Introduction

Patrick: [00:00:49] This week I'm hosting an investor retreat, and so thought it fitting to release this conversation with Priya Parker on The Art of Gathering. I've been interested in the topic of community and gathering for some time. And along with the book, The Art of Community, Priya's book on The Art of Gathering is by far the best I've read. There's both conceptually interesting and extremely practical. In the book there was literally a table for how big a gathering space should be per person sorted by the type of vibe that you're after. We had a time constraint, but I could've talked to Priya for much longer. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did, and that it inspires you to do something new and different with friends, family, or colleagues.

So Priya this is a completely new topic for me, which is always these conversations that I enjoy most. We're going to talk about your book and the framework you lay out in it, but kind of go all over the place as well. I didn't know your background actually, prior to you sitting down. So Art of Gathering is the outgrowth of your professional career. Maybe it'd be interesting to start there with telling people what you do and why that lets you learn about this way of structuring people getting together.

Priya: [00:01:49] I'm a conflict resolution facilitator, but for groups. So rather than mediator doing one-on-one, my background is in helping groups that are in some kind of transition sometimes in crisis, step back and figure out a better way forward. And my work started first in the context of race relations in the U.S. I worked first a student, I went to the University of Virginia and I'm biracial. And the first question that people asked me when I came onto campus, this was in 2000 was, what are you? And I thought it was a very odd question and I didn't know how to answer it. And I quickly realized that this was sort of racial code. And I supposed to say, "I'm biracial, I'm half white, half Indian." And the question bothered me, but more than the question bothering me, the order of the question bothered me, because the questions people ask you first, when the first meeting you signal what matters in this specific context. And I had never been in such a racialized context before.

And so I learned about a process called Sustained Dialogue over the course of my first year there and began to explore, how do you actually change a cultural context in this case, race; that's deeply historically, structurally embedded in a place and became a group dialogue facilitator. After I graduated, I worked with the Sustained Dialogue Campus Network, and it was the kind of thing where we were at the right place at the right time. We launched sustained dialogue, this process at UVA on September 10th, 2001, and then of course, 9/11 happened. And so it became very needed UVA and we expanded very quickly. And then it went to 12 and then 16 campuses all within sort of four or five years.

And so I learned this process of group facilitation and studied race and political theory, immigration identity at the University of Virginia. My actual major was political and social theory. So that's kind of the way you organize society. And after college eventually moved to India and worked with the Dalai Lama's Peace Foundation doing sustained dialogue, but focusing on Hindu Muslim contexts and conflict. And long story short, I learned a very specific way of bringing groups together, who were at odds with one another and for different reasons wanting to make things better. And did this work, it got pretty dark. And I ended up moving back to the U.S. and did an MBA and a policy degree, and basically began to realize that what I most love was facilitation and the facilitation of groups.

And after graduate school, started my own practice and worked with large groups that are in transition sometimes in crisis, but with organizations, with companies, corporations, political movements, to come in and facilitate complicated, sometimes longer-term conversations among groups that are trying to figure out their identity, their interests, their vision, and the way forward.

Establishing Purpose for Gatherings

Patrick: [00:04:47] So very early in the book, you talk about this notion of establishing purpose for gatherings, which if it's more social people probably think of gathering as something fun and light, that's maybe not the thing you're thinking of, the purpose might be just have a good time. Obviously, in those early examples, there is an extremely clear purpose. And I want to come back to that, how people should think about doing that when they're establishing a gathering. But I'm curious what your early lessons were in those very charged, difficult type environments about what to do and what not to do when structuring one of these things, when structuring a gathering? And more specifically, how much of it was things that you were taught to do or read to do versus were sort of improv and you learned on the go from doing it from practice?

Priya: [00:05:32] Both, the process I was trained in is called Sustained Dialogue. And it was created by a man named Harold Saunders who was Kissinger's Assistant Secretary of State, wrote the Camp David Accords, saw what governments could do to create peace. And then was also disappointed by what governments could do to build peace that even through peace treaties, relationships and trust between citizens on the ground don't necessarily change. And he coined this term sustained dialogue after working with citizens for 10, 15 years first with U.S. and Soviet citizens during the Cold War, and then in Tajikistan. And the first thing I learned was if you want to bring a group of people together, the natural process when people commit to come together over and over again, usually unfolds in five stages.

First, you decide to engage and that's a stage we often skip. But the fact is that you have to actually decide to get involved. You have to decide to figure out an invitation. You have to decide who's going to be in the room. You have to decide what the power dynamics are going to be. You have to set the preconditions. And then the second thing was, you start with story. So one of the biggest things I learned as a facilitator was not to start with strategy, but to start with people's personal stories and lived experiences, and to actually take some of the pressure off, not by trying to solve anything, but to just spend time actually cultivating, listening to each other's not perspectives but experiences.

And that was the most transformational part for me. And through starting to listen to each other's stories, if you have a group that's diverse enough, the theory goes, you start actually developing a more accurate map of what's happening in your community. Because if you're say a white student UVA that is on frat row a lot versus a Black student who sings in Black voices and has never been to a frat party, you have very different perspectives of what UVA is, for example. But if you start listening to one another and map collectively the community that you're in, both of you start having a more nuanced and full perspective of what the community is and where the problems are.

And the theory of this process is as you build and transform the underlying relationship and build trust, you can start developing a more accurate perception collectively of what's going on. And over time, if you build trust a willingness to do something about it.

Patrick: [00:07:45] What was the first event that you facilitated and do you have a most memorable piece or moment in that event?

Priya: [00:07:51] The first event I facilitated, I think the actual group. So the first event we hosted was the launch opening announcements that sustained dialogue was going to happen. And well, I'll give two stories and it was in an auditorium at UVA, and it was probably 150 seat auditorium and is packed. And I had gotten my co-founders woman named Jacqueline Switzer, and she and I had gotten friends from all different parts of our social circles to agree to be in a skit. And we wrote the skit and we tried to make it as real, but also controversial as possible to name the things that people often say behind closed doors, but not to each other.

And so there was 10 of us at the front of the room. And instead of just talking about, hey, we should all get involved in these race dialogues to help improve race relations. We just started the entire thing as a cold open, which I write about in the book. And it was probably a two and a half minute skit of people stepping forward and stepping back and just saying things that they'd heard or seen at UVA. And I can't remember exactly, but it would be things like first, as basic as those names of a book, why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria? To, how come we have parties at the same time and the white parties can go on until three in the morning and every single Black party, the same night gets broken up by the police by 11? To, why can't I walk up... African-American man and Indian woman stepped forward and said, "Why do my girlfriend and I get looks walking down the hallway?"

Human, but just very relative and relevant to what everybody in the room had heard. And it was a way of realizing that you can name something at the outgoing of a gathering that completely builds a legitimacy for what you're saying you actually need. And I remember that was a powerful lesson because within two and a half minutes, we'd made the case for why we actually needed this thing.

Patrick: [00:09:41] I was going to ask you about this later, but since you mentioned a great example, we'll cover it now. Sounds like one of the biggest blown opportunities in any gathering is the opening. It's sort of like books that start with the acknowledgements, that's not what I'm here for, get to the meat.

Priya: [00:09:53] I want to thank my long last cat.

Patrick: [00:09:57] So talk about that special opportunity that very beginning of the event and why most people screwed up and what they should do instead.

Priya: [00:10:04] So I have a chapter called never start a funeral with logistics, and it comes from a real story with a mentor of mine. We were all in the church and it was pregnant with emotion, multiple generations of his followers around the room. And the minister came on stage and said... took a breath and we all took a breath with him and ready to emote. And he said, "Now, before we start, I just want to let you know that the family would like to have you join them in the community center, down the street. Now it's down the street and there actually isn't any parking. So, if you could find a parent..." And he just went on and on and on, and I was thinking, "Are you kidding me?" He lost the moment.

And of course the rest of the funeral is beautiful, but why it matters is because these opening moments are the moments of greatest expectation. And every gathering is an opportunity to create a temporary world. And when you start with logistics, you basically make something that could be profound at its absolute best. But now, so going back to the simple example of this launching of this race organization at UVA, we could've gotten up there and said, "Thank you so much for coming. We'll just go for about an hour. So don't worry. You're going to be able to get to Alderman on time. There's a few people in the backseat. Do you mind actually coming forward a little? Okay, great. Well, so my name is Priya Parker-

Patrick: [00:11:27] This is also like every event.

Priya: [00:11:28] Yes. "And I'm really excited to be here. And I think we are here to..." And go on and on and just explain the process. But instead we started with an embodiment of the problem and in a naming and we use language that was jarring, but also very real and worked in that context. And studies show that the first 5% and the last 5% of an audience has experience as the moment where their attention is the highest. And one peak moment. And by starting with logistics or announcements or clearing our throat, it's not just nitpicking. It's actually the moments where you have the biggest opportunity to capture people. And it's the moments where people are wondering, how's this going to go? What are the norms here? Is this interesting? Should I be here? Should I get on my phone? Should I have be doing my email on the side? And you basically have three to 5% of that opening experience to both set the pathway for the rest of the time, but also the kind of when your audience over. Every gathering to me is a battle for legitimacy. Do we deserve to use your attention?

Patrick: [00:12:32] There's the famous... I can't remember his name. I think his name is Simon Sinek. The guy who... the famous TED Talk talkers. I think the name of that TED Talk is Start With Why. So everyone screws it up and says the what first and the how, and maybe eventually, or never gets to the why. And your advocacy early in the book is that gatherings are made or broken based on thoughtful setting of intention or purpose. And so talk through that process again, trying to correct all the bad gatherings we've all been to. I think it's because you don't know why you're there, what you're supposed to get out of it. So talk about what makes for a good purpose and how important that is as sort of the germinating seed of any good gathering or event.

Priya: [00:13:08] We tend to confuse category with purpose. And what I mean by that is the more obvious seeming the purpose is, birthday party, networking night, board meeting, wedding, the more likely we are to skip over it and the more likely we are to follow a specific form. So if you say what's the purpose of a wedding, people might look at you kinda funny and be like, "To get married," or what's the purpose of the board meeting? Like, "To get the board together." And because we don't ask actually the second or third layer questions of, well, why do you want to get the board together? Or why do you want to get married with people around you? Why don't you just go to City Hall? We tend to not actually know why we're doing something and we tend to just follow scripts or follow the routine of what we think something should feel like.

So I'll give an example from a work context. People often want to host conferences or networking nights. And even with the example of a networking night, let's host a networking nights to let people meet each other. Well, if you only land there and don't actually ask what the purpose of the networking night is, you probably will follow a certain form, which has everybody's wandering around, there's a bar on the back and you're stuffing business cards into each other's pockets and looking at each other's shoulders wondering if there's a better conversation I could be having somewhere else. It's like this extreme experiment and FOMO/feeling badly about yourself, but it's also diluted because if you don't actually ask, what is the purpose of this networking night? Is it to deepen relationships and trust between people who already somewhat know each other? Is it to introduce potential business partners? Is it to introduce new clients? Is it to raise a new round of capital people who may not know your product?

The answer to those questions should look like very different nights. And so the first step in thinking about a gathering is to ask your purpose and make it specific and disputable, if your purpose doesn't give you a sense of who should be there and who shouldn't be there, you haven't gotten specific enough.

Patrick: [00:15:08] I love all the emphasis on use the word specifics or specificity already, rules, standards, codes of conduct, and that maybe somewhat counter-intuitively the stricter you are with those sorts of things, the better the event tends to be. So talk about that counter intuition and why that's so important.

Priya: [00:15:26] Many of the gatherings that we go to, particularly the social gatherings. My experience has broadly been social gatherings are under controlled and corporate gatherings are over controlled. And in social gatherings, whether it's a dinner party or whether it's a neighborhood potluck, one of the things that ends up happening is we assume that we should be chill. So I'm okay, you're okay. Let people be, let them do whatever they want. I'm not the controlling type. All of these things that we hear all the time and it actually makes her very bad gatherings. And in part, because when you bring people together as a host, if you say, "Come over," or, "Come to this spot in the park at some time," people are looking to you to navigate and kind of host the experience. And when we don't actually guide our guests to find ways to connect with one another, to protect one another from each other and to temporarily equalize, whatever the dynamics are in the room, but among participants will perpetuate.

So an example I love at the highest level is president Barack Obama towards the end of his administration, his term, he at least... what I heard is he found a study that was making the rounds at the time that basically said that men tend to ask more questions in Q&As and they get disproportionately called on. And so he started this experiment to see if he could use his authority in those moments to counterbalance that trend. That this is not a good trend for question askers, this is not a good trend for the types of questions that they could ask and this is not a good trend for gender participation. So he made a simple rule at all of his press conferences, and then all of his public Q&As, whether it's Indiana speaking Labor Union or whether he was at a high school. After he spoke, he'd say, "Okay, we're not going to do Q&A, but we're going to boy, girl, boy, girl."

And if a girl or a woman didn't have a question, he would just wait. And sometimes for 30 seconds, 45 seconds until people started laughing uncomfortably, and finally a hand would go up. And to me, this is such an interesting use of an understanding of what you can do as a host to in that case counter balance a hierarchy that he thought was not useful.

Another example is a moderator who I really respect David Gergen. He's known more as a political commentator, but if you've ever seen him host a town hall or any type of conference, which he does a lot, he at the end of the panel, he'll look to the audience and he'll say, "Well, now we're going to ask questions. I want you to limit the questions, your questions to 10 to 30 seconds and questions end with a question mark." And everyone laughs. But because he says that then when you have the random woman or man in the back, first talking all about how wonderful they are, and then continuing to basically give a comment on the head of state on the stage that everyone actually wants to hear from, because Gergen has already said questions end in question marks, the audience starts laughing. Because he's primed them and he's actually set a rule and everybody starts realizing that this person is breaking the norm.

And so powerful hosts and social, or work gatherings are ones that create rules and terms that help everybody get to the purpose. They're not arbitrary. They help us realize that when people get together, we actually need somebody who, if you're going to set rules that help for the enforce the purpose, there's somebody there and ideally the host that's going to enforce them in ways that protect the rest of the group.

Patrick: [00:18:57] Do you think in some way that a lot of what you've written about is about finding ways to extract creative output from the attendees? That there's sort of these barriers to sharing and that the structure of a gathering, including things like rules are really just about getting people to share real stuff?

Priya: [00:19:15] Yeah. I think that's part of it and I think it depends on the size of the group. So in some cases, basically you and I, and every individual has like, you ask a question and there's a thousand ways one could answer it. And so I think part of what rules do, particularly in larger groups, so rules are particularly helpful in groups of, I'd say 20 to a 1000, but let's call it 20 to 300; which is the size of most conferences or work get togethers. And if you think about how do you have a meaningful conversation in a room of 50 to 200 people? It's with some amount of guidance and most people don't have the training to ask a question of a group to make it actually understandable to most people.

So I'll give an example. I run these art of gathering experiences across the country where as part of the experience to train large groups of people in thinking about hosting gatherings differently. At one point in the experience, I'll say to a group of 300 people, "Okay, you can now ask the group anything you want." So people will be in a huge circle or be in rows and I give the reins over and I'll give them instructions. Then I'll say, "Ask it in a question that everybody understands what you mean." So they'll say something like, it could be simple like, "If you are looking for a job stand," and that's people might stand or not stand. But they may say something like, "If you are thinking about potentially entering into a new field stand," and I'll pause, and I'll say, "Well, why is that meaningful? How do you make more specific? How do you make it hearable?"

And one of the things that most of us aren't trained to do is how do we actually have meaningful conversations when it's not just three or four people in a room? How do you have a meaningful conversation where 400 people can participate? And part of it is understanding how to ask questions, understanding how to limit its time and a good moderator, or host helps as many people as possible participate, but answer in a way where within 30 seconds they've actually said something profound.

Patrick: [00:21:13] Not to lose the thread of setting a purpose. Are there any rules or general ideas about how to segregate a good from a bad purpose? And specificity is one. And maybe even being able to imagine a specific kind of outcome might be another, but anything else, if people want to think about this and apply this in their own lives about what makes for good purpose versus maybe too vague or less than good.

Priya: [00:21:36] Absolutely. So first, if your purpose sounds like an activity, it's probably an activity, not a purpose. So if it's a family reunion and the purpose of our time together is to play a lot of games. So then ask, why are you playing a lot of games? To have fun together. Even that like, "Well, why do you want to have fun together?" And that's the point people look at me like I'm crazy. It's like, "No, really? Why do you want to have fun together?" "Because we believe that family is important and when we're worried that the glue is starting to weaken across the next generation." Okay. That's interesting.

So then as you move to the activity and you move actually to the need behind the activity, all of a sudden you no longer are attached to the activity. It goes to the conversation we're having before we started about Paul Graham's keep your identity small. So the deeper you can figure out the purpose of your gathering, the less attached you become to the form. So for a family reunion, if you say we wanted to get together so we can do a lot of activities together. And you finally get to the point where it's like, "Okay, we want to have a family reunion this year to strengthen the glue of the furthest out generation." That gives you a lot of information. Who do we want to absolutely be there?

One of the people I interviewed for the book it was the founder of The Moth, George Dawes Green, and he had a family reunion. He spoke about it with like over a 100 people gathering in Upstate New York. And if you know that your goal is to let the next generation of cousins meet, you're going to spend one a lot more time, making sure that that last generation, which is most likely to ignore the invitation is going to come. So how do you get them to come? Maybe you get them to host it. Maybe you will say, "You can do whatever you want with all of us for two days." That's a really interesting, different invitation than, "Come and do whatever grandma wants us to do."

I was working with another group that's multi-generation ethnic group. And in that specific context, and hey had kind of reunions every year. And these are 3000 people getting together at a time. And one of the biggest lines of difference was whether or not it was, if you were still a good such and such, if you ate meat. And that was this really strong dividing line between these two different generations. And the year that they were planning, the biggest line was whether or not for the first time, in like 22 years, there would be a meat table. And from a perspective of the next generation, someone said to me, "I know that they are expanding their ability to understand what it means to hold this identity, because they are letting the next generation coordinate off, but have a meat table." That's really interesting. Most of us are like, "Meat? Really meat or vegetarian. Why do you care what..." But in specific context, what you eat, how you pray, what you wear actually has deep significance and changing with generations over time.

So in a type of a family reunion, when you start putting a line in the sand of whether this year, this is about honoring the past generation versus this year is figuring out how to build the glue of the next generation; those should look like very different gatherings with different people making decisions and different risks been take.

Idea of Identity

Patrick: [00:24:36] I want to click on this idea of identity here and how identity relates to good and bad gatherings. Would it be fair to say that a good gathering is about giving a space for people to evolve their identity versus confirm their biases or identities? I don't want to over read this one.

Priya: [00:24:54] Yeah. I think that we each have individual identities and then a group over time has a collective identity. And the first thing I'll say is, when you're bringing people together across difference, we tend to assume that the best way to help them connect is to stamp out their differences, to basically pretend that you're all the same; but actually what is much more powerful and much more honoring of all the individuals is rather than make everybody the same, you want to complicate each individual. And what I mean by that is rather than saying, "Okay, we're all humans," create a conversation, create a type of experience where you start realizing that, "Yeah, he's Muslim," or, "Yeah, he's Jewish, but he also plays the guitar in a band like me." Or, "Yeah, she's a banker and she's a runner. And I was an occupy wall street, but we both have adopted across trans racial lines."

And one of the things in my work is realizing that you can actually create much more meaningful connection when you're not trying to get somebody to dissolve one part of their identity, but you help everybody see that we all have multiple parts and some of our parts are in conflict with each other. The most interesting moments are, Krista Tippett, the radio hosts has this line that I love. She says, we assume a monolith in the other that we know not to be true in our own sides. So we assume that the other side is totally one way, even within our own family, there are fights. And so this is a long way of saying, I think gatherings opportunities to create collective identity, but the collective identity doesn't mean that the individuals all have to be the same.

Patrick: [00:26:42] Speaking of individuals, you used the word earlier. I think you said disputable is a good attribute. And maybe I wonder if a good definition of purpose is how obvious it is, like who should come and who shouldn't, which leads to this guest list idea. So talk about the interrelationship between purpose and who gets to come and what the difficulty of that list says about the purpose in the first place.

Priya: [00:27:02] One example I love, because I think who we invite is often the proxy battle around purpose. So weddings, for example, when you start arguing about whether or not your father's colleague versus your long lost college buddy should come, you're actually arguing about like, who is this fore first? Is this about you all? Or is this about us? But one of the characters in my book Nora Abousteit, her father is somebody who really intrigues me. He was an Egyptian immigrant and in the '50s immigrated to a small town in Germany. And he started the first student only bar. And at the time it was this novel idea and they did things like drink beer out of beer bottles rather than pouring into the cup, which at the time was considered very forward and brash. And it was an interesting idea in and of itself, student only bar.

But it consummated its purpose when one day the vice mayor of the town came, not a student came to the bar and wanted in, he heard there was a buzz around this bar is a really cool place, he wanted to see the students. And some of the people in the bar were kind of excited that like, "Wow, look at the attention we're getting." Let's let them in and show off who we are. And the bouncer said, "No, you're not allowed in." And he was shocked to particularly in a town that really respected authority. And he said, "No, let me talk to the manager." And the manager was Osman, the father. And he came out and he said, "There must be some mistake. I'm the vice mayor of the town. I'd like to come see your bar." And he said, "No, this is a student's only bar." And he held the line. And that day they actually became a student only bar when they enforced who couldn't be there.

And similarly, I think we tend to over include I'm as guilty of this as most, sometimes out of guilt, sometimes out of obligation sometimes because we don't know how to say no, but when we gather and we don't want to know why we're gathering; but two, if we do, and we still let people come, we dilute the gathering. I'll give another very simple example. When my husband and I were getting married, we wanted to get together. My parents and his parents, my parents are divorced and they're both remarried. So is one set of my parents, my father and step-mother for tea. And at the last minute, and it was early in our relationship, they hadn't met very many times and we didn't live in their city. So it was a very rare opportunity. And at the last minute, a visiting aunt happened to be staying with my parents. And it happened to be her birthday.

Patrick: [00:29:20] This is a good example.

Priya: [00:29:21] And it's complicated. And she wanted to come. And originally they said... and I saw this coming. I said, "She's going to be in town. Is this going to be a problem?" They said, "No. She has friends in town," whatever it is, then the friends left early. It's always the last minute stuff. And they called and said, "She'd like to come." And we, in that moment had to basically decide, do we hold our ground or do we let them be nice and inclusive and let her come? And I think probably too many people shock, including my poor aunt. We said, "No, please don't have her come." And they said, "Why?" And said, "Do you not like her?" It's like, no, it has nothing to do with not liking her; she's not a parent.

And this was just one person and said, well, if there's four people in the room plus us six, and then there's just one person, seven, who's already an outsider, once they're in the room, you're going to be polite and inclusive. And then the conversation changes. The focus changes who you have to include changes, the percentage of time you spend on each person changes. It's her birthday, so of course so then it's odd to not acknowledge them. I like this example and part because it's so simple, it's stripped away. If there was a clear purpose, I think most people understand why you would want a set of parents to meet ahead of a time of a wedding before you're going to have complicated conversations around financial stuff.

There is a very specific reasons you want people to get together. And I think part of gathering more purposefully is to learn to say no, in a way that's not personal. And then in the future, when you invite people, they know that you actually really want them there. And a huge part of gathering is about allowing the time spent be used in the way that reflects the purpose that you had in mind.

Patrick: [00:31:06] I like how the notion of risk kind of plays into this. Because on the one hand, I completely agree. Well-defined purpose makes it clear who should come and then that's probably a better event, but of course there's a downside that some people don't get to come. And obviously there's some horrific groups historically that have set exactly the wrong kinds of rules and the strength of the rules maybe perpetuated the existence of the group. So there's like a negative component to all this as well but interesting this idea of risk, you do have to take some risks hopefully your purposes are noble, but it's kind of like the trophy for every participant syndrome in sports or something, you can't give everyone a trophy.

Priya: [00:31:42] If everybody is family, nobody is family. And I think this is what you brought up to me as some of the most interesting territory of this entire conversation, which is historically all around the world, but I'll stick to the U.S. context. The people who have continued to say over and over again, that community building is line drawing, that you can't have a nation without a border. That if everybody is in, nobody is out. That you can't have an us without them, have largely been associated with I would say evil, whether it's World War II, whether it's the Holocaust, whether it's the history of race in this country, whether... And yet sociologically community building is line drawing.

Barack Obama's aunt said to him, he wrote about this in Dreams From My Father, literally, that she was explaining her perspective to Barack of his father, of why he in her mind died alone. And he said, "Your father didn't understand he thought he was a global citizen. He thought he could be anywhere, he could belong to anything." He said, "What your father didn't understand is if everybody is family nobody's family." And part of what I think is so powerful about gatherings is I'm separating, gathering from community building. I think communities sometimes have gatherings, and I think gatherings can result in a feeling of community. But when I'm talking about the word gathering, I use it as anytime three or more people come together for a purpose with a beginning, middle and end. And so if you're excluding based on purpose one time, it doesn't mean that you're excluding those people forever. It's asking the question, what is a need in my life or in this work right now that by bringing a specific group of people together, we might be able to address?

Patrick: [00:33:21] So I want to follow that framework. It's simple and easy, beginning, middle, and end. And then kind of the wrapper where it happens, how big it is, et cetera of touching those details too. I think we've covered beginning, not wasting that opportunity, that sort of pregnant moment at the beginning. Anything else there that you recommend people think about in that stage of a gathering.

Priya: [00:33:39] I would just pause and say, the beginning really starts, the opening moment of a gathering as the moment of discovery. It's not the moment people walk in the door and it's the moment that a guest receives the invitation and the invitation might be a paperless post invitation. It might be a phone call and might be a flyer on a tree in a park. So it's the moment that they discover that there's a future promise for a happening and that they could go to it. And you, as a host are hosting that guest up until the moment they walk in and a huge amount people often ask me, how do you get people to be vulnerable at a gathering? And I'll say, "Well, first you need to make sure that it matches your purpose," and we can get into the middle.

This is more about the middle of the gathering, but second, you need to prime them ahead of time and invitations think very deeply about your invitation. And don't worry so much about the logistics of it in terms of telling people the date time and place, give your gathering a name, a dinner party versus... this is a real example, a worn out moms hootenanny. Those are two varied... they're the same night, but a very different ethos of what am I actually going to expect as I arrive. I was invited to a house party and the PS said, "Keep your park slope strollers at home." And it was a reference to Brooklyn. And it basically said in this funny tonal way, "No kids, this is going to be a rave."

And use your invitation to prime people in the language and what you call it and the stories that you tell as to what is the context of this event. What is the meaning and how do we want you to show up. It's a lot harder to get to spring something on people when they walk in the door. Then for all of this kind of ramp up to the moment that they walk in.

Patrick: [00:35:15] I love that. That's such a... again, overlooked piece of this whole puzzle. So transitioning now to the middle part of an event, sort of the meat of the thing you already said at the beginning, that you're going to have most people's attention at the two tails at the very open at the very close. So how do you make it enjoyable, fun, worthwhile-

Priya: [00:35:31] Not an empty sandwich?

Patrick: [00:35:32] Exactly, in the 80% in the middle?

Priya: [00:35:35] First think about what's actual structure that you want to use over the course of that middle, if it's a conference, what are the various formats that are going to be interesting to people? In a conference, not everything should be a panel, for example. Think very deeply about what are the different types of ways you can get people to meaningfully exchange information. And some of the most interesting experiments are on conferences where participants come up with the agenda live in person and host the conversation they want to have, or night markets where intellectual night markets, or all types of various structure. So think creatively about your structure.

But then the other thing just more principally in terms of the middle part is two elements that we would see again and again, in our dialogue groups, was that the moments that would peak and the moments that would lead to transformation, were one of two things. One was what I would call broadly intimacy, kind of vulnerability, a showing of oneself. And then the other was heat and heat could be burning relevant. So it could be taboo, it could be a risk, but the moments that had people just basically sit up and pay attention, whether it was because of the format or because of the content were moments where either someone was saying something that they would typically hide for various reasons. And we're actually showing an honest face to it, or they were saying something that had risk in it.

I'll give an example. I was recently in Chicago for a large design conference, and I asked this question, there's maybe 3000 people in the room. I asked this question, "If you've ever taken on client work that you philosophically disagreed with? If you ever took on client work that you either philosophically or morally disagreed with?" And probably half the room stood. So already, it's this beautiful moment where you're standing up and you're showing self perception. I talked about earlier, we have many selves and some of those selves conflict. My moral self and my desperate self or practical self. And so then I said, "If you're willing to talk about, you don't have to tell us the exact example, but what was the narrative? What was the justification? What was the story you told yourself as to why you took the work anyway?"

And then people stood up and shared. One man said, "I was ill in the hospital and old client called up and said, "Hey, I have some work for you," but it was a cigarette company. It was a tobacco company. And he said, "And I believe that I was at the end of my wave. I didn't know if I'd ever get work again, but my mother died of lung cancer." And right then the entire audience, the entire room can deeply relate to not necessarily that exact example, but the many paradoxes and the many moral trade-offs and frankly in that moment, difficulty of freelancing. And all of a sudden, immediately there was relevance. There was intimacy, there was heat, there was sort of moral provocation. And I think the moments in a gathering, or when you can get people to feel safe enough to share what's really going on as it relates to a purpose.

So again, that question wasn't gratuitous. This is a group of designers that are trying to figure out what's the future of the field? How do I, and what do I say yes or no to? What kind of work do I take on? In a moment of time where the most prestigious clients, 10 or 15 years ago, and now becoming the most problematic. Seven years ago for most independent freelancers or companies partnering with Facebook or having Facebook as a client was the first logo you put in your client list. Three weeks ago, Carole Cadwalladr, opening speaker at TED basically says, you think you are connecting the world to Facebook. You think you are connecting the world, but you are the handmaidens of authoritarianism. So what does it mean to serve Facebook right now? And how do you navigate those questions within your field? Those are relevant, interesting questions.

Patrick: [00:39:34] It's fascinating stuff. And it's almost again like setting the structure so that you can explore polarity or the edges of a distribution versus the more accepted kind of meat that progress happens there. Humans tend to socially cluster around norms and a good gathering breaks down that structure.

Priya: [00:39:53] Yes. And I would say, a couple of other things is I don't think it's always necessarily that the it's the distribution and you're looking at the fringes. I think part of it is it's just knocking people off of their scripts. So at some level, most people think they might be at the center of the bell curve or the... But that's only when we're walking in terms of the scripts that we assume that we should be playing in a specific gathering. And I think one of the things that helps... There's a woman whose work I admire who's in the book named Ida Benedetto and she's an underground experience designer. She creates these gatherings to help people navigate their relationship with risk. And she does it physically.

So one of the gatherings she and her business partner used to do, I think it still happens called a Timothy Convention. So it's every year at the Waldorf Astoria, it's a fake convention, a hundred people show up dress in black tie, men and women. And they're given a list of 20 prompts that kind of increases with risks. And there's everything from, there's a wedding on the second floor, crash it and give a toast to the bride or take a selfie in a guests bathtub, or use the freight elevator, and they're different. And none of them are immoral. They're not necessarily illegal, but they're definitely breaking social norms.

And I think this thing is totally fascinating and every time she asks, every time she designs an experience, she asks these four questions, first, what is this group avoiding? Second, what is the gift in helping them face it? Third, what is the risk in helping them face it? And fourth, is the gift worth the risk? And her graduate work is called patterns of transformation and she highlights, I think her graduate work, she looks at sex parties, wild water rafting, and funerals. And looks at why some are transformative and her thesis is it all comes down to risk.

Hero's Journey

Patrick: [00:41:46] So I'm curious in your research, first of all, that last study is so interesting. It makes me think instantly about this kind of hero's journey idea. So threshold crossing, we didn't talk about that yet. I think part of the Gathering, can't remember which chapter is literally ushering people across the threshold as a key part of the physical space. Did you come across that idea, this sort of hero's journey idea of going into the unknown, retrieving something, a gift that's often called a gift? That's why it makes me think of it and then bringing it back. Is that something that your research uncovered?

Priya: [00:42:16] A lot of experienced designers use that as a metaphor. And I think the frame that's helpful for the everyday gatherer is the idea that you're taking people on a journey and at some level journeys are interesting when there's some level of conflict. So stories are interesting when there's conflict and somebody I interviewed runs these experiences for companies called, I think they're called Character Camps. And what he does is he helps companies and brands get to the core of what they're about. And the example he gave to me in terms of how he gets companies to understand what they're about is that, his thesis is every company has a core conflict between two goods that are actually intention with one another.

And he said, for example, if you're going up to a fair line and you're debating whether to get the cake or the broccoli, the cake, or the kale, those are two goods that are in competition with each other, which is like health and indulgence. And one of the things that he said is if you go to a dinner party and someone's like... or whatever, a conference, and someone says, "Hey, how was your vacation?" He says, "Oh, I was in Hawaii. It was amazing. The sun was perfect. I reconnected with my spouse. It was great." And everyone's, "Great, good for you." Versus if you're on a vacation, you're coming back from Hawaii, "How was it?" "You would never believe what happened. Our plane got hijacked." It's like, "What!"

And so part of this entire thing with gatherings is it's not to be inauthentic. And I think there's parts of experience design that are a bit more about creating absurd experiences for people. I'm really much more interested in this goes back to purpose of helping people have what I call good controversy. So it's controversy that pushes forward a purpose. Its controversy that helps groups of people face the things that we typically avoid, or simply talk about what's actually going on.

One of the gatherings I love is called House of Genius. They are two founders who went to conference after conference, they're entrepreneurs and realized that at all of these conferences and networking nights, everybody would talk about how great everything was going. "Oh, series A, series B. Yeah. We're so great. We have so many clients. We have many products." And they'd be, "Well then why are you here? If you don't need anybody, why are you here?" Clearly it's not going that well. But the norm was basically the stump speech to show your best side, because everybody could be an investor. You never know who saw... And it was very transactional. And so they inverted the norms to be that if you want to come to our gathering, which they called House of Genius, you only come if you actually need help.

They are now... It's like a two hour evening event in, I don't know, 70 plus cities around the world. I went to two in New York to check them out. They gathered 12 people in an evening. There's a host sometimes two. They say, no one is an individual genius, but together, the 12 of us has a house of genius. And they have four strict rules, which goes back to your rule making. First is you can't reveal what you do for a living, to basically counter a balance the norms of everybody listening to the VC in the room, or even from a gender perspective or an age perspective, ignoring the young person and trusting the gray hairs or vice versa in Silicon Valley, it's sort of like the age discrimination either way.

Second is, if somebody already said what you want to say, don't say it again. Just say plus one. So, again, it's like pushing conversation forward. There's two other rules, but they have a very specific process that's moderate. Oh, you can't talk about work. And there's a purposely a 30 minute social time ahead of time. And I went and I live in New York City. This was in New York and it was really awkward meeting people and realizing you can't say anything about work. So somebody said, "Now you can talk about Disney world." And so we literally talked about Disney world because we were so unpracticed in not talking about work. And it was really fun and funny. And then they moderate. So two entrepreneurs come, they sit at the top, the hot seat and you each get 45 minutes. And this is structured, very structured dialogue, where they share a very specific example and question and problem that they're having in their startup. They're letting us look under their hood. And they're basically saying, "What should we do?"

And it's helpful to the entrepreneurs. It's helpful to everybody else because it models courageous conversation and saying, "Hey, maybe people actually want to help me when I show that this isn't working versus how fabulous I am." And they append the norms of what it is okay to share at what is 'a networking night.' And people end up actually 'networking' much more meaningfully through this two structure, than kind of walking around vaguely talking about your 30 seconds script you've practiced to get somebody to be interested to give you 30 more seconds to explain what you do.

Patrick: [00:46:56] Well, one of the great little ideas around gathering in the book is this idea of creating a separate world that people sort of walk into for a time and then leave. And so the leaving is important, right? And you already mentioned the beginning, middle and end. So these events have to end. What can people do thoughtfully to help the transition back out if the transition in is so important and the invitations and the people there and the purpose and all of these things, how do you make it end and have a lasting effect, but also be clear that it's over?

Priya: [00:47:21] My final chapter is called accept that there is an end. And I spent time with two Buddhist monks who do a lot of end of life ritual making for families who basically are avoiding the reality of death of a loved one. And I asked them, "Why are so many of our endings so bad?" And they said, "Because we tend to avoid the endings. We don't like endings culturally." And the example they gave us, they have a six month program where students come together to actually learn about how to do end of life care. And no matter what, every time there's a consistent participation all through the six months. And then all of a sudden for the final class, multiple students, all of a sudden have urgent knitting to do, or they have a kid's baseball game, or, even in a class about how to name close things, people don't want to be there.

And so I love this example in part, because it pertains to this larger part of our culture, I think kind of don't want things to end, or we find them awkward, or we're not sure how to do it. And so many of our gatherings don't end, they stop. So there's a conference, the ending time is at 3:00 PM. It's 2.50 is 2.55 and all of a sudden it's about time to go over. Someone gets up there and says, "Thank you for coming". Or it's a party and all of a sudden it's midnight and everyone leaves suddenly. So a couple of things, one is, issue a last call. So in the same way that bars have like last call borrow from that and do some kind of signal that helps people understand that this is starting to come to a close.

In conferences that can be something more formal. Actually announcing, "This is the last session." But I know business executives who will have their assistant on purpose knock five minutes before the end of the meeting and say, "Your next meetings in five." And then it's the last call. And part of that is it allows us to begin to close up. The second thing is to help the group make meaning. So one of the things is, well after a gathering, everybody will make meaning on their own, regardless of what happens. You go out, "What did I think of that? What were my favorite memories?" After a wedding the next morning you debrief at breakfast. And not just what happened, but what meaning do we make of it? And the best gatherers realize they want to help make some of that meaning before people leave. And you can do in a couple of different ways.

One is, particularly after conference or time you'll have people longer together to spend the last 5% asking people, "What is one insight taking from this?" Not necessarily focusing on action. "What is one thing that you learned from this?" And helping people say aloud and process themselves, and also to help each other witness what actually transpired here. The second thing is, as a host to remind people to flick at the memory of what did transpire here. "We began like this. And one of my favorite parts of the evening was when Barbara shared the story about her mother, it reminded me of what Steve said about what it was like going a Peace Corps. And when I really think about what I'll most remember about tonight is, we all have complicated relationships to home."

Allowing to take and it can be in a minute or 30 seconds to almost think as if you're a narrator creating the last scene of a film. What's the last image you want people to walk away with? And then the final thing is, exit people. So walk them to the door. Don't let themselves out and allow them to cross back out of the threshold. One example I give also from the book, my mother's a cultural anthropologist. So I grew up with all sorts of unusual gatherings that she would design for me. And when I was a teenager, she realized that I, and a number of my female friends were really struggling with what does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean to be an adolescent girl? What does it mean to be a woman in this country? What are we ashamed about? All of those stuff.

And so she made up this gathering for six Mondays in a row. She hosted a two hour session in her basement called circle of friends. And she'd teach us all sorts of stuff that she learned from participatory development to meditation, to breathing, to using our voice in specific ways, to connecting with what we actually wanted versus what the norm said that we should be. All of these different elements. And at the last class she gave each of us a little bracelet and they're kind of cool. They look like modern art, very simple. I think she probably got them at the dollar store. And we all got one and I didn't think anything of it. And we left and the next morning at school, almost all of the girls were wearing them.

And it was this kind of through line of this thread that even we walked back into high school and up until that moment, no one really knew we were doing this. It created this physical symbol that wait, "What's going on here?" And it gave, at least for me kind of courage to remember, there was this other world, we all were a part of it and there is proof. So what of this other world and experience do I want to take and make a risk today and raise my hand in a certain way or walk up and speak to that boy, or like to stand up for myself in a certain way, or to breathe, even though I'm feeling really nervous versus just going back into my own old patterns. So one of the elements of any type of gathering is how and what do you want people to consciously take with them and ideally transform into the other gatherings they go to.

Patrick: [00:52:24] Well, it's been wonderful. I could talk to you for hours and I'll pay your book and you're the compliment of what I call onion people. So I've read your book and I love what I read a book. First of all, there's a lot more of the book than we've talked about, so everyone should read it. Second, talking to you about it today, I've learned a lot more layers down beneath the things that you write about in the book. So it's really been a pleasure. Everything we've talked about is related to the same question I ask everybody at the close. This is my way of transitioning people out, which is to ask for what the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you is?

Priya: [00:52:52] It's a lovely question. And I'm having a number of different things come up so I'll go with one that I haven't thought of in a while. It was a very simple moment. I mentioned the top of this conversation that I'm biracial and I'm also bicultural and bi-religious. And I grew up in these two households that believe radically different things, and many of their beliefs were in tension with one another. And one side is evangelical Christian. Then the other side was kind of Hindu, Buddhist, theosophist agnostic. And it was a real source of tension. And I felt at the center of that tension.

I went to this summer camp, it was a Christian summer camp when I was... My parents had joint custody. So it was during my father's time of the year. And it was a canoe camp in West Virginia. And I had complicated relationship to the kind of exclusive elements of Christianity. And at one moment, camp counselor, who I loved, and always just seemed to have different interpretations of everything, including the Bible and Christianity, but was one of the strongest leaders in the camp and considered himself a very strong Christian. I saw this like a little image of a tattoo kind of poke out of his sleeve. And I could just see a little bit of it, but it's like really brightly colored. And I thought, that's interesting. I thought this was a Christian camp.

And I asked him and I said, "What is your tattoo of?" And he looked at me and I could see that he hesitated. And then he looked at me and he just moved to the side and it was a tattoo of Shiva, a Hindu God. And I was shocked and also felt this deep peace. And I looked at him and he looked at me and he winked and he said something, "Don't worry, it's all there." And I just thought that for me, I spoke about a lot of my own challenges in these various Bible studies, so he knew where I was coming from. And to me that was a moment of deep kindness because he took a lot of risks. I think tattoos are probably against the code. There was probably a lot of people on the board that would be against those beliefs, but he saw a child that was confused and he, to me offered a moment of kindness that helped me.

Patrick: [00:55:05] Wonderful, excellent place to end. Thank you so much for your time. I can do it again anytime.

Priya: [00:55:09] Thanks so much for having me.

Transcript by @ScarrottKalani