Episode 19 - Raising the Temperature on Leadership: The Power of Third Spaces With Therme’s Adam Tanaka

Jun 2

The design of a physical space – its scale, its seating geometry, its relationship to technology – does more to shape human connection than most leaders realize, and more than most team-building budgets reflect. Adam Tanaka, COO of Therme Group US and PhD sociologist, argues that in a world increasingly mediated by screens and AI, the premium on analog, embodied experiences is approaching an inflection point. His case: wellness is no longer a luxury amenity, it's social infrastructure. And leaders who understand that have a meaningful advantage.

Why are third places disappearing and should leaders do something about it?

Loneliness now carries roughly the same mortality risk as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The share of American men with six or more close friends fell from 55% in 1990 to 27% in 2021. And people under 30 are now lonelier than people over 65; 29% of young adults report feeling lonely most or all of the time, compared to just 8% of seniors.

These aren't just public health statistics. They're a description of the workforce most leaders are currently trying to engage, retain, and inspire.

Adam Tanaka, COO of Therme Group US, connects these numbers to a structural problem: the disappearance of third places. Not home, not work, they’re the in-between spaces where people historically built the informal bonds that made both home and work more bearable. Think cafés, bathhouses, parks, community centers. Sociologist Eric Klinenberg calls these spaces "social infrastructure."

“Especially in today's very digital world, having analog experiences where you don't have technology mediating your relationship with people is increasingly rare. As a result, people are increasingly starved and desperate for it.”

– Adam Tanaka, COO of Therme Group US

His argument isn't that leaders need to build saunas, specifically. It's that we need to take seriously what the sauna represents: a space where bodies are activated, devices are absent, and the typical social armor and hierarchy of the office washes away – turns out it’s hard to establish authority in a felt hat and a bathrobe.

How do you design a physical space that actually creates connection?

This is where Adam does get specific, and where his sociology of culture PhD earns its keep.

Most spaces designed for human connection fail not because of bad intentions but because of bad geometry. The seating configuration of a room, the scale of the group it holds, the presence or absence of ambient stimulation are not just aesthetic choices. They are decisions that impact what kind of conversation is possible. Bluntly put: the conference room with the long rectangular table and the flickering overhead light feels like an interrogation room – and who wants to make connections there?

The primary lesson Adam has learned from years of running bathhouses and sauna festivals is the dinner party rule of six: when a group is more than six people, conversation reliably fragments into sub-conversations. Under six, something different becomes possible. People talk to strangers. Silences become comfortable rather than awkward. They become, if only briefly, a group.

“It tends to be the smaller saunas – four-seaters, six-seaters, eight-seaters – where you see the social magic happening. In a big city like New York, where people feel disconnected from people around them, having a space with the orientation of a hearth or a dinner table immediately makes you want to talk to people.”

– Adam Tanaka

The design principles translate directly. The offsite that puts 40 people in a hotel ballroom is not a connection-building exercise. It's a performance. The dinner with six people, the small-group walk, the meeting where devices stay outside…these are the configurations that actually produce the thing everyone claims to be optimizing for.

There's also the body chemistry argument. Contrast therapy – the combination of heat and cold – drives endorphins and lowers serotonin in ways that reduce social inhibition. The sauna and the cold plunge do, neurochemically, some of what a round of drinks used to do, without the next morning's consequences.

Saunas: all of the social lubrication, none of the regrettable Slack messages.

How should leaders create space for creative risk-taking?

Therme US organized a festival in Washington DC where they projected murals from local artists onto a translucent sauna, so that as guests bathed, the neighborhood's art washed over them. The idea was beautiful, but for Adam, the execution was a B+/A-. Some ambient light got in the way. Not all guests understood what the animation was communicating. Still, the muralists themselves, bathing in their own work, had an experience that was moving and surreal (which genuinely sounds like one of the more poetic things to ever happen at a business event).

“You have to be willing for things not to work. The only way to push the box is to do things that haven't been done before, and there's a chance that they might not work. You often learn more from the things that don't work than from the things that do.”

– Adam Tanaka

What makes that possible organizationally is a formula Adam returns to repeatedly: psychological safety plus a clear North Star. Psychological safety without direction produces scattered experiments that feel purposeless. Direction without psychological safety produces compliance without creativity. The combination allows everyone to speak up about what's working and what isn't, and grow from there.

There's one more element: the leader has to actually use the thing they're building. Adam and his colleague Robbie Hammond – one of the founders of The High Line in NYC – are in bathing suits almost all the time at their festivals, Adam says. Not for optics, but because they genuinely love it, and there is no substitute for understanding an experience from the inside.

“If you're creating experiences for people, you also have to experience them. If you're just creating them and then sitting in an office watching video footage, that's not the way to do it.”

– Adam Tanaka

What to do this week:

Look at the next gathering you're planning, whether a meeting, an offsite, or a team dinner, and apply the dinner party rule of six. If the group is larger than six, break it into smaller configurations for at least part of the time, and be intentional about the seating geometry. Benches facing each other, a round table, a walk. Something that creates the physical conditions for the kind of conversation you actually want to have, rather than the performative kind that a hotel ballroom or a conference call naturally produces.

Then, before the event, ask yourself: am I going to experience this the way my team does? If the honest answer is no, change something.

Related Episodes

– What Leaders Can Learn From Children's Play with Ginny McCormick

– Building the High Line and Beyond with Robbie Hammond

– Meditation for Busy Leaders with Michael Miller