The Art of Gathering

Key Concepts

Start with the purpose of the gathering, and let that guide your design and invitations

“In short, our thinking about gathering—when we gather and why—has become muddled. When we do gather, we too often use a template of gathering (what we assume a gathering should look like) to substitute for our thinking. The art of gathering begins with purpose: When should we gather? And why?” (p. 2)

“Most purposes for gatherings feel worthy and respectable but are also basic and bland: “We’re hosting a welcome dinner so that our new colleague feels comfortable in our tight-knit group,” or “I’m throwing a birthday party to look back on the year.” These are purposes, but they fail at the test for a meaningful reason for coming together: Does it stick its neck out a little bit? Does it take a stand? Is it willing to unsettle some of the guests (or maybe the host)? Does it refuse to be everything to everyone?” (p. 17)

“What are the ingredients for a sharp, bold, meaningful gathering purpose?” (p. 17)

“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.” (p. 17)

“Uniqueness is another ingredient. How is this meeting or dinner or conference unique among the other meetings, dinners, and conferences you will host this year?” (p. 18)

“Drill, baby, drill: 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.” (p. 22)

“Reverse engineer an outcome: Think of what you want to be different because you gathered, and work backward from that outcome.” (p. 24)

“When there really is no purpose: If you go through these steps and find that you still cannot figure out any real purpose for your get-together, then you probably shouldn’t be planning the kind of meaningful gathering that I am exploring here.” (p. 25)

“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.” (p. 32)

Use the purpose to decide the invitation list

“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.” (p. 35)

“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.” (p. 46)

The venue choice and setup should also support the purpose

“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.” (p. 53)

“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.” (p. 53)

“A deft gatherer picks a place that elicits the behaviors she wants and plays down the behaviors she doesn’t.” (p. 58)

“Gatherings need perimeters. A space for a gathering works best when it is contained.” (p. 65)

“One underground party planner explained it to me like this: ‘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.’” (p. 66)

“Studies show that simply switching rooms for different parts of an evening’s experience will help people remember different moments better. To ensure people will remember the distinct parts of your party, Ed Cooke, an expert on the workings of memory, suggests having several interesting phases over the course of the evening, each of which occurs in a different space.” (p. 66)

“Just as we go into autopilot on the location of our weekly staff meetings, we also tend to accept the default setup we’re given. If there’s a table in the middle of the room, we leave it there. If the chairs are set up on two of the four sides, we don’t move them, even though it would create more intimacy if we did. So next time you’re in a gathering venue, remember that something as simple as a few flip charts can allow you to transform the feel of a room.” (p. 68)

“Don’t Be a Chill Host”

“The chill approach to hosting is all too often about hosts attempting to wriggle out of the burden of hosting. 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.” (p. 74)

“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. Those others are likely to exercise power in a manner inconsistent with your gathering’s purpose, and exercise it over people who signed up to be at your—the host’s—mercy, but definitely didn’t sign up to be at the mercy of your drunk uncle.” (p. 74)

Use your power as a host to enforce rules and to protect your guests

“So remember, if you’re going to compel people to gather in a particular way, enforce it and rescue your guests if it fails.” (p. 79)

“An essential step along the path of gathering better is making peace with the necessity and virtue of using your power. If you are going to gather, gather. If you are going to host, host. If you are going to create a kingdom for an hour or a day, rule it—and rule it with generosity.” (p. 80)

“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.” (p. 83)

“Create a Temporary Alternative World”

“A gathering’s blandness is a symptom of a disease. We must treat the disease. And what is the disease? That the gathering makes no effort to do what the best gatherings do: transport us to a temporary alternative world.” (p. 112)

“Whereas etiquette fostered a kind of repression, gathering with rules can allow for boldness and experimentation. Rules can create an imaginary, transient world that is actually more playful than your everyday gathering. That is because everyone realizes that the rules are temporary and is, therefore, willing to obey them.” (p. 120)

“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. When they do, they often end up creating that temporary alternative world I described earlier. By drafting a kind of one-time-only constitution for a gathering, a host can give rise to a fleeting kingdom that pulls people in, tries something new, and, yes, spices things up.” (p. 121)

“Priming” guests for the experience you want to create

“Your gathering begins at the moment your guests first learn of it. This may sound obvious, but it’s not. If it were obvious, hosts wouldn’t fail to host the pregame for their gathering as often as they do.” (p. 145)

“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.” (p. 149)

“Another lesson is that the pregame should sow in guests any special behaviors you want to blossom right at the outset.” (p. 151)

“Priming can be as simple as a slightly interesting invitation, as straightforward as asking your guests to do something instead of bring something.” (p. 152)

“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.” (p. 154)

“And so part of the job of the pregame is to find ways, implicit and explicit, to communicate to your guests what they’re signing up for by saying yes to the invitation.” (p. 158)

“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.” (p. 158)

“Ushering” guests into the meeting

“In many gatherings, your guests will benefit from being carried across a proverbial threshold, leaving the wide world and entering your small kingdom.” (p. 163)

“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.” (p. 170)

“Launching” the event well

“The first change you should make if you want to launch well is to quit starting with logistics.” (p. 173)

“Your opening needs to be a kind of pleasant shock therapy. It should grab people.” (p. 178)

“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.” (p. 181)

“In the hustle-bustle of modern life in the West, we often skip this step. This is what happens in many churches when the pastor invites the congregation to shift its attention from the pulpit to one another and to wish a round of “Good morning” or “Happy Easter.” This kind of invitation is missing from too many gatherings and can be especially powerful at the outset.” (p. 183)

“Keep Your Best Self Out of My Gathering”

“One of these approaches is to seek out and design for what I call the “sprout speech,” as distinguished from its tedious better-known cousin the stump speech. The stump speech is the pre-planned, baked spiel that people have given a thousand times.” (p. 202)

“What I learned from 15 Toasts is that while we tend to give stump speeches at so many gatherings of consequence, it is people’s sprouts that are most interesting—and perhaps most prone to making a group feel closely connected enough to attempt big things together.” (p. 203)

“Many gatherings would be improved if people were simply asked for their stories.” (p. 210)

“If guests often bring their stump rather than sprout speeches to events, if they often talk of their theories rather than their experiences, then organizers can succumb to their own kind of phoniness. They insist on keeping gatherings positive, especially when choosing themes. The meaningful gatherer doesn’t fear negativity, though, and in fact creates space for the dark and the dangerous.” (p. 212)

“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.” (p. 230)

“At each 15 Toasts since, I almost always say something like ‘Tell us something that would surprise us,’ or ‘Leave your successes at the door,” or ‘There’s no need to slip in an accomplishment.’” (p. 231)

Facilitators need to lead guests in vulnerability

“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.” (p. 223)

How to end well

“More often than not at our gatherings, hosts passively allow their events to flicker out instead of claiming a specific concluding moment—a real send-off. Too many of our gatherings don’t end. They simply stop.” (p. 248)

“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.” (p. 259)

“Part of preparing guests for reentry is helping them find a thread to connect the world of the gathering to the world outside. That thread could come in the form of a verbal or written pledge, as some conferences have begun to do in their closing sessions. They give guests an opportunity to make public pledges to the group of what they will do differently moving forward, and often have a physical wall that people can write the pledges on. A thread could be a letter that each guest can write to their future self on a self-addressed postcard, to be mailed out by the organizer a month later.” (p. 268)

“Just as you don’t open a gathering with logistics, you should never end a gathering with logistics, and that includes thank-yous.” (p. 271)

“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.” (p. 271)

Quotables

“Even outside of work, you are proposing to consume people’s most precious resource: time. Making the effort to consider how you want your guests, and yourself, to be altered by the experience is what you owe people as a good steward of that resource.” (p. 24)

“If you are going to hold your guests captive, you had better do it well. When a host fails to exercise power, the authority that pops up instead can be annoying, but it is hard to pin down. It comes from fellow guests whose names you may not even know. When a host exercises power badly, on the other hand, the anger has a clear focus. The wrath knows where to go.” (p. 105)

“So he created a temporary methodology, called Open Space Technology, in which he embedded among other things one specific rule that helped counterbalance an implicit norm of politeness. It was called the Law of Two Feet, and it stipulated this: ‘If at any time during our time together you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing, use your two feet, go someplace else.’” (p. 142)

“Consider the case of Paul Laudicina, who realized that a bad habit had formed in the board of directors he was leading at A. T. Kearney, a global management consulting firm. Board members were constantly asking for more information and asking clarifying questions, and this was preventing the kinds of conversations that help a board reach critical decisions. At one point, when negotiations among board members were breaking down and tempers were flaring, Laudicina realized that people were asking questions in order to avoid making tough decisions. Curiosity was fine in general, but it wasn’t useful given the purpose of this particular gathering. As the chair of the board, he introduced a new rule: Board members could only ask questions that were not asking for more information—that were building on what information there already was. For example, ‘What is blocking us from getting this done?” or “Who has a problem with this?’ or ‘What would it take to come to agreement on this issue?’ As opposed to ‘Can you give me last year’s Q4 numbers?’” (p. 143)

“One other lesson is that, whether in Middle East peace talks or at weekend dance parties, 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.” (p. 151)

“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.” (p. 173)

“As each guest arrived, Thurston would start clapping and yelling, “Atención, atención!” All the other guests would turn and look as he playfully yelled, “Announcing . . . Katie Stewart!” He then went on to tell the room a few details about Katie that others might be interested in: “I first met Katie at a surfing class, where it turns out she was the best surfer in the class. Katie moved to New York three years ago from a job in Kenya. She is a neighbor—go, Brooklyn!—and has two pugs. My favorite thing about Katie is that, despite having a crazy job, whenever I call her, she picks up.” The other guests would burst into applause after each introduction. It was a bit of a shtick, but the introductions were funny, insightful, and unexpected, and Thurston owned it, so everyone went along.” (p. 186)

“The power of the stranger lies in what they bring out in us. With strangers, there is a temporary reordering of a balancing act that each of us is constantly attempting: between our past selves and our future selves, between who we have been and who we are becoming. Your friends and family know who you have been, and they often make it harder to try out who you might become. But you’re not the singing type! Why would you want to be a doctor when you hated biology in school? I guess I just don’t see you doing stand-up. Strangers, unconnected to our pasts and, in most cases, to our futures, are easier to experiment around.” (p. 216)

“Virtually every conference or industry gathering I have attended features panels, and virtually every panel I have ever seen is dull. The people who pick the panel topics pick the blandest ideas they can find—something about collaboration or partnership, prosperity or building bridges, new horizons or growth.” (p. 228)

“So we came to our own version of a last call. Once I can see the conversation petering out after dessert, I pause, thank everyone for a beautiful evening, then suggest we move to the living room to have a nightcap. I give the guests who are tired the opportunity to leave, but both my husband and I emphasize that we’d rather everyone stay. That invitation to the living room is a soft close; in a sense, it’s the equivalent of the last call. You can ask for the check, so to speak, or you can order another round. Those who are tired can leave without appearing rude, and those who want to stay can stay. The party, relocated and trimmed, resumes.” (p. 255)