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

by Priya Parker

networking event may be something like this: I am paying forty-five dollars to attend this event; in return, you will ensure that there are better people here than I would meet on my own at the local bar.

am in no way advocating for your gatherings to be made transactional. Rather, 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 with that evening in Aspen. If you don’t prepare people for the fact that you will be asking them for advice about your company, if you don’t tell them that their phones will be taken away for the full day, if you don’t warn them that they will be asked to share a personal story prompted by a question, you will often encounter resistance or worse.

But Greenberger was running a food program and wanted to help students connect to one another, not just to her, and so she decided to call the weekly hour Community Table. Over time, the gathering has grown into the name; students now turn up with baked goods as well as notebooks.

call them Visioning Labs. “Visioning” because I am helping people figure out their vision for their work, company, or life. And “Lab,” short for laboratory, because it signifies experimentation and possibility, which is crucial to the process.

Names help guests decide whether and how they fit into the world you’re creating.

Whatever the medium, the purpose of priming is to signal to people the tone and mood you’re going for at your gathering.

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

They could have had some volunteers work as facilitators to get people to sit in groups, or turn to a stranger, and talk about why they were there, what they believed the country most needed, and why they believed Sanders was the answer.

Studies show that audiences disproportionately remember the first 5 percent, the last 5 percent, and a climactic moment of a talk. Gatherings, I believe, work in much the same way. And yet we often pay the least attention to how we open and close them, treating these elements as afterthoughts.

When Saturday Night Live starts with a skit of several minutes that sometimes seems like part of a news show or other program, and only later reveals itself when the performers scream “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” it is deploying the cold open at its best. The show understands that attention is everything in television, and once you have captured it, you can take care of business, thank people, attend to housekeeping.

The simple act of your guests’ acknowledging one another and confirming their own presence is a crucial step we often forget when we gather. In the Zulu tribe, this acknowledgment is baked into the very language of their call-and-response greeting: Greeting: “Sawubona.” (I see you.) Response: “Ngikhona.” (I am here.)

“We get to play, like children,” Soloway told another interviewer. “Nobody has to worry about getting anything wrong.” In around twenty minutes, the director transforms a bunch of actors and extras into a tribe, by making them see one another.

together of friends. He was throwing a holiday party in his home and realized that all his guests didn’t know one another. He was the hub connecting us spokes,

He then went on to tell the room a few details about Katie that others might be interested in: “I first met Katie at a surfing class, where it turns out she was the best surfer in the class. Katie moved to New York three years ago from a job in Kenya. She is a neighbor—go,

attention-getting introductions gave everyone in the room permission to look at one another, know something about one another, have a way into the horizontal ties that the evening had lacked at the outset.

shared concerns ahead of time, the likelihood of complications and deaths fell by 35 percent. Surgeons, like many of us, assumed that they shouldn’t waste time going through the silly formalities of seeing and being seen for something as important as saving lives. Yet it was these silly formalities that directly affected the outcomes of surgeries. Even

it’s not about their connection to me. It’s this psychological inter-stitching of the group that allows you and them to take risks, build together, and have the boldest version of whatever gathering they’re having.

“the extent and depth of their social relationships and networks.” Perhaps because of this focus, many of us on the council were struck by how the WEF’s culture made it hard for leaders to develop along these dimensions. A colleague of mine on the council, a German marketing executive named Tim Leberecht, and I wondered if an experiment could change that.

But how do you create an intimate dinner at a networking event? How do you get people to be vulnerable when they show up invulnerable? How do you create a work dinner that feels more like a rehearsal dinner? How do you take people who have come to hawk one idea or organization and restore them, for a night, into the complex, multifaceted human beings they actually are? How do you allow for weakness and doubt in people who normally exude certainty and confidence?

What if, instead of just introducing the theme of “a good life,” we asked each guest, at some point in the night, to give a toast to “a good life,” whatever that phrase means to them? OK, that was good. But what if people just waxed on and on about some grandiose idea of theirs? Another idea: What if we asked them to start their toasts with a personal story or experience from their own life? We were making progress. But this was a lot to ask of people.

An image came to mind of a good life, and it was a moment from when I was eleven. Then I thought: I can’t share that with this group. My heart started pounding, a sign that I tend to interpret as saying, Do it. I took a breath, hands shaking, and clinked my glass. People seemed surprised that I was going to go so early in the evening.

was something to be celebrated. But she didn’t stop there. Two weeks later, my mother threw me a period party.

That day, I knew I mattered. I was seeing, and I was being seen. I was being witnessed. And to me, that was a good life. And a small surprise for

baked spiel that people have given a thousand times. We all have stump speeches, and at many of the more formal and important gatherings we attend, it is our stump speeches that come out to play.

consequence, it is people’s sprouts that are most interesting—and perhaps most prone to making a group feel closely connected enough to attempt big things together. So

One of the insights we learned from 15 Toasts is that, in keeping with my approach to openings, 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. When

us: To get the group to be vulnerable, he said, we facilitators needed to share an even more personal story than we expected our clients to. We would set the depth of the group by whatever level we were willing to go to; however much we shared, they would share a little less. We had to become, in effect, participants.

making good use of what divides us in our gatherings.

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

it is your job to help your guests close that world, decide what of the experience they want to carry with them, and reenter all that from which they came.

In a 2010 survey, 48 percent of people said they preferred a “celebration of life” compared with 11 percent who wanted a “traditional funeral.” One-third of all respondents said they wanted no funeral at all. This idea of celebration may seem evolved and selfless at first, but the monks believe it deprives people of the experience of processing a death for what it

There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. And that’s the same in a group. Once you’ve gone through that process, what are we doing now? We’re rehashing. What is it in you that doesn’t want this group to end?” he asked.

you relieve the entire group at the first sign of a significant minority being done? Do you quit while the party is ahead? Or do you let the guests be your guide? I live in a house divided, because my husband is staunchly in favor of letting

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.

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.