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Future of Conflict #10: The Art of Gathering

This week I read Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering. I bought the book because I thought it was about throwing better parties, but it turns out the material is much more specific.

It’s not so much about building long-term local community (which is what people in my town spend a lot of time doing) as it is getting strangers to fuse and see the connections among them.

…which is an essential part of conflict resolution and thus even more relevant than I thought it would be.

There are 5 insights I gleaned from The Art of Gathering I want to share with you. Some of them are stated explicitly, and some are my own conclusions based on digesting Priya’s words and experiences.

They are:

  1. Everything can matter
  2. Hosting is Power
  3. Preparation is 90% of the work
  4. Realness can be designed
  5. Every event is a temporary world

As you read this, it will be helpful to think of an upcoming gathering you’re organizing or imagining. It can be a wedding, it can be a baby shower, it can be a work retreat, or it can be a knitting group.

These insights apply well to anything that involves getting strangers together with an intention that they leave changed by their experience of the event.

Everything can matter

Like Othello, this one is “a minute to learn, a lifetime to master”.

Every detail around the event will impact the experience of every person who attends the event. With every single choice, you are influencing the choices and actions of every person who attends.

In Priya’s words:

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.

The event is like a game, and the attendees the players. Or the event is a water park and and the attendees are the water. Every detail will be noticed — consciously or subconsciously — and influence what happens.

Examples include: how you invite people, how you describe the event, who you invite, who you don’t invite, where you host it, the layout of the room, the smells, the decoration or lack of decoration, the distance between chairs, the presence of food, where the food comes from, the kind of plates that are used, whether there is a microphone or not, what people know and do not know in advance, the dress code, the first words they hear upon arriving, and on and on and on.

I can imagine someone reading that paragraph and falling into the grip of anxiety and perfectionism. That’s not why I wrote it! I’m trying to tell you how many levers can pull to make your event cohere to your vision. How many options you have. How much flexibility and how many degrees of freedom are at your disposal.

I consider myself a pretty good host and event planner and I probably consciously think about 20% of these details. Priya probably does more, but is almost certainly not doing everything, because that’s not the point.

The point is that you have lots of options if you want the event to go in a certain way. And if there are a few elements that aren’t under your control, you can compensate.

You can still throw a deeply connectful and celebratory birthday party, even if your venue is a funereal home.

You can still have a powerful bachelor party, even if the groom’s mother insists on being there.

You can have an intimate work retreat at the Hyatt in Cancun. You just have to push all the other buttons you can.

Hosting is Power

Priya goes off at length on how bad “chill hosts” are. At first I didn’t grasp the depth of her displeasure, but then I understood she was meditating on power.

To hosting an event is to tap into an ancient tradition of human ritual. In the ritual, the host is accorded a temporary power over the other humans at the event. This power must be used legitimately and responsably.

Overusing and underusing this power equally destroy the event.

A too-chill host is abdicating their power and leaving the event to the wolves. It’s the host job to have a clear vision and purpose behind the event, and make every decision necessary to protect it.

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.

That means inviting the right people and blocking the wrong ones. When Jenna’s ex-husband wants to show up to her “moon goddess divorce liberation ceremony”, the good host doesn’t say “I guess you can come in, since you already drove here”.

That means enforcing whatever rules are present and rescuing the guests from each other. If there’s a format to the book club, you can’t enforce it for the first 3 people and then discard it when it gets to Richard because you’re too afraid to shut him up.

One of Priya’s best mantras is to 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.

The host has to be able to hold this responsibility without flinching. It’s a heavy energetic mantle. It’s an ancient contract.

There’s two ways of fucking it up:

  1. Abdicating authority
  2. Dominating

Pretty obvious, I guess. Priya uses the term “Generous Authority” to capture both responsibilities and highlight both opportunities for error.

Preparation is 90% of the work

This is a mindset and expectations thing. The mindset you have on walking into the party will have a disproportionate influence on your experience of the party.

(I don’t say “determine” because the world is magic and you are magic, and some small detail can change everything.)

In Priya’s words:

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.

This means the host wants to do everything they can to get the people in the right mindset before they show up. This means:

  1. Building your trust and relationship with them beforehand
  2. Being honest and transparent about what your expectations are beforehand
  3. Giving them an appropriate amount of information
  4. Giving them an opportunity to share their excitement, concerns, desires for the event.

It’s like the boss who tells you: “Come to my office tomorrow, I want to talk to you about something.”

Depending on your personality, you might make very different assumptions about what that meeting is about.

Wouldn’t you have a more productive meeting if they said:

  • “I’d like to talk tomorrow about our dreams and expectations for the coming year. I suggest we both come with a 1-page document describing what we want, and then take it from there”, or
  • “I got a lot of complaints about the project that just finished. I’d like to do a post-mortem with you about it tomorrow. Can you come prepared to walk me through your decision process at the three most difficult moments?”

Priya uses the following technique to prepare every attendee:

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.

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.

Anybody who does that has already given themselves to the event before they even show up. You don’t have to spend Day 1 showing them what you want to do and how you want them to show up, because they’ve already done it.

Realness can be designed

We’ve heard this kind of thing before: it’s an ode to intention.

In Conscious Uncoupling, the author says that time does NOT heal emotional wounds by it itself — you need an intention to heal and learn.

Both Camp and Ury emphasize how much background research is necessary to understand the other side during a negotiation.

Similarly, if we want people to Be Real and not play status games or hide behind ego constructs during our event, we have to design for it.

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.

Basically, you have to signal this is your intention from the outset. It doesn’t have to be explicit, but there has to be enough hints that people don’t feel attacked.

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.

And, like everything else, talking about Realness is not enough. We have to demonstrate it.

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.

Of course, nobody in their right mind is going to get vulnerable without basic guarantees of safety. So we have to find out what safety means to people — is it confidentiality? is it reciprocality? is it autonomy? — and then provide it.

Here’s a great metaphor on safety:

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 invites intimacy [but] 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.”

Priya also makes an interesting equivalence with the investment world: risk and reward go together. In a gathering where nobody is taking any risks, there is a limited chance of reward.

She turns to the work of Ana Benedetto to examine this relationship:

[Ana] 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.

This is a very useful framework. What is the purpose of the event we’re creating? And what is risky about that for each participant?

The idea is not to force people into it, but to make the choice clear to each person, on their own terms.

Every event is a temporary world

This is the big one. To me, Priya’s book highlighted the magical nature of every ephemeral event. We become who we are through our experiences. The more powerful and intentional the experience, the more it changes us.

Each event is a gateway to the next version of our self. As such it is an entire world, an entire journey.

Humans have understood this succession of journeys for a long time, and developed ritual to help point our attention to what’s happening.

The opportunity for ritual should not be declined. From the invitation to the welcoming to the opening speech to the gentle enforcing of boundaries to the restating of how we grew to the closing words, it’s all ritual. The form is there to support and magnify the content.

To do that, one has to:

  1. Know exactly Why we’re getting together
  2. Make every decision with that Why in mind
  3. Be sufficiently developed as to hold the power required
  4. Remember the Why throughout the entire event

It’s a form of chaplaincy, of witnessing, of guiding. Even for a book club or stand-up!

In my community, we often have gatherings around a fire. Over the years, we organically developed rituals to make the gathering more powerful. Nobody wanted to put work or intention into these gatherings. We just wanted to hang out. But I found the event itself calling for more care.

As if the fire was saying:

I can help you, but only if you give me permission.

Go ahead, give it permission.

Note: Here’s a link to the blog post with all the quotes. I have to say, my favorite part was about a surprise bachelor party. Not that related to my insights, but a great, great story.