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

by Priya Parker

Among the variety of people I spoke with, they all shared one crucial trait: a fascination with what happens when people come 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. Let’s begin.

You are not alone if you skip the first step in convening people meaningfully: committing to a bold, sharp purpose.

We get lulled into the false belief that knowing the category of the gathering—the board meeting, workshop, birthday party, town hall—will be instructive to designing it. But we often choose the template—and the activities and structure that go along with it—before we’re clear on our purpose. And we do this just as much for gatherings that are as low stakes as a networking night as for gatherings that are

1 percent of the cases processed by the Justice Center result in jail at arraignment. “I have been in the justice system for twenty years,” Calabrese says in a documentary film about the center, “and I finally feel that I have a chance to really get to the problem that causes the person to come in front of me.” The Justice Center

team has been able to do this because they figured out the larger purpose of why they wanted to gather: they wanted to solve the community’s problems—together. And they built a proceeding around that.

When you skip asking yourself what the purpose of your birthday party is in this specific year, for where you are at this present moment in your life, for example, you forsake an opportunity for your gathering to be a source of growth, support, guidance, and inspiration tailored to the time in which you and others find yourselves. You squander a chance for your gathering to help, and not just amuse, you and others. Looking back, that’s what I did when I barred my husband from my baby shower.

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.

Ichi-go ichi-e. The master told me it roughly translates to “one meeting, one moment in your life that will never happen again.”

When clients or friends are struggling to determine their gathering’s purpose, I tell them to move from the what to the why.

Think of what you want to be different because you gathered, and work backward from that outcome. That is the formula of Mamie Kanfer Stewart and Tai Tsao, who set out some years ago to improve the work meeting.

In my experience, a lot of people don’t gather with real purpose because they’re not clear on what a purpose is or how you arrive at one. But 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. Both reared their heads when a woman I know—we’ll call her

Despite knowing this, she ran into the instinct to multitask—to make a gathering do many things, not just something.

modesty can also derive from the idea that people don’t want to be imposed on. This hesitancy, which permeates many gatherings, doesn’t consider that you may be doing your guests a favor by having a focus.

gathering’s purpose doesn’t have to be formal, stiff, or self-important. It doesn’t have to be philanthropic or achieve some social good. The Golden Retriever Festival in Scotland,

Having a purpose simply means knowing why you’re gathering and doing your participants the honor of being convened for a reason. And once you have that purpose in mind, you will suddenly find it easier to make all the decisions that a gathering requires. PURPOSE

The desire to keep doors open—to not offend, to maintain a future opportunity—is a threat to gathering with a purpose.

You will have begun to gather with purpose when you learn to exclude with purpose. When you learn to close doors.

By closing the door, you create the room.

Looking back on the episode, it becomes clear to me that 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. This was also what happened with my workout group: We didn’t think about what it was for until we found ourselves in an argument about who it was for.

is to 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

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. Therefore, when you are figuring out whom

If the purpose has something to do with bonding a group, you will want more listening behavior and less declaiming behavior.

people out of their habits. It is about waking people up from the slumber of their own routines.

“If you are on a picnic blanket, you will hang out around your picnic blanket. It’s not because there’s a fence around it; it’s because your picnic blanket is your mental construct. It’s not about sitting on a blanket versus sitting on the grass; it’s about claiming that mental space and making it yours

isn’t enough just to set a purpose, direction, and ground rules. All these things require enforcement. And

you’re going to compel people to gather in a particular way, enforce it and rescue your guests if it fails.

The kinds of gatherings that meaningfully help others are governed by what I call generous authority. A gathering run on generous authority is run with a strong, confident hand, but it is run selflessly, for the sake of others.

Generous authority is the comedian Amy Schumer facing down a heckler at a comedy show—hecklers being a perfect example of those pretender authorities waiting to rule if the host shows any weakness. Someone yelled a non sequitur from the audience, “Where’d you get your boots?” Schumer hit the heckler back hard: “On the corner of You Can’t Afford Them and Stop Talking to Me.” She was funny, but she was also implicitly using her power to prevent one heckler from ruining the show for others.

It ended with the words “Thanks for not coming back to the Alamo, TEXTER!” The ad went viral. The company’s CEO, Tim League, explained the company’s policy and strict enforcement of it: “When you are in a cinema, you are one of many, many people in the auditorium.

Rather, it is working to protect the purpose of the gathering: to enjoy the magic of the movies.

People aren’t setting out to be bad people at your gatherings; bad behavior happens. But it’s your job as a host—kindly, graciously, but firmly—to ward it off.

Jefferson was wise enough to understand that this ideal of equality should not remain an abstract concept. It should also dictate how he and other American leaders lived their lives—and, yes, organized their gatherings. Jefferson believed a new republic needed

You have to design your gatherings for the kinds of connections you want to create. And, again, it doesn’t have to be elaborate and complicated.

In a group, if everybody thinks about the other person’s needs, everyone’s needs are actually fulfilled in the end. But if you only think about yourself, you are breaking that contract.”

Emily Post, Robert’s Rules of Order for business conduct, and various other sources of guidance on how not to mess up in polite society.

The etiquette approach to life is also imperious. It is the opposite of humble. It shows minimal interest in how different cultures or regions do things. It upholds a gold standard of behavior as the only acceptable one for people who wish to be seen as refined. It is not interested in variety or diversity, or the idea of different strokes for different folks. At Junior Cotillion, we didn’t learn the dances of Compton, Spanish Harlem,

How do you get people to be present at your gathering? How do you get them not only out from behind their screens but also not thinking about those screens? If people check their phones an average of 150 times a day, as some studies have shown, how do you ensure 50 of those check-ins aren’t at your event? You may have everyone in one room, but how do you get people to be here?

That’s the point and the magic. In a world of infinite choices, choosing one thing is the revolutionary act. Imposing that restriction is actually liberating.

way) people to interact. The rule took something most people wanted (a drink) and tied it to something that can be awkward initially: approaching someone you don’t know. They knew that the old etiquette of pouring other people’s drinks before your own had withered too much to expect strangers to follow it at their gatherings. So they made it a rule.

Your gathering begins at the moment your guests first learn of it. This may sound obvious, but it’s not. If it were obvious, hosts wouldn’t fail to host the pregame for their gathering as often as they do. In my experience, hosts often think of their event as beginning when you call the meeting to order or take your seats at the wedding or walk into your dinner party.

The intentional gatherer begins to host not from the formal start of the event but from that moment of discovery.

There is the “Theme list,” the “Budget list,” the “Decoration list,” the “Music playlist,” and so on. The tips are helpful, but all ten focus on the logistics of things and people, not on the priming of the guests.

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

It’s hard to get a dance party started, for example, when people show up subdued and in the mood for quiet conversation. Similarly, if you’re hosting a meeting at work and hoping to have an honest conversation in which employees share what they’re actually experiencing, it can be harder to do if they show up cynical or defensive. Sure, you can try to change their mood when they arrive. But it takes more energy and sophistication on the part of the host and cuts into the time for the gathering. It is preferable to pregame. Priming

Priming can be as simple as a slightly interesting invitation, as straightforward as asking your guests to do something instead of bring something.

He dashed off a quick email to his guests asking them to send him two photographs of happy moments they’d had in the past year.

When the guests walked in the door that evening, they found a Christmas tree decorated with twenty-four printed photographs, cut into small circles, of their own joyous moments: scuba diving, standing in front of a house bearing a “Sold” sign, wearing acrobat gear before a performance. They

Asking guests to contribute to a gathering ahead of time changes their perception of it.