I spend the majority of my week in some sort of meeting, gathering, conversation with other people, classroom, etc. I can clearly tell the difference when someone has been intentional with crafting this time. The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters by Priya Parker is a great resource for anyone that wants to make their gatherings happen on purpose and with a purpose for the good of all involved. Some of my best takeaways from this book will influence my time with my family as well as those I have the privilege of interacting with in the school that I serve. I’m already thinking about things that should impact meetings that are already scheduled. I truly want to welcome people into the interaction LONG before they walk into the room.
This is a great read and full of practical information for anyone who interacts with at least one other person. I highlighted several things and posted my notes below…
- Gathering—the conscious bringing together of people for a reason—shapes the way we think, feel, and make sense of our world. Location: 40
- My lens on gathering—and the lens I want to share with you—places people and what happens between them at the center of every coming together. Location: 68
- 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. Location: 112
- You are not alone if you skip the first step in convening people meaningfully: committing to a bold, sharp purpose. Location: 120
- 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. Location: 330
- Specificity sharpens the gathering because people can see themselves in it. Location: 343
- Ichi-go ichi-e. The master told me it roughly translates to “one meeting, one moment in your life that will never happen again.” Location: 349
- Before you gather, ask yourself: Why is this gathering different from all my other gatherings? Why is it different from other people’s gatherings of the same general type? What is this that other gatherings aren’t? Location: 354
- Zoom out: If she doesn’t zoom out, a chemistry teacher might tell herself that her purpose is to teach chemistry. While teaching is a noble undertaking, this definition does not give her much guidance on how to actually design her classroom experience. If, instead, she decides that her purpose is to give the young a lifelong relationship to the organic world, new possibilities emerge. The first step to a more scintillating classroom begins with that zooming out. Location: 381
- Reverse engineer an outcome: Think of what you want to be different because you gathered, and work backward from that outcome. Location: 406
- Having a purpose simply means knowing why you’re gathering and doing your participants the honor of being convened for a reason. Location: 515
- Make purpose your bouncer. Let it decide what goes into your gathering and what stays out. Location: 521
- If you want a lively but inclusive conversation as a core part of your gathering, eight to twelve people is the number you should consider. Smaller than eight, the group can lack diversity in perspective; larger than twelve, it begins to be difficult to give everyone a chance to speak. Location: 745
- A venue is a nudge. Location: 785
- Generous authority is not a pose. It’s not the appearance of power. It is using power to achieve outcomes that are generous, that are for others. The authority is justified by the generosity. When I tell you to host with generous authority, I’m not telling you to domineer. I’m saying to find the courage to be authoritative in the service of three goals. Location: 1,146
- PROTECT YOUR GUESTS Location: 1,149
- Protecting your guests doesn’t have to consist of loud interruptions or fierce rules. It can be done through small, almost unnoticeable interventions that happen throughout a gathering: rescuing a guest from a long, one-sided conversation in the corner of your party; shutting down a domineering employee at work with a joke; asking someone to stop texting. Location: 1,204
- Protecting your guests is, in short, about elevating the right to a great collective experience above anyone’s right to ruin that experience. It’s about being willing to be a bad cop, even if it means sticking your neck out. Location: 1,206
- EQUALIZE YOUR GUESTS Location: 1,209
- CONNECT YOUR GUESTS Location: 1,267
- Your gathering begins at the moment your guests first learn of it. Location: 1,918
- This window of time between the discovery and the formal beginning is an opportunity to prime your guests. It is a chance 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. Location: 1,924
- 90 percent of what makes a gathering successful is put in place beforehand. Location: 1,964
- 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. Location: 2,040
- One way to help people leave their other worlds and enter yours is to walk them through a passageway, physical or metaphorical. Location: 2,151
- However vital it may seem to start with this housekeeping, you are missing an opportunity to sear your gathering’s purpose into the minds of your guests. And sometimes you are actually undermining that purpose by revealing to your guests that you do not, in fact, care about the things you claim to care about as much as you profess. Location: 2,292
- 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. Location: 2,328
- On the first day of school, the school brings in the first-graders for just a half day and begins to initiate them into the core principles of a Montessori-run school, one of which is community. So how does Barrett embody the idea of a community on the first day? He takes a ball of string and throws it to a student, saying something nice to her. And then the child continues the practice, holding her part of the string and throwing the ball to another student and saying another nice thing, and so on, until the group has built a spiderweb of string. “If I tug my end of the web, everyone else feels it move, and that’s what a community is,” Barrett tells them. “All of your choices, all of your actions, large or small, will affect everybody else.” Location: 2,495
- 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. Location: 2,794
- When I host 15 Toasts on the sidelines of a conference or another high-powered gathering, I tend to say in my welcome words that there is a typical dynamic to such events that we are hoping to avoid—the dynamic of showiness and puffery. Given our desire to counteract that, I invite people to leave outside the door those parts of their lives and work that are going great. We’re interested in the half-baked parts. We’re interested in the parts they’re still figuring out. We’re not interested in their preplanned speeches but rather in the words and thoughts still forming. Location: 2,852
- The workbook included prompts about participants’ personal history, to get them to connect back to their own core values: “Tell me about a moment in your early life that deeply influenced you and, in some way perhaps, led you to the work you do today.” But the majority of the questions encouraged the leaders to speak about what wasn’t working: “If you were to say something that was politically incorrect, or taboo, about this process or project, what would it be?” It asked: “What do you think is the most needed conversation for this group to have now?” Location: 3,079
- I began the day by setting ground rules. I asked the following questions: What do you need to feel safe here? What do you need from this group to be willing to take a risk in this conversation today? Location: 3,095
- What is the gift in broaching this issue? And what is the risk? Is it worth it? And can we handle it with care? Location: 3,155
- When done well, openings and closings often mirror one another. Just as before your opening there should be a period of ushering, so with closings there is a need to prepare people for the end. This is not ushering so much as last call. Location: 3,274