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

by Priya Parker

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.”