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

by Priya Parker

It’s rare for groups of people to do things together for a sustained amount of time. We all carry with us the technical capacity to be anywhere, to check out of the present time or space. That means we always could be doing anything. So the active choice to do ONE thing and to do it with a fixed set of people is significant.

And so rules allow for an experimental spirit in gathering, whereas etiquette is that spirit’s enemy.

In Thailand, and particularly at this firm, there was a very strong etiquette among the consultants that the client always comes first. Accordingly, it is understood that they pick up the phone at all hours of the night, leave family dinners to take calls, step out of weddings to reply to texts, and hop on planes if needed. This etiquette had helped to make the firm extremely successful in general. However, it was an etiquette that was threatening the success of this particular gathering: a retreat intended to build trust internally among the consultants.

“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?”

Moreover, the less priming you do in this pregame window, the more work awaits you during the gathering itself.

A colleague in the conflict-resolution field taught me a principle I have never forgotten: 90 percent of what makes a gathering successful is put in place beforehand.

In some

cases, she would build trust with potential participants by sitting for hours while having tea with their family.

She traveled vast distances into disputed territories to demonstrate goodwill, to prove that she was willing to take risks, much as she was asking her guests to do.

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.

One other lesson is that, whether in Middle East peace talks or at weekend dance parties, every gathering benefits or suffers from the expectations and spirit with which guests show up.

He was putting them into the state of mind with which he wanted them to pass through the door.

By crafting the workbooks and sending them out, I am sending the participants an invitation to engage. By filling them out and sending them back to me, they are accepting. The relationship, and the sharing of confidences, begins well before we enter the room.

The dinner guests, many of them not experts in the industry or particularly interested in “working” at the end of a long day, were suddenly expected to be advisers.

My friends, who were among these nonexpert guests, suddenly realized that the dinner invitation was the lure; now they were on the hook to help the hosts make business decisions.

Even though the hosts were paying for the dinner, the guests felt used. You never want your guests to think, “H...

This is what might be thought of as the Martha Stewart approach, elevating the readying of things over the readying of people.

To name a gathering affects the way people perceive it. The name signals what the purpose of the event is, and it also prepares people for their role and level of expected participation. 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.

Community Table.

This kind of priming is especially important when the host is demanding a lot or when the guest is of a particularly reluctant sort.

This one act sped up the intimacy and the sense of permission to walk up to anyone over the course of the weekend, which many of us did. It was an initial act of tribe building, and it happened at the border of the gathering.

No matter what environment you’re given as a gatherer, you might ask yourself how you could create a transition of this kind—a passageway that tunes out the prior reality and captures people’s attention and imagination. By doing so, you create a starting line and, even more important, you help your guests cross it as a collective.

In the first few moments of a gathering, we are all Neo Muyanga, reading cues and asking ourselves: What do I think of this gathering? Am I in good hands? Is the host nervous? Should I be? What’s going to happen here? Is this worth my time? Do I belong? Do I want to belong? The opening is, therefore, an important opportunity to establish the legitimacy of your gathering.

Our brain effectively chooses for us what we will remember later. Studies show that audiences disproportionately remember the first 5 percent, the last 5 percent, and a climactic moment of a talk.

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.

His loyalty was to his audience’s experience, and he was willing to sacrifice for it. You should be, too.

It’s not that you don’t need time for logistics and the like. Just don’t start with them. Open cold.

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.

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.

Cecchini is the man onstage, but he’s also your host, your guide, your friend. As he

models openness and passion, he wakes up those parts in you. Suddenly you find yourself turning to strangers, taking small risks, and asking unexpected questions, behaving differently than you would in a typical restaurant.

making your guests feel like valued members of a club to which they have no business belonging.

Moderators at conferences could learn from Perel. They tend to overfocus on their panelists and the questions they are going to ask. 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:

They lurk there because everyone is presenting the best self they think others expect to meet.

The people chosen to join these councils are invited because of their accomplishments and their strengths, not because of their vulnerability. For this reason, the meetings, and even the dinners and coffee breaks, can become like show-off sessions, with round after round of one-upmanship.

Given that this wasn’t an insurance industry conference but an event about addressing the biggest problems of humanity, this superficiality seemed to interfere with our chances of doing so.

It said that space was defined by, among other things, “the emotional capacity of the leader (values, courage, self-awareness, authenticity)” as well as “the extent and depth of their social relationships and networks.”

Our goal was both simple and very complicated: to get people to turn off their networking engines and elevator pitches and get them to connect—humanly, authentically.

The night before the dinner, I had trouble sleeping. Why did we invite all these people? What if it doesn’t go well? What if no one speaks? What if the theme doesn’t work? I was worried about the actual conversation, the one part I assumed I could not shape ahead of time. I felt there was too much riding on our ability to facilitate a complicated conversation among fifteen strangers. And while we had spent so much time mastering every other detail down to choosing the opening welcome drink, we hadn’t given much thought to the actual structure of the conversation. We were winging it. I wanted to make something intimate. But I had not actually designed for intimacy.

Then came the clincher: What if we made the last person sing their toast? I laughed when my husband proposed this, but he was serious. It would set a brisk pace for the evening and add some nice risk.

My heart started pounding, a sign that I tend to interpret as saying, Do it.

My mother happened to be on another council at the forum. Because we have different last names, no one knew we were related. Everyone was stunned to realize that a woman who was sitting at the table, someone they might have known only as a World Bank expert on poverty, was also a mother who had designed a period party for her daughter. I was still shaking from telling such a vulnerable story, but I thought, What the hell, hoping it would crack others open.

People dropped their scripts.

It was a moving, beautiful night. All these people whose titles usually enter the room before they do left their egos at the door. They showed us fresh, raw, honest sides of themselves. The dinner pointed to what was possible at gatherings like this.

But seeing them there in the hot seat, knowing they had volunteered for this, to expose themselves and their ideas to strangers, made me feel compassion for them and made me want to use my brain and resources to push them forward.

The stronger they seemed, the less they needed me and the less I could connect with their travails.

We would skip over all the parts that were working and dive straight into sharing what was not. We would tell authentic, painful stories—about parents who had abandoned us, about bullies who had taunted us, about poverty that had shamed us. We showed frailty, vulnerability, and fear; in fact, in an inversion of Kennedy School norms, weakness became more valued than strength.

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.

What struck him about the language in the preambles was that it consisted of “perfectly natural phrases,” Green said, “and the audience would immediately perk up and be with the poet, because there was no longer a sense of artifice, a wall.