can look like a webinar with too many slides and not enough senior people talking.
But I came out of that hour having moved miles ahead in my understanding of what we are really doing, and what we are actually trying to do at TGLF.
Not because someone lectured me.
Because the structure did the work: the absence of ceremony, the discipline of listening, the local voices read out as evidence, the pace, careful planning and scripting to create room for improvisation, and the refusal to waste anyone’s attention.
If you have spent your career in meetings designed to demonstrate that you were in the room, this will feel strange.
That strangeness is the point.