Remembering Gail Taylor

December 22, 2025
by Eugene Eric Kim

I’ve now officially been in the collaboration business for 23 years. Thinking out loud has been an important ethic from day one, and I managed to blog regularly about my work for the first 18 of these years. Then the pandemic happened, and I essentially took a four year break from thinking out loud. I was still working and learning and wondering. I just stopped writing. It wasn’t a conscious decision. I was just exhausted.

Earlier this year, I felt ready to write again. The world had changed dramatically, I had grown a lot, and I had learned things I wanted to share more broadly. But simply picking up where I had left off didn’t seem right. Given the social mission of my work, I didn’t feel like I could just suddenly appear after four years and share an observation about organizational power dynamics that I had observed in a client project without first saying something about the state of the world.

Several months later, I published “Good Energy,” the longest and most personal piece I had ever published on a professional space. I followed it last month with “Foraging for Ginseng,” another intensely personal essay. I’m almost ready to return to my regularly scheduled programming, but there’s one more personal professional piece I need to share.

On November 5, 2023, my friend and mentor, Gail Taylor, passed away. She was 83 years old, still playing, still working literally until the very end.

Gail and her husband, Matt, were instrumental in my growth as a practitioner. I first got to work with her in 2003, just as I was embarking on my first professional attempt at helping folks collaborate more effectively together. I was in my late 20s, and even though my resume didn’t reflect it, I felt irrationally qualified to do this work. In particular, I was steeped in the wonders of open source software development and early wiki communities, where people all over the world would come together and build sophisticated, complex systems together without ever having met in person. I had first-hand knowledge of the power and beauty of large-scale, open, participatory processes in largely virtual spaces, and I wanted to apply what I had learned to other groups.

What I was missing was experience, especially with large, in-person groups. At some level, this translated into designing and facilitating good meetings, especially large ones, but that was not my primary interest. I cared about systems as a whole. Collaboration doesn’t just happen in meetings.

Thanks to Gail and Matt, I didn’t have to figure this out on my own. Gail had just left MG Taylor, the company she and Matt had founded 20 years earlier. They were best known for their DesignShops, three-day, immersive gatherings where large groups could come together and tackle hard stuff. They had built large environments with their own furniture designed to maximize exploration, serendipity, alignment, and joy. They were already doing amazing work, but Gail wanted more. She wanted to spend more time experimenting and working with different kinds of groups, not just large companies.

Gail had the gentle, loving ferocity of the best kindergarten teacher you ever had. Not surprisingly, that’s how she got her start — teaching kids. She had a curiosity for learning and a passion for play that I think all children (and adults) relate and respond to, and she had an egalitarian energy that made you feel like she was your partner, not your authority, even when she was standing in front of the room. She also had a quiet power and presence that made you sit up at attention when it was time to get to work.

Gail completely shifted my view of what facilitation was. She helped me realize that facilitation was a leadership practice, not a position, and that everyone in the system played that role, even if you were the “official” facilitator in the moment. Recognizing your role as part of the system (as opposed to being outside of it) not only made you more effective as a facilitator, it made it less stressful, because it got you out of the “heroic leader” mindset. The whole system was holding the space, not just you.

Moreover, working with Gail made me see my role more as a systems designer than as a facilitator. You had way more power to shift the dynamics of a group by changing the physical environment — from how you arranged the chairs to the light and design of the space itself — or by carefully designing process than you did by just being a good facilitator. This didn’t just apply to meetings, it applied to every aspect of work.

All of this came intuitively to Gail. She loved teaching kindergarteners, but she thought that traditional institutions and pedagogy were at odds with their purpose of creating great learning environments for children. She continued to experiment, ultimately creating her own educational institution in Kansas City with her own approaches to learning, complete with custom furniture made of tri-wall cardboard. (If you’ve ever experienced any of my meetings with cardboard boxes, that trick came directly from Gail.)

As she saw what worked with kids, she wondered why the same principles couldn’t work with adults. That question led to her meeting Matt, and as they continued to learn together, they started pulling out principles of good system design. The more they played, the more people started recognizing their success, which gave them bigger and more complex opportunities to play. That included training and building a whole community of practitioners and an ecosystem in which they could thrive. They literally created job titles and descriptions that had never existed before and taught clients to seek folks to fill these roles, which helped sustain and grow the community.

While I was inspired by this community and consider many of its members close friends and colleagues, I never felt like I quite fit into this group as a whole. I felt like some of the practitioners in that community didn’t quite understand Gail and Matt’s core principles, and I was hungry to experiment and build on my own ideas and experiences. Gail not only understood this about me, she embraced and encouraged me, and she and Matt made me feel like I was part of the family anyway.

I learned many tangible things from Gail over the years, but the biggest impact she had on me was normalizing, “Why not?” I’m not afraid of following my instincts or my curiosity, to try things that might be outside of a group’s comfort level. I’m not afraid, because Gail was not afraid. Because I experienced this with her so early in my career, that became my norm. It took me many years before realizing what a huge gift that was.

I am so, so grateful for everything I learned from her, but more than anything, I am grateful for her guidance and her friendship. Spending a few days with her up in her then-home off the Mendocino Coast was a guaranteed salve when I was struggling or stuck. Here’s a little video I took of her on one of our walks back in 2011. The content of the conversation is somewhat representative of what we often discussed, but the vibe — the calm, the comfort, the wisdom — perfectly captures what it was like for me to be around Gail.

I last saw Gail in 2018. I was coming off an intense three-year project that had ended poorly, and I badly needed solace and wisdom. As always, time with them was both healing and inspiring. A few years later, they decided to move back to Kansas City. Other than exchanging some emails, I never got a chance to see Gail again, a fact that continues to pain me.

Gail was a prolific journaler. At her memorial in Kansas City last year, her son, Todd Johnston (not surprisingly another great practitioner), read this excerpt from one of her recent journals.

It was an exploration of her multifaceted identity, and it ended with the following statement:

Today I claim my self as a seeder… planting seed through all of my conversations — seeds that will grow and become strong over time. Oak trees.

I feel lucky to be one of her trees, still developing, but with a solid root system.

After the memorial, I rescued a small vase with three frogs from her. Todd explained that she used to like to place her animal-laden tchotchkes close to each other so that they could have conversations with each other. The vase now sits on my desk. I don’t facilitate meetings as much as I used to, but when I do, I always bring the vase with me, sometimes garnished with something from my garden, so that a little piece of her is there too, helping me and everyone else hold the space.