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

by Priya Parker

We spend our lives gathering—first in our families, then in neighborhoods and playgroups, schools and churches, and then in meetings, weddings, town halls, conferences, birthday parties, product launches, board meetings, class and family reunions, dinner parties, trade fairs, and funerals. And we spend much of that time in uninspiring, underwhelming moments that fail to capture us, change us in any way, or connect us to one another.

Zoom out: If she doesn’t zoom out, a chemistry teacher might tell herself that her purpose is to teach chemistry. While teaching is a noble undertaking, this definition does not give her much guidance on how to actually design her classroom experience. If, instead, she decides that her purpose is to give the young a lifelong relationship to the organic world, new possibilities emerge. The first step to a more scintillating classroom begins with that zooming out. Drill, baby, drill: Take the reasons you think you are gathering—because it’s our departmental Monday-morning meeting; because it’s a family tradition to barbecue at the lake—and keep drilling below them. Ask why you’re doing it. Every time you get to another, deeper reason, ask why again. Keep asking why until you hit a belief or value.

Ask not what your country can do for your gathering, but what your gathering can do for your country: I often press my clients and friends to think about what larger needs in the world their gathering might address.

Reverse engineer an outcome: Think of what you want to be different because you gathered, and work backward from that outcome.

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

As part of her job, Woon teaches a course for graduate students who aspire to become museum educators. It takes place in a classroom within the museum. On the first day of class, at 3 p.m. sharp, the classroom door opens. In the middle of the room is a huge mess of white chairs, all tangled together—a giant highway pileup of seating. The students pause, confused. They look around at one another and then at Woon. Their teacher watches quietly, giving away nothing. Eventually the students begin talking to one another. Little by little, their confidence growing, their interactions becoming more amusing by the minute, they untangle the chairs and arrange them. As they do so, each student must decide what to do with his or her chair without instructions: Where should I put my chair? How close should the chair be to someone else’s? Are we forming rows? A circle? If someone is not going along with the group shape, what should we do? This is what I mean when I say that gathering well doesn’t require money or fish knives. It doesn’t require a fancy venue. The classroom that Woon uses is utterly ordinary—an unremarkable space in a building, and a city, full of remarkable spaces. By doing one simple thing—setting up the chairs in that crazy tangle—Woon makes the place an embodiment of her purpose. What was that purpose? To teach these future museum educators that nothing in a museum is sacred—not even a pile of chairs that at MoMA could have been confused for a work of art. And to te...

If someone asks Perel a question about cheating or divorce or boredom, before answering it, she’ll look out at the audience and ask, “How many of you can relate to this question?” Or, “Who also wonders about this?” In that simple act, she transforms a one-to-many speech into a collective experience.

within the first five minutes of my opening I always say something like this: “I want you to imagine you’re building a spiderweb together. That each of you has strings coming out of your wrists that connect with the other thirty-two people here. We can only go as deep as the weakest thread will allow. Now, none of you are the weakest link.” Everyone usually laughs nervously at that part. “No one’s going to be voted off the island. But the weakest thread between two of you is what’s going to determine how deep we can go together.” I make this explicit, and I remind them of it during their breaks and at other moments of transition. Build a web, build a web, build a web. Because it’s not about their connection to me.

He takes a ball of string and throws it to a student, saying something nice to her. And then the child continues the practice, holding her part of the string and throwing the ball to another student and saying another nice thing, and so on, until the group has built a spiderweb of string. “If I tug my end of the web, everyone else feels it move, and that’s what a community is,” Barrett tells them. “All of your choices, all of your actions, large or small, will affect everybody else.”

Ida Benedetto who creates secret, underground gatherings that help guests safely take risks they wouldn’t normally take. Benedetto and her partner N. D. Austin are self-described “transgression consultants” and cofounders of a design practice called Sextantworks. They were behind gatherings like the Night Heron, a New York speakeasy housed illegally in a water tower. Benedetto and Austin are also the creators of a fake conference called the Timothy Convention, an annual, flash-mob-like gathering at the iconic Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York. At this “convention,” one hundred strangers dressed in black tie descend on the hotel and have to complete “harmless transgressive acts,” such as “Deliver room service to a hotel guest,” “Wear a robe in an unlikely place,” “Acquire Waldorf cutlery for your entire team,” “Collect two business cards from hotel guests,” and take a “team photo in the maid’s closet.” Benedetto and Austin have been described as “New York’s wildest underground event planners,” and their events as nights “you’ll never forget.”