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

by Priya Parker

At each 15 Toasts since, I almost always say something like “Tell us something that would surprise us,” or “Leave your successes at the door,” or “There’s no need to slip in an accomplishment.” I have also found that this leaving of things at the door is easier when people are seen for their virtues. People are still people, and, particularly in professional contexts, no one wants to look weak. But I have discovered that if I, the host, acknowledge and broadcast their strength, as individuals and collectively well in advance, it relieves some of the pressure people feel to flex during the event itself. I say something up front like “You’re all here because you’re remarkable.” I acknowledge their remarkableness and then I add, “That said, we don’t want to hear about your résumé or how great you are. We already know that.”

It can help you use gatherings to answer big questions: what you want to do, what you stand for, who you are.

Virtually every conference or industry gathering I have attended features panels, and virtually every panel I have ever seen is dull. The people who pick the panel topics pick the blandest ideas they can find—something about collaboration or partnership, prosperity or building bridges, new horizons or growth. In this they follow the Freemasons’ mantra of avoiding what would “blast our Harmony.” When they select moderators, they seem to pick people trained in the Emily Post tradition of smoothing things over and preventing the eruption of “unpleasantnesses.” When was the last time you heard a panel moderator ask a tough question instead of tossing softballs? When was the last time you saw a couple of panelists truly argue about something worth arguing about?

What, you might ask, is “good controversy”? Good controversy is the kind of contention that helps people look more closely at what they care about, when there is danger but also real benefit in doing so. To embrace good controversy is to embrace the idea that harmony is not necessarily the highest, and certainly not the only, value in a gathering. Good controversy helps us re-examine what we hold dear: our values, priorities, nonnegotiables. Good controversy is generative rather than preservationist. It leads to something better than the status quo. It helps communities move forward in their thinking. It helps us grow. Good controversy can be messy in the midst of the brawling. But when it works, it is clarifying and cleansing—and a forceful antidote to bullshit.

Because, almost by definition, controversy arises from what people care enough about to argue over, most gatherings are marred either by unhealthy peace or by unhealthy heat. Either no one is really saying anything that they actually think, or you end up with what I call the “Thanksgiving problem”: a total free-for-all of pent-up grievances that often brings out tears and a screaming match, culminating in your cousin’s announcement that he will be attending his “Friendsgiving” back home from now on. Good controversy is much more likely to happen when it is invited in but carefully structured.

One way to achieve that structuring at your gathering is to do what we did with the cage match: We moved the controversy from implicit to explicit by ritualizing it. We created a temporary alternative world within the larger gathering, a wrestling match that allowed the controversy to be litigated in a way that was honest and aired feelings without being bridge-burning. We borrowed from an earlier chapter’s idea of pop-up rules, and made the whole thing playful. The purpose of a cage match is, after all, to fight. If there was no way they would debate within the context and norms of their everyday collegiality, we had to change that context and those norms temporarily. To do that safely, we turned to ritual.

On the one hand, they figured it might be better to pretend everything is fine to keep the coalition together. On the other hand, they hadn’t been particularly successful in achieving their overall mission, and maybe it was time to let things hang out.

Issues have heat when they affect or threaten people’s fears, needs, and sense of self. And when they poke at a source of power. Touching on these elements with care can produce transformative gatherings, because you can dig below the typical conversation into the bedrock of values.

To address these areas of heat, you need to know where they are. Thus you make a heat map. You can do this by asking yourself (and others) the following questions: What are people avoiding that they don’t think they’re avoiding? What are the sacred cows here? What goes unsaid? What are we trying to protect? And why?

By making this transition, I introduced the next level of risk into the process. The workbook included prompts about participants’ personal history, to get them to connect back to their own core values: “Tell me about a moment in your early life that deeply influenced you and, in some way perhaps, led you to the work you do today.” But the majority of the questions encouraged the leaders to speak about what wasn’t working: “If you were to say something that was politically incorrect, or taboo, about this process or project, what would it be?” It asked: “What do you think is the most needed conversation for this group to have now?”

We hosted a 15 Toasts dinner with the leaders and chose the theme of conflict. I wanted to normalize the word and show that there was some light in it. At first, people seemed confused by the theme, but before too long the toasts started rolling in. (A lot of people did not want to sing.) The toasts progressed through the night, and what they began to demonstrate was that there are all kinds of conflicts: within families and between friends, though the one that most resonated with people was of a different kind: inner conflict. A number of toasts exposed sides of these leaders that we hadn’t known before. That was a vital lesson. More important for the next day’s gathering, it was a reminder that they were complicated, multifaceted people who didn’t have everything worked out. And that good conflict could lead them somewhere new.

To do this, I began the day by setting ground rules. I asked the following questions: What do you need to feel safe here? What do you need from this group to be willing to take a risk in this conversation today?

In the same way, should you decide to bring some good controversy to your next gathering, you can benefit from asking yourself Benedetto’s questions: What is the gift in broaching this issue? And what is the risk? Is it worth it? And can we handle it with care?

We closed without closing. We didn’t take stock of what they had absorbed over the two days. We didn’t gauge their buy-in. We didn’t talk about how they would carry what we had done together into their daily lives—for example, by retraining their researchers in the new approach. Most basically, though, we allowed the clock—and only the clock—to demarcate our ending. In one of the two most vital moments in any gathering, we offered only a gaping void. Even when our guests seemed to challenge this void, begging with their facial expressions for more, we refused to close meaningfully.

Too many of our gatherings don’t end. They simply stop.

As with the operas Muyanga listens to, you, too, have hopefully created a temporary alternative world in your gathering, and it is your job to help your guests close that world, decide what of the experience they want to carry with them, and reenter all that from which they came.

Look a little closer. In so many gatherings, somewhere during the inevitable wind-down, there comes a moment when the host or the guests or some combination make a faint, usually futile bid to prolong it. We often take these bids to be charming, and sometimes indeed they are. But they are also symptoms of gatherings that lack a clear closing. We force wedding bands to play that One Last Song three different times, so that the third- or fourth-to-last song has the kaboom of a send-off and the remaining songs have the quality of a balloon slowly letting out its air. We keep dinner guests at our table for as long as the person who least wants to go home wishes to stay, even if one or two people have started to fall asleep. We create WhatsApp chat groups after conferences, promising to “keep the spirit alive.” We promise to sustain what is better surrendered.

Accepting the impermanence of a gathering is part of the art. When we vaguely try to extend our gatherings, we are not only living in denial, we are also depriving our gathering of the kind of closing that gives it the chance of enduring in people’s hearts.

They encourage people to turn toward the fact of the death rather than away from it. And they show people that they can, in fact, handle death.

Students often approach the teachers seeking a prolonging. “Almost every group, every time, during the last week, there has been a group discussion asking me if we can extend the group by two weeks. And I always say, ‘No, it’s done. You signed up for nine months; it’s nine months.’ But every group does it,” Koshin said. The monks never grant these requests “because life is not about extensions. It’s finite. There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. And that’s the same in a group. Once you’ve gone through that process, what are we doing now? We’re rehashing. What is it in you that doesn’t want this group to end?” he asked.

Understanding this tendency in students, Koshin and Chodo try to prepare them for the end of their gathering as a class. Midway through their nine months together, they talk to the students about their “mid-life” as a group. “Look around again, see how it feels, how your relationships have changed,” they might say. “We’re at our mid-life, and in four and a half months this group will die. So what do you need to do in the next four months in these relationships? What are your patterns of leaving? What are your habits?” They use the group itself and the experience of being part of a group to help them look at their own “habits of how they end things.” Why do they do this? “Because everything ends,” Chodo said. “There’s nothing that doesn’t end. On some level, what we do in our work is hold that truth. This is going to end, whether you like it or not. Whether it’s meeting your ninety-eight-year-old grandma in this hospice bed; whether it’s a week long or a day long, it’s going to end. No question. We don’t hold magical thinking for anyone,” he says.

last calls would make our dinner parties and conferences and work meetings better, why don’t we issue them? One reason is that, in a bar, the closing time is an unavoidable legal reality that applies equally. In other gatherings, people are having different experiences side by side, and gatherers are often reluctant to impose a universal closing.

So ask yourself: What is your equivalent of the twenty-people-left-on-the-dance-floor moment? When, by transitioning into that last call, are you still in charge of events instead of being carried by them? When are you still quitting while you are ahead? When are you allowing things to go on long enough to feel satisfied with the event—but not so long as to feel the energy draining from the room? And who should make this decision to issue the last call?

A strong closing has two phases, corresponding to two distinct needs among your guests: looking inward and turning outward. Looking inward is about taking a moment to understand, remember, acknowledge, and reflect on what just transpired—and to bond as a group one last time. Turning outward is about preparing to part from one another and retake your place in the world.

Many, though not all, gatherings will benefit from a pause to reflect on what happened here. A gathering is a moment of time that has the potential to alter many other moments of time. And for it to have the best chance of doing so, engaging in some meaning-making at the end is crucial. What transpired here? And why does that matter? Whether or not a gathering creates space for meaning-making, it is something that individual guests will do on their own. What did I think of that? How am I going to talk about it with others? A great gatherer doesn’t necessarily leave this process to unfold only within individuals. Rather, the gatherer might find a way of guiding guests toward some kind of collective exercise of stock-taking.

Looking back, though, is just one aspect of turning inward. Another is connecting the tribe one last time. To have an affirming moment of recalling not what we did here but who we were here.

Over the four and a half days of the festival, a certain intimacy forms. That is because people show up as families, and because every family member is treated as a contributor to the program, and because people are encouraged to show different sides of themselves.

This second phase is defined by the question: What of this world do I want to bring back to my other worlds?

I am not suggesting that you cannot thank people. I simply mean that you shouldn’t thank them as the last thing you do when gathering. Here’s a simple solution: do it as the secondto-last thing.