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A review by mburnamfink
The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker
informative
inspiring
fast-paced
5.0
How many awful meetings have you attended? Disoriented business planning sessions that end with no plan; bloviating academic conferences and charity galas; empty rituals of religious services and family feasts. Don't you owe it to your community and yourself to stop wasting time and do better?
Parker is a professional facilitator specializing in dialogue across fraught groups, and this book is a distillation of her wisdom and experience. It is fantastic, a 21st century version of Carnegie's How to Win Friends & Influence People, and absolutely critical reading for anybody who plans to host an event of any sort. I'd place it next to Wiggins and McTighe Understanding by Design for most impactful professional advice I've encountered.
Parker's method is fairly straight forward, with a few counter-intuitive wrinkles. The first thing to do is to figure out the real purpose of an event, which may not be obvious. A couple might want to throw a dinner party to repay a prior invitation, build new friendships, and catch up with old friends, but odds are that the dinner which tries to do all three will be a flop. Similarly, an organization like a business or an academic disciplinary network, should figure out what its goals actually are. A corporate offsite with a goal like "have fun in a different setting" is pointless. Ending the feud between sales and marketing is worth trying.
Having figured out the what of your event, the next step is the 'who'. Parker advocates for four reasonable scales of events (6, 15, 30, and 150 people), and considered inclusion and exclusion. The best events aren't just "everybody who shows up", but the right people. And while there is a natural urge to add more people, especially for an existing group the goals and well-being of the group should be balanced against the tendency for unconsidered expansion.
Next is getting the guests in the right mood. A host should use their generous authority to protect, equalize, and connect guests. Do this, and people will feel special and invested. Abdicating authority in the interest of being chill does not erase power, it simply lets the most strong-willed guests bend the event to their own ends, with harm to the experience as a whole and to other guests. And similarly, don't go mad with power. If the purpose of your event is to gather audiences to celebrate you and your organization, perhaps try something different.
Parker is a big fan of temporary rules to create special circumstances at an event. Traditional codes of etiquette are a double edge blade, which excludes those who haven't been raised to the unspoken rules, while also serving to blunt realness in the spirit of 19th century nicety. "No phones" is a simple liminal rule, while odd dress codes and focused limits on conversation like "no work talk" can avoid overly rehearsed stump speeches and elevator pitches in favor of weirder sprout speeches. Sharing personal stories is a favored ploy to build human connections which can be leveraged to make cognitive and social breakthroughs later on.
And finally, the little stuff, like logistics. Events begin and end with a certain energy, and that energy should never be dissipated on details like travel arrangements or what's for dinner. There's a good ritual element to closing down an event, which a host should attend to with equal care as to the beginning.
For all my griping, I have been to some good events, and Parker's advice resonates with the ones that succeeded. Coming from a game studies and tabletop gaming background, much of the advice cross-applies for running an immersive game session. Now that we're emerging from our featureless voids, it'll be good to have some structure to the things we're going back to. Try this book, I promise that it can't hurt the thing that you're planning.
Parker is a professional facilitator specializing in dialogue across fraught groups, and this book is a distillation of her wisdom and experience. It is fantastic, a 21st century version of Carnegie's How to Win Friends & Influence People, and absolutely critical reading for anybody who plans to host an event of any sort. I'd place it next to Wiggins and McTighe Understanding by Design for most impactful professional advice I've encountered.
Parker's method is fairly straight forward, with a few counter-intuitive wrinkles. The first thing to do is to figure out the real purpose of an event, which may not be obvious. A couple might want to throw a dinner party to repay a prior invitation, build new friendships, and catch up with old friends, but odds are that the dinner which tries to do all three will be a flop. Similarly, an organization like a business or an academic disciplinary network, should figure out what its goals actually are. A corporate offsite with a goal like "have fun in a different setting" is pointless. Ending the feud between sales and marketing is worth trying.
Having figured out the what of your event, the next step is the 'who'. Parker advocates for four reasonable scales of events (6, 15, 30, and 150 people), and considered inclusion and exclusion. The best events aren't just "everybody who shows up", but the right people. And while there is a natural urge to add more people, especially for an existing group the goals and well-being of the group should be balanced against the tendency for unconsidered expansion.
Next is getting the guests in the right mood. A host should use their generous authority to protect, equalize, and connect guests. Do this, and people will feel special and invested. Abdicating authority in the interest of being chill does not erase power, it simply lets the most strong-willed guests bend the event to their own ends, with harm to the experience as a whole and to other guests. And similarly, don't go mad with power. If the purpose of your event is to gather audiences to celebrate you and your organization, perhaps try something different.
Parker is a big fan of temporary rules to create special circumstances at an event. Traditional codes of etiquette are a double edge blade, which excludes those who haven't been raised to the unspoken rules, while also serving to blunt realness in the spirit of 19th century nicety. "No phones" is a simple liminal rule, while odd dress codes and focused limits on conversation like "no work talk" can avoid overly rehearsed stump speeches and elevator pitches in favor of weirder sprout speeches. Sharing personal stories is a favored ploy to build human connections which can be leveraged to make cognitive and social breakthroughs later on.
And finally, the little stuff, like logistics. Events begin and end with a certain energy, and that energy should never be dissipated on details like travel arrangements or what's for dinner. There's a good ritual element to closing down an event, which a host should attend to with equal care as to the beginning.
For all my griping, I have been to some good events, and Parker's advice resonates with the ones that succeeded. Coming from a game studies and tabletop gaming background, much of the advice cross-applies for running an immersive game session. Now that we're emerging from our featureless voids, it'll be good to have some structure to the things we're going back to. Try this book, I promise that it can't hurt the thing that you're planning.