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

by Priya Parker

In addition to setting the right environment (we always try to do it in private spaces, with low lighting, flickering candles, comforting food, and flowing wine), I have found there are certain approaches the thoughtful gatherer can take to encourage people to jettison the phony and the polished for the true.

That evening there would be two presenters, and each would get a roughly forty-five-minute session with the House. For the first five minutes, each one would make a presentation to the room about a challenge. We would then have two or three minutes to ask clarifying questions about the challenge, and the entrepreneur would answer them. Then everyone would have one minute to give their “first thoughts.” (You can ask questions during this period, but the entrepreneur can’t answer them.) And the rest of the time is a dialogue between the House and the entrepreneur. The moderator makes sure that everyone has a chance to talk and guides us on what makes good feedback: examples of past successes and failures, contacts because “we want to extend tonight into the future,” and books and articles. At the end of the evening, we would have the Reveal, in which we would each share who we are and what we actually do for a living.

some ways, this should be obvious. Being vulnerable with people makes them feel for you.

Lazarus had an insight about her peers: that we all wear masks, and that while masks have uses, taking them off can allow for deeper connection, shared growth, and more fruitful collaboration.

That evening in Abu Dhabi we had asked guests to give their toasts in the form of a story, but we had done so mainly as a form of quality control. We figured that anyone can tell a story from their life, and that such stories might be better than riffs on a theme people hadn’t thought about. As it turned out, though, the emphasis on stories did something else as well, something we hadn’t necessarily planned: It helped us feel connected. And it worked because we were explicit about it. We got stories because we asked for stories—we made a clear distinction in the prompt between people’s concrete experiences and their abstract ideas.

Story is about a decision that you made. It’s not about what happens to you. And if you hit that and you get your vulnerability and you understand the stakes, and a few other things, people will intuitively find great stories to tell, and as soon as they do, we know them. We know them as human beings. This is no longer my boss’s colleague. This is a real person who had heartbreak. Oh, I know that.

15 Toasts to the stranger, to faith, to happiness, to collateral damage, to escapes, to borders, to Them, to fear, to risk, to rebellion, to romance, to dignity, to the self, to education, to the story that changed my life, to the end of work, to beauty, to conflict, to tinkering, to the truth, to America, to local, to the fellow traveler, to origins, to the right problem, to the disrupted, to the fourth industrial revolution, to courage, to borders, to risk, and, yes, to vulnerability. What we came to find over time was that the best themes were not the sweet ones, like happiness or romance, but rather the ones that had darker sides to them: fear, Them, borders, strangers. The ones that allowed for many interpretations. The ones that let people show sides of themselves that were weak, that were confused and unprocessed, that were morally complicated.