The Art of Gathering

Highlights

• 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.
• first step in convening people meaningfully: committing to a bold, sharp purpose.
• When we don’t examine the deeper assumptions behind why we gather, we end up skipping too quickly to replicating old, staid formats of gathering. And we forgo the possibility of creating something memorable, even transformative.
• 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?
• Gatherings that please everyone occur, but they rarely thrill. Gatherings that are willing to be alienating—which is different from being alienating—have a better chance to dazzle.
• 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.
• 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?
• Think of what you want to be different because you gathered, and work backward from that outcome.
• You will have begun to gather with purpose when you learn to exclude with purpose. When you learn to close doors.
• If everyone is invited, no one is invited—in the sense of being truly held by the group. By closing the door, you create the room.
• The crux of excluding thoughtfully and intentionally is mustering the courage to keep away your Bobs. It is to shift your perception so that you understand that people who aren’t fulfilling the purpose of your gathering are detracting from it, even if they do nothing to detract from it. This is because once they are actually in your presence, you (and other considerate guests) will want to welcome and include them, which takes time and attention away from what (and who) you’re actually there for.
• But diversity is a potentiality that needs to be activated. It can be used or it can just be there.
• 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.
• You should, for starters, seek a setting that embodies the reason for your convening. When a place embodies an idea, it brings a person’s body and whole being into the experience, not only their minds.
• A deft gatherer picks a place that elicits the behaviors she wants and plays down the behaviors she doesn’t.
• Displacement is simply about breaking people out of their habits. It is about waking people up from the slumber of their own routines.
• Gatherings need perimeters. A space for a gathering works best when it is contained. Photographers and choreographers often close all the doors in a room to, as Platon explained to me, “make sure the energy isn’t leaking out.”
• A contained space for a gathering allows people to relax, and it helps create the alternative world that a gathering can, at its best, achieve.
• The size of a gathering’s space should serve your purpose.
• A ubiquitous strain of twenty-first-century culture is infecting our gatherings: being chill. The desire to host while being noninvasive.
• What is Heifetz doing? Launching a course on leadership by showing students what happens when you abdicate leadership. You don’t eradicate power. You just hand the opportunity to take charge to someone else—in this case, the students. You are not easing their way or setting them free. You are pumping them full of confusion and anxiety.
• “Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.”
• 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.
• 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.
• That is protecting your guests: anticipating and intercepting people’s tendencies when they’re not considering the betterment of the whole of the group or the experience.
• One measure of a successful gathering is that it starts off with a higher number of host-guest connections than guest-guest connections and ends with those tallies reversed, far in the guest-guest favor.
• When the social code is spelled out, when it is turned into a one-night-only game, you don’t have to know certain unsaid things, you don’t have to have been raised in a certain way, you don’t have to be steeped in a certain culture, you don’t have to have parsed decades’ worth of social cues. You just need to be told tonight’s rules.
  • Note: Structure makes you free.
• One of my favorites, as shared with me by one of their talented “Praxis” facilitators, Anthony Rocco, was that you couldn’t pour yourself a drink; someone had to pour it for you. This simple rule forced (in a playful way) people to interact.
• The intentional gatherer begins to host not from the formal start of the event but from that moment of discovery.
• The bigger the ask—say, if you’re having people travel long distances to attend your gathering—the more care, attention, and detail should be put into the pregame phase.
• Another lesson is that the pregame should sow in guests any special behaviors you want to blossom right at the outset.
• Priming matters because a gathering is a social contract, and it is in the pregame window that this contract is drafted and implicitly agreed on.
• 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.
• In the first few moments of a gathering, we are all Neo Muyanga, reading cues and asking ourselves: What do I think of this gathering? Am I in good hands? Is the host nervous? Should I be? What’s going to happen here? Is this worth my time? Do I belong? Do I want to belong? The opening is, therefore, an important opportunity to establish the legitimacy of your gathering.
• Because we think the moments before we start somehow don’t matter, any number of gatherings begin with throat clearing. Conferences that commence this way: “Before we start, there’s a white Camaro with its lights on in the parking lot, license plate TXW 4628.”
• Your opening needs to be a kind of pleasant shock therapy. It should grab people. And in grabbing them, it should both awe the guests and honor them. It must plant in them the paradoxical feeling of being totally welcomed and deeply grateful to be there.
• But every time people gather, they are being brought into the opportunity to help one another, to do what they couldn’t do or think up or heal alone. And yet so often when we gather, we are gathered in ways that hide our need for help and portray us in the strongest and least heart-stirring light.
• It is also important as a host to be attentive to the needs of different personalities. No one, however extroverted, wants to feel like they have no choice but to share a deeply personal story. One of the reasons choosing a general theme works so well is because there is a lot of freedom within that theme to choose the level of depth one wants to take.
• The responsible harnessing of good controversy—handling with structure and care what we normally avoid—is one of the most difficult, complicated, and important duties for a gatherer. When it is done well, it is also one of the most transformative.
• In almost any group of people—including strangers—certain areas of conversation will generate more heat than others. This heat can arise from conflict, taboos, transgression, power differences, hypocrisy, identity clashes, etc.
• I bring good controversy to a gathering only when I believe some good can come out of it—enough good to outweigh the risks and harm. For your gatherings, you should make a similar assessment.
• Accepting the impermanence of a gathering is part of the art. When we vaguely try to extend our gatherings, we are not only living in denial, we are also depriving our gathering of the kind of closing that gives it the chance of enduring in people’s hearts.
• 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.
• Part of preparing guests for reentry is helping them find a thread to connect the world of the gathering to the world outside.