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we spend much of that time in uninspiring, underwhelming moments that fail to capture us, change us in any way, or connect us to one another.
As traditional religion struggles to attract young people, millennials are looking elsewhere with increasing urgency.”
We reduce the question of what to do with people to a question of what to do about things:
A facilitator is someone trained in the skill of shaping group dynamics and collective conversations.
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.
help people experience a sense of belonging.
take an ordinary moment with others and make it unforgettable—and meaningful.
We gather to solve problems we can’t solve on our own. We gather to celebrate, to mourn, and to mark transitions. We gather to make decisions. We gather because we need one another. We gather to show strength. We gather to honor and acknowledge. We gather to build companies and schools and neighborhoods. We gather to welcome, and we gather to say goodbye.
When we don’t examine the deeper assumptions behind why we gather, we end up skipping too quickly to replicating old, staid formats of gathering. And we forgo the possibility of creating something memorable, even transformative.
the question we are asking at the end of the day is, what is the problem, and how can we work together to come to a solution?”
This is supposed to be a laboratory and a model. It’s supposed to be a different way of doing things. And a better way of doing things.”
It was almost becoming a routine—that great enemy of meaningful gathering.
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.
“The more specific the Meetup, the more likelihood for success,”
Uniqueness is another ingredient. How is this meeting or dinner or conference unique among the other meetings, dinners, and conferences you will host this year?
“one meeting, one moment in your life that will never happen again.”
“We could meet again, but you have to praise this moment because in one year, we’ll have a new experience, and we will be different people and will be bringing new experiences with us, because we are also changed.”
Why is this gathering different from all my other gatherings? Why is it different from other people’s gatherings of the same general type? What is this that other gatherings aren’t?
The meetings she attended, Stewart told me, were “the absolute best part of the day.”
working backward from an outcome can be helpful in personal settings, too.
you are proposing to consume people’s most precious resource: time. Making the effort to consider how you want your guests, and yourself, to be altered by the experience is what you owe people as a good steward of that resource.
The group laughed and questioned and even teared up, because the topic struck a chord that was both universal and deeply personal.
“I am still thinking about your amazing question. My husband and I continued to talk about it all the way home. And now we’re even discussing it with our children! Thank you.”
The purpose of your gathering is more than an inspiring concept. It is a tool, a filter that helps you determine all the details, grand and trivial.
Make purpose your bouncer. Let it decide what goes into your gathering and what stays out.
What brought you to this city—whether birth or circumstance? What is a book that really affected you as a child? What do you think would make us a better city?
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.
“This is not a class.” What it wasn’t helped us to see what it was.
a stranger might damage the intimacy and people’s willingness to share.
in trying not to offend, you fail to protect the gathering itself and the people in it.
conflict often unearths purpose.
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.
the purpose of a gathering can remain somewhat vague and abstract until it is clarified by drawing the boundary between who is in and out.
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.
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.
6, 12 to 15, 30, and 150.
When you choose a venue for logistical reasons, you are letting those logistics override your purpose, when in fact they should be working for it.
the context of the room does eighty percent of the work, in terms of giving you a position of advantage over the audience.”
first you determine your venue, and then your venue determines which you gets to show up.
figuring out the venue is about deciding how you want to nudge those chosen few to be the fullest versions of themselves and the best guests.
Sometimes just reconfiguring a room is enough.
What many hosts don’t realize is that the choice of venue is one of your most powerful levers over your guests’ behavior.
Displacement is simply about breaking people out of their habits. It is about waking people up from the slumber of their own routines.
Platon is displacing his subjects from the context that they’re in and is, through this physical object, connecting them to all the other photo shoots (and therefore people) who have come before them.
Gatherings need perimeters. A space for a gathering works best when it is contained.
“If you are on a picnic blanket, you will hang out around your picnic blanket.
Studies show that simply switching rooms for different parts of an evening’s experience will help people remember different moments better.
suggests having several interesting phases over the course of the evening, each of which occurs in a different space
you can remember specific things that happened at each point. You go on a journey; there’s a narrative,”
