Art of Gathering by Priya Parker - Summary and Notes

Thursday. December 28, 2023 - 47 mins

Summary / Top Takeaways

This book opens with how a strong purpose to a gathering helps guide the decisioning on who to invite and how to structure the gathering. Often we do this step in reverse. People often don’t realize that there is a window of opportunity from when the invitations are sent to when the event actually starts where the guests can be ‘primed’. Priming the guests before the event has even begun is a great way to have a memorable gathering. Strong openings that awe guests and bring them together as a group, combined with thoughtful closings that help people reflect, and reconnect outside the even can elevate the experience they have from the gathering. Lots of actionable takeaways and advice here that has truly changed my perspective on gatherings large and small.

Favorite Quotes and Chapter Notes

I went through my notes and captured key quotes from all chapters below.

P.S. – Highly recommend Readwise if you want to get the most out of your reading.

Introduction

Gatherings crackle and flourish when real thought goes into them, when(often invisible) structure is baked into them, and when a host has the curiosity, willingness, and generosity of spirit to try.

One | Decide Why You’re Really Gathering

But here is the great paradox of gathering: There are so many good reasons for coming together that often we don’t know precisely why we are doing so. You are not alone if you skip the first step in convening people meaningfully: committing to a bold, sharp purpose.

A Category Is Not a Purpose

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.
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
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. Looking
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, the way the Red Hook Community Justice Center and The New York Times have done, your gathering has less chance of being the most it can be.

Commit to a Gathering About Something

Yet forcing yourself to think about your gathering as stand-taking helps you get clear on its unique purpose. Gatherings that please everyone occur, but they rarely thrill. Gatherings that are willing to be alienating—which is different from being alienating—have a better chance to dazzle. How do you do this? How do you arrive at a something worth gathering about? What are the ingredients for a sharp, bold, meaningful gathering purpose? 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. I
When its founders began to study what made for a successful group, a surprising observation came to light. It wasn’t always the big-tent groups, being everything to everyone, that most attracted people. It was often the groups that were narrower and more specific.“The more specific the Meetup, the more likelihood for success,” Scott Heiferman, its cofounder and CEO, told me.
Specificity sharpens the gathering because people can see themselves in it.
The tea master there told me of a phrase the sixteenth-century Japanese tea master Sen no Rikyū taught his students to keep in the front of their minds as they conduct the ceremony: Ichi-go ichi-e. The master told me it roughly translates to“one meeting, one moment in your life that will never happen again.” She explained further:“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.” Each gathering is ichi-go ichi-e. And it can help to keep that in the forefront of our minds as we gather.
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. A disputable purpose, on the other hand, begins to be a decision filter. If you commit to a purpose of your wedding as a ceremonial repayment of your parents for all they have done for you as you set off to build your own family, that is disputable, and it will immediately help you make choices. That one remaining seat will go to your parents’ long-lost friend, not your estranged college buddy. If, on the other hand, you commit to the equally valid purpose of a wedding as a melding of a new couple with the tribe of people with whom they feel the most open, that, too, is disputable, and it implies clear and different answers. The parents’ friend may have to stand down for the college buddy.
Similarly, at The New York Times, there were certainly, at least for a time, journalists and editors who did not think that digital should be elevated above print. Each of these gatherings’ purposes were disputable—and that’s why, in part, they had energy behind them.

Some Practical Tips on Crafting Your Purpose

Ask not what your country can do for your gathering, but what your gathering can do for your country: I often press my clients and friends to think about what larger needs in the world their gathering might address. What problem might it help solve? Again,
Reverse engineer an outcome: Think of what you want to be different because you gathered, and work backward from that outcome. That
Stewart and Tsao’s big idea is that every meeting should be organized around a“desired outcome.” When a meeting is not designed in that way, they found, it ends up being defined by process. For example, a meeting to discuss the quarter’s results is a meeting organized around process.

Purpose Is Your Bouncer

Virtually every choice will be easier to make when you know why you’re gathering, and especially when that why is particular, interesting, and even provocative. Make purpose your bouncer. Let it decide what goes into your gathering and what stays out. When

Part One: Who

I have worked with more than a few hosts who feel gung-ho about their gathering’s daring new purpose only to have their courage melt under the pressure of deciding whom to include or exclude. The desire to keep doors open—to not offend, to maintain a future opportunity—is a threat to gathering with a purpose. Inviting people is easy. Excluding people can be hard.
You will have begun to gather with purpose when you learn to exclude with purpose. When you learn to close doors.
Faced with people who should not, in theory, be there but are hard to keep away, it can feel easier and more generous to go with the flow. But the thoughtful gatherer understands that inclusion can in fact be uncharitable, and exclusion generous.
But here is what the skilled gatherer must know: in trying not to offend, you fail to protect the gathering itself and the people in it. I have learned that far too often in the name of inclusion and generosity—two values I care about deeply—we fail to draw boundaries about who belongs and why.
Barack Obama’s aunt once told him,“If everyone is family, no one is family.” It is blood that makes a tribe, a border that makes a nation. The same is true of gatherings. So here is a corollary to his aunt’s saying: If everyone is invited, no one is invited—in the sense of being truly held by the group. By closing the door, you create the room.
These are some of the questions I ask them: Who not only fits but also helps fulfill the gathering’s purpose? Who threatens the purpose? Who, despite being irrelevant to the purpose, do you feel obliged to invite?
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.
To do that, we would need to design a gathering where they meaningfully engaged with one another. In this case, we believed, bringing a close friend would keep that guest’s attention at least somewhat focused on her friend, as well as provide a safety blanket to not engage as deeply as she might otherwise.
When I talk about generous exclusion, I am speaking of ways of bounding a gathering that allow the diversity in it to be heightened and sharpened, rather than diluted in a hodgepodge of people.
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.
In my experience, there are certain magic numbers in groups. Every facilitator has his or her own list, and these are obviously approximations, but here are mine: 6, 12 to 15, 30, and 150.
Groups of 6: Groups of this rough size are wonderfully conducive to intimacy, high levels of sharing, and discussion through storytelling.
Twelve is small enough to build trust and intimacy, and small enough for a single moderator, if there is one, formal or informal, to handle.
In my work, I have found that 12, give or take, is the number beyond which many start-ups begin to have people problems as they grow.
Thirty starts to feel like a party, whether or not your gathering is one. If smaller gatherings scale greater heights of intimacy, the group of 30 or so has its own distinctive quality: that buzz, that crackle of energy, that sense of possibility that attaches to parties.
A Belgian hotelier I know recommended weddings of 150 because, she felt, that was the size at which everyone could see one another at the same time and thereby function as a kind of organism. This spectrum roughly matches what some anthropologists have come to regard as the natural size of a tribe.

Part Two: Where

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.
Venues come with scripts. We tend to follow rigid if unwritten scripts that we associate with specific locations. We tend to behave formally in courtrooms, boardrooms, and palaces. We bring out different sides of ourselves at the beach, the park, the nightclub.
If figuring out the guest list is about deciding who best helps you fulfill the purpose of your gathering, 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.
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.
So a well-chosen venue might signal to people what your gathering is ultimately about(embodiment). It might nudge people to behave in the particular ways that make the most out of this coming-together(the Château Principle). And a venue can and should do one further thing: displace people. Displacement is simply about breaking people out of their habits. It is about waking people up from the slumber of their own routines.
Gatherings need perimeters. A space for a gathering works best when it is contained. Photographers and choreographers often close all the doors in a room to, as Platon explained to me,“make sure the energy isn’t leaking out.”
A contained space for a gathering allows people to relax, and it helps create the alternative world that a gathering can, at its best, achieve. It can be as simple as putting down a blanket for a picnic rather than sitting on the endless expanse of grass; or temporarily covering the glass walls of a fishbowl conference room with flip-chart paper to create a modicum of privacy.
“If you are on a picnic blanket, you will hang out around your picnic blanket. It’s not because there’s a fence around it; it’s because your picnic blanket is your mental construct. It’s not about sitting on a blanket versus sitting on the grass; it’s about claiming that mental space and making it yours and comfortable and safe.”
“When the walls came down, even though we didn’t take away any of the pieces of the board game, they didn’t feel like continuing,” Zimmerman told me.“The energy was dispersed.” Once the game’s perimeter was gone, its players lost their sense of being in an alternative universe.
Studies show that simply switching rooms for different parts of an evening’s experience will help people remember different moments better.
Mac says one of the reasons party guests often end up gravitating to the kitchen is that people instinctively seek out smaller spaces as the group dwindles in order to sustain the level of the density.

“Chill” Is Selfishness Disguised as Kindness

In gatherings, once your guests have chosen to come into your kingdom, they want to be governed—gently, respectfully, and well. When you fail to govern, you may be elevating how you want them to perceive you over how you want the gathering to go for them. Often, chill is you caring about you masquerading as you caring about them.

Authority Is an Ongoing Commitment

But exercising your authority once and early on in a gathering is as effective as exercising your body once and early on in your life. 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.

The Wonders of Generous Authority

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.

Protect Your Guests

The first and perhaps most important use of your authority is the protection of your guests. You may need to protect your guests from one another, or from boredom, or from the addictive technologies that lurk in our pockets, vibrating away. We usually feel bad saying no to someone. But it can become easier when we understand who and what we are protecting when we say no.
EQUALIZE YOUR GUESTS Another vital use of a host’s authority is to temporarily equalize your guests. In almost any human gathering there will be some hierarchy, some difference in status, imagined or real, whether between a sales vice president and a new associate at an all-hands meeting or between a teacher and a parent at back-to-school night. Most gatherings benefit from guests leaving their titles and degrees at the door.

Equalize Your Guests

CONNECT YOUR GUESTS A third use of generous authority is in connecting your guests to one another. 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.

Connect Your Guests

The moral of this story is that connection doesn’t happen on its own. You have to design your gatherings for the kinds of connections you want to create. And, again, it doesn’t have to be elaborate and complicated. I once heard of a couple who found a clever way to seed connection among their wedding guests. At the entrance to the reception, they left a hint to each guest to seek out another specific guest they were told shared one similar interest—for example, to find the avid skier who once quit a management consulting job to become a ski instructor. They knew that, absent such instructions, friends and family who knew one another would seek one another out and stick together.

Half-German, Half-Egyptian Authority

Abousteit uses her authority to protect her guests in ways small and large. At her formal seated dinners, she informs guests that they can’t show up late.“People warm up together,” she tells me.“They get to a certain point, and there’s a certain kind of energy, and it’s a collective experience.” By letting people come whenever they want, Abousteit understands that she would be failing to protect those who showed up on time. In that same spirit, if two friends are in a corner catching up with each other and ignoring the rest of the group, Abousteit has no problem saying to them,“Catch up on your own time.” She is protecting those who may not have the luxury of catch-up buddies at the dinner, and whose chance of having a good time depends on other people being open to conversation with a stranger.
At one banquet she hosted, she ended the evening by suggesting that the group of forty 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. And then she equalized her guests by enforcing that sixty-second rule mercilessly.
Abousteit connects her guests to one another as if it’s her job. At one party she hosted, as friends streamed up the stairs to the main room, she stood at the top with a big smile on her face, welcomed each guest, and told them that she loves nothing more in the world than the people she loves meeting one another, and that they have one job before dinner: make two new friends. And because she’s so authentic and explicit about it, people make an effort to talk to new people, in part because she’s given them the social cover to do so.
One way Abousteit helps her guests connect is by priming them to take care of one another. When she gathers a large group of people who are sitting at separate tables, 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. A“Water Minister” ensures that everyone has full glasses of water. A“Wine Minister” keeps the wine flowing. At another dinner, with people seated banquet-style next to others they didn’t know, when the food arrived in big bowls, she explicitly invited her guests to“serve each other and not worry about getting served themselves.” She explained:“In Egypt, we always serve one another first. When that happens, everyone gets food. You’re not worried about yourself.” Abousteit laughingly admits that she plays the Egyptian when greater warmth is required and it’s helpful to be Egyptian, and she plays the German when greater order is required and it’s helpful to be German. That night, the guests, a bit startled but also intrigued, began lifting bowls of quinoa salad to serve one another, everyone looking around to see if their dinner mates had gotten enough food. This small reorientation shifted the dynamic of the room. Instead of worrying about themselves, the guests relaxed and started to look out for everyone else. She had nudged people into relationships of care, even though many of them had just met.
and because she herself hailed from multiple places, the guests were from many different countries. At the tables, she tried to put together people who were different but somehow complementary. She considered the dynamics between individuals and the table’s potential conversations as a whole. And to the dismay of some of her guests, she followed German tradition and separated couples by putting them at different tables.
One of my favorite gathering documents is an email that Abousteit once wrote to a friend, offering tips for throwing a dinner on the sidelines of the South by Southwest Conference. It leaves no doubt about where her heart is: YOU ARE THE BOSS. Hosting is not democratic, just like design isn’t. Structure helps good parties, like restrictions help good design. Introduce people to each other A LOT. But take your time with it. Be generous. Very generous with food, wine, and with compliments/introductions. If you have a reception before people sit, make sure there are some snacks so blood sugar level is kept high and people are happy. ALWAYS do placement. Always. Placement MUST be boy/girl/boy/girl, etc. And no, it does not matter if someone is gay. Seat people next to people who do different things but that those things might be complementary. Or make sure they have something else in common; a passion or something rare is best. And tell people what they have in common. Within each table, people should introduce themselves, but it must be short. Name, plus something they like or what they did on the weekend or maybe something that can relate to the gathering. For dessert, people can switch, but best to have it organized: tell every other person at the table to move to another seat. I love this list for how it distills the ethos of generous authority. In almost every instruction two things are embedded: compassion and order.

Etiquette vs. Pop-Up Rules

Rules-based gatherings, controlling as they might seem, are actually bringing new freedom and openness to our gatherings.
If the standards of etiquette are fixed, imperious, and exclusionary, pop-up rules have the power to flip these traits on their head, creating the possibility of more experimental, humble, and democratic—and satisfying!—gatherings.
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.

“I Am Here” Days

Among these rules, it became clear that the two most important ones were spending a full day together and no technology. And they were powerful because they forced a degree of presence rare in New York and the tech-addled modern world. People had to come on time, stay the entire time—no coming and going. When they knew that was the deal, they became more relaxed.
We discovered from these experiments that spending twelve hours together as a group is fundamentally different from spending four hours together on three separate occasions. The longer you’re together, the more reality sets in. You can only chitchat for so long. People(including you) get tired and cranky; walls start to come down. By the time late afternoon arrives, people begin sharing stories of their pasts, of their struggles with money, parents, religion—topics that don’t always come up easily. And it was these conversations that truly mattered and made me feel less alone.
It’s rare for groups of people to do things together for a sustained amount of time. We all carry with us the technical capacity to be anywhere, to check out of the present time or space. That means we always could be doing anything. So the active choice to do ONE thing and to do it with a fixed set of people is significant.
In a world of infinite choices, choosing one thing is the revolutionary act. Imposing that restriction is actually liberating.

Push-Ups!

The proper use of rules can help you get so much more out of a gathering because it can help temporarily change behavior.
Laudicina didn’t need to create an entire world of rules to temporarily shift the world of the board meeting. He was able to identify the one behavior that he believed was stalling progress and create a temporary rule to overturn it.

Priming

Before your event starts, it has begun Your gathering begins at the moment your guests first learn of it. This may sound obvious, but it’s not.
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. Moreover, the less priming you do in this pregame window, the more work awaits you during the gathering itself.
90 percent of what makes a gathering successful is put in place beforehand.
The bigger the ask—say, if you’re having people travel long distances to attend your gathering—the more care, attention, and detail should be put into the pregame phase. You need to attend to your guests in this pregame window in proportion to the risk and effort you are demanding of them.
every gathering benefits or suffers from the expectations and spirit with which guests show up. It’s hard to get a dance party started, for example, when people show up subdued and in the mood for quiet conversation.
Priming can be as simple as a slightly interesting invitation, as straightforward as asking your guests to do something instead of bring something.
The problem was, he hadn’t even had time to decorate his Christmas tree. He dashed off a quick email to his guests asking them to send him two photographs of happy moments they’d had in the past year. When the guests walked in the door that evening, they found a Christmas tree decorated with twenty-four printed photographs, cut into small circles, of their own joyous moments: scuba diving, standing in front of a house bearing a“Sold” sign, wearing acrobat gear before a performance. They had a cocktail around the tree, marveling at one another’s moments.“Suddenly they were not strangers or colleagues, but the personal part was there, and that started the dinner so well,” Laprise recalled.
Asking guests to contribute to a gathering ahead of time changes their perception of it. Many of us have no trouble asking guests to bring a bottle of wine or a side dish, but rarely do we consider what else we might demand of them in advance.
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.
A gathering is a social contract Priming matters because a gathering is a social contract, and it is in the pregame window that this contract is drafted and implicitly agreed on. Why is a gathering a social contract? Because it proceeds from an understanding between host and guest, sometimes stated and sometimes unstated, about what each is willing to offer to make it a success. Another way to say that is that all gatherings come with expectations.
Even though the hosts were paying for the dinner, the guests felt used. You never want your guests to think,“Hey! I never signed up for this.”
Among the burdens of hosting is drafting this social contract, starting with that moment of discovery. First things first, the host has the chance to frame the event. This is where your specific, unique purpose comes into play. For a funeral, are we coming together to“celebrate and remember,” or are we gathering to“grieve and to mark”? Those different purposes imply different types of funerals and different moods and behaviors among guests. From the first lines of the invitation, there is an opportunity to get your guests ready for how you want them to show up.
The most important part of your invitation, though, is what it signals to your guests about your gathering and what it asks of them. And one way to send your guests a signal is to give your gathering a specific name.
Part of what worked with our“I Am Here” days, I later realized, was that we gave it a name and that name primed people for what we most needed from them: presence.
Simply because of the name, I’ve noticed that people seem to show up differently. They’re more open, since they’re not sure what to expect from a Visioning Lab, and they are curious. These are some of the behaviors I need them to show up with in order to help them in a meaningful way. Names help guests decide whether and how they fit into the world you’re creating.
And in keeping with an earlier chapter’s commandment to be thoughtfully exclusive, being explicit with your guests ahead of time about what/who is in and what/who is out can help guests prepare for what is coming.
After the kindling, a Kindle The invitation is just the beginning. After the moment of discovery, it would be a mistake not to sustain the excitement. Once the invitation has done its work, there are many chances along the way to reach out to your guests and continue the priming. The thoughtful gatherer is conscious of these moments and uses them to set the tone of the gathering and groom the guests to uphold their end of the bargain.
This kind of priming is especially important when the host is demanding a lot or when the guest is of a particularly reluctant sort.

Ushering

Hosts often don’t realize that there tends to be unfilled, unseized time between guests’ arrival and the formal bell-ringing, glass-clinking, or other form of opening. Make use of this no-man’s-land.
Passageways and doorways One way to help people leave their other worlds and enter yours is to walk them through a passageway, physical or metaphorical.
Over the years, Abramović has developed the so-called Abramović Method for Music, which includes a way of preparing her guests for these performances. When audience members arrive, they are asked to put all their belongings(including their cellphones) into a locker before entering the venue. Then they sit in a chair silently, wearing noise-canceling headphones for thirty minutes to block out all the distractions that keep us from being truly present. She thinks of this time as a palate cleanser.“The silence is something that prepares them for their experience,” she told me.
When my sister-in-law was getting married, her then-fiancé’s Scottish family had flown in for the festivities. The Friday night before the wedding, the entire Scottish clan was invited to my in-laws’ home for a party. When the bus pulled up to the house and all the Scots stepped out in their finery, my husband and I spontaneously joined my father-in-law by the doorway and greeted each person as they walked in—dozens of them. This small welcome created a moment for virtually everyone on the groom’s side to meet the bride’s family, not at the end of the ceremony or during the reception but at the outset. This one act sped up the intimacy and the sense of permission to walk up to anyone over the course of the weekend, which many of us did. It was an initial act of tribe building, and it happened at the border of the gathering.
No matter what environment you’re given as a gatherer, you might ask yourself how you could create a transition of this kind—a passageway that tunes out the prior reality and captures people’s attention and imagination. By doing so, you create a starting line and, even more important, you help your guests cross it as a collective.
One of the mistakes many of us make in thinking about this in-between time is believing that“it doesn’t count.” It does. In everyday gatherings, it can be as simple as lighting a candle or making a welcome announcement or pouring every guest a special drink at the same time. But the final transition between the guests’ arrival and the opening is a threshold moment. Anticipation builds between the initial clap of thunder and the first drops of rain; hope and anxiety mingle. And then when that opening moment finally comes, it is time to give your guests a message: A magical kingdom exists, and you are invited inside.

Launching

The opening, whether intentionally designed or not, signals to guests what to expect from the experience.
Our brain effectively chooses for us what we will remember later. 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.
The first change you should make if you want to launch well is to quit starting with logistics.
Your opening needs to be a kind of pleasant shock therapy. It should grab people. And in grabbing them, it should both awe the guests and honor them. It must plant in them the paradoxical feeling of being totally welcomed and deeply grateful to be there.
He is honoring his guests by engaging with them, even though he may not share a language with them. He moves around the table, visiting each guest, shaking hands, pausing and listening to stories, pinching cheeks, laughing heartily. Cecchini is fully alive in his butcher shop, and he makes you feel so, too. Cecchini is the man onstage, but he’s also your host, your guide, your friend. As he models openness and passion, he wakes up those parts in you. Suddenly you find yourself turning to strangers, taking small risks, and asking unexpected questions, behaving differently than you would in a typical restaurant. When you awe as a host, you are in a sense putting yourself—and your gathering—above your guest. When you honor, you are placing your guest above you.
Fuse your guests 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.
In thirty seconds, he built each guest up while giving everyone in the room three or four pieces of interesting grist to connect to. He didn’t reduce anyone to their profession. He’d leave some mystery(I wonder what that crazy job is). He did it for each guest, and each guest looked at once embarrassed, thrown off guard, and pleased. His jovial, 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. As a host, he was honoring each guest by spending time on them.
The importance of a group“seeing” one another may sound trivial, but it can be deadly serious. Until recently, when medical teams gathered to operate on a patient, studies showed that they often didn’t know one another’s names before starting. A 2001 Johns Hopkins study found that when members introduced themselves and 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.

Sprout Speeches, Not Stump Speeches

In the classrooms where we were supposed to learn what we didn’t already know, the culture taught us to avoid sounding stupid in front of one another. It didn’t make sense to try ideas out loud, because these were your potential future bosses and partners and employees, and it was important to show your strength.

No Ideas, Please. We’re Gathering

Many gatherings would be improved if people were simply asked for their stories.
Story is about a decision that you made. It’s not about what happens to you. And if you hit that and you get your vulnerability and you understand the stakes, and a few other things, people will intuitively find great stories to tell, and as soon as they do, we know them.

The Stranger Spirit

Strangers, unconnected to our pasts and, in most cases, to our futures, are easier to experiment around. They create a temporary freedom to pilot-test what we might become, however untethered that identity is to what we have been. They allow us to try out new sides. In front of a stranger, we are free to choose what we want to show, hide, or even invent.

Fresh Eyes

Borrowing from my CAN group’s use of“crucible moments,” we asked the group to share a story, a moment, or an experience from their life that“changed the way you view the world.” Then we added the clincher: It had to be a story that no one else at the gathering knew. This was, in a sense, a rather wild requirement for a gathering of family members in a tight-knit society in which relatives are a bigger part of life than friends. But we thought it might give the dinner a shot at getting people who thought they knew everything about one another to see one another with fresh eyes.

The Invitation Matters

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. 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 I host 15 Toasts on the sidelines of 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.

Host, Reveal Thyself

Holtrop shared one of his pro-tips with 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.

Risk Management

It is also important as a host to be attentive to the needs of different personalities. No one, however extroverted, wants to feel like they have no choice but to share a deeply personal story. One of the reasons choosing a general theme works so well is because there is a lot of freedom within that theme to choose the level of depth one wants to take. While we do ask that everyone present participate, we let people decide what and how much they want to share. And this level of choice is the difference between people being game for the evening and people resenting it. 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.” Allowing each person to choose what and how much they want to expose was vital to making 15 Toasts intimate without being pushy.

Cage Matches Aren’t Just for Wrestlers

In so many gatherings, we are so afraid of getting burned that we avoid heat altogether. 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.

Why Closings Matter

Because great hosts, like great actors, understand that how you end things, like how you begin them, shapes people’s experience, sense of meaning, and memory.

Just Accept It

Accepting the impermanence of a gathering is part of the art. When we vaguely try to extend our gatherings, we are not only living in denial, we are also depriving our gathering of the kind of closing that gives it the chance of enduring in people’s hearts.
It is your job as a gatherer to create an intentional closing that helps people face, rather than avoid, the end.

Last Call

A last call is not a closing; it’s the beginning of an outbound ushering. A last call can be verbal, as at our dinner parties. But it doesn’t have to be. Dario Cecchini, at the end of the long beefy dinners he presides over, rings a cowbell to signal the night is winding down.

The Anatomy of a Closing

A strong closing has two phases, corresponding to two distinct needs among your guests: looking inward and turning outward. Looking inward is about taking a moment to understand, remember, acknowledge, and reflect on what just transpired—and to bond as a group one last time. Turning outward is about preparing to part from one another and retake your place in the world.
When a mother asks her children every night at dinner not just what happened today, but for their“rose” and“thorn”(the best and worst parts of their day), she is helping them make meaning.
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.
Look at how quickly your identity has formed, a group of people who maybe two days ago you didn’t talk to, but now they are forever in your memory of this team of yours. Look at how you were fighting till the end two days ago, and now there’s no more Green team. There’s this construction of a team and a cause that was valuable and supporting, but also look at how quickly we can coalesce around this constructed identity.

Finding the Thread

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. Whether implicitly or explicitly, you should help them answer these questions: We’ve collectively experienced something here together, so how do we want to behave outside of this context? If we see people again, what are our agreements about what and how we’ll talk about what occurred here? What of this experience do I want to bring with me?
The next time you have the chance to distribute party favors, whether for a child’s birthday or something more unusual, like a work event, ask yourself: How can I use this gift to turn an impermanent moment into a permanent memory?

And Now, the End Is Near

I am not suggesting that you cannot thank people. I simply mean that you shouldn’t thank them as the last thing you do when gathering. Here’s a simple solution: do it as the secondto-last thing.

Recall Your Purpose

He then performs a card trick, and at the end of the trick he says to his students that while it looks like magic, it is just technique, and that he hopes for them to master the techniques in his course until they look like magic. Then he reads a poem by the Irish poet John O’Donohue,“For a New Beginning,” urging his students to“Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning.” Finally, he ends the way the class began, by asking the students to close in a minute of silence. All this for a consulting class? I had heard from him that, year after year, the students are really moved, with the class often ending in tears.(He also regularly wins teaching awards.)

The Exit Line

All day long, I have been taking notes on what people say and jotting down specific phrases, confessions, epiphanies, jokes, and one-liners that I think capture an important moment. Then, in my closing, after all the other participants have shared, I have them stand up, look at one another, and listen. I read aloud bits and phrases that people have said over the preceding day. In hearing their own voices, presented in the order of the day’s events, they are reminded of all we did together. I am also showing them how deeply they were listened to, and signaling to them that what they said was remembered. Finally, I come to my last quote.(Often it is something that was said by another participant in their closing comments just a few minutes prior to me speaking.) I close my iPad or the notebook from which I’m reading. I pause. I look up. I let the moment hang. And then I say some version of“I pronounce this Lab…”—then I clap: an exit line—“closed.” I mark it. I end it. And they are released. And usually everyone starts clapping. It’s over.(Don’t worry. I don’t do this at parties.)
A good and meaningful closing doesn’t conform to any particular rules or form. It’s something you have to build yourself, in keeping with the spirit of your gathering, in proportion to how big a deal you want to make of it. Just because it’s a regular weekly sales meeting doesn’t mean that a closing is too fancy or strange. A huddle and group chant of“Front line matters!” before the meeting ends might quickly but meaningfully remind people why they choose to do what they do. Just because it’s a casual dinner with friends doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have a closing. A simple, subtle one, like a goodbye chocolate as they walk out the door, can make a difference. Even a minimalist closing can manage to acknowledge what transpired and offer a release.
There are masterful closers everywhere, finding small but powerful ways to metaphorically wrap their gatherings in a bow and thereby distinguish them. It’s the yoga classes that end in a collective“Om” versus those that don’t. It’s teachers who end class on a story versus those who end with an assignment. It’s walking your guests to the door to say goodbye versus having them let themselves out. Sometimes it can be just a pause, a moment, a tight squeeze, to acknowledge what has happened.