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

by Priya Parker

Studies show that simply switching rooms for different parts of an evening’s experience will help people remember different moments better.

Just as we go into autopilot on the location of our weekly staff meetings, we also tend to accept the default setup we’re given. If there’s a table in the middle of the room, we leave it there. If the chairs are set up on two of the four sides, we don’t move them, even though it would create more intimacy if we did. So next time you’re in a gathering venue, remember that something as simple as a few flip charts can allow you to transform the feel of a room.

one of the reasons party guests often end up gravitating to the kitchen is that people instinctively seek out smaller spaces as the group dwindles in order to sustain the level of the density.

to talk about their role is to talk about their power as a host, and to talk about that power is to acknowledge that it exists. This is not what most people want to hear.

Chill is a miserable attitude when it comes to hosting gatherings.

hosting is inevitably an exercise of power. The hosts I guide often feel tempted to abdicate that power, and feel that by doing so they are letting their guests be free. But this abdication often fails their guests rather than serves them.

chill is you caring about you masquerading as you caring about them.

Hosts assume that leaving guests alone means that the guests will be left alone, when in fact they will be left to one another.

Those others are likely to exercise power in a manner inconsistent with your gathering’s purpose, and exercise it over people who signed up to be at your—the host’s—mercy, but definitely didn’t sign up to be at the mercy of your drunk uncle.

Launching a course on leadership by showing students what happens when you abdicate leadership. You don’t eradicate power. You just hand the opportunity to take charge to someone else—in this case, the students. You are not easing their way or setting them free. You are pumping them full of confusion and anxiety.

“Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.”

A gathering run on generous authority is run with a strong, confident hand, but it is run selflessly, for the sake of others.

Protecting your guests is, in short, about elevating the right to a great collective experience above anyone’s right to ruin that experience.

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.

we will delve into a way of seasoning your gathering more deeply: designing it as a world that will exist only once.

Pop-up rules are perhaps the new etiquette, more suited to modern realities. If implicit etiquette, absorbed from birth, was useful for gatherings of closed tribes, whether Boston Brahmins or Tamil ones, explicit pop-up rules are better for gathering across difference. Rules-based gatherings, controlling as they might seem, are actually bringing new freedom and openness to our gatherings.

If etiquette is about sustaining unchanging norms, pop-up rules are about trying stuff out.

rules can allow for boldness and experimentation. Rules can create an imaginary, transient world that is actually more playful than your everyday gathering.

Etiquette allows people to gather because they are the same. Pop-up rules allow people to gather because they are different—yet open to having the same experience.

In a world of infinite choices, choosing one thing is the revolutionary act. Imposing that restriction is actually liberating.

only three of Stewart’s steps involve communicating with guests, and each of these is logistical: mail or email invitations; let guests know what to make if it’s a potluck; chase guests who haven’t yet RSVP’d. In this vision, people are to be corralled, not prepared.

The clock of the gathering starts, so to speak, from the moment a guest becomes aware of its existence.

90 percent of what makes a gathering successful is put in place beforehand.

every gathering benefits or suffers from the expectations and spirit with which guests show up.

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.

I almost always send out a digital “workbook” to participants to fill out and return to me ahead of the gathering. I design each workbook afresh depending on the purpose of the gathering and what I hope to get guests to think about in advance. The workbooks consist of six to ten questions for participants to answer.

two elements in my workbook questions: something that helps them connect with and remember their own sense of purpose as it relates to the gathering, and something that gets them to share honestly about the nature of the challenge they’re trying to address.

a gathering is a social contract, and it is in the pregame window that this contract is drafted and implicitly agreed on.

Among the burdens of hosting is drafting this social contract, starting with that moment of discovery. First things first, the host has the chance to frame the event. This is where your specific, unique purpose comes into play.

I am suggesting that it is impossible to gather without some kind of implicit deal. And when this deal isn’t carefully crafted, and when people’s expectations of one another are out of step with what people are willing to give, problems arise—as

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.

Between the priming and preparation and the actual opening of a gathering, there is another, often overlooked step: ushering. In many gatherings, your guests will benefit from being carried across a proverbial threshold, leaving the wide world and entering your small kingdom.

what I am really telling you to do is manage your guests’ transition into the gathering you have bothered to create.

people are more open to new experiences when the old is cleared away and some space is carved out for the new.

there are many tiny ways you can create a threshold, a pause, before you and your guests cross the starting line together.

In everyday gatherings, it can be as simple as lighting a candle or making a welcome announcement or pouring every guest a special drink at the same time. But the final transition between the guests’ arrival and the opening is a threshold moment.

Your opening needs to be a kind of pleasant shock therapy.

Moderators at conferences could learn from Perel.

Could we induce people trained to present themselves as perfectly baked loaves to bring dough worth sharing instead?

If the term “stump speech” evokes the strongest, most durable part of the tree, the part that is firmly in the ground, the sprout is, by contrast, the newest and weakest part of the tree. It is the part still forming.

“A moment a story works is usually a moment of vulnerability,” he said. “You can’t tell a story that’s any good about how successful you are.

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.

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.

If you want to try this type of gathering, centered on people’s real selves rather than their best selves, you need to warn them.

you should tell people as explicitly as possible and at the beginning what you want in the room and what you want to be left at the door.

Early in the gathering, you, the host, need to go there yourself. You need to show them how.

When you’re asking people to go deeper, to share what they don’t usually share, you must manage the risk-taking you are encouraging.

It is also important as a host to be attentive to the needs of different personalities. No one, however extroverted, wants to feel like they have no choice but to share a deeply personal story. One of the reasons choosing a general theme works so well is because there is a lot of freedom within that theme to choose the level of depth one wants to take.

When I work with clients, they often tell me they want to do a “town hall” to air opinions and get people to speak their truth. Then the day comes, and if I haven’t managed to wrest control over the event, the town hall is used to recirculate the old platitudes, to reassure those in charge about the wisdom of their rule, to keep everything exactly as it is. When I challenge the organizers, they often tell me that it’s too risky to introduce controversy in a group setting. 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?

good controversy rarely happens on its own. It needs to be designed for and given structure. Because, almost by definition, controversy arises from what people care enough about to argue over, most gatherings are marred either by unhealthy peace or by unhealthy heat. Either no one is really saying anything that they actually think, or you end up with what I call the “Thanksgiving problem”: a total free-for-all of pent-up grievances that often brings out tears and a screaming match, culminating in your cousin’s announcement that he will be attending his “Friendsgiving” back home from now on. Good controversy