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We don’t even seem to be thrilled with the time we spend with our friends. A 2013 study, The State of Friendship in America 2013: A Crisis of Confidence, found that 75 percent of respondents were unsatisfied with those relationships.
My job is to put the right people in a room and help them to collectively think, dream, argue, heal, envision, trust, and connect for a specific larger purpose. My lens on gathering—and the lens I want to share with you—places people and what happens between them at the center of every coming together.
Gatherings crackle and flourish when real thought goes into them, when (often invisible) structure is baked into them, and when a host has the curiosity, willingness, and generosity of spirit to try.
You are not alone if you skip the first step in convening people meaningfully: committing to a bold, sharp purpose.
When we gather, we often make the mistake of conflating category with purpose.
Thinking of the place as a laboratory frees the people at the Justice Center to be great gatherers. “There are no lines in our head about how we should gather or what it needs to look like,” Berman told me. “Every case and every client is looked at individually.” This attitude allows them to separate their assumptions of what a court proceeding should look like from what a proceeding could look like.
There is nothing terrible about going with that flow, about organizing a monthly staff meeting whose purpose is to go through the same motions as every monthly staff meeting before it. But when you do, you are borrowing from gatherings and formats that others came up with to help solve their problems.
These are purposes, but they fail at the test for a meaningful reason for coming together: Does it stick its neck out a little bit? Does it take a stand? Is it willing to unsettle some of the guests (or maybe the host)? Does it refuse to be everything to everyone?
Gatherings that please everyone occur, but they rarely thrill.
Specificity is a crucial ingredient. The more focused and particular a gathering is, the more narrowly it frames itself and the more passion it arouses.
Specificity sharpens the gathering because people can see themselves in it.
Uniqueness is another ingredient.
Ichi-go ichi-e. The master told me it roughly translates to “one meeting, one moment in your life that will never happen again.”
A good gathering purpose should also be disputable.
move from the what to the why
Zoom out:
Drill, baby, drill:
Ask not what your country can do for your gathering, but what your gathering can do for your country:
Reverse engineer an outcome: Think of what you want to be different because you gathered, and work backward from that outcome.
Stewart and Tsao’s big idea is that every meeting should be organized around a “desired outcome.” When a meeting is not designed in that way, they found, it ends up being defined by process.
When there really is no purpose: If you go through these steps and find that you still cannot figure out any real purpose for your get-together, then you probably shouldn’t be planning the kind of meaningful gathering that I am exploring here. Do a simple, casual hangout.
many others, myself included, aspire to greater purpose in gathering yet often run up against two kinds of internal resistance. One comes from the desire to multitask; the other from modesty.
This modesty is related to a desire not to seem like you care too much—a desire to project the appearance of being chill, cool, and relaxed about your gathering. Gathering well isn’t a chill activity.
Virtually every choice will be easier to make when you know why you’re gathering, and especially when that why is particular, interesting, and even provocative. Make purpose your bouncer.
You will have begun to gather with purpose when you learn to exclude with purpose. When you learn to close doors.
thoughtful, considered exclusion is vital to any gathering, because over-inclusion is a symptom of deeper problems—above all, a confusion about why you are gathering and a lack of commitment to your purpose and your guests.
the thoughtful gatherer understands that inclusion can in fact be uncharitable, and exclusion generous.
here is what the skilled gatherer must know: in trying not to offend, you fail to protect the gathering itself and the people in it.
when you don’t root your gathering up front in a clear, agreed-on purpose, you are often forced to do so belatedly by questions of membership that inevitably arise.
some of the questions I ask them: Who not only fits but also helps fulfill the gathering’s purpose? Who threatens the purpose? Who, despite being irrelevant to the purpose, do you feel obliged to invite?
shift your perception so that you understand that people who aren’t fulfilling the purpose of your gathering are detracting from it, even if they do nothing to detract from it. This is because once they are actually in your presence, you (and other considerate guests) will want to welcome and include them, which takes time and attention away from what (and who) you’re actually there for.
Who is this gathering for first?
diversity is a potentiality that needs to be activated. It can be used or it can just be there.
When I talk about generous exclusion, I am speaking of ways of bounding a gathering that allow the diversity in it to be heightened and sharpened, rather than diluted in a hodgepodge of people.
It invited 2 and eventually 5 music students from the school to live with its 120 elderly residents rent-free, in exchange for giving recitals and art-therapy courses and spending time with residents. Organizers hoped the music students would serve as a tonic against isolation, dementia, and even high blood pressure. The idea was rooted in studies that show huge health benefits for the elderly when they interact with young people.
Specificity in gathering doesn’t have to mean narrowing a group to the point of sameness.
we started getting reports from student moderators that the best, liveliest, most intense groups were those consisting of two groups locked in a particular historical conflict, as opposed to the more general “multicultural” groups.
If you want a lively but inclusive conversation as a core part of your gathering, eight to twelve people is the number you should consider. Smaller than eight, the group can lack diversity in perspective; larger than twelve, it begins to be difficult to give everyone a chance to speak.
Groups of 6: Groups of this rough size are wonderfully conducive to intimacy, high levels of sharing, and discussion through storytelling.
Groups of 12 to 15: The next interesting number is around 12. Twelve is small enough to build trust and intimacy, and small enough for a single moderator, if there is one, formal or informal, to handle.
If smaller gatherings scale greater heights of intimacy, the group of 30 or so has its own distinctive quality: that buzz, that crackle of energy, that sense of possibility that attaches to parties.
it’s the tier at which, as one organizer told me, “intimacy and trust is still palpable at the level of the whole group, and before it becomes an audience.”
Venues come with scripts. We tend to follow rigid if unwritten scripts that we associate with specific locations.
seek a setting that embodies the reason for your convening.
The Château Principle, in its narrowest form, is this: Don’t host your meeting in a château if you don’t want to remind the French of their greatness and of the fact that they don’t need you after all.
If the purpose has something to do with bonding a group, you will want more listening behavior and less declaiming behavior.
“I’m ninety-nine percent sure that the meeting place reinforced or brought out the underlying assumption.
Displacement is simply about breaking people out of their habits.
A dinner party is not supposed to take place in an ocean. Which is why Fermor went there. And which is why you should think about where your next gathering ought not take place, and hold it there.
Gatherings need perimeters. A space for a gathering works best when it is contained.
