Parliament | The Art of the Rumble
There's a particular kind of meeting we have grown to love at Hoot: the one where you walk in knowing you'll disagree, where the answers aren't predetermined, where someone's going to leave uncomfortable. We call these rumbles, and we schedule them deliberately.
The term comes from Brené Brown's work on vulnerability and leadership, though its roots trace back further—possibly to S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, where rival groups would set a time and place to fight it out. The scheduling matters. It's the difference between ambush and preparation, between defensiveness and intention.
In a rumble, you show up committed to getting it right over being right.
You expect to debate. You expect complexity. You don't expect anyone to capitulate or for consensus to emerge easily. What you do expect is that the truth—messy and multifaceted as it is—will get closer to the surface.
This is uncomfortable work, and it's even harder to do in today's fast-paced, transactional environment. We've all sat through the meetings where disagreement gets smoothed over, where the loudest voice wins, where everyone nods along to preserve harmony while privately planning to ignore the outcomes.
Those meetings produce objectives that gather dust.
Real strategy—the work of articulating who you are and where you're going—should feel difficult because it is difficult. You're not filling in a template.
You're excavating truth from layers of assumption, market pressure, and founder mythology. You're reconciling the company you said you'd build with the company you've actually built.
You're choosing between equally valid paths forward, knowing that choosing one means closing another.
This kind of thinking can't happen in a conference room between Slack notifications, with people half-present on Zoom tiles. It requires dedicated time, physical presence, and an environment designed for depth rather than distraction. It requires rumbling.
Which is why we built The Bird House.
The decision to invest in a 1,300-square-foot purpose-built facility for multi-day strategic work wasn't about having a nice space to show clients. It was a bet that the future of transformational work is increasingly in-person, even as the rest of the world defaults to remote. It was recognition that if you're going to ask founders to do genuinely hard thinking—to rumble through their brand identity, their cultural values, their marketing strategy—you need to create the conditions for that work to actually happen.
Setting the stage for disagreement changes everything. When you name upfront that this will be challenging, that we'll debate, that discomfort is part of the process, people relax. The performance of certainty drops away. Real questions emerge. The work gets better.
The rumble format has become so central to how we work that it's shaped our entire business model. Not every branding agency builds a workshop house.
But if you believe that brand definition is genuinely complex, intellectually demanding work, not a logo exercise, then you have to create the space for that complexity to breathe.
Here's what we've learned: the hard conversations are the ones worth scheduling.
The work that feels difficult is the work that matters. And if you're going to rumble, you might as well do it somewhere designed for the fight.
The Bird House is our answer to that belief.
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