The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

by Priya Parker

But here is what the skilled gatherer must know: in trying not to offend, you fail to protect the gathering itself and the people in it. I have learned that far too often in the name of inclusion and generosity—two values I care about deeply—we fail to draw boundaries about who belongs and why.

“If everyone is family, no one is family.” It is blood that makes a tribe, a border that makes a nation. The same is true of gatherings. So here is a corollary to his aunt’s saying: If everyone is invited, no one is invited—in the sense of being truly held by the group. By closing the door, you create the room.

As revealed in my workout group, conflict often unearths purpose. What we all knew was that the group had developed its rhythms and rituals and had created a certain magic.

When you exclude, the rubber of purpose hits the road.

When you’re hosting a gathering with others, as opposed to hosting on your own, you should spend time not only reflecting on the purpose of the gathering but then also, ideally, aligning on it with the other hosts. Why are we doing this? Whom should we invite? Why? To put it another way, thoughtful exclusion, in addition to being generous, can be defining. It can help with the important task of communicating to guests what a gathering is.

How to exclude well

So how, you might ask, do I exclude generously? This issue comes up a lot when I’m organizing large, complicated meetings for clients. These are some of the questions I ask them: Who not only fits but also helps fulfill the gathering’s purpose? Who threatens the purpose? Who, despite being irrelevant to the purpose, do you feel obliged to invite?

The crux of excluding thoughtfully and intentionally is mustering the courage to keep away your Bobs. It is to shift your perception so that you understand that people who aren’t fulfilling the purpose of your gathering are detracting from it, even if they do nothing to detract from it. This is because once they are actually in your presence, you (and other considerate guests) will want to welcome and include them, which takes time and attention away from what (and who) you’re actually there for. Particularly in smaller gatherings, every single person affects the dynamics of a group. Excluding well and purposefully is reframing who and what you are being generous to—your guests and your purpose.

Who was this gathering for first? The gathering was first for the forty leaders. If the organizers could get them to agree on a common vision, it would be a huge breakthrough for the movement. As the organizers teased out the purpose, they realized that part of the magic of the meeting would be to get these leaders to connect their various agendas to a larger cross-unifying theme. To do that, we would need to design a gathering where they meaningfully engaged with one another. In this case, we believed, bringing a close friend would keep that guest’s attention at least somewhat focused on her friend, as well as provide a safety blanket to not engage as deeply as she might otherwise. She was told no. (She accepted the invitation anyway.)

Good exclusion activates diversity

Isn’t exclusion, however thoughtful or intentional, the enemy of diversity?

But diversity is a potentiality that needs to be activated. It can be used or it can just be there.

When I talk about generous exclusion, I am speaking of ways of bounding a gathering that allow the diversity in it to be heightened and sharpened, rather than diluted in a hodgepodge of people.

In any of those cases, the experiment would have been diluted. More openness would have meant weaker activation of the age differential the home was seeking to bring together. There was a power in the specific age and moment of life these students were in that inspired the residents.

Specificity in gathering doesn’t have to mean narrowing a group to the point of sameness. With certain types of gatherings, over-including can keep connections shallow because there are so many different lines through which people could possibly connect that it can become hard to meaningfully activate any of them. Excluding thoughtfully allows you to focus on a specific, underexplored relationship.

The matter of size

For every gathering purpose, there is a corresponding ideal size. There is no magic formula for the chemistry of what happens in a room; it’s not scientific. And yet the size of a gathering shapes what you will get out of people when you bring them together.

If you want a lively but inclusive conversation as a core part of your gathering, eight to twelve people is the number you should consider. Smaller than eight, the group can lack diversity in perspective; larger than twelve, it begins to be difficult to give everyone a chance to speak.

Groups of 6: Groups of this rough size are wonderfully conducive to intimacy, high levels of sharing, and discussion through storytelling.

Groups of 6 are, on the other hand, not ideal for diversity of viewpoints, and they cannot bear much dead weight. To make the gathering great, there’s more responsibility on each person.

Groups of 12 to 15: The next interesting number is around 12. Twelve is small enough to build trust and intimacy, and small enough for a single moderator, if there is one, formal or informal, to handle.

12 is large enough to offer a diversity of opinion and large enough that it allows for a certain quotient of mystery and intrigue, of constructive unfamiliarity.

I have found that 12, give or take, is the number beyond which many start-ups begin to have people problems as they grow. I sometimes refer to this as the “table moment,” when an organization’s members can no longer fit around one table.

the group of 30 or so has its own distinctive quality: that buzz, that crackle of energy, that sense of possibility that attaches to parties.

between 100 and 150 people. While they disagree on the precise number, they all agree that it’s the tier at which, as one organizer told me, “intimacy and trust is still palpable at the level of the whole group, and before it becomes an audience.”

This number, 150, also matches the number of stable friendships that the anthropologist Robin Dunbar says humans can maintain, which has come to be called Dunbar’s number.

PART TWO: WHERE A venue is a nudge

The choice of place is often made according to every consideration but purpose. The cost determines the venue. Or convenience. Or traffic. Or the fact that someone happened to raise her hand and offer her deck.

Venues come with scripts. We tend to follow rigid if unwritten scripts that we associate with specific locations. We tend to behave formally in courtrooms, boardrooms, and palaces. We bring out different sides of ourselves at the beach, the park, the nightclub.

To paraphrase and distort Winston Churchill, first you determine your venue, and then your venue determines which you gets to show up.

Embodiment You should, for starters, seek a setting that embodies the reason for your convening. When a place embodies an idea, it brings a person’s body and whole being into the experience, not only their minds.

I wanted to show my students that you must actually design a ‘space’ for exchange

The Château Principle, in its narrowest form, is this: Don’t host your meeting in a château if you don’t want to remind the French of their greatness and of the fact that they don’t need you after all. Every gathering with a vivid, particular purpose needs more of certain behaviors and less of others. If the purpose has something to do with bonding a group, you will want more listening behavior and less declaiming behavior.

What many hosts don’t realize is that the choice of venue is one of your most powerful levers over your guests’ behavior. A deft gatherer picks a place that elicits the behaviors she wants and plays down the behaviors she doesn’t.

People are affected by their environment, and you should host your gathering in a place and context that serves your purpose.

And a venue can and should do one further thing: displace people. Displacement is simply about breaking people out of their habits. It is about waking people up from the slumber of their own routines.

A dinner party is not supposed to take place in an ocean. Which is why Fermor went there. And which is why you should think about where your next gathering ought not take place, and hold it there.

Perimeter, area, and density The above pointers should help you choose your overall environment.

Metaphorical doors aren’t the only doors that need closing in a purposeful gathering. The artful gatherer is also mindful of physical doors. Gatherings need perimeters. A space for a gathering works best when it is contained.

“make sure the energy isn’t leaking out.”

A contained space for a gathering allows people to relax, and it helps create the alternative world that a gathering can, at its best, achieve.

“If you are on a picnic blanket, you will hang out around your picnic blanket. It’s not because there’s a fence around it; it’s because your picnic blanket is your mental construct. It’s not about sitting on a blanket versus sitting on the grass; it’s about claiming that mental space and making it yours and comfortable and safe.”

Studies show that simply switching rooms for different parts of an evening’s experience will help people remember different moments better.

The size of a gathering’s space should serve your purpose.

Examples: Square Feet Per Guest Sophisticated Lively Hot Dinner party 20 sq. ft. 15 sq. ft. N/A Cocktail party 12 sq. ft. 10 sq. ft. 8 sq. ft. Into the night/dance party 8 sq. ft. 6 sq. ft. 5 sq. ft.

He suggests dividing the “square feet of your party space by the number to get your target number of guests.”

Mac says one of the reasons party guests often end up gravitating to the kitchen is that people instinctively seek out smaller spaces as the group dwindles in order to sustain the level of the density.

“CHILL” IS SELFISHNESS DISGUISED AS KINDNESS

Many people who go to the serious trouble of hosting aspire to host as minimally as possible. But who wants to sail on a skipperless ship?

After it was planned, one of the state leaders couldn’t make the dinner but wanted to attend the meeting the next day. I strongly urged that the organizers say no. The dinner wasn’t an aside; it was a core part of the design of the gathering. The full group would have bonded, creating the potential for an entirely different, more generative dynamic for the meeting. Then one person who didn’t go through that process would show up a day late and affect the entire group by her unchanged mindset. The four organizers, averse to conflict and worried about upsetting an important leader, resisted my advice. They wanted to let the state leader decide. Finally, the senior woman in charge listened to me and told the state leader: You are welcome at both parts of the gathering or neither part. She attended neither. After the dinner, seeing the shift that had occurred in the group through the meaningful personal conversation that evening, the organizers understood why it would have then been disruptive