Really thoughtful comments from everyone. I appreciate Greg reframing this point to clarify that while the caller may not always be at fault, the caller always must take responsibility. Hear hear. Two further points: 1) Context does matter. Most gigs have few enough dancers that callers can intervene vocally or physically when problems occur on the dance floor. And careful advance planning can pre-empt many problems. But if a minor breakdown occurs in a hall of 500 dancers, as in my earlier example, I'd argue that not only should the caller consider not intervening, but that this minor breakdown is a sign of success, not failure. Why success? For one thing, having only minor breakdowns in a hall with that many dancers indicates that overall, the caller has exercised effective programming, set management, and calling techniques; otherwise, major rather than minor breakdowns would have ensued. Second, the caller has the maturity and confidence NOT to intervene upon seeing every individual breakdown on the floor, which at best would be distracting to the majority of the dancers and at worst would be impossible. Evaluating when intervention is merited is itself a caller skill. 2) Lewis used the metaphor of conducting an orchestra to show how the caller is responsible for meshing everything together from the helm. This metaphor is accurate in the sense that callers, like conductors, do "conduct" all parties at the dance into a coherent whole. But it's also important to recognize the limitations of the metaphor: unlike conductors, callers exercise limited control over who is in their "orchestra." Generally, anyone in the orchestra has reached a certain level of mastery and has been individually selected to be there. In contrast, as Dan Pearl's post illustrated, callers are at the mercy of whoever shows up to dance, and sometimes those dancers present challenges beyond the callers' ability to efficiently remediate. Even the most talented conductors would be severely challenged if forced to conduct an orchestra formed moments earlier and made up of people who have never before touched an instrument. Jeremy _________________________________________________________________ The New Busy think 9 to 5 is a cute idea. Combine multiple calendars with Hotmail. http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?tile=multicalendar&ocid=…