Main takeaways
Any convening of people could benefit from thoughtful contemplation of that gathering’s purpose. Its purpose informs whom to invite (and whom to exclude), the venue, and how hosts can exercise generous authority to protect, equalize, and connect their guests. A gathering is an opportunity to create a temporary alternative world. Think carefully about strong openings and closings, designing for authentic interactions, and whether to cultivate conversation around controversy.
Introduction
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.
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.
Chapter 1: Decide Why You’re Really Gathering
Main takeaways
To determine the purpose of a gathering:
- Think beyond the category
- Increase the specificity of the who, what, and why of the gathering
- Think about how this gathering is unique Tips for moving from what questions (logistics) to why questions (purpose):
- Zoom out: What is the broader context in which participants are acting in this gathering?
- Ask “why” like a toddler: Keep asking why about event details until you hit a core value or belief
- Reverse engineer an outcome
A Category is Not a Purpose
When we gather, we often make the mistake of conflating category with purpose. We outsource our decisions and our assumptions about our gatherings to people, formats, and contexts that are not our own. We get lulled into the false belief that knowing the category of the gathering—the board meeting, workshop, birthday party, town hall—will be instructive to designing it. But we often choose the template—and the activities and structure that go along with it—before we’re clear on our purpose. (Page 4)
Commit to a Gathering About Something
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? (Page 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. I have discovered this anecdotally through my own work, but one of my clients has collected the data to back it up. … For example, “LGBT couples hiking with dogs” would have a tighter fit (and presumably be more successful over time) than “LGBT couples hiking” or “couples hiking with dogs” or even “LGBT hikers with dogs.” Because, as Heiferman explains, “the who is often tied to the what.” Specificity sharpens the gathering because people can see themselves in it. (Pages 17-18)
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? (Page 18)
A good gathering purpose should also be disputable. If you your wedding is to celebrate love, you may the say purpose of bring a smile to people’s faces, but you aren’t really committing to anything, because who would dispute that purpose? Yes, a wedding should celebrate love. But an indisputable purpose like that doesn’t help you with the hard work of creating a meaningful gathering, because it won’t help you make decisions. When the inevitable tensions arise—guest list, venue, one night versus two—your purpose won’t be there to guide you. A disputable purpose, on the other hand, begins to be a decision filter. If you commit to a purpose of your wedding as a ceremonial repayment of your parents for all they have done for you as you set off to build your own family, that is disputable, and it will immediately help you make choices. That one remaining seat will go to your parents’ long-lost friend, not your estranged college buddy. If, on the other hand, you commit to the equally valid purpose of a wedding as a melding of a new couple with the tribe of people with whom they feel the most open, that, too, is disputable, and it implies clear and different answers. The parents’ friend may have to stand down for the college buddy. (Page 20)
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. (Page 22)
Chapter 2: Close Doors
Main takeaways
- Who nourishes the gathering’s purpose? Who threatens that purpose?
- It is tempting to over-include to avoid hurting feelings, but thoughtful exclusion can benefit the gathering by activating the relationships that we want to cultivate.
- Where to gather? Choose a location that embodies the reason for gathering, does not embody purposes that you want to avoid, and breaks people out of their habits.
In a world where exclusion becomes OK, aren’t we moving backward? Isn’t exclusion in gatherings something we’ve been fighting against for years? Isn’t exclusion, however thoughtful or intentional, the enemy of diversity? … But diversity is a potentiality that needs to be activated. It can be used or it can just be there. (Page 46)
Here is the lesson of Judson Manor as I see it: Specificity in gathering doesn’t have to mean narrowing a group to the point of sameness. With certain types of gatherings, over-including can keep connections shallow because there are so many different lines through which people could possibly connect that it can become hard to meaningfully activate any of them. Excluding thoughtfully allows you to focus on a specific, underexplored relationship. An overly inclusive volunteer program at Judson Manor would have been similar to many volunteer programs at nursing homes. The tightly bound program transformed it from a service program into a relationship between young artists and aging ears. (Page 48)
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, my the park, the nightclub. (Page 54)
Chapter 3: Don’t Be a Chill Host
Main takeaways
We can use our power as hosts to exercise generous authority: to protect, equalize, and connect our guests.
When I raise the question of the host’s role to clients or friends, whether in preparation for business meetings or family gettogethers, I am often greeted with hesitancy. This is because to talk about their role is to talk about their power as a host, and to talk about that power is to acknowledge that it exists. This is not what most people want to hear. Many people who go to the serious trouble of hosting aspire to host as minimally as possible.
But who wants to sail on a skipperless ship? (Page 71)
In this chapter, I want to convince you to assume your proper powers as a host. That doesn’t mean that there’s one way to host or one kind of power to exert over your gathering. But I do believe that hosting is inevitably an exercise of power. The hosts I guide often feel tempted to abdicate that power, and feel that by doing so they are letting their guests be free. But this abdication often fails their guests rather than serves them. 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. (Page 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. (Page 75)
The kinds of gatherings that meaningfully help others are governed by what I call generous authority. A gathering run on generous authority is run with a strong, confident hand, but it is run selflessly, for the sake of others. Generous authority is imposing in a way that serves your guests. It spares them from the chaos and anxiety that Heifetz knowingly thrust upon his students. It spares them from the domination of some guests by other guests that the dinner host unwittingly enabled. It wards off pretenders who threaten a purpose. Sometimes generous authority demands a willingness to be disliked in order to make your guests have the best experience of your gathering. (Page 81)
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. (Page 83)
Chapter 4: Create a Temporary Alternative World
Main takeaways
We can plan a gathering by designing it as a world that will only exist once. In doing so, it is helpful to distinguish between etiquette and pop-up rules. Etiquette consists of unspoken rules of culture that is characterized by fixedness, imperiousness, and exclusion. In contrast, pop-up rules are characterized by experimentation, flexibility, and inclusion.
The rise of pop-up rules can be better understood against this backdrop. It is no accident that rules-based gatherings are emerging as modern life does away with monocultures and closed circles of the similar. Pop-up rules are perhaps the new etiquette, more suited to modern realities. If implicit etiquette, absorbed from birth, was useful for gatherings of closed tribes, whether Boston Brahmins or Tamil ones, explicit pop-up rules are better for gathering across difference. Rules-based gatherings, controlling as they might seem, are actually bringing new freedom and openness to our gatherings. (Page 118)
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?”
Laudicina ensured that all board members had the information they needed well ahead of the meetings and had ample time before the meetings to ask any questions that clarified the issues. By putting information-gathering questions off-limits, he forced his board members to have the kind of difficult but productive conversations that led them to state their positions more explicitly and reach decisions. (Page 144)
Chapter 5: Never Start a Funeral with Logistics
Main takeaways
- The time leading up to an event is key for priming guests to enter a certain way. Think about pre-event communication tactically.
- The way we naming an event (e.g., a forum, workshop, etc.) has an important role in priming
- The way we usher guests into the event has an impact on the mood.
- Create a strong start that is related to the event’s purpose - don’t start with logistics immediately. They can come shortly after if needed.
This window of time between the discovery and the formal beginning is an opportunity to prime your guests. It is a to shape their journey into your gathering. If this chance is squandered, logistics can again overrun the human imperative of getting the most out of your guests and offering them the most your gathering can. Moreover, the less priming you do in this pregame window, the more work awaits you during the gathering itself.
Because so much gathering advice comes from experts in food and decor rather than from facilitators, that advice almost invariably focuses on preparing things instead of preparing people. (Page 146)
Asking guests to contribute to a gathering ahead of time changes their perception of it. Many of us have no trouble asking guests to bring a bottle of wine or a side dish, but rarely do we consider what else we might demand of them in advance. Rarely do we follow Laprise’s example of asking guests to perform a task that isn’t really a task much as an attempt to get them in the mood. (Page 153)
Priya creates workbooks to send to attendees in advance:
I try to embed two elements in my workbook questions: something that helps them connect with and remember their own sense of purpose as it relates to the gathering, and something that gets them to share honestly about the nature of the challenge they’re trying to address. (Page 154)
Chapter 6: Keep Your Best Self Out of My Gathering
- 15 Toasts: An activity where people at the gathering take turns delivering a toast on the theme of the event
- Sprout speeches instead of stump speeches: Stump speeches are pre-written speeches that have been delivered a 1000 times. Sprout speeches convey our newest ideas
- Get people to share experiences instead of ideas
- “The Dark Theme”: Maybe the theme of the event doesn’t have to be positive only. Focusing on the negative can help frame the positive
- Ask questions that encourage people familiar with each other to share experiences that the others might not know about
- Let people know in advance what you want them to bring to the gathering (in terms of state of mind) and what you want them to leave out. e.g., “Tell us something that would surprise us,” “Leave your successes at the door,” or “There’s no need to slip in an accomplishment.” To encourage people leaving undesired things at the door, start by acknowledging everyone’s virtues: “We know that everyone here is remarkable/cares deeply about X.”
- As a host, model #6 yourself at the start of the event.
- Choose prompting questions that are general enough that participants can decide how much vulnerability they show via the experience they share. No one wants to feel forced to share a deeply personal story.
As Leberecht and I began to spread 15 Toasts to other venues, we varied the themes: 15 Toasts to the stranger, to faith, to happiness, to collateral damage, to escapes, to borders, to Them, to fear, to risk, to rebellion, to romance, to dignity, to the self, to education, to the story that changed my life, to the end of work, to beauty, to conflict, to tinkering, to the truth, to America, to local, to the fellow traveler, to origins, to the right problem, to the disrupted, to the fourth industrial revolution, to courage, to borders, to risk, and, yes, to vulnerability. What we came to find over time was that the best themes were not the sweet ones, like happiness or romance, but rather the ones that had darker sides to them: fear, Them, borders, strangers. The ones that allowed for many interpretations. The ones that let people show sides of themselves that were weak, that were confused and unprocessed, that were morally complicated. (Page 213)
One of the more improbable secrets of unleashing honesty and vulnerability in a gathering is raising the stranger quotient. Though it seems counterintuitive, it is often easier to get people to share when many in the room are unknown to them—or when they are helped to see those they do know with fresh eyes. (Page 215)
It is often easier to confess parts of our lives with strangers, who have no stake in our lives, than with intimates who do. (Page 216)
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. They create a temporary freedom to pilot-test what we might become, however untethered that identity is to what we have been. They allow us to try out new sides. In front of a stranger, we are free to choose what we want to show, hide, or even invent. (Page 216)
Chapter 7: Cause Good Controversy
Main takeaways
Some gatherings may benefit from turning up the heat to actually make progress on key issues rather than stagnating by avoiding conflict.
Chapter 8: Accept That There Is an End
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. (Page 251)
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. (Page 259)