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

by Priya Parker

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.

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.

She thought for a moment. “Because I think if they know who they really are, they don’t have to compensate with anger or self-hatred or all those things,” she said.

“integration of the shadow.”

aggression, violence, nonconsensual fantasies, etc.). Disowning these parts of ourselves is not an effective way to deal with them, as what is disowned or ignored tends to grow (and often grow unconsciously).

The lesson she offers is that darkness is better inside the tent than outside of it. We all have it. It’s going to be at your gathering. And if you bar it from the formal proceedings, it doesn’t disappear. It shows up in ways that do your gatherings no favors.

The power of the stranger lies in what they bring out in us. With strangers, there is a temporary reordering of a balancing act that each of us is constantly attempting: between our past selves and our future selves, between who we have been and who we are becoming.

Your friends and family know who you have been, and they often make it harder to try out who you might become.

Strangers, unconnected to our pasts and, in most cases, to our futures, are easier to experiment around.

In front of a stranger, we are free to choose what we want to show, hide, or even invent.

Under the heading of “Starters” were questions like “How have your priorities changed over the years?” and “How have your background and experience limited or favoured you?” Under “Soups” was an invitation to ask, “Which parts of your life have been a waste of time?” Under “Fish”: “What have you rebelled against in the past and what are you rebelling against now?” Under “Salads”: “What are the limits of your compassion?”

The moment changed her perception of her father and educated her in how change happens (slowly and with people in privilege as protectors).

I have also found that this leaving of things at the door is easier when people are seen for their virtues. People are still people, and, particularly in professional contexts, no one wants to look weak. But I have discovered that if I, the host, acknowledge and broadcast their strength, as individuals and collectively well in advance, it relieves some of the pressure people feel to

flex during the event itself. I say something up front like “You’re all here because you’re remarkable.”

This commandment to avoid the dangerously interesting is widespread. Personally, I believe that few things are as responsible for the mediocrity and dullness of so many gatherings as this epically bad advice.

So how do we create gatherings that can hold some heat without burning up in flames? How do we cause, and have the group benefit from, good controversy?

The group was suffering from what many of us suffer from: a well-meaning desire not to offend that devolves into a habit of saying nothing that matters.

They were not getting ideas out into the open.

In so many gatherings, we are so afraid of getting burned that we avoid heat altogether. There is always risk inherent in controversy, because things can go very wrong very quickly. But in avoiding it, we waste countless opportunities to truly connect with others about the things they care about. The responsible harnessing of good controversy—handling with structure and care what we normally avoid—is one of the most difficult, complicated, and important duties for a gatherer. When it is done well, it is also one of the most transformative.

Good controversy is much more likely to happen when it is invited in but carefully structured.

Issues have heat when they affect or threaten people’s fears, needs, and sense of self.

What are people avoiding that they don’t think they’re avoiding? What are the sacred cows here? What goes unsaid? What are we trying to protect? And why?

Second, there was a massive power imbalance because of differences in size, resources, and public recognition among the partners’ organizations that affected all of their interactions.

The workbook included prompts about participants’ personal history, to get them to connect back to their own core values: “Tell me about a moment in your early life that deeply influenced you and, in some way perhaps, led you to the work you do today.” But the majority of the questions encouraged the leaders to speak about what wasn’t working: “If you were to say something that was politically incorrect, or taboo, about this process or project, what would it be?” It asked: “What do you think is the most needed conversation for this group to have now?”

and part of their dynamic was that their most honest conversations as a group tended to be offline or in sidebars.

Spending the time asking such questions helps further prime your guests to take chances in the conversation and to listen more deeply than they otherwise might. Getting them to participate in creating the rules, as opposed to just presenting the rules myself, is also a way to begin naming and acknowledging past behaviors at some of their meetings that served to shut people down—behaviors now inspiring the suggestion of new rules to foster new behaviors. It also lends a legitimacy to the rules. It lets the facilitator say: “These are the rules you said you wanted.”

These stories reminded all of us of the feeling with which we had left the previous night’s dinner. It helped draw a thread back to that sensation.

What is the gift? And what is the risk? She thinks of each of her gatherings as fulfilling a specific need for a specific group of people. But for that gift to be given, she has learned, there needs to be some amount of risk. “No true gift is free of risk,” Benedetto told me. She defines risk as “a threat to one’s current state that could destabilize the way things are.” The risk is what allows for the possibility of the gift.

Now we turn to an equal and opposite problem: a widespread tendency to close without closing.

Over the course of the two days, our job was to take what these evaluators had been trained to value and shift it. We had been hired less to teach them the new approach than to get them to buy into it and even believe in it.

We closed without closing. We didn’t take stock of what they had absorbed over the two days. We didn’t gauge their buy-in. We didn’t talk about how they would carry what we had done together into their daily lives—for example, by retraining their researchers in the new approach. Most basically, though, we allowed the clock—and only the clock—to demarcate our ending. In one of the two most vital moments in any gathering, we offered only a gaping void. Even when our guests seemed to challenge this void, begging with their facial expressions for more, we refused to close meaningfully.

With that simple act of turning an ending into a closing, he transforms the act of submitting a thesis and creates a moment that students never forget (including this one, from the Class of 2004).

We promise to sustain what is better surrendered.

But I have found, again and again, that the failure to close well is rooted in the avoidance of an end.

The crux of what they teach health-care professionals and laypeople is, as one of the monks put it, “How do you allow them to welcome everything and push away nothing?”

The night was over. I had ceded my own ending by giving someone else a chance to issue a kind of unintended last call.

Whether or not a gathering creates space for meaning-making, it is something that individual guests will do on their own. What did I think of that? How am I going to talk about it with others? A great gatherer doesn’t necessarily leave this process to unfold only within individuals. Rather, the gatherer might find a way of guiding guests toward some kind of collective exercise of stock-taking.

When a mother asks her children every night at dinner not just what happened today, but for their “rose” and “thorn” (the best and worst parts of their day), she is helping them make meaning.

The answer is a special closing session called “If These Were My Last Remarks.” The session features approximately twenty participants, each of whom is given two minutes to tell the group what they would say if this were the end of their life. People read poems, share stories about their faith, confess doubts, recall tragedies large and small. “It’s motivating, it’s touching, it’s tragic, and it kind of seals the bond,” Gelles said. Notably, by asking the participants to contemplate their actual, physical mortality, the group is subtly reminded to confront its metaphorical mortality. Most important, though, the group is being shown itself in dramatic fashion before it disperses. This is who we were here—open, vulnerable, thoughtful, funny, complicated. Tribe-making is vital to meaning-making.

But the counselors also have a big responsibility to give the students the skills to reenter their very different realities back home.

Reentry, as the term is used in conflict resolution, refers to helping someone who has gone through an intense experience within the bubble of a dialogue return to their original context. The term is also used for circumstances such as soldiers returning from war or prisoners finishing their sentences. Yet even the most ordinary comings-together of people have an element of reentry. As a host, you can help your guests think about what they would like to take with them as they go back into the world, given what they have experienced with you. In the case of Seeds of Peace, now that they’re a “seed,” how will they plant themselves in the hostile, messy soil beyond?

I met a stranger in the night whose light had ceased to shine. I paused and let him light his lamp from mine. A tempest sprang up later on and shook the world about. When the storm was over, my lamp was out. But back to me the stranger came his lamp was glowing fine. He held to me his precious flame and thus rekindled mine.

The dynamics of extreme cases are not all that different from the dynamics of ordinary events. The advantage of the extreme is that the dynamics are easier to see. No matter how ordinary your gathering, if you have forged a group and created something of a temporary alternative world, then you should also think about helping those you gathered “take the set down” and walk back into their other worlds.

Part of preparing guests for reentry is helping them find a thread to connect the world of the gathering to the world outside.

A thread could be a letter that each guest can write to their future self on a self-addressed postcard, to be mailed out by the organizer a month later.

How can I use this gift to turn an impermanent moment into a permanent memory?

“citizens of character that I am unleashing into the world.”

Whatever your final moment is, it should be authentic and make sense in your context.

Cunningham derived inspiration from studying the funeral rituals of various cultures. And she ended up adopting one from the Jewish tradition. In it, the person presiding over the funeral asks everyone except for the immediate family to form two lines facing each other, making a kind of human hallway from the gravesite to the cars. Then the rabbi asks the immediate family to turn away from the grave and walk down that makeshift aisle, and as they do so, to look into the eyes of their friends, who “are now like pillars of constancy and love.” Cunningham described it as “a way to usher them into the next part of their journey, and the next stage of their grieving.” As the family walks by, the people at the farthest-back part of the line fold in and follow them, and then the rest, slowly, join a kind of procession out of the cemetery. It is a simple structural process that helps organize a group and facilitate a graceful exit. Yet it does so in a purposeful way that supports the people who most need it, connects them to the people still present, and gives everyone a way to move forward together.

The friends found a way to say, “This gathering was different from all the others.”