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

by Priya Parker

As much as our gatherings disappoint us, though, we tend to keep gathering in the same tired ways. Most of us remain on autopilot when we bring people together, following stale formulas, hoping that the chemistry of a good meeting, conference, or party will somehow take care of itself, that thrilling results will magically emerge from the usual staid inputs. It is almost always a vain hope. When we do seek out gathering advice, we almost always turn to those who are focused on the mechanics of gathering: chefs, etiquette experts, floral artists, event planners. By doing so, we inadvertently shrink a human challenge down to a logistical one. We reduce the question of what to do with people to a question of what to do about things: PowerPoints, invitations, AV equipment, cutlery, refreshments. We are tempted to focus on the “stuff” of gatherings because we believe those are the only details we can control. I believe that’s both shortsighted and a misunderstanding about what actually makes a group connect and a gathering matter.

A facilitator is someone trained in the skill of shaping group dynamics and collective conversations. My job is to put the right people in a room and help them to collectively think, dream, argue, heal, envision, trust, and connect for a specific larger purpose. My lens on gathering—and the lens I want to share with you—places people and what happens between them at the center of every coming together.

I believe that everyone has the ability to gather well. You don’t have to be an extrovert. In fact, some of the best gatherers I know suffer from social anxiety. You don’t need to be a boss or a manager. You don’t need a fancy house. The art of gathering, fortunately, doesn’t rest on your charisma or the quality of your jokes. (I would be in trouble if it did.) Gatherings crackle and flourish when real thought goes into them, when (often invisible) structure is baked into them, and when a host has the curiosity, willingness, and generosity of spirit to try. Let’s begin.

The art of gathering begins with purpose: When should we gather? And why?

If I were to ask you (or your host) the purpose behind each of those gatherings, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear what I often do in my work: what you were supposed to do at the gathering. That networking night, you might tell me, was intended to help people in similar fields meet one another. The book club was organized to get us to read a book together. The volunteer training was arranged to train the volunteers. The purpose of your church’s small group was to allow church members to meet in smaller groups. This is the circular logic that guides the planning of many of our gatherings. “What’s wrong with that?” you might say. Isn’t the purpose of a networking night to network? Yes, to a point. But if that’s all it is, it will likely proceed like so many other networking nights: people wandering around and awkwardly passing out their business cards, practicing their elevator pitches on anyone with a pulse who’ll listen. It will likely not dazzle anyone. It may even make some guests feel awkward or insecure—and swear off future networking nights. When we don’t examine the deeper assumptions behind why we gather, we end up skipping too quickly to replicating old, staid formats of gathering. And we forgo the possibility of creating something memorable, even transformative. For example, in planning that networking night, what if the organizers paused to ask questions like these: Is our purpose for this gathering to help people find business partners or clients? Is the purpose t...

A traditional courtroom is adversarial. That is a design that derives from its own very worthy purpose: surfacing the truth by letting the parties haggle over it. But the organizers behind the Red Hook Community Justice Center were motivated by a different purpose. Would it be possible to use a courtroom to get everyone involved in a case—the accused, judges, lawyers, clerks, social workers, community members—to help improve behavior instead of merely punish

The Justice Center team has been able to do this because they figured out the larger purpose of why they wanted to gather: they wanted to solve the community’s problems—together. And they built a proceeding around that.

And it’s not just in public gatherings like courtrooms where we follow traditional formats of gathering unquestioningly. A category can masquerade as a purpose just as easily, if not more so, in our personal gatherings, particularly those that have become ritualized over time. Thanks to ancient traditions and modern Pinterest boards, it’s easy to overlook the step of choosing a vivid purpose for your personal gathering. Just as many of us assume we know what a trial is for, so we think we know what a birthday party is for, or what a wedding is for, or even what a dinner party is for. And so our personal gatherings tend not to serve the purposes that they could. When you skip asking yourself what the purpose of your birthday party is in this specific year, for where you are at this present moment in your life, for example, you forsake an opportunity for your gathering to be a source of growth, support, guidance, and inspiration tailored to the time in which you and others find yourselves. You squander a chance for your gathering to help, and not just amuse, you and others. Looking back, that’s what I did when I barred my husband from my baby shower.

My girlfriends offered to throw a shower for me. Like most people, we didn’t spend any time thinking about why we were having a baby shower. It wasn’t the first one we’d had in our circle of friends, and it wouldn’t be the last. It was almost becoming a routine—that great enemy of meaningful gathering. And so, with a date agreed on, my girlfriends went straight into logistics. I was excited. The problem was, my husband was, too. When I told him about the shower, he asked if he could come. I thought he was pulling my leg. Then I realized he was serious. He really wanted to attend my baby shower. At first I thought it made no sense. But in time I wondered if he had a point. I always value a circle of women in my life, but that wasn’t my highest need in this case. If I had thought about my gathering need more deeply at that moment, it probably would have been something about preparing both my husband and me for our new roles and the new chapter of our marriage as we welcomed our first child. I was becoming a mother. Anand was becoming a father. But we were also, as our doctor pointed out, transforming from a couple to a family. If I had been more thoughtful about it, I would have sought out a gathering that helped us make that weighty transition. But the structure and ritual of most baby showers—women-only, playing games, opening presents, making something crafty for the baby—were based on a different purpose. Traditional baby showers, I realized, were rituals for expecting m...

How do you arrive at a something worth gathering about? What are the ingredients for a sharp, bold, meaningful gathering purpose? Specificity is a crucial ingredient. The more focused and particular a gathering is, the more narrowly it frames itself and the more passion it arouses. I have discovered this anecdotally through my own work, but one of my clients has collected the data to back it up.

Uniqueness is another ingredient. How is this meeting or dinner or conference unique among the other meetings, dinners, and conferences you will host this year?

A good gathering purpose should also be disputable. If you say the purpose of your wedding is to celebrate love, you may bring a smile to people’s faces, but you aren’t really committing to anything, because who would dispute that purpose? Yes, a wedding should celebrate love. But an indisputable purpose like that doesn’t help you with the hard work of creating a meaningful gathering, because it won’t help you make decisions. When the inevitable tensions arise—guest list, venue, one night versus two—your purpose won’t be there to guide you. A disputable purpose, on the other hand, begins to be a decision filter. If you commit to a purpose of your wedding as a ceremonial repayment of your parents for all they have done for you as you set off to build your own family, that is disputable, and it will immediately help you make choices.

If I had applied these criteria to my own baby shower, here’s how it might have gone. If I had sought out a more specific purpose than celebrating the coming of a baby, I might have settled on the idea that my husband and I were setting out to do something for which there was little precedent: to parent equally. Because of the rarity of the practice until recently, there isn’t much wisdom or folklore about how to make it work. Instead, there are articles warning of how hard it is to “have it all” and studies informing us about how treacherous equality can be for intimacy. A more specific purpose suited to our needs might have helped us navigate these relatively uncharted waters. As for uniqueness, what might have made the shower different from many others’ showers was the equal participation of the father and other male guests in the ceremony. And it is disputable that a baby shower should include a man, and, what is more, be reorganized around his and potentially other men’s presence. Disputable in a good way. We wished to be witnessed in our community as a couple parenting in full and actual equality, not as a mom raising a child with a dad who “helps.” This is a disputable way of life, and a shower designed to help us get there would have had a disputable purpose.

When clients or friends are struggling to determine their gathering’s purpose, I tell them to move from the what to the why. Here are some strategies that help them do so. 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. Let’s look at how we might move from the what to the why of something as simple as a neighborhood potluck: Why are you having a neighborhood potluck? Because we like potlucks, and we have one every year. Why do you have one every year? Because we like to get our neighbors together at the beginning of the summer. Why do you like to get your neighbors together at the beginning of the summer? I guess, if you really think about it, it’s a way of marking the time and reconnecting after the hectic school year. Aha. And...

Sometimes asking why means helping people drill until they find an insight that will help them design the gathering itself. I was once advising a publicist who was hosting a book event. I asked what the purpose of the event was for her—what she wanted out of it. And she said something to the effect of “To make it the best book of the fall.” If we had stopped there, it wouldn’t have given her any guidance on how to design the book event. Nor, frankly, was it an inspiring reason to people outside that publisher. So we kept digging. Why do you think this book deserves to be the best book of the fall? Why does this book matter so much to you? She thought about it for a second and lit up, and said something like “Because it’s a powerful rendering of how a story can completely change based on whose perspective it is.” Aha. That was both meaningful and an insight she could begin to design an event around. 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. What problem might it help solve? Again, this may sound like too much to ask for a chamber of commerce or a church group. But if you think the problem of your country is that people from disparate tribes no longer know one another or communicate honestly with one another, that kind of insight and theory of the case can translate very plainly into a purpose of using y...

Stewart and Tsao’s big idea is that every meeting should be organized around a “desired outcome.” When a meeting is not designed in that way, they found, it ends up being defined by process. For example, a meeting to discuss ...

This focus on the outcome may sound obvious in a business context but strange when getting together with friends and family. Yet working backward from an outcome can be helpful in personal settings, too. Even outside of work, you are proposing to consume people’s most precious resource: time. Making the effort to consider how you want your guests, and yourself, to be altered by the experience is what you owe people as a good steward of that resource.

When there really is no purpose: If you go through these steps and find that you still cannot figure out any real purpose for your get-together, then you probably shouldn’t be planning the kind of meaningful gathering that I am exploring here. Do a simple, casual hangout. Or give people their time back. And plan your next gathering when you have a specific, unique, disputable purpose that helps you make decisions about how the event should unfold.

Gathering type Your purpose is a category (i.e., you don’t have a purpose) Basic, boring purpose, but at least you’re trying Your purpose is specific, unique, and disputable (multiple alternatives) Company offsite To get out of the office together in a different context To focus on the year ahead To build and to practice a culture of candor with one another To revisit why we’re doing what we’re doing and reach agreement about it To focus on the fractured relationship between sales and marketing, which is hurting everything else

wasn’t unaware of the desirability of gathering with purpose. She had come to me precisely because she knew that she wanted a more purposeful gathering. Despite knowing this, she ran into the instinct to multitask—to make a gathering do many things, not just something. Through further questioning, I tried to get S. to commit to one of those many possible somethings: If she could accomplish anything with this dinner, how would she want her guests to walk away at the end? The more we spoke, the more her ideas flowed, and the more excited she became. She realized before long that what mattered most to her was creating a gathering that interrupted the patterns of hosting that she had fallen into. When they were younger, she and her husband had met new people through his work. But as they aged, her husband started his own small company, their kids left for college, and they had begun to gather less often. They found themselves having similar conversations with the same people over and over. While she loved her friends, having dinners only with them didn’t contribute to the sense of adventure and variety they valued in themselves. She decided what she wanted from the dinner—and from the dinners for which it might set a precedent—was novelty and freshness. She decided to put aside the demi-purposes of bringing her husband new business and reciprocating with her friends, and to zero in on connecting meaningfully with new people.

“Who am I to gather in this way?” people often ask themselves. “Who am I to impose my ideas on other people? A big purpose may be fine for a state dinner or corporate retreat, but doesn’t it sound too arrogant, ambitious, or serious for my family reunion/dinner party/morning meeting?” This modesty is related to a desire not to seem like you care too much—a desire to project the appearance of being chill, cool, and relaxed about your gathering. Gathering well isn’t a chill activity. If you want chill, visit the Arctic. But modesty can also derive from the idea that people don’t want to be imposed on. This hesitancy, which permeates many gatherings, doesn’t consider that you may be doing your guests a favor by having a focus.

I have worked with more than a few hosts who feel gung-ho about their gathering’s daring new purpose only to have their courage melt under the pressure of deciding whom to include or exclude. The desire to keep doors open—to not offend, to maintain a future opportunity—is a threat to gathering with a purpose. Inviting people is easy. Excluding people can be hard. “The more the merrier,” we are told from childhood. “The more souls, the more joy,” the Dutch say. “The more fools there are, the more we laugh,” the French declare. At the risk of dissenting from millennia of advice along these lines, let me say this: You will have begun to gather with purpose when you learn to exclude with purpose. When you learn to close doors.

thoughtful, considered exclusion is vital to any gathering, because over-inclusion is a symptom of deeper problems—above all, a confusion about why you are gathering and a lack of commitment to your purpose and your guests.

Faced with people who should not, in theory, be there but are hard to keep away, it can feel easier and more generous to go with the flow. But the thoughtful gatherer understands that inclusion can in fact be uncharitable, and exclusion generous.

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? When my clients answer the first two questions, they begin to grasp their gathering’s true purpose. Obviously people who fit and fulfill your gathering’s purpose need to be there. And, though this one is harder, people who manifestly threaten the purpose are easy to justify excluding. (That doesn’t mean they always end up being excluded. Politeness and habit often defeat the facilitator. But the hosts still know deep down who shouldn’t be there.)

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.

You might ask: In a world where exclusion becomes OK, aren’t we moving backward? Isn’t exclusion in gatherings something we’ve been fighting against for years? Isn’t exclusion, however thoughtful or intentional, the enemy of diversity? It is not. I started my life as a facilitator by moderating racial dialogues. I am biracial. I believe in few things as passionately as I believe in the power of the unlike being brought together and made to figure out the world. I exist because of that. But diversity is a potentiality that needs to be activated. It can be used or it can just be there. A citywide book festival whose audience is very diverse but whose organizers keep them in silence, looking up at the conversations onstage, isn’t getting much out of that diversity. Giving readers time and a prompt to talk to one another would squeeze more juice and more insight from difference. On the other hand, at Back to the Bay, the diversity was well activated. A student who hid himself at school let himself become real in that space. And it was exclusion that allowed that diversity to be activated. 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.

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. An overly inclusive volunteer program at Judson Manor would have been similar to many volunteer programs at nursing homes. The tightly bound program transformed it from a service program into a relationship between young artists and aging ears.

Sometimes after I have guided a client to do what we’ve talked about here, she is ready to exclude in a purposeful way. But the inevitable question arises: How do I tell people? The most honest way is to point your would-be guest to your purpose. Your purpose isn’t personal. Your gathering has a life of its own, and you might tell them that this is not the gathering best suited to them. But it can also be helpful to blame size, and if you do, you aren’t lying. For every gathering purpose, there is a corresponding ideal size.

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. Therefore, when you are figuring out whom to include and how to exclude, know that by jamming in those extra few people you are changing the nature of the interaction because of the size of the group. If, on the other hand, the purpose of your meeting is to make a decision, you may want to consider having fewer cooks in the kitchen.

Groups of 6: Groups of this rough size are wonderfully conducive to intimacy, high levels of sharing, and discussion through storytelling. The Young Presidents’ Organization, a network for CEO types, has developed a highly structured process that helps peers in groups of 6 thoughtfully coach one another through their problems. 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. (When multiple facilitators are required at a large meeting, it is customary to divide the number of participants by 12 to figure out how many facilitators are needed.) At the same time, 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. In Sustained Dialogue, our groups were always between 8 and 12 people.

In my work, 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. It is a milestone that causes more problems than you would imagine. I once worked with a technology company that hit this size and began observing conflict and mistrust in a culture that had previously been collegial. When the size of the group was still under a dozen, the entire company could grab a chair and sit in one conference room to discuss anything. Once the staff grew to 20, meetings started to exclude people. Exclusion was probably good for focus, but it changed the vibe of the company.

Thirty starts to feel like a party, whether or not your gathering is one. If smaller gatherings scale greater heights of intimacy, 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. Groups of this size are generally too big for a single conversation, although I’ve seen that done well with experienced facilitators and the proper arrangement of a room.

150: The next interesting number lies somewhere between 100 and 200. When I speak to conference organizers who think about group dynamics, the ideal range I hear again and again is somewhere 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.” Spark Conference, an experimental gathering run by leaders in the media, began with 100 people, and found that 70 created a more intimate environment. Many so-called “unconferences,” at which attendees improvise the agenda, are designed for 100 people. A Belgian hotelier I know recommended weddings of 150 because, she felt, that was the size at which everyone could see one another at the same time and thereby function as a kind of organism. This spectrum roughly matches what some anthropologists have come to regard as the natural size of a tribe. The group of 150 is one in whi...

Tides of humanity: Well beyond these gathering sizes is the sea of humanity.

venue is a nudge You have your purpose in mind. You have your guest list in hand. Where will you gather? 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. When you choose a venue for logistical reasons, you are letting those logistics override your purpose, when in fact they should be working for it. You might object: Isn’t a room sometimes just a room? What’s wrong with taking Morgan up on her offer of her deck? Here is the problem: 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. As Patrick Frick, a fellow member of my tribe of professional facilitators, told me, “The environment should serve the purpose.” When he is working with high-level teams and they give him a boardroom to facilitate the meeting in, he said, “ninety-five percent of my options are gone.” Why? Because, Frick said, “people who walk into this room will immediately fall into the same pattern of behavior: The CEO sits at the top, and you’re trained—you’re absolutely trained and brainwashed—how to behave there. You take your place according to hierarchy, you know when you’re allowed to speak, and so on.”

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.

Embodying a purpose doesn’t necessarily require going anywhere special. Sometimes just reconfiguring a room is enough. 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. 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 ...

So a well-chosen venue might signal to people what your gathering is ultimately about (embodiment). It might nudge people to behave in the particular ways that make the most out of this coming-together (the Château Principle). And a venue can and should do one further thing: displace people.

simply about breaking people out of their habits. It is about waking people up from the slumber of their own routines. As a facilitator, I seek to do that through the questions I ask and the exercises I run. But it is also possible to achieve a great deal of displacement through the choice of a space. As in the case of Wendy Woon, it takes imagination and effort more than anything else to achieve a little displacement. It is not more complicated than doing an activity in a place where people would think you shouldn’t. A dinner, for example, is generally thought best had on dry land. That, at least, is the conventional wisdom. However, one night in the Greek town of Kalamata, in the 1940s, the British travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor and his friends had another idea. As the group was seated on the quay waiting for their meal to arrive in the searing heat, Fermor and his two companions silently picked up their iron table and carried it into the sea. They sat waist-deep in the water, patiently awaiting service. When the waiter emerged from the restaurant, Fermor wrote, he “gazed with surprise at the empty space on the quay; then, observing us with a quickly masked flicker of pleasure, he stepped unhesitatingly into the sea” with their dinners. The surrounding diners, amused at the spectacle, began to send the maritime diners wine in celebration of their insouciance. Perhaps not surprisingly, Fermor’s New York Times obituary would note that his “tables” were “reputed to be a...

Gatherings need perimeters. A space for a gathering works best when it is contained. Photographers and choreographers often close all the doors in a room to, as Platon explained to me, “make sure the energy isn’t leaking out.” This rule is commonly violated in restaurants. Tables are often set up so that there is no “head” of the table, with chairs facing each other in two rows. I once went to a dinner at a restaurant with five friends. Our table was three square tables pushed together, with three chairs on each side. Throughout the evening, the conversation never really took off. It was difficult to have one conversation, as the person in the middle had to look left and right, as if watching a tennis match, and eventually the table broke off into two separate conversations. The two ends of the table remained “leaky.” It didn’t feel cozy or intimate. We should have simply asked the waiter to remove one of the square tables and moved two people to the ends. We would then have had a contained space (through the placement of our bodies) and it would have been easier for us to talk, to share—to come together.

And I have since learned that event planners and space designers actually have rules of thumb for event density. Billy Mac, an event planner, swears by the following parameters for the number of square feet required per guest for different vibes: 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. Source: Apartment Therapy blog, https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/party-architecture-density-how-to-plan-a-party-5359.

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.

hosting is inevitably an exercise of power. The hosts I guide often feel tempted to abdicate that power, and feel that by doing so they are letting their guests be free. But this abdication often fails their guests rather than serves them. The chill approach to hosting is all too often about hosts attempting to wriggle out of the burden of hosting. In gatherings, once your guests have chosen to come into your kingdom, they want to be governed—gently, respectfully, and well. When you fail to govern, you may be elevating how you want them to perceive you over how you want the gathering to go for them. Often, chill is you caring about you masquerading as you caring about them. THE

Many hosts I work with seem to imagine that by refusing to exert any power in their gathering, they create a power-free gathering. What they fail to realize is that this pulling-back, far from purging a gathering of power, creates a vacuum that others can fill. Those others are likely to exercise power in a manner inconsistent with your gathering’s purpose, and exercise it over people who signed up to be at your—the host’s—mercy, but definitely didn’t sign up to be at the mercy of your drunk uncle.

What is Heifetz doing? Launching a course on leadership by showing students what happens when you abdicate leadership. You don’t eradicate power. You just hand the opportunity to take charge to someone else—in this case, the students. You are not easing their way or setting them free. You are pumping them full of confusion and anxiety.

“Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.”

The kinds of gatherings that meaningfully help others are governed by what I call generous authority. A gathering run on generous authority is run with a strong, confident hand, but it is run selflessly, for the sake of others. Generous authority is imposing in a way that serves your guests. It spares them from the chaos and anxiety that Heifetz knowingly thrust upon his students. It spares them from the domination of some guests by other guests that the dinner host unwittingly enabled. It wards off pretenders who threaten a purpose. Sometimes generous authority demands a willingness to be disliked in order to make your guests have the best experience of your gathering.

Protecting your guests is, in short, about elevating the right to a great collective experience above anyone’s right to ruin that experience. It’s about being willing to be a bad cop, even if it means sticking your neck out. And it’s generous, because you’re doing it for your guests so that, as at the Alamo Drafthouse, they don’t have to.