The Art of Gathering

Description

“Hosts of all kinds, this is a must-read!” –Chris Anderson, owner and curator of TED
 
From the host of the New York Times podcast Together Apart, an exciting new approach to how we gather that will transform the ways we spend our time together—at home, at work, in our communities, and beyond.

In The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker argues that the gatherings in our lives are lackluster and unproductive–which they don’t have to be. We rely too much on routine and the conventions of gatherings when we should focus on distinctiveness and the people involved. At a time when coming together is more important than ever, Parker sets forth a human-centered approach to gathering that will help everyone create meaningful, memorable experiences, large and small, for work and for play.

Drawing on her expertise as a facilitator of high-powered gatherings around the world, Parker takes us inside events of all kinds to show what works, what doesn’t, and why. She investigates a wide array of gatherings–conferences, meetings, a courtroom, a flash-mob party, an Arab-Israeli summer camp–and explains how simple, specific changes can invigorate any group experience.

The result is a book that’s both journey and guide, full of exciting ideas with real-world applications. The Art of Gathering will forever alter the way you look at your next meeting, industry conference, dinner party, and backyard barbecue–and how you host and attend them.“A long overdue and urgent manifesto.” —Seth Godin

“The Art of Gathering is one of the most transformative books I’ve read in years. It has fundamentally changed I how run meetings, attend conferences, and even arrange dinner with friends. Equally important, it has reminded me why people come together in the first place — and why we should treat every gathering as an opportunity to deepen our shared humanity.” —Daniel H. Pink, author of When and Drive

“As social animals, humans gather, meet, and bond—seeking meaning, purpose, creative expression, and more. In almost all cases this is an unconscious process leading to subtle frustration and a lack of satisfaction. For the last few years I’ve avoided social gatherings because I find them meaningless and banal. I learned much from this book. Priya Parker has created both an art and a science to gathering in ways that can bring joy and fulfillment to any meeting.” —Deepak Chopra  

“[A] remarkable new book about how we spend our time together, at work, at home, and beyond. If you want to get more out of every event, whether it’s with your boss and co-workers or friends and family, The Art of Gathering can help.” —Bustle

“[A] fantastic book . . . . Good things happen when people connect. Especially when we follow Priya’s sage advice.” —Forbes

“Enthusiastically delivered formulas for better get-togethers… useful to those whose job it is to plan meetings, conferences, and the like and a worthy survival manual for consumers of the same.” —Kirkus Reviews

“This clear and engaging book sets down many things you thought you knew, until you find yourself remembering that you did not attend to its simple rules at the last significant event you hosted.… A passion for successful encounters enlivens every page.” —Sherry Turkle, author of Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age and Alone Together

“We’re more connected than ever. But it doesn’t really feel that way. We talk on the phone less than we used to, but we spend more time in front of screens, or plugged into earbuds. We’re constantly interacting, but not always communicating on a meaningful level. We’re busy, but we’re not often getting a lot done. Priya Parker aims to change that. In her new book The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, Parker sets out to make our lives more productive, and our interactions more meaningful.” —Debbie Millman, Design Matters

“A brilliant and eminently practical guide! The Art of Gathering will open your eyes to just how often we gather – and how we can turn those mundane events into dazzling opportunities for meaning, dreaming, and doing.  This book should be mandatory reading for everyone from the business executive to the community activist, the conflict resolution specialist to the dinner host.  Concrete advice that will forever change the way you gather.” —Daniel L. Shapiro, founder of the Harvard International Negotiation Program and author of Negotiating the Nonnegotiable

“Don’t read this book alone. Read it at a gathering of friends, in a book club, with a team of colleagues, or on a family reunion. But read it—for its wisdom, its charm, its insight, and its ability to make every encounter with others more meaningful and enjoyable. The Art of Gathering is a book long overdue, and just in time.” —Bruce Feiler, bestselling author of The Secrets of Happy Families and Walking the Bible  “Many of the best things in life happen when people gather. So it’s remarkable how little conscious intent goes into planning such moments. Thank goodness for this book. It opens up new ways of thinking about wonderful gatherings with a delicious confection of smartly-defined concepts and detailed examples. Hosts of all kinds, this is a must-read!” —Chris Anderson, owner and curator of TED

“Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering is brilliant. The book is a timely reminder: It’s our human-to-human links that make the most meaningful moments of our lives. Page by page, Parker offers a decoder ring for the secret forces at work when we gather for business, crises or celebration. What to leave out, where to meet, how to charm—it’s all here, explained with unforgettable stories and clever tips. You’ll only put this book down because it will make you so hungry for a gathering of your own.” —Joshua Cooper Ramo, author of The Seventh Sense and The Age of the Unthinkable

PRIYA PARKER works to help people create collective meaning in their lives through gatherings. She is a master facilitator, strategic advisor, acclaimed author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters, and the host and executive producer of the New York Times podcast, Together Apart. Trained in the field of conflict resolution, Parker has worked on race relations on American college campuses and on peace processes in the Arab world, southern Africa, and India. She studied organizational design at M.I.T., public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and political and social thought at the University of Virginia. She lives with her husband and two children in Brooklyn, NY. @priyaparker

The way we gather matters. Gatherings consume our days and help determine the kind of world we live in, in both our inti- mate and public realms. Gathering—the conscious bringing together of people for a reason—shapes the way we think, feel, and make sense of our world. Lawgivers have understood, perhaps as well as anyone, the power inherent in gatherings.  In democracies,  the freedom  to assemble  is one of the foundational rights granted to every individual.  In countries descending into authoritarianism, one of the first things to go is the right to assemble. Why? Because of what can happen when people come together, exchange information, inspire one another, test out new ways of being together. And yet most of us spend very little time thinking about the actual ways in which we gather.

We spend our  lives gathering—first in our families, then in neighborhoods and playgroups, schools and churches,  and then in meetings, weddings, town halls, conferences, birthday  parties, product  launches,  board  meetings,  class and  family  reunions, dinner parties, trade fairs, and funerals.  And we spend much of that time in uninspiring,  underwhelming moments that fail to capture us, change us in any way, or connect us to one another.

Any number of studies support a notion that’s obvious to many of us: Much of the time we spend in gatherings with other people disappoints us. “With the occasional exception, my mood in conferences usually swings between boredom, despair, and rage,” Duncan Green, a blogger and specialist in international development, confesses in the Guardian. Green’s take isn’t unique to conferences: The 2015 State of Enterprise Work  survey found that “wasteful meetings” were employees’ top obstacle to getting work done.

We don’t even seem to be thrilled with the time we spend with our friends.  A 2013 study,  The State of Friendship in America 2013: A Crisis of Confidence, found that 75 percent of respondent were unsatisfied with those relationships. Meanwhile, in How We Gather,  a recent  report  on the spiritual life of young people, Angie Thurston and Casper  ter Kuile write,  “As traditional religion struggles to attract young people, millennials are looking elsewhere with increasing urgency.”
As much as our gatherings disappoint us, though, we tend to keep gathering in the same tired ways. Most of us remain on autopilot when we bring people together,  following stale formulas, hoping that the chemistry of a good meeting, conference, or party will somehow take care of itself, that thrilling results will magically emerge from the usual staid inputs. It is almost always a vain hope.

When we do seek out gathering advice, we almost always turn to those who are focused on the mechanics of gathering: chefs, etiquette experts, floral artists, event planners. By doing so, we inadvertently shrink a human challenge down to a logistical one. We reduce the question of what to do with people to a question of what to do about  things: PowerPoints, invitations, AV equipment,  cutlery, refreshments. We are tempted to focus on the “stuff” of gatherings because we believe those are the only details we can control. I believe that’s both shortsighted and a misunderstanding about what actually makes a group connect and a gathering matter.

I come to gatherings not as a chef or an event planner, but as someone trained in group dialogue  and conflict resolution. I’ve spent much of the past fifteen years of my life studying, designing, and advising gatherings whose goals were to be transformative for the people involved and the communities they were trying to affect. Today I work as a professional facilitator. Though there are many of us around, you may have never heard of us. A facilitator is someone trained in the skill of shaping group dynamics and collective conversations. My job is to put the right people in a room and help them to collectively think, dream, argue, heal, envision, trust, and connect for a specific larger purpose. My lens on  gathering—and the  lens I want  to  share  with  you—places people and what happens between them at the center of every coming together.

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.

I discovered that  field in college when I became interested in, and anguished by, the state of race relations at the University of Virginia. Upon graduating, I worked  in  communities—in the United States and abroad—to train leaders in a group dialogue process called Sustained Dialogue. It is a gathering technique that aims to transform fractured relationships across racial, ethnic, and religious lines. Through that work, I became fascinated with what occurs when people attempt to come together across difference.

In the years since, I have applied the methods of conflict resolution in a variety of settings and to a great variety of problems. I’ve run meetings in five-star hotels, in public parks, on dirt floors, and in college dorm rooms. I’ve led sessions with villagers in western India grappling with how to rebuild their community after  ethnic riots and with Zimbabwean activists fighting  the threat of a government shutdown of their NGOs. I’ve worked on dialogues between Arab opposition leaders and their European and American counterparts to explore the relationship between Islam and democracy. I’ve designed gatherings for state and federal officials in the United States to figure out how to revitalize a national poverty program for a new generation. I’ve facilitated gatherings for technology companies, architecture firms, beauty brands, and  financial  institutions, helping them hold complicated, difficult discussions about their future.

I live in New York City, where people gather a lot. I am often a host and often a guest, and in both roles I am endlessly intrigued by the small and important interventions we can all make to help groups gel. Among my friends and relatives, I am the person people text or call with questions like “Should my work dinner have a guided conversation around a question, or should we just let people chat?” and “How  should we handle the one blabbermouth church volunteer?” How, a half-Muslim, half-Christian immigrant friend asked me, might she come up with her own version of a Jewish shiva to mark the death of her father in Germany with friends in New York who never knew him?

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.

My hope is that this book will help you think differently about your gatherings. I have organized the chapters to reflect the sequence that I walk my clients and friends through, and that I employ myself, when designing a meaningful event. Though there are certainly some principles that I believe apply to even the simplest of gatherings, you need not follow every suggestion or step in this book. You are the best person to decide what  will be helpful for you and what makes sense in the context of your gatherings.

This book is based on my own experience and ideas, both what I know has worked and what  I know hasn’t. Yet because gathering is inherently a collective endeavor, I’ve also interviewed more than one hundred other gatherers to learn their secrets and test my own ideas. My conversations with conference organizers, event planners, circus choreographers, Quaker meeting clerks, camp counselors, funeral directors, DJs, auctioneers, competitive wingsuit flying-formation instructors, rabbis, coaches, choir conductors, performance artists, comedians, game designers, Japanese tea ceremony masters, TV directors, professional photographers, family wealth advisers, and fundraisers have all informed the ideas here. I intentionally draw from a wide variety of gatherings—museums, classrooms, partner meetings, birthday parties, summer camps, and even funerals—to illustrate the creativity that people use regardless of the context, and I hope it inspires you to do the same. All the stories that  follow are true, though I have changed some identifying names, details, and locations of events and people for private  gatherings. Among the variety of people I spoke with, they all shared one crucial trait: a fascination with what happens when people come together.

As I send you off into these pages, let me declare my bias up front:

I believe that everyone has the ability to gather well.

You don’t have to be an extrovert. In fact, some of the best gatherers I know suffer from social anxiety.

You don’t need to be a boss or a manager. You don’t need a fancy house.

The art of gathering, fortunately, doesn’t rest on your charisma or the quality of your jokes. (I would be in trouble if it did.)

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.

Let’s begin.US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.8300 × 5.4300 × 8.2000 in
Imprint	Riverhead Books
ISBN-13	09781594634932
ISBN-10	1594634939
Author	Priya Parker
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	BUS071000, PSY017000
Subjects	motivational gifts, gather, the art of, baby shower gifts, self help books for women, business books, inspirational gifts, relationship books, personal development books, hospitality, sociology books, personal growth books, management books, leadership books, philosophy books best sellers, leadership book, wedding party gifts, boat gifts, art, psychology, BUS071000, self help, networking, PSY017000, leadership, creativity, community, gift, self help books, how to, art book, Art books, inspirational books, motivational books, wedding planners