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

by Priya Parker

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 invited, no one is invited—in the sense of being truly held by the group. By closing the door, you create the room.

Wendy Woon runs the department of education at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her job is to help make a world-famous museum more accessible to the public. It is a challenging job in any museum, because the power in museums tends to lie with the curators. Sometimes it can seem that museums are being run for them and not merely by them. The goal of making a museum speak to ordinary people is often in tension with the curators’ desire for exhibits that win them esteem among their fellow curators and the larger art world. The job of someone like Woon is to constantly provide a counterweight to that desire—to be the voice within the museum for questioning how art is presented and for ensuring that it’s still accessible and connects to people’s lives and experiences. Even if that means pushing back against the curators. Woon’s role is to remind people that what curators may consider sacred isn’t sacred—that a museum should adapt itself to speak to people.

gathering. As the chair of the board, he introduced a new rule: Board members could only ask questions that were not asking for more information—that were building on what information there already was. For example, “What is blocking us from getting this done?” or “Who has a problem with this?” or “What would it take to come to agreement on this issue?” As opposed to “Can you give me last year’s Q4 numbers?”

Because so much gathering advice comes from experts in food and decor rather than from facilitators, that advice almost invariably focuses on preparing things instead of preparing people. This advice makes the pregame window about physical setup rather than human initiation, about the gathering space and not what it holds: people.

In this vision, people are to be corralled, not prepared. Compare this lack of human preparation to the kind of preparation that Stewart suggests for things: “1 Day Before: Wash and prepare salad greens and other vegetables, and blanch vegetables for crudités (keep these wrapped in paper towels). Refrigerate all separately, in airtight containers.” This encapsulates the prevailing approach to gathering that I hope to change: fussing over the crudités and hoping for the best when it comes to the human beings. We deserve better.

permission for the participants and preparing her guests for the dialogue. She knew how vital it was that her interlocutors trust her. You “need from the beginning to reinforce your interlocutors’ belief that you will never bullshit them; you will never promise what you cannot deliver; that you will always be straightforward with them; that there are no hidden agendas,” she told me. This is what she is getting at when she says that 90 percent of the gathering’s success is set in motion before the actual convening. She calls it “the pre-dialogue dialogue phase.”

The bigger the ask—say, if you’re having people travel long distances to attend your gathering—the more care, attention, and detail should be put into the pregame phase. You need to attend to your guests in this pregame window in proportion to the risk and effort you are demanding of them.

Another lesson is that the pregame should sow in guests any special behaviors you want to blossom right at the outset. If you are planning a corporate brainstorming session and you’re going to be counting on your employees’ creativity, think about how you might prime them to be bold and imaginative from the beginning. Perhaps by sending them an article on unleashing your wildest ideas a few days beforehand. If, for example, you are planning a session on mentorship in your firm, and you need people to show up with their guards down, send an email out ahead of time that includes real, heartfelt testimonials from three senior leaders sharing personal, specific examples of the transformative power that a mentor had on them. In Slim’s case, she knew she was going to need her participants to behave with an almost irrational degree of trust.

In my own work with organizations, I almost always send out a digital “workbook” to participants to fill out and return to me ahead of the gathering. I design each workbook afresh depending on the purpose of the gathering and what I hope to get guests to think about in advance.

To get the group to be vulnerable, he said, we facilitators needed to share an even more personal story than we expected our clients to. We would set the depth of the group by whatever level we were willing to go to; however much we shared, they would share a little less. We had to become, in effect, participants.

When I work with clients, they often tell me they want to do a “town hall” to air opinions and get people to speak their truth. Then the day comes, and if I haven’t managed to wrest control over the event, the town hall is used to recirculate the old platitudes, to reassure those in charge about the wisdom of their rule, to keep everything exactly as it is. When I challenge the organizers, they often tell me that it’s too risky to introduce controversy in a group setting.

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.

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.

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?”