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

by Priya Parker

Another vital use of a host’s authority is to temporarily equalize your guests. In almost any human gathering there will be some hierarchy, some difference in status, imagined or real, whether between a sales vice president and a new associate at an all-hands meeting or between a teacher and a parent at back-to-school night. Most gatherings benefit from guests leaving their titles and degrees at the door. However, the coat check for their pretenses is you. If you don’t hang them up, no one else will.

third use of generous authority is in connecting your guests to one another. One measure of a successful gathering is that it starts off with a higher number of host-guest connections than guest-guest connections and ends with those tallies reversed, far in the guest-guest favor.

The organizers had scheduled a day full of panels, speakers, and updates from the field. But we knew that a key element in making them think of themselves as a group would be to build their sense of community. By the end of the day, we wanted them to feel as though they could pick up the phone and call anyone else in the room. So I set myself the goal of figuring out how to provide each participant with an opportunity for meaningful small-group conversations with at least three-quarters of the other guests. Yet the only way I could think of to actually do this was to have them get up and move to a different table after every speaker. It was a hassle, and people often resist packing up their belongings and moving. Nonetheless, we decided to do it. After every speaker and every coffee break, I reminded them that it’s hard to build a movement if you don’t know who’s in it. So each person had to move to a different table. At their new ten-seat tables, they would have a chance to introduce themselves to new people and answer a question relevant to the day or the most recent speaker. In order to deliver on the larger purpose of connecting the group, I had to be willing to face a few grumbles about moving belongings and not being able to talk to friends. I had to operate as a representative of their future selves—happy they met new people, surprised by new connections with people unlike themselves—and actively go against what their present selves demanded. By the end of the day, ...

Abousteit uses her authority to protect her guests in ways small and large. At her formal seated dinners, she informs guests that they can’t show up late. “People warm up together,” she tells me. “They get to a certain point, and there’s a certain kind of energy, and it’s a collective experience.” By letting people come whenever they want, Abousteit understands that she would be failing to protect those who showed up on time. In that same spirit, if two friends are in a corner catching up with each other and ignoring the rest of the group, Abousteit has no problem saying to them, “Catch up on your own time.” She is protecting those who may not have the luxury of catch-up buddies at the dinner, and whose chance of having a good time depends on other people being open to conversation with a stranger. She equalizes her guests by holding everyone to the same standards. At one banquet she hosted, she ended the evening by suggesting that the group of forty go around the table with each person sharing a single piece of culture, broadly defined, that truly moved them that year. She insisted that each person get only sixty seconds to do so. And then she equalized her guests by enforcing that sixty-second rule mercilessly. Whether it was her mother-in-law, her husband’s colleague, or a high school friend, at sixty seconds, Abousteit said, “Time’s up,” and the group moved on.

One way Abousteit helps her guests connect is by priming them to take care of one another. When she gathers a large group of people who are sitting at separate tables, she assigns roles to a guest at each table, which gives them something to do and an excuse to talk to the others around them. A “Water Minister” ensures that everyone has full glasses of water. A “Wine Minister” keeps the wine flowing. At another dinner, with people seated banquet-style next to others they didn’t know, when the food arrived in big bowls, she explicitly invited her guests to “serve each other and not worry about getting served themselves.” She explained: “In Egypt, we always serve one another first. When that happens, everyone gets food. You’re not worried about yourself.” Abousteit laughingly admits that she plays the Egyptian when greater warmth is required and it’s helpful to be Egyptian, and she plays the German when greater order is required and it’s helpful to be German. That night, the guests, a bit startled but also intrigued, began lifting bowls of quinoa salad to serve one another, everyone looking around to see if their dinner mates had gotten enough food. This small reorientation shifted the dynamic of the room. Instead of worrying about themselves, the guests relaxed and started to look out for everyone else. She had nudged people into relationships of care, even though many of them had just met.

YOU ARE THE BOSS. Hosting is not democratic, just like design isn’t. Structure helps good parties, like restrictions help good design. Introduce people to each other A LOT. But take your time with it. Be generous. Very generous with food, wine, and with compliments/introductions. If you have a reception before people sit, make sure there are some snacks so blood sugar level is kept high and people are happy. ALWAYS do placement. Always. Placement MUST be boy/girl/boy/girl, etc. And no, it does not matter if someone is gay. Seat people next to people who do different things but that those things might be complementary. Or make sure they have something else in common; a passion or something rare is best. And tell people what they have in common. Within each table, people should introduce themselves, but it must be short. Name, plus something they like or what they did on the weekend or maybe something that can relate to the gathering. For dessert, people can switch, but best to have it organized: tell every other person at the table to move to another seat.

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...

In the organizers’ mind, the perceived upside (galvanizing a group of leaders around the president’s new innovative initiative) was not worth the risk of the perceived downside (the president making some offhand comment that might cause other problems). This risk factor is among the biggest reasons many institutional gatherings leave the generosity out of their authority. If timidity can make gatherers ungenerous, so does navel-gazing.

HOW I RUINED THAT DINNER So as a host, how do you get your power right? How do you not abandon your guests while ensuring that your power serves them? How do you strike that balance? Or to put the question in more personal terms: How could I have done it better that night I ruined dinner?

I could have addressed the need for introductions in a number of creative ways: letting people ask each other questions, having partners introduce each other, asking each person to answer one fun question. But

I could have started before the gathering even began. In my reminder email to the group the day before, I could have easily included a little fun background on each person, which they could read on their own time to get a sense of who would be there. As they walked in, I could have connected them, making a point of bringing each person around, even though it was a small group, and introducing them warmly to one another, saying a few nice things about each, as Abousteit’s list advises.

Once at the table, if I was going to do introductions, I could have prepared better so that my comments would be warm and interesting and, more important, accurate and egalitarian. I could have found one beautiful detail about each person that no one knew. Or I could have asked a question at the beginning of the meal to connect the group, something like “What is on your mind for the year ahead for yourself?

began noticing the invitations a few years ago—invitations I personally received and ones people showed me. In some ways, they were conventional, asking people to a dinner, a conference, or a meeting. But they contained an unfamiliar, even jarring ingredient: rules for the gathering.

It took me time to understand that what these gatherings signified was not a doubling down on etiquette but a rebellion against it. In the explicitness and oftentimes the whimsy of these rules was a hint of what they were really about: replacing the passive-aggressive, exclusionary, glacially conservative commandments of etiquette with something more experimental and democratic.

These positive features of etiquette work particularly well in stable, closed, homogeneous groups. When like gathers with like, etiquette often does its work so well that no one notices its presence.

If etiquette is about the One Right Way, pop-up rules make no such claims. They are free of the ethnocentric, classist pretensions of etiquette, because the rules they enforce are made-up. Their impermanence is a sign of their humility. No one is claiming that the withholding of last names is the mark of a cultured person. They are just saying that on this day, at this time, with these people, for this purpose, do not say your last name, and let us see what happens.

And if etiquette is about keeping people out of certain gatherings and social circles, pop-up rules can actually democratize who gets to gather. What could be less democratic than etiquette, which must be internalized for years before showing up at an event? A rule requires no advance preparation. Thus someone who has just arrived in a country and is unfamiliar with its culture, but is able to read an email, can fully, without embarrassment, partake in a rules-based gathering—but would struggle at a gathering full of etiquette landmines.

When the social code is spelled out, when it is turned into a one-night-only game, you don’t have to know certain unsaid things, you don’t have to have been raised in a certain way, you don’t have to be steeped in a certain culture, you don’t have to have parsed decades’ worth of social cues. You just need to be told tonight’s rules. This is the bargain that the rules-based gatherer offers: if you accept a greater rigidity in the setup of the event, the gatherer will offer you a different and much richer freedom—to gather with people of all kinds, in spite of your own gathering traditions.

Sometimes a rule is useful when a gatherer wants people to connect in a way that normal social norms would discourage. For example, the Latitude Society, a controversial secret society in San Francisco that has since disbanded, used to design various rules at their gatherings to create a sense of belonging. One of my favorites, as shared with me by one of their talented “Praxis” facilitators, Anthony Rocco, was that you couldn’t pour yourself a drink; someone had to pour it for you. This simple rule forced (in a playful way) people to interact. The rule took something most people wanted (a drink) and tied it to something that can be awkward initially: approaching someone you don’t know. They knew that the old etiquette of pouring other people’s drinks before your own had withered too much to expect strangers to follow it at their gatherings. So they made it a rule.

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?” Laudicina ensured that all board members had the information they needed well ahead of the meetings and had ample time before the meetings to ask any questions that clarified the issues. By putting information-gathering questions off-limits, he forced his board members to have the kind of difficult but productive conversations that led them to state their positions more explicitly and reach decisions.

This window of time between the discovery and the formal beginning is an opportunity to prime your guests. It is a chance to shape their journey into your gathering. If this chance is squandered, logistics can again overrun the human imperative of getting the most out of your guests and offering them the most your gathering can. Moreover, the less priming you do in this pregame window, the more work awaits you during the gathering itself.

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.

Lest you think you must become a peace negotiator to gather well, let me say that a thoughtful email can take care of the need to host your pregame. Priming can be as simple as a slightly interesting invitation, as straightforward as asking your guests to do something instead of bring something.

He decided one winter to host an end-of-the-year gathering at his home after a heavy season of touring. The problem was, he hadn’t even had time to decorate his Christmas tree. He dashed off a quick email to his guests asking them to send him two photographs of happy moments they’d had in the past year. When the guests walked in the door that evening, they found a Christmas tree decorated with twenty-four printed photographs, cut into small circles, of their own joyous moments: scuba diving, standing in front of a house bearing a “Sold” sign, wearing acrobat gear before a performance. They had a cocktail around the tree, marveling at one another’s moments. “Suddenly they were not strangers or colleagues, but the personal part was there, and that started the dinner so well,” Laprise recalled.

dashing off that last-minute email and getting his guests to send photographs of themselves, Laprise had begun to host them during the pregame, not just from the formal beginning. By asking them to dig out photographs from the past year, he was getting them to reflect on it. He was priming them for a celebration of the year by having them rummage through it before they showed up. He was putting them into the state of mind with which he wanted them to pass through the door.

For a gathering on the future of education at a university, I asked questions like “What is one moment or experience you had before the age of twenty that fundamentally impacted the way you look at the world?” and “What are the institutions in the United States and abroad that are taking a bold, effective approach to educating the next generation of global problem solvers? What can we learn from them?” For a gathering on rethinking a national poverty program, I asked questions like “What is your earliest memory of facing or coming into contact with poverty?” and “How are our core principles the same or different from when we started fifty years ago?” For a gathering of a technology company’s executive team after a merger, I asked questions like “Why did you join this company?” and “What are the most pressing questions you think this team needs to address?”

If you’re hosting a half-day gathering for your team to discuss a new strategy, do you call it a “meeting,” a “workshop,” a “brainstorming session,” or an “idea lab”? Of these names, “brainstorming session” implies a heavier level of participation than perhaps “meeting” does. Part of what worked with our “I Am Here” days, I later realized, was that we gave it a name and that name primed people for what we most needed from them: presence.

Rachel Greenberger, an administrator at Babson College in Massachusetts, hosted a weekly meeting for students. She didn’t want to call this time “office hours,” because it sounded like an obligation as well as a one-way deal: The student comes to the professor for help and guidance. But Greenberger was running a food program and wanted to help students connect to one another, not just to her, and so she decided to call the weekly hour Community Table. Over time, the gathering has grown into the name; students now turn up with baked goods as well as notebooks. And in a way she couldn’t have planned, the Community Table idea she began has now been transplanted to New York, where every month entrepreneurs, academics, activists, and students interested in food engage together around a table, giving and exchanging ideas and building a community.

In my own work, I don’t call my sessions “workshops.” I call them Visioning Labs. “Visioning” because I am helping people figure out their vision for their work, company, or life. And “Lab,” short for laboratory, because it signifies experimentation and possibility, which is crucial to the process. Simply because of the name, I’ve noticed that people seem to show up differently. They’re more open, since they’re not sure what to expect from a Visioning Lab, and ...

Carrying guests across a threshold sounds intimate and serious, but what I am really telling you to do is manage your guests’ transition into the gathering you have bothered to create. Hosts often don’t realize that there tends to be unfilled, unseized time between guests’ arrival and the formal bell-ringing, glass-clinking, or other form of opening. Make use of this no-man’s-land.

let us imagine what could have been done with that time. A few thousand fans of Bernie Sanders, a few hours, no candidate on-site. They could have had some volunteers work as facilitators to get people to sit in groups, or turn to a stranger, and talk about why they were there, what they believed the country most needed, and why they believed Sanders was the answer. They could have set up story circles where clusters of eight sat and shared their own experiences of being on the wrong end of America’s economic divide. They could have used that time to create a movement. They had the complete attention of thousands of people, but because the time period was mentally scheduled under “waiting,” they didn’t make use of it. They didn’t understand that they were already hosting.

The first change you should make if you want to launch well is to quit starting with logistics.

I imagine many people will, perhaps grudgingly, agree with me regarding events like funerals. In theory, no one believes in starting a funeral (or other intimate and personal gathering) with logistics. It’s just a failure to live up to what we imagine would be best. But with other gatherings, ones where sponsors are involved and there are people to be thanked, I know many hosts will say: I have no choice.

Sponsors are there to amplify what you can do with an event. However, the moment the host of the event is not also the person funding the event, the event has two masters: the host and the sponsor. And their interests are not always aligned. This misalignment can arise throughout your gathering, but it is often most painfully clear in the opening and closing. So a host must be aware of the fact that handing over precious real estate to sponsors is never costless or neutral. As in the case of the Personal Democracy Forum, it may even raise doubts about the gathering’s premise. If you need some inspiration to push back against those sponsors, consider the case of George Lucas. When he was filming the original Star Wars, he wanted a bold launch for his movie. The Directors Guild of America protested. Most films at the time started by naming the writer and director in the opening title sequence—in this case, thanking the film’s creators rather than its sponsors. It was how things were done. Despite the protests of the Directors Guild, Lucas decided to forgo opening credits entirely. The result was one of the most memorable beginnings in movie history. And he paid for it—the Directors Guild fined him $250,000 for his daring. His loyalty was to his audience’s experience, and he was willing to sacrifice for it. You should be, too.

Every gathering, to be sure, has logistical demands. People need to know where the bathroom is. People need to know where lunch can be found. There are often last-minute changes to announce. But people do not need to know this information at the very first moment of your gathering. It’s not that you don’t need time for logistics and the like. Just don’t start with them. Open cold.

Once you bar the housekeeping from your opening, what should you actually start with? My answer is simple: Your opening needs to be a kind of pleasant shock therapy. It should grab people. And in grabbing them, it should both awe the guests and honor them. It must plant in them the paradoxical feeling of being totally welcomed and deeply grateful to be there.

Any author will regale you in great detail with tales of how long she labors over her opening sentences. Ask hoteliers about the theory behind the practice of lobby design, and they will tell you what a difference certain tweaks make. Each of these is its own professional domain. What intrigues me is what their approaches have in common. When Melville opens Moby-Dick with “Call me Ishmael,” and when the Four Seasons lobby greets you with flowers taller than you, both, I believe, are honor-awing. In each of these openings, we are being made to feel slightly overwhelmed while at the same time made to feel welcome; our attention is gripped even as our nerves are soothed. When Melville addresses you, the reader, confidently and directly, there’s a familiarity he’s assuming, but there is also a confidence. He is not explaining an entire world to you. He is simply welcoming you into a world. Similarly, the flowers in the Four Seasons are stunning and maybe taller than you, and that awes you, intimidates you, makes you remember that you don’t live like this back home. But of course the flowers are there for you, to honor you.

After the initial shock therapy of honoring and awing, you have your guests’ attention. They want to be there. They feel lucky to be there. They might well be considering giving the gathering their all. Your next task is to fuse people, to turn a motley collection of attendees into a tribe. A talented gatherer doesn’t hope for disparate people to become a group. She makes them a group.

Jill Soloway, the writer and director, will rarely begin a day of shooting without the people who work for them (Soloway uses the gender-neutral pronoun “they”) having connected in this way. Soloway, the Emmy-winning showrunner behind the series Transparent and I Love Dick, calls the ritual “Box.” After breakfast, once all the actors and extras have arrived and the set and equipment have been arranged, Soloway or another director of a particular episode will decide it is time for Box. A production assistant will place a wooden box in a central area with plenty of space around it. As soon as the crew sees the box, people start gathering around in a wide circle while clapping and chanting “Box, Box, Box, Box!” The chanting persists until everyone has joined the circle and speeds up until someone hops up on the box to speak. Once someone is standing on the box, that person has the floor. People share whatever is on their mind—worries about an old friend, a death in the family, how they’re feeling about their own acting. “People get up on the box and they talk about their problems, they talk about their breakthroughs, and you cry and you release,” Jay Duplass, who plays Josh in Transparent, told The Hollywood Reporter. “Things get purged prior to the workday that set the tone for the tenderness and brilliance that gets delivered,” Trace Lysette, another cast member, was quoted as saying. “That’s how Jill likes to work.”

Box usually takes twenty to twenty-five minutes, but it can go as long as forty minutes before they start the actual rehearsal. Soloway gives the ritual the time it needs. Christina Hjelm, who works as an assistant to Soloway, described to me how they close Box once the time is right and transition into rehearsal: Once there seems to be a lull in folks wanting to get up on the box, the AD will make a show of circling the crowd, giving any last takers the opportunity to hop up and speak. If no one hops up on the box by the time the assistant director has circled the whole crowd, the AD will then hop on the box and give their closing remarks. The closing remarks typically consist of any special shooting instructions for the day and safety warnings the crew needs to keep in mind while on set. They then end it by shouting the safe word of the day and having the crowd shout it back to them. Popular safe words on our sets have been “Bucky” and “Chicken.” Box is an opening ritual that connects a large team to one another, clears people’s minds, and creates a passageway of sorts into rehearsal. “It turns into this collective moment for everyone to connect before we start working,” Landecker has said.

the introductions were funny, insightful, and unexpected, and Thurston owned it, so everyone went along.

A 2001 Johns Hopkins study found that when members introduced themselves and shared concerns ahead of time, the likelihood of complications and deaths fell by 35 percent. Surgeons, like many of us, assumed that they shouldn’t waste time going through the silly formalities of seeing and being seen for something as important as saving lives. Yet it was these silly formalities that directly affected the outcomes of surgeries. Even with such complex and intricate work, it was when the nurses and doctors and anesthesiologists practiced good gathering principles that they felt more comfortable speaking up during surgery and offering solutions.

Right before the opening dinner, the organizers gather everyone and deliver “highly personal, whimsical” introductions of each person, ending with their name, according to a report by the conference.

As attendees, whom the organizers call Campers, recognize themselves, they are asked to stand. “You’ll often see a lot of eyes darting around the room, and some careful deep thinking before someone stands up,” Pergam said. The organizers “spend an inordinate amount of time doing research on an individual” and “find obscure details about someone’s past and marry that with all of their other achievements.” It not only spares the Campers the pressure of introducing themselves to dozens of other people, it also gives them easy ways to go up to one another later.

You can even bond an audience while giving a lecture. For example, observe a talented presenter like Esther Perel, a relationship and sex therapist and seasoned speaker who regularly addresses crowds of more than one thousand people. In addition to her intriguing content, Perel is so sought after because of how she connects audience members to one another, signaling in subtle ways that they are not alone. 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.

The talented moderator understands that even a panel is not a stand-alone conversation. It exists within the context of a gathering. And so the solution might simply be to turn to the audience in the beginning of the session and ask: How many of you consider yourself an expert on artificial intelligence? How many of you are working in the field? How many of you are thinking about this for the first time? How many of you just realized you’re in the wrong session?

Whenever I do a Visioning Lab, whether it’s at a government agency, a university, or a financial institution, 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. It’s this psychological inter-stitching of the group that allows you and them to take risks, build together, and have the boldest version of whatever gathering they’re having.

My own belief is that any kind of gathering can practice any of these elements at least a little. But if you want to do more than a little, if you really want to go to the next level with your opening, here is some extra credit: Try to embody, with that opening, the very reason that you felt moved to bring a group of human beings together. Try to make your gathering’s purpose felt in those first moments.

At first, we focused on the normal preparations: We booked a private room in a restaurant. We invited fifteen guests from various councils, many of whom we did not know but who intrigued us. To help focus the evening, we chose a theme: “a good life.” We had used that theme previously on another project we had worked on and knew it was a rich topic—and one we were well prepared to moderate as a result. It was also purposefully a good life (as in, what do we think makes for a good life?), not the good life.

We explained the rules, including the singing rule and the Chatham House Rule (borrowed from the Royal Institute of International Affairs) that we had adopted, which allows people to talk about their experience of a private meeting and share the stories that emerge, but forbids specific attributions to any of the participants. We also instructed people to begin each toast by telling a story, and to signal when they were done by raising a glass to the value or lesson behind that story.