These are my notes and quotes from The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker. I wrote my key takeaways elsewhere, for the subscribers of my Future of Conflict series.

Quotes from The Art of Gathering (Priya Parker)

She has a fantastic background for a conflict resolution specialist:

In my work, I strive to help people experience a sense of belonging. This probably has something to do with the fact that I have spent my own life trying to figure out where and to whom I belong. I come on my mother’s side from Indian cow worshippers in Varanasi, an ancient city known as the spiritual center of India, and on my father’s side from American cow slaughterers in South Dakota. To cut a very long story short, my parents met in Iowa, fell in love, married, had me in Zimbabwe, worked in fishing villages across Africa and Asia, fell out of love, divorced in Virginia, and went their separate ways. Both of them went on to remarry, finding spouses more of their own world and worldview. After the divorce, I moved every two weeks between my mother’s and father’s households, toggling back and forth between a vegetarian, liberal, incense-filled, Buddhist-Hindu-New Age universe and a meat-eating, conservative, twice-a-week-churchgoing, evangelical Christian realm. So it was perhaps inevitable that I ended up in the field of conflict resolution.

One of the main points I kept getting from the book was that every little detail can matter, if you want it to to.

In all my gatherings, whether a board meeting or a birthday party, I have come to believe that it is the way a group is gathered that determines what happens in it and how successful it is—the little design choices you can make to help your gathering soar. So The Art of Gathering is part journey and part guidebook. It is for anyone who has ever wondered how to take an ordinary moment with others and make it unforgettable and meaningful.

One of the first distinctions she makes is Purpose vs. Category. Trials, Bachelor Parties, Dinners, and Church Services are categories. To have a fantastically dazzling event with a bunch of strangers (the point of the book), you need to go deeper and figure out the real Why.

A category can masquerade as a purpose just as easily, if not more so, in our personal gatherings, particularly those that have become ritualized over time. Thanks to ancient traditions and modern Pinterest boards, it’s easy to overlook the step of choosing a vivid purpose for your personal gathering. Just as many of us assume we know what a trial is for, so we think we know what a birthday party is for, or what a wedding is for, or even what a dinner party is for. And so our personal gatherings tend not to serve the purposes that they could. 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.

The risk of going with the flow:

Perhaps you go with the flow of the old templates, hoping things will work themselves out. There is nothing terrible about going with that flow, about organizing a monthly staff meeting whose purpose is to go through the same motions as every monthly staff meeting before it. But when you do, you are borrowing from gatherings and formats that others came up with to help solve their problems. To come up with the formats they did, they must have reflected on their needs and purposes. If you don’t do the same and think of yourself as a laboratory, … your gathering has less chance of being the most it can be.

Like niche marketing, a good gathering should have a clear litmus test to decide what is appropriate and what is not.

A good gathering purpose should also be disputable. If you say the purpose of your wedding is to celebrate love, you may bring a smile to people’s faces, but you aren’t really committing to anything, because who would dispute that purpose? Yes, a wedding should celebrate love. But an indisputable purpose like that doesn’t help you with the hard work of creating a meaningful gathering, because it won’t help you make decisions. When the inevitable tensions arise—guest list, venue, one night versus two—your purpose won’t be there to guide you.>

Like in career coaching, you can keep asking Why to figure out that purpose.

Take the reasons you think you are gathering—because it’s our departmental Monday-morning meeting, because it’s a family tradition to barbecue at the lake—and keep drilling below them. Ask why you’re doing it. Every time you get to another, deeper reason, ask why again. Keep asking why until you hit a belief or value.>

Here’s an example:

Why are you having a neighborhood potluck?

Because we like potlucks, and we have one every year.

Why do you have one every year?

Because we like to get our neighbors together at the beginning of the summer.

Why do you like to get your neighbors together at the beginning of the summer?

I guess, if you really think about it, it’s a way of marking the time and reconnecting after the hectic school year.

And why is that important?

Because when we have more time in the summer to be together, it’s when we remember what community is, and it helps us forge the bonds that make this a great place to live.
And safer.
And a place that embodies the values we want our children to grow up with, like that strangers aren’t scary.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

Priya has a lot of good chapter headings. One of them is “Purpose as Bouncer”.

Make purpose your bouncer. Let it decide what goes into your gathering and what stays out. When in doubt about any element, even the smallest detail, hark back to that purpose and decide in accordance with it. In the ensuing chapters, I will take you through some of the decisions you must make when you seek to gather better and more meaningfully, equipped with bold purpose.

Should you invite somebody who is irrelevant but non-threatening to your gathering?

But what’s wrong with someone who’s irrelevant to the purpose? What’s wrong with inviting Bob? Every gathering has its Bobs. Bob in marketing. Bob your friend’s girlfriend’s brother. Bob your visiting aunt. Bob is perfectly pleasant and doesn’t actively sabotage your gathering. Most Bobs are grateful to be included. They sometimes bring extra effort or an extra bottle of wine. You’ve probably been a Bob. I certainly have.

The crux of excluding thoughtfully and intentionally is mustering the courage to keep away your Bobs. It 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 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. Particularly in smaller gatherings, every single person affects the dynamics of a group. Excluding well and purposefully is reframing who and what you are being generous to—your guests and your purpose.

It’s a bit harsh for people named Bob, but it’s a good point.

The Chateau Principle, or, location matters.

The Château Principle, in its narrowest form, is this: Don’t host your meeting in a château if you don’t want to remind the French of their greatness and of the fact that they don’t need you after all.

Every gathering with a vivid, particular purpose needs more of certain behaviors and less of others. If the purpose has something to do with bonding a group, you will want more listening behavior and less declaiming behavior. If the purpose is to get your company out of the rut of old ideas and thinking, the opposite may be true. What many hosts don’t realize is that the choice of venue is one of your most powerful levers over your guests’ behavior. A deft gatherer picks a place that elicits the behaviors she wants and plays down the behaviors she doesn’t.

Priya also has a vendetta against “chill” hosts. She sees that behavior as an abdication of power that ultimately throws the guests under bus, because somebody will always be there to suck up the power the host abdicated.

Behind the ethic of chill hosting lies a simple fallacy: Hosts assume that leaving guests alone means that the guests will be left alone, when in fact they will be left to one another. Many hosts I work with seem to imagine that by refusing to exert any power in their gathering, they create a power-free gathering. What they fail to realize is that this pulling-back, far from purging a gathering of power, creates a vacuum that others can fill.

She instead proposes “generous authority”:

Generous authority is Daisy Medici’s arduous effort to equalize who gets to speak when wealthy families get together to make decisions and plans. Medici is a financial adviser who facilitates when the patriarchs and matriarchs of moneyed families convene their extended tribes for what are often difficult conversations. Generous authority is Medici’s awareness and gentle counterbalancing—of the tendency of in-laws often to stay silent, deferring to the blood relatives, and of the elders to edge out their adult children, even though it is those children who will live with the consequences of, say, selling off a family business or giving money away.

Generous authority is not a pose. It’s not the appearance of power. It is using power to achieve outcomes that are generous, that are for others. The authority is justified by the generosity. When I tell you to host with generous authority, I’m not telling you to domineer. I’m saying to find the courage to be authoritative in the service of three goals.

Those goals are protect your guests (from people who would dominate, equalize your guests (with eacho ther), and connect your guests (to each other, not to you).

On connecting:

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.

She then has a section on the difference between old-school etiquette rules and modern attempts to explicitly state what can and cannot happen at the party, like “Don’t bring your phone” or “Don’t say your title”.

The rise of pop-up rules can be better understood against this backdrop [of etiquette]. It is no accident that rules-based gatherings are emerging as modern life does away with monocultures and closed circles of the similar. 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. To grasp why, we have to look into the differences between pop-up rules and etiquette.

The pop-up rules are an attempt to create a certain feel — a temporary world — in the gathering that makes everybody feel special, without anybody having to know any unspoken codes beforehand (like which fork to use).

What could be less democratic than etiquette, which must be internalized for years before showing up at an event? A rule requires no advance preparation. Thus, someone who has just arrived in a country and is unfamiliar with its culture—but is able to read an email—can fully, without embarrassment, partake in a rules-based gathering, but would struggle at a gathering full of etiquette landmines. It is not difficult as an outsider to comply with the rules of a Jeffersonian Dinner or a House of Genius event or one of the trendy new “silent dinners.”

But grasping whether a dinner party in Hamburg is the kind at which you should say “gesundheit” after a sneeze or rather shouldn’t—that takes years of immersing in German social life, of learning codes and cues. If implicit etiquette serves closed circles that assume commonality, explicit rules serve open circles that assume difference. The explicitness levels the playing field for outsiders.

The role of etiquette vs. pop-up rules for gatherings in multi-cultural societies:

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 my observation, many of the people best able to gather across tribal lines these days are those willing to play with pop-up rules.

These reals are inherently limiting, which is what allows different ways of being to emerge. Like a sonnet.

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.

Best Bachelor Party Ever! How could I not use this?

Four months after he got engaged, Felix Barrett, a prominent London-based theater director, received a key in the mail in an envelope marked “To be continued.” He heard nothing else for months. “It was blissful torture,” he later said, “the whole world suddenly took on a heightened hyper-real feeling, and everything was shrouded in mystery.”

After that first envelope arrived, he waited. Eventually, another letter arrived: “Now we can begin.” A suitcase was delivered to him at work. Inside, he later told The New York Times, he found a tide table, map coordinates, and a small shovel. He followed the coordinates and found himself on the banks of the River Thames. There, he dug up a box full of photographs of words on a computer screen. Those photographs told him that if he completed a series of challenges, he would be welcomed into a secret society.

For weeks, he would receive bizarre prompts from odd messengers: strangers, the words on a cat collar, letters in remote vacation spots. Each prompt included some kind of challenge that he would have to complete were he to enter this secret society. Barrett being Barrett, he obliged. He found himself doing half-marathons and climbing between boats on ropes. Each individual challenge presumably took him one step closer to that secret society.

Then suddenly one day he was blindfolded, kidnapped, and taken to an old manor house where he was greeted by thirty men in hooded robes. They were his best friends. He was at the bachelor party of a lifetime—his own.

Great story, but there was a point. She is talking about all the preparation and priming that happens before an event as absolutely essential.

Barrett’s friends understood two things well in organizing his bachelor party. First, that a gathering starts long before guests walk through the door. The clock of the gathering starts, so to speak, from the moment a guest becomes aware of its existence.

For Barrett, the moment he received the key in the envelope, his journey into the gathering had begun. And from that moment onward, his friends knew that they were hosting Barrett all the way to the actual gathering. And that how they hosted him would shape how he showed up to the gathering.

She generalizes the point:

A colleague in the conflict-resolution field taught me a principle I have never forgotten: 90 percent of what makes a gathering successful is put in place beforehand.

An example in an organizational context:

In my own work with organizations, 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.

For a gathering on the future of education at a university, I asked questions like “What is one moment or experience you had before the age of twenty that fundamentally impacted the way you look at the world?” and “What are the institutions in the United States and abroad that are taking a bold, effective approach to educating the next generation of global problem solvers? What can we learn from them?”

For a gathering on rethinking a national poverty program, I asked questions like “What is your earliest memory of facing or coming into contact with poverty?” and “How are our core principles the same or different from when we started fifty years ago?”

For a gathering of a technology company’s executive team after a merger, I asked questions like “Why did you join this company?” and “What are the most pressing questions you think this team needs to address?”

What’s the fundamental point of the workbook?

I try to embed 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.

Remember, everything matters. The who. The where. The priming beforehand. And the opening. One of her mantras: “Don’t open a funeral with logistics.”

The basic idea is that the gathering is a ceremony, full of ritual potential. The host has the exclusive power of realizing that potential in the opening and closing. Many times we “can’t hold the energy” and give it away. Logistics are a great way of doing that.

Don’t kill the attention of mourners. The first change you should make if you want to launch well is to quit starting with logistics.

Rather, she wants the host to step into their power, and use it to both awe and honor the guests. So they are stoked to be there and feel like they belong.

Then you have to create a cohesive group out of the assembled:

After the initial shock therapy of honoring and awing, you have your guests’ attention. They want to be there. They feel lucky to be there. They might well be considering giving the gathering their all. Your next task is to fuse people, to turn a motley collection of attendees into a tribe. A talented gatherer doesn’t hope for disparate people to become a group. She makes them a group.

A lot of Priya’s work is with professionals who have a high opinion of themselves. The ego gets in the way of authenticity. But the authenticity is what makes gatherings awesome. So she has to design for realness.

Mantra: Realness Can Be Designed

I have found there are certain approaches the thoughtful gatherer can take to encourage people to jettison the phony and the polished for the true.>

She has all kinds of formats and questions that she uses, but no matter what she is doing, she never sneaks up on people.

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.

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.

She is explicit about what she wants to accomplish, and invites them to collaborate with her:

When I host a conference or another high-powered gathering, I tend to say in my welcome words that there is a typical dynamic to such events that we are hoping to avoid—the dynamic of showiness and puffery. Given our desire to counteract that, I invite people to leave outside the door those parts of their lives and work that are going great. We’re interested in the half-baked parts. We’re interested in the parts they’re still figuring out. We’re not interested in their preplanned speeches but rather in the words and thoughts still forming.

Leading by example:

It isn’t enough to signal what you want and don’t want from your guests when it comes to sharing more honestly and authentically. Early in the gathering, you, the host, need to go there yourself. You need to show them how.

If you are hoping to help your guests be more real, you need to be real yourself. When I host these dinners, I make sure that [everybody] has my full attention throughout the dinner. I listen deeply and show the kind of self that I am asking them to show me.

You also don’t want to freak people out or push them out of their comfort zone. That’s a form of violence and un-generous authority:

Leng Lim, a fellow facilitator and an Episcopalian minister, uses the analogy of a swimming pool to talk about people’s different comfort levels. He hosts a range of gatherings, some at business schools, some at his farm, and he told me that he invites intimacy in all of them. But he is explicit about letting every participant choose their desired level of depth.

“I draw a swimming pool,” he said. “There is a deep end and a shallow end. You can choose whatever end you want to enter. If you want to tell us your deepest secrets, you can. Or you can be superficial, and getting wet means being real, so bring something that is real for you.” It is important, Lim said, to offer an “invitation to intimacy, but depth is a complete choice.”

Priya is looking for something deeper than harmony:

My belief is that controversy of the right kind—and in the hands of a good host—can add both energy and life to your gatherings as well as be clarifying. It can help you use gatherings to answer big questions: what you want to do, what you stand for, who you are. Good controversy can make a gathering matter.

Good controversy is the kind of contention that helps people look more closely at what they care about, when there is danger but also real benefit in doing so. To embrace good controversy is to embrace the idea that harmony is not necessarily the highest, and certainly not the only, value in a gathering. Good controversy helps us re-examine what we hold dear: our values, priorities, nonnegotiables. Good controversy is generative rather than preservationist. It leads to something better than the status quo. It helps communities move forward in their thinking. It helps us grow. Good controversy can be messy in the midst of the brawling. But when it works, it is clarifying and cleansing—and a forceful antidote to bullshit.

Once again, it must be (and can be) designed for:

In my experience, though, good controversy rarely happens on its own. It needs to be designed for and given structure—bringing conflict out into the open, in a safe, regulated, constructive way.

She turns to the work of Ana Benedetto to examine the relationship between risk and reward in these gatherings:

Before every gathering she creates, she asks herself two questions: What is the gift? And what is the risk? She thinks of each of her gatherings as fulfilling a specific need for a specific group of people. But for that gift to be given, she has learned, there needs to be some amount of risk.

“No true gift is free of risk,” Benedetto told me. She defines risk as “a threat to one’s current state that could destabilize the way things are.” The risk is what allows for the possibility of the gift.

In the same way, should you decide to bring some good controversy to your next gathering, you can benefit from asking yourself Benedetto’s questions: What is the gift in broaching this issue? And what is the risk? Is it worth it? And can we handle it with care?

We’re getting near the end here…

Naturally, closing a gathering is as important as opening. There must be a sign the gathering will end (Last Call), an opportunity to do logistics before the end, a time to make sense of what happened, and a ritual, dramatic close.

When done well, openings and closings often mirror one another. Just as before your opening there should be a period of ushering, so with closings there is a need to prepare people for the end. This is not ushering so much as last call.

In drinking establishments around the world, bartenders loudly announce last call. Why? To prepare you for the end of your time in that place. To allow you to resolve whatever unfinished business you may have at that bar—be that settling the tab or ordering a final drink or asking that man for his number. The announcement of last call unites the gathering of the bar around the knowledge of the night’s finitude. I believe many gatherings—in homes and workplaces and beyond—could benefit from adopting the idea behind issuing the last call.

Looking Inward: Meaning-Making and Connecting One Last Time

Many, though not all, gatherings will benefit from a pause to reflect on what happened here. A gathering is a moment of time that has the potential to alter many, many other moments of time. And for it to have the best chance of doing so, engaging in some meaning-making at the end is crucial. What transpired here? And why does that matter?

Whether or not a gathering creates space for meaning-making, it is something that individual guests will do on their own.

Turning Outward: Separation and Reentry

Once a group has been invited to take stock and connect one last time, it is ready for the second phase of the closing, which concerns itself with the transition back to the world from which the gathered came. This second phase is defined by the question: What of this world do I want to bring back to my other worlds?

The more different from the real world your gathering was, the more important it is to create a strong, clear ending to prepare your guests for reentry into the real world. The more tightly bonded your gathering is, the more it forms a tribe, the more important it is to prepare your guests for the dissolution of that tribe and for the opportunity to join and rejoin other tribes.

You give the guests a change to understand how the gathering changed them, and what they will take home (forever).

After all that, and maybe a few logistics, she proposes a swift dramatic ending, like “This gathering is over” (and then a clap), to prevent all the wishy-washy long goodbye type stuff.

This post is now over.
(clap)