More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The space was too big. The room was gymnasium-sized. There was never a moment when you accidentally bumped into someone, you turned around and met someone new.
she took all the flip-chart stands we had been working with throughout the day and placed them in a semicircle that cordoned off a small section of the room.
event planners and space designers actually have rules of thumb for event density.
He suggests dividing the “square feet of your party space by the number to get your target number of guests.”
hold an intimate, single-conversation dinner the night before the meeting, to give participants a chance to bond.
You are welcome at both parts of the gathering or neither part.
once your guests have chosen to come into your kingdom, they want to be governed—gently, respectfully, and well.
pulling-back, far from purging a gathering of power, creates a vacuum that others can fill. 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.
You are not easing their way or setting them free. You are pumping them full of confusion and anxiety.
It isn’t enough just to set a purpose, direction, and ground rules. All these things require enforcement. And if you don’t enforce them, others will step in and enforce their own purposes, directions, and ground rules.
get to know one another by guessing one another’s occupations.
One of the guests, perhaps sensing the vacuum or perhaps doing what he always does, began to suck up a disproportionate amount of attention.
if you’re going to compel people to gather in a particular way, enforce it and rescue your guests if it fails.
and in trying to be generous to that peer, the host wouldn’t enforce the agenda.
If you are going to create a kingdom for an hour or a day, rule it—and rule it with generosity.
A gathering run on generous authority is run with a strong, confident hand, but it is run selflessly, for the sake of others.
Sometimes generous authority demands a willingness to be disliked in order to make your guests have the best experience of your gathering.
You may need to protect your guests from one another, or from boredom, or from the addictive technologies that lurk in our pockets,
insist on taking questions in “boy, girl, boy, girl” fashion.
You just have to be aware of the power dynamics at your gathering and be willing to do something about them—as
it’s hard to build a movement if you don’t know who’s in it. So each person had to move to a different table. At their new ten-seat tables, they would have a chance to introduce themselves to new people and answer a question relevant to the day or the most recent speaker.
We had gone through a lot of technical information about the grass-fed beef industry, but we hadn’t sacrificed connection on the altar of our agenda.
connection doesn’t happen on its own. You have to design your gatherings for the kinds of connections you want to create.
go around the table with each person sharing a single piece of culture, broadly defined, that truly moved them that year. She insisted that each person get only sixty seconds to do so.
one job before dinner: make two new friends.
she assigns roles to a guest at each table, which gives them something to do and an excuse to talk to the others around them.
“serve each other and not worry about getting served themselves.”
She had nudged people into relationships of care, even though many of them had just met.
In a group, if everybody thinks about the other person’s needs, everyone’s needs are actually fulfilled in the end.
ALWAYS do placement. Always. Placement MUST be boy/girl/boy/girl, etc.
But what they gave us in return did not justify the freedom they were asking us to give up.
designing it as a world that will exist only once.
Rules can create an imaginary, transient world that is actually more playful than your everyday gathering. That is because everyone realizes that the rules are temporary and is, therefore, willing to obey them.
By drafting a kind of one-time-only constitution for a gathering, a host can give rise to a fleeting kingdom that pulls people in, tries something new, and, yes, spices things up.
“The story is not just about the day,” Ishihara said. “It’s over the course of the month at least, buying the candle stand that you like, the skirt that you like, so you’re building momentum and excitement.”
“If at any time during our time together you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing, use your two feet, go someplace else.”
you couldn’t pour yourself a drink; someone had to pour it for you. This simple rule forced (in a playful way) people to interact.
Laudicina ensured that all board members had the information they needed well ahead of the meetings and had ample time before the meetings to ask any questions that clarified the issues. By putting information-gathering questions off-limits, he forced his board members to have the kind of difficult but productive conversations that led them to state their positions more explicitly and reach decisions.
He was able to identify the one behavior that he believed was stalling progress and create a temporary rule to overturn it.
Your gathering begins at the moment your guests first learn of it.
The intentional gatherer begins to host not from the formal start of the event but from that moment of discovery.
This window of time between the discovery and the formal beginning is an opportunity to prime your guests. It is a chance to shape their journey into your gathering. If this chance is squandered, logistics can again overrun the human imperative of getting the most out of your guests and offering them the most your gathering can.
advice almost invariably focuses on preparing things instead of preparing people.
90 percent of what makes a gathering successful is put in place beforehand.
You need to attend to your guests in this pregame window in proportion to the risk and effort you are demanding of them.
If you are planning a corporate brainstorming session and you’re going to be counting on your employees’ creativity, think about how you might prime them to be bold and imaginative from the beginning.
You never want your guests to think, “Hey! I never signed up for 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.
A social contract for a gathering answers this question: What am I willing to give—physically, psychologically, financially, emotionally, and otherwise—in return for what I expect to receive?
part of the job of the pregame is to find ways, implicit and explicit, to communicate to your guests what they’re signing up
