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

by Priya Parker

WHEN AUTHORITY TURNS UNGENEROUS I’m sure you’ve been to many gatherings governed under the doctrine of chill. Conferences in which the “questioner” before you in line deprives you of the opportunity to ask something because his “question” turns out to be a soliloquy spanning two typed pages, and the moderator doesn’t stop him. School-welcome picnics at which not so much as an opening announcement is made, leaving you wondering if you are actually at the school picnic or just a crowded portion of the park. Dinner parties at which you become an expert in start-ups—or at least the start-up of the really talkative guy next to you. I’m also certain, though, that you’ve been to another, very different kind of gathering: one in which you felt not unattended or abandoned, but rather controlled, bossed around, taken for granted, even tricked—and very clearly for the sake of the host, not anyone else. Ungenerous anarchy—a.k.a. chill—is not the only enemy of generous authority. There’s also the problem of ungenerous authority, to which we now turn. If the sin of the chill host is leaving people alone for his or her own sake, the sin of the domineering host is controlling people for his or her own sake. It is running your gathering with an iron fist, and doing so in a way that is in service, above all, of yourself. Though there are no hard and fast rules, in my own experience, it is institutional gatherings that more often err on the side of ungenerous authority, the bureaucratic need...