Priya Parker on Meaningful Gatherings

Hi! Good morning everybody! Hi! It is so amazing to be here with you. I mean, it's been a while. It's wonderful to be here in person and everybody joining online. It is so beautiful to be with you again. So last time we were here, I want to tell a little story first. In 2019, when we were in this physical space together, I was so excited. I want to go back and like really grow my meetup program. And somebody shared an amazing book. And that author is going to come join me in a second. Who is this author? It's Priya Parker, who is helping us take a deeper look at anyone who can create collective meaning in modern life, one gathering at a time. As Krista Trippett of On Being called her, the voice of what it means to gather in this world that we inhabit now. She is a facilitator, a strategic advisor, acclaimed author of Art of the Gathering. I hope we all have that on our bookshelves. Thank you. and the host of New York Times podcast, Together Apart. She has spent 20 years helping leaders and communities have complicated conversations at... Moments of transition. She has spoken at TED, and her video has been viewed three million times. We really value her words. And now I want to ask her to join me on stage, and I want to ask you to give her an amazing CMX welcome, both here in the stage and online. I want to see those emojis online. Welcome Priya Parker to the stage. What a treat. It's so beautiful to be here. I have my tea. There's like a real green room, not just like a Zoom green room. And I'm so excited that you all are here joining us online. It's a hybrid event, very meta. But thank you. so much for having me and to being here and seeing all of your faces. It's really a true treat. I've been hearing about you all for years, and I'm delighted to be here. Yeah, we've wanted her for a long time. So I first want to talk about you have have a really interesting background. And I think we'd all love to know, how did you come to it? Like, dialogue work, conflict work, and especially maybe some of your role models and mentors. So, like many of you, I was born in Zimbabwe. And that is true. And perhaps like many of you, so much of the work I do today is really based on how it was written. raised and kind of the different worlds I was a part of and what I saw. I'm biracial. My mother is Indian. My father is white American. And for the first kind of ten years of their life, they were in international development work. And we moved every year, every six months, every 16 months. How many folks in here or online kind of moved a lot in their younger years as a child? That's often an experience. And long story short, we eventually settled in Virginia. And within a year, they... they announced that they were going to separate. And within two years, they divorced. And within three years, they each remarried other people. And I was their only child. And they had joint custody, so that effectively meant that I would sort of toggle back and forth between these two homes. And there were really kind of two different worlds. There were two different forming communities. There were two families that were trying to figure out themselves. Who are we now with these new partners? How do we raise our children with these joint families? What do we believe? How do we begin dinner? What do we do? do on Saturdays? Do we charge? Do we fine for bad behavior? Do we pay for grades? Who are we? But one microscopic community at a time. And they were also kind of worlds apart in many ways. My mother is an Indian woman, immigrant, now American citizen. My stepfather's English. And their household was kind of Indian, British, progressive. New agey, lots of workshops, landmark forum-y, for those of you who know what that is. And then I would leave, and I'd enter my father and stepmother's home. And they were and are white American evangelical Christians, conservative, Republican, twice-a-week churchgoing, softball playing, meat eating. You kind of get the picture. My husband's here. I often joke, like, my name is Priya Parker. And you can kind of guess, you know, which side is which. He often says it doesn't take a shrink to explain how Priya got into the field of conflict resolution. And so I became a conflict resolution facilitator in college. And I would say a couple of things. I learned as a facilitator, and I think this is really true for community managers as well, that groups are complicated. Community is complicated. Like, you all are like the OG bodyguards, therapists, protectors, like meeting planners, security officers, all of these things. And one of the people who kind of most shaped my work is a guy named Hal Saunders. He was a diplomat and he worked for many years within the government, the U.S. government, and he eventually left. He helped create the Camp David Accords. And he basically realized that governments can do certain things, like make peace treaties, but if the beliefs on the ground, if citizens don't actually know one another, if they don't shift their perceptions of one another, it's very difficult to also make change. And he worked with us as students to help create this process called sustained dialogue. And we had to figure out, I imagine like many of you in different parts of the communities that you're managing and working in, we had to figure out like how do you get people to show up? Like literally, like we want to start this program on race where we get people at the University of Virginia to talk to each other about things they never actually talked to each other about. Like literally how do you get people to show up? There's a room like this, maybe we should do a skit. No one's gonna, oh maybe we should, should we tell the local student newspaper? Just like bit by I'm curious, maybe online, since I hear there's a lot of you, if you could just pop into the chat, what is the first community you ever managed, quote unquote? And maybe here, turn to the person next to you. Can we do that? Yeah. And what's the first community you ever realized you had to shape in some way, even if that wasn't your formal role? And just pop into the chat. We'll see you. I need water. OK. OK, OK, OK, come back. All right, I'll be back. And we can't actually see the chat, but I'll just say, and we're hoping you do this all day long and all day tomorrow to start getting each other's.. But I, it was through my experience in college that I started to realize that community is something, and growing up, community is something that is invented and shaped. And long story short, I years later, I became a facilitator that continued to be my day job, and I wrote this book. I realized that what most of us are taught about gathering or hosting is not what I was trained as as a facilitator, that actually creates meaning, that actually gets people to say what they really think, that actually gets people to feel safe or feel like they belong. And so I interviewed over 100 different folks that other people credited. with consistently creating transformative experiences. A rabbi, a photographer that has seven minutes with the head of state and 18 bodyguards in the room, how does, like, what does he do? Like, literally, second to second, what does he do to shift the room to get that shot? And the biggest thing that I learned, and I wrote in The Art of Gathering, was none of them had a specific form in their head of what it had to look like. That is kind of this, I imagine like all of you, it's like this wandering path, but I continue to notice what is working here, and what is the common belief or perception of how something works, and where's the gap, and how do I begin to close that gap? I think that's what a community manager and a gatherer tries to do every day. Yeah, yeah. So speaking about gathering, what is gathering, and specifically I think for us here, how does it differ? from community work, and where do they intersect and overlap? So I define a gathering just kind of like to set the table. I define a gathering as any time three or more people come together for a purpose with a beginning, middle, and end. So it ends. It's a moment in time. It's an event. It's a happening. It can be public. It can be a protest. It can be a Saturday morning meeting in the park. It can be a. board meeting, it can be a wedding, it can be a funeral. Like, I'm agnostic about the actual form. And I define a community. Well, maybe I should ask you all how you define a community. But communities have gatherings, and gathering can create a sense of community. But gatherings can also create a sense of isolation. You can be with other people and feel incredibly alone. You can be with other people and feel incredibly isolated. Gathering is not a good in and of itself. It's a tool. And I think of gathering as a mechanism. to build community, but a gathering can also be a mechanism to tear a community apart. The January 6th coup was not a gathering to bring people together. Gathering is a tool and it can be used in any way. And so part of a community manager, the way I would think about it, is that this is a tool that shapes community. This is a tool that shapes beliefs. This is a tool that shapes how people perceive where they belong in the community. And it's something anyone can do and that we need to get better at. Thank you! When I was originally reading Art of the Gathering, the thing I just walked away that was the question I kept asking myself is, you know, what is purpose? What is purpose? What is the purpose of my gathering? And I want to kind of go into that. Like, why is it important to create like that specific purpose. And I love how you say it. It's like, what does it mean to have a specific, disputable purpose to kind of, like, create a better gathering? So when I interviewed these 100 folks, And I was kind of like looking at the patterns, like why. They were from all walks of life. Many of them, this was really interesting to me, many of them identified as introverts. Many of them identified as suffering from social anxiety. And when I saw this pattern, I was like, you know, I asked one of them, and she said, I create the gatherings I wish existed in the world. And the other thing they said was every single time I first ask, I said this earlier, I don't have a specific form in my head. I first ask, what is the need here? Why are we bringing these people together? And so often part of the reason I think they're such innovative gatherers is because they're not on repeat. They're not thinking like board meeting, you know, one long brown table, 12 white men. That was a joke. Wedding, you know, like white dress walking down an aisle. You know, and instead they're asking, what is the purpose of this wedding? Right? Not like do I, like a couple, not do we, why do we want to get married? Right? You should probably ask that first before you plan your wedding. But why are we having this wedding? Is it to unite our different communities and have an experience so that when the going gets tough, as it does in any marriage, my husband's here. He will attest to this. When the going gets tough, your people come together and say, remember what we did at your wedding? Remember what we saw there? Remember your vows? Remember how you had us make a community vow? Versus is it a a fundamental social contract that's actually repaying and thanking the previous generation, as it is in many contexts, right? All of our people were invited to all of these other weddings, and this is fundamentally about our parents, and we're there. And neither is good or bad, but there are different purposes. And so often we don't actually pause and ask, what is the need, why are we doing this? And it erupts in proxy wars. And the proxy war, you end up having this conversation through fighting over the guest list, right? Does the final invitation go to your college buddy, your law school buddy? long lost college buddy or to your mother's colleague? Well, those are fundamentally different beliefs about who is this actually for. And so in a gathering, when you first actually ask what is the need here, it actually allows you to break form and design a gathering that is relevant to the need at hand. Can I give a simple example? So I wrote The Art of Gathering in 2018, and a journalist called me up and she said, I need you to Art of Gatheringify my dinner party. And I said, what do you think that means? And she was like, I don't know. And I think she thought I was to say like. Like, you put the fish knife here. You put the wine here. And I'm like, I'm a terrible cook. But why are you doing this? Like, what is a need in your life? And she said, you know, I don't really, like, for a dinner party? And I said, just what is a need in your life? Like, forget the dinner party. What is a need in your life? And she said, you know, I am, I was like, she was like, I don't know if this counts. But I'm a worn out mom. This was coming up. I'm a worn out mom. I'm also working. I'm exhausted. The other day, a friend cut me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich into triangles. Baby carrot sticks. I ate it and I'm. burst into tears. I said, why did you burst into tears? And she said, because I realized I haven't been taken care of. in a long time. She said, what if I threw a dinner party for my other worn out moms? And I said, great, give it a name. And she called it the worn out mom's hootenanny. And then I said, give it a rule. And she said, if you talk about your kids, you have to take a tequila shot. And she actually did this. And I could see her, like the energy and her faith, the life came back in her. It was something that was relevant. It was specific. It was for worn out moms. It was disputable. Can dads come? Well, if they're a little bit more worn out, they can come too. I'm being a little facetious here. But then the third thing she did was she shifted the culture of the room by creating this pop-up rule. Because you can bring these people together, and then they can just talk about their kids the whole time, or whatever it is. And part of what she wanted was somebody with shared experience, but to actually constrict the conversation, to give permission to other parents, to other mothers in that case, who are working. and can also talk about many things, also have many identities, can also talk about all sorts of things, all within the vessel of a simple dinner party. I like that. I want to go to that dinner party. Exactly. Exactly. Now I want to go back to you. Wrote Art of the Gathering before the world shifted, before the global pandemic. And now that we have to contend with virtual gathering, how has the pandemic changed our gathering? And also, how can we create purpose? And I wrestle with this. How can we create it virtually? You know, when the pandemic hit, Maybe we can, I'm not going to ask you all to do this, but maybe on the, since this is a hybrid, maybe on the chat, just pop into the chat, like where were you or what is a moment you realized this was going to be a big thing? Maybe in your head you all can think about that too. For me, it was when the NBA canceled the season. I remember seeing that tweet and I was like, oh my goodness. And it was also the week, South by Southwest, the technology entertainment conference. They were like, I don't know if you all remember, there was like this battle between the city and the conference organizers because no one wanted to cancel or be the one that canceled because it was like $350 million impact on the local economy. It's where so many indie films get launched. It was like a very big deal. And I remember I was supposed to do, I was doing a podcast at the time with the New York Times, but it was in pre-production. And it was supposed to be called Gathering with Priya Parker. We had brides going into their weddings with voice memo apps on. We had birthday. It was like this whole, it was like Queer Eye for gathering. And my producer, one of my producers texted me and he said, I think we need to pause, it was like March 10th or something. I think we need to pause this podcast. A show called Gathering is going to sound like a horror film. And we pivoted and we launched this thing as a remote team to take other apart. But I think what the pandemic most did, basically I That week, I started getting texts, and the word gathering started just, I had a Google alert for the word gathering. And there was like some signal from the noise, right? I could see the art of gathering. I could kind of see. All of a sudden, the word gathering went from like the fringes of like community managers and facilitators and sociologists, you know, the nerds among us, all the way, basically, we ceded that territory to public officials, to governors, to the CDC. And I could see. that basically over the next, that gathering was going to be attacked, gathering was being taken from us. And also when we could no longer gather, we would begin to see it. Oh, gathering affects our life. Oh, this is how we raise our money for our nonprofit. Oh, this is how we teach. Oh, this is how I see my neighbors. And part of how the pandemic has changed is it has literally helped us see gathering as something that is created, as something that is invented, as something that gives us life, but also as something that has also in many places been incredibly inequitable, as forms that have actually excluded a lot of people. I remember, I'll stop here, but I remember a tweet by the researcher Sasha Constanza-Schock during that South by Southwest debate, and they said, they tweeted, Disabled people, colon, could you just put in a live stream? Able people, colon. This was like a tweet on March 10, 2020. Able people, it's too hard. Disabled people, it's not that complicated. Could you just put in a live stream? Able people, it's really expensive. COVID-19, like, hey, y'all. Able people, we're pleased to announce a state of the art live stream technology. And so I say all of that, which is like, the pandemic has given us a social X-ray of how we used to gather. And it's given us an opportunity to ask, what do we want to bring through? What do we want to bury and maybe host a funeral for? And what do we want to invent anew? Yeah. Yeah, that was something really, yeah, powerful seeing disabled people. I saw a lot of information about that where, like, Somebody was like, I feel less lonely now. I feel more connected to community. How can we continue to perpetuate that type of connection as well? I mean, I'm not sure what you mean by that kind of question. Well, I guess for populations and communities that actually felt more connected during the pandemic. I mean, basically, the pandemic was this massive interruption. I mean, I'm stating the obvious, but we're moving so quickly. I'm just going to say it was a massive interruption to our entire social, political, economic infrastructure. And I'm going to stay in my lane of gathering. But part of what that did is that it had to, by necessity, loosen our ties, our threads, our assumptions of how we do things, how we wed. How many of you have been invited to a Zoom wedding? How many of you have had a Zoom wedding? Anyone married by Zoom? Anyone on the chat married by Zoom? We'll pop you in there. So I think I see one hand back there. Congratulations. You talk about virtual meaning. I remember seeing a tweet. I have a newsletter that is free every month. And at the end of the first year of the pandemic, I put out the top 10 tweets on gathering that shifted how I think about gathering. And one of them was Sasha's tweet, and one of them was this guy who said, it never occurred to me that all of my friends live within a two mile radius of me and my partner. And I can invite my, I could actually have people who I love who are part of my meaningful moments, and they can zoom in. And I think that meaningful connection and who our people are, it's kind of exhausting. Like, it's a lot easier to be like, these are my people. I can walk or move to their homes like I'm good. You know, I'm exhausted like my seven people, my seven people. I'm so happy. And your seven people, it's like Aristotle's like this Nisimian ethics, right? There's three types of friendship and one is proximity. Proximity is like what is arbitrary. So how do you what the pandemic has helped us think about is like fundamentally, who do who am I? Who are my people? How do I want to work? Where do I want to work? How do I want to be? And how do I create meaningful connection with people, regardless at some level of who we are, but also that in-person gathering, as you can feel in this room, is not the same as virtual gathering. And that's OK. But to pretend that it's the same is incredibly problematic. And so I think the real conversations are what rises to the level of an in-person gathering. Where is there choice in a workspace? Where is it required versus where is it strongly encouraged? In a conference like this example, When do you choose that you can come in virtually? When do you come in person? And how do you navigate the two? These are fundamental questions to how we community. And as a conflict resolution facilitator, the number one thing you can do is to name that these are actually different experiences and have some discretion and discernment as to when and how you do which. Yeah, and that kind of leads into the next question, is like, what kind of mistakes do we make? Like, classic mistakes when we gather. And now added onto that just both in-person mistakes and also virtual mistakes. So the biggest mistake we make when we gather, myself included, is at some level, the more confident we are. Well, this is probably like some U-curve that a scientist can create. But either when we're not conscious or when we're like overconfident, like I got this, is we keep assuming that the purpose is obvious. The purpose of the gathering is obvious and shared. Oh, I know what a Tuesday staff meeting is. Oh, I know what a birthday party is. So that's, and so every single time, like it's a practice, it's a practice, it's a practice. I have a digital course we just launched and it was virtual. And this was my team trying to figure out like, how do we create meaningful connection virtually? And what is the need here? And we started with purpose. And it's like in every single person's, in every single person's like case study gathering. A huge part of the work. is realizing that we have a lot of assumptions of what something needs to look like. So the biggest mistake we make is we assume the purpose is shared and obvious. The second biggest mistake, and I'll go to virtual and hybrid, is we try to pretend that all of the different experiences require the same skills. So in-person gathering is the same skills as virtual gathering is the same skills as hybrid gathering. And so just a simple, like hybrid gatherings right now. So when I say hybrid gatherings, I mean There's at least one in-person group around the same table or in the same room. And there's at least one virtual experience. And then there's a decision of, do we connect them? And hybrid gatherings aren't one gathering. There are three. They're the virtual experience. Right now, I can say on the chat, like, OK, I'm going to ask the audience, what is one question you want to say? So actually, let me do this. So there's a virtual experience right now. There's a virtual gathering. They may be chatting. They don't. We have no idea. There's this room, right? You can look around, you can feel each other's breathing bodies. It's hybrid when we connect this room with that. So I'm just going to ask, can someone yell out a question that we're going to ask the folks in the virtual room to put into the chat? What would you like to know from the folks in the virtual room? Just pop into the chat. Where are you coming from? Like where? Do you mean physically? Physically, geographically, let's do city and make it specific. City and state in this moment. Just pop into the chat. Actually, we'll just do city, comma, and then the room you're watching this from. Okay, so city, comma, room you're watching this from, living room, bedroom, toilet, basement, comma, and the noise that you hear that's not coming from this gathering. OK, so town, room, noise. Now, if we really wanted to have feedback, we'd have a screen up here, and someone's like, dog barking, air conditioner, child crying. But these are all decisions. And so the simplest thing to do in this moment of complex hybrid gathering is first ask, what is the purpose of this? What is the need? Number two, what are the ratios? What should rise to the level of an in-person meeting? Ray Ringel is a facilitator, and she wrote a great piece in the Harvard Business Review a couple of years ago, which is a graph. When should something rise to the level of in-person meeting? And she says, the more emotionally complex and the more intellectually complex, the more we benefit being together. And then finally, if we are hybrid, what are the ratios? Do people all have to get onto a virtual Zoom, if most people are virtual but some people are in person? Or is it all right to have them have separate experiences? And sometimes it's OK to have separate experiences. Because connecting the two, as you just saw, takes more time and is more complicated. And so the payoff should be worth it. Yeah, I'm noting something. I think we have time for one more. I would love to know, you know, as you've seen people kind of deal with the new ways we gather, both in person and virtually, what are some just, like... Heartwarming examples of like when people got it right, when people really thought about purpose of this new landscape and just came out with a gathering that just knocked your socks off. Let me think. I'll share. I'm like, do we end? OK, let me share two examples. One is. a very fun one. I actually, if there are any newsletter subscribers in the room, this was the last newsletter. Virgos, you all remember the Virgo party? Any Virgos in the room? Okay. So, and any Virgos on the chat, you know, show us your prize. So Virgos, I didn't know this. For those of you who don't know this, Virgos are Beyonce's star sign. And I, there's a there's a publisher, there's a group that I knew that they were, they're very, they were like a relatively close team, pandemic hits, they're all, they all go remote, and they start realizing like they're kind of like losing their magic, they're like losing their energy, they're losing their sauce, and very specific, very disputable, but they are disproportionately Virgos on that team, and every year, because there's so many Virgos, and it's like all through the publishers, like the associate publisher, or the marketer, the publisher, they would always have a Virgo party in August. And pandemic hits and they realize like we need to do a pen we're gonna do a Virgo party but we need to do it on zoom and again if they did the same thing if they try to do what they did in the room and put it on zoom it would have not made any sense so they paused and they thought how can we make this super creative and they were like okay let's do Virgos are competitive this is like asterisk asterisk asterisk this is what they told me I don't actually know anything about astrology but this is how they were pointed to me Virgos are competitive we're gonna do a competition And we're going to have non-Virgos be the judges. There's going to be three rounds. And they got everybody on to do this competition. And they were funny, and they were warm, and they were kind of sarcastic. And there was three rounds. And the rounds were things like, show us your refrigerator organizational system. And to not be like, people were showing them, they're like, I have beer over here. I have gluten-free over here. I have spinach over here. Running through their homes, showing the refrigerator. And the next one was like, show us one organizing system you're really deeply proud of. And they're like, ah! And they're going through, running through, showing their bookcase, showing their pencil things. Everyone's laughing. There's motion. They're moving through their space. They've shifted their perception of what needs to be within a Zoom thing, but it's still appropriate for colleagues. And then there's one more round. I can't remember what it was. And then there was a surprise round for worst loser. And then everyone was laughing. And it was like, saw it all, all of this kind of warmth in this community. And then and. Basically, and I heard about this gathering from so many people, Virgos and non-Vergos on the team, which was like, we remembered why we love each other. We were so static as a team on Zoom. We had lost our agency of jokes and humor and moving through the hallways. And that is problematic for all sorts of other reasons. We enjoy some of our remote life. And I think part of why I love this example so much is because they pause to think about, who are we? How do we know who our people are? How do we create a gathering that's innovative and that's full of care, that's appropriate, that's functional in that moment? And how do we actually think about, how do we like hack the technology that we have? Right? It wasn't, is that a virtual gathering? I don't know. Is that a hybrid gathering? I don't know. But they created, they stitched a bespoke gathering for their people in a way that knowing and talking to people, you may be like, this is a really weird gathering. Or it's like we, or you may be like, we are doing a Virgo party at our, you know, community. They felt seen. They felt known. They felt like this is the reason why we work here is because it's full of humor. And they found, despite the kind of static community, the static tools, they found a way to breathe life into it. Yeah, I'm a Virgo. I loved it. I loved the last newsletter. And sadly, we're out of time. This has been such a sweet, amazing conversation. I'm glad you were able to make it this year. One last question. How do we continue to learn from you about gathering? Where can we get your newsletter? Where can we follow you online? Thank you for that question. Thank you so much for being here and for being here in community. Thank you all for your... I hear the chat is lit. Maybe someone can drop into the chat. You can go... I have actually on... On my website, PriyaParker.com, you can download a special free guide called The New Rules of Gathering, and it's how to plan any special occasion. It's kind of thinking in this new way, as well as a guide on 10 ways to have a better virtual gathering, virtual meeting. If you're on Instagram, we have a lot of lively conversations there at Priya Parker. And I don't know if this works or not. If you're at home or you're here, you can pull out your phone. I'm told that if you text the word gather to 66866, You can sign up for the newsletter, and that's how you find out about the digital course. But really also, just send me your examples. We are gathering is contagious, positive and negative. And how you gather, and so many of my examples, and so many of my inspirations isn't how I gather. It's how you all gather. So send me your questions. Send me your examples. Send me what you all are doing out in the world, because the questions that you all are focusing on right now, thank you for having me, Jessica, and for interviewing me so beautifully. Like, these are the core. This isn't some twee fringe content anymore. This is the core, like how we meet, how we gather, how we bring together people virtually, hybrid, and in between are the core civilizational questions right now. And you all just happen to have been working on this for 10 years and 20 years and 30 years. Like these are the questions that are actually going to shift the next generation's assumptions of how we do this. And the window won't be open forever, so now is the time to shape it. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Thank you.

Hi! Good morning everybody! Hi!

It is so amazing to be here with you. I mean, it's been a while. It's wonderful to be here in person and everybody joining online.

It is so beautiful to be with you again. So last time we were here, I want to tell a little story first. In 2019, when we were in this physical space together, I was so excited. I want to go back and like really grow my meetup program. And somebody shared an amazing book.

And that author is going to come join me in a second. Who is this author? It's Priya Parker, who is helping us take a deeper look at anyone who can create collective meaning in modern life, one gathering at a time.

As Krista Trippett of On Being called her, the voice of what it means to gather in this world that we inhabit now. She is a facilitator, a strategic advisor, acclaimed author of Art of the Gathering. I hope we all have that on our bookshelves.

Thank you. and the host of New York Times podcast, Together Apart. She has spent 20 years helping leaders and communities have complicated conversations at... Moments of transition.

She has spoken at TED, and her video has been viewed three million times. We really value her words. And now I want to ask her to join me on stage, and I want to ask you to give her an amazing CMX welcome, both here in the stage and online.

I want to see those emojis online. Welcome Priya Parker to the stage. What a treat.

It's so beautiful to be here. I have my tea. There's like a real green room, not just like a Zoom green room.

And I'm so excited that you all are here joining us online. It's a hybrid event, very meta. But thank you.

so much for having me and to being here and seeing all of your faces. It's really a true treat. I've been hearing about you all for years, and I'm delighted to be here. Yeah, we've wanted her for a long time.

So I first want to talk about you have have a really interesting background. And I think we'd all love to know, how did you come to it? Like, dialogue work, conflict work, and especially maybe some of your role models and mentors.

So, like many of you, I was born in Zimbabwe. And that is true. And perhaps like many of you, so much of the work I do today is really based on how it was written. raised and kind of the different worlds I was a part of and what I saw.

I'm biracial. My mother is Indian. My father is white American. And for the first kind of ten years of their life, they were in international development work.

And we moved every year, every six months, every 16 months. How many folks in here or online kind of moved a lot in their younger years as a child? That's often an experience.

And long story short, we eventually settled in Virginia. And within a year, they... they announced that they were going to separate. And within two years, they divorced.

And within three years, they each remarried other people. And I was their only child. And they had joint custody, so that effectively meant that I would sort of toggle back and forth between these two homes.

And there were really kind of two different worlds. There were two different forming communities. There were two families that were trying to figure out themselves.

Who are we now with these new partners? How do we raise our children with these joint families? What do we believe? How do we begin dinner?

What do we do? do on Saturdays? Do we charge?

Do we fine for bad behavior? Do we pay for grades? Who are we? But one microscopic community at a time.

And they were also kind of worlds apart in many ways. My mother is an Indian woman, immigrant, now American citizen. My stepfather's English. And their household was kind of Indian, British, progressive. New agey, lots of workshops, landmark forum-y, for those of you who know what that is.

And then I would leave, and I'd enter my father and stepmother's home. And they were and are white American evangelical Christians, conservative, Republican, twice-a-week churchgoing, softball playing, meat eating. You kind of get the picture. My husband's here.

I often joke, like, my name is Priya Parker. And you can kind of guess, you know, which side is which. He often says it doesn't take a shrink to explain how Priya got into the field of conflict resolution.

And so I became a conflict resolution facilitator in college. And I would say a couple of things. I learned as a facilitator, and I think this is really true for community managers as well, that groups are complicated.

Community is complicated. Like, you all are like the OG bodyguards, therapists, protectors, like meeting planners, security officers, all of these things. And one of the people who kind of most shaped my work is a guy named Hal Saunders.

He was a diplomat and he worked for many years within the government, the U.S. government, and he eventually left. He helped create the Camp David Accords. And he basically realized that governments can do certain things, like make peace treaties, but if the beliefs on the ground, if citizens don't actually know one another, if they don't shift their perceptions of one another, it's very difficult to also make change.

And he worked with us as students to help create this process called sustained dialogue. And we had to figure out, I imagine like many of you in different parts of the communities that you're managing and working in, we had to figure out like how do you get people to show up? Like literally, like we want to start this program on race where we get people at the University of Virginia to talk to each other about things they never actually talked to each other about.

Like literally how do you get people to show up? There's a room like this, maybe we should do a skit. No one's gonna, oh maybe we should, should we tell the local student newspaper? Just like bit by I'm curious, maybe online, since I hear there's a lot of you, if you could just pop into the chat, what is the first community you ever managed, quote unquote? And maybe here, turn to the person next to you.

Can we do that? Yeah. And what's the first community you ever realized you had to shape in some way, even if that wasn't your formal role?

And just pop into the chat. We'll see you. I need water.

OK. OK, OK, OK, come back. All right, I'll be back.

And we can't actually see the chat, but I'll just say, and we're hoping you do this all day long and all day tomorrow to start getting each other's.. But I, it was through my experience in college that I started to realize that community is something, and growing up, community is something that is invented and shaped. And long story short, I years later, I became a facilitator that continued to be my day job, and I wrote this book.

I realized that what most of us are taught about gathering or hosting is not what I was trained as as a facilitator, that actually creates meaning, that actually gets people to say what they really think, that actually gets people to feel safe or feel like they belong. And so I interviewed over 100 different folks that other people credited. with consistently creating transformative experiences.

A rabbi, a photographer that has seven minutes with the head of state and 18 bodyguards in the room, how does, like, what does he do? Like, literally, second to second, what does he do to shift the room to get that shot? And the biggest thing that I learned, and I wrote in The Art of Gathering, was none of them had a specific form in their head of what it had to look like.

That is kind of this, I imagine like all of you, it's like this wandering path, but I continue to notice what is working here, and what is the common belief or perception of how something works, and where's the gap, and how do I begin to close that gap? I think that's what a community manager and a gatherer tries to do every day. Yeah, yeah.

So speaking about gathering, what is gathering, and specifically I think for us here, how does it differ? from community work, and where do they intersect and overlap? So I define a gathering just kind of like to set the table. I define a gathering as any time three or more people come together for a purpose with a beginning, middle, and end.

So it ends. It's a moment in time. It's an event.

It's a happening. It can be public. It can be a protest. It can be a Saturday morning meeting in the park.

It can be a. board meeting, it can be a wedding, it can be a funeral. Like, I'm agnostic about the actual form.

And I define a community. Well, maybe I should ask you all how you define a community. But communities have gatherings, and gathering can create a sense of community. But gatherings can also create a sense of isolation.

You can be with other people and feel incredibly alone. You can be with other people and feel incredibly isolated. Gathering is not a good in and of itself.

It's a tool. And I think of gathering as a mechanism. to build community, but a gathering can also be a mechanism to tear a community apart. The January 6th coup was not a gathering to bring people together. Gathering is a tool and it can be used in any way.

And so part of a community manager, the way I would think about it, is that this is a tool that shapes community. This is a tool that shapes beliefs. This is a tool that shapes how people perceive where they belong in the community. And it's something anyone can do and that we need to get better at. Thank you!

When I was originally reading Art of the Gathering, the thing I just walked away that was the question I kept asking myself is, you know, what is purpose? What is purpose? What is the purpose of my gathering? And I want to kind of go into that. Like, why is it important to create like that specific purpose.

And I love how you say it. It's like, what does it mean to have a specific, disputable purpose to kind of, like, create a better gathering? So when I interviewed these 100 folks, And I was kind of like looking at the patterns, like why. They were from all walks of life. Many of them, this was really interesting to me, many of them identified as introverts.

Many of them identified as suffering from social anxiety. And when I saw this pattern, I was like, you know, I asked one of them, and she said, I create the gatherings I wish existed in the world. And the other thing they said was every single time I first ask, I said this earlier, I don't have a specific form in my head.

I first ask, what is the need here? Why are we bringing these people together? And so often part of the reason I think they're such innovative gatherers is because they're not on repeat.

They're not thinking like board meeting, you know, one long brown table, 12 white men. That was a joke. Wedding, you know, like white dress walking down an aisle.

You know, and instead they're asking, what is the purpose of this wedding? Right? Not like do I, like a couple, not do we, why do we want to get married?

Right? You should probably ask that first before you plan your wedding. But why are we having this wedding?

Is it to unite our different communities and have an experience so that when the going gets tough, as it does in any marriage, my husband's here. He will attest to this. When the going gets tough, your people come together and say, remember what we did at your wedding? Remember what we saw there?

Remember your vows? Remember how you had us make a community vow? Versus is it a a fundamental social contract that's actually repaying and thanking the previous generation, as it is in many contexts, right?

All of our people were invited to all of these other weddings, and this is fundamentally about our parents, and we're there. And neither is good or bad, but there are different purposes. And so often we don't actually pause and ask, what is the need, why are we doing this?

And it erupts in proxy wars. And the proxy war, you end up having this conversation through fighting over the guest list, right? Does the final invitation go to your college buddy, your law school buddy? long lost college buddy or to your mother's colleague? Well, those are fundamentally different beliefs about who is this actually for.

And so in a gathering, when you first actually ask what is the need here, it actually allows you to break form and design a gathering that is relevant to the need at hand. Can I give a simple example? So I wrote The Art of Gathering in 2018, and a journalist called me up and she said, I need you to Art of Gatheringify my dinner party.

And I said, what do you think that means? And she was like, I don't know. And I think she thought I was to say like. Like, you put the fish knife here.

You put the wine here. And I'm like, I'm a terrible cook. But why are you doing this?

Like, what is a need in your life? And she said, you know, I don't really, like, for a dinner party? And I said, just what is a need in your life? Like, forget the dinner party.

What is a need in your life? And she said, you know, I am, I was like, she was like, I don't know if this counts. But I'm a worn out mom. This was coming up.

I'm a worn out mom. I'm also working. I'm exhausted. The other day, a friend cut me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich into triangles. Baby carrot sticks.

I ate it and I'm. burst into tears. I said, why did you burst into tears?

And she said, because I realized I haven't been taken care of. in a long time. She said, what if I threw a dinner party for my other worn out moms? And I said, great, give it a name. And she called it the worn out mom's hootenanny.

And then I said, give it a rule. And she said, if you talk about your kids, you have to take a tequila shot. And she actually did this.

And I could see her, like the energy and her faith, the life came back in her. It was something that was relevant. It was specific.

It was for worn out moms. It was disputable. Can dads come? Well, if they're a little bit more worn out, they can come too. I'm being a little facetious here.

But then the third thing she did was she shifted the culture of the room by creating this pop-up rule. Because you can bring these people together, and then they can just talk about their kids the whole time, or whatever it is. And part of what she wanted was somebody with shared experience, but to actually constrict the conversation, to give permission to other parents, to other mothers in that case, who are working.

and can also talk about many things, also have many identities, can also talk about all sorts of things, all within the vessel of a simple dinner party. I like that. I want to go to that dinner party.

Exactly. Exactly. Now I want to go back to you.

Wrote Art of the Gathering before the world shifted, before the global pandemic. And now that we have to contend with virtual gathering, how has the pandemic changed our gathering? And also, how can we create purpose? And I wrestle with this. How can we create it virtually?

You know, when the pandemic hit, Maybe we can, I'm not going to ask you all to do this, but maybe on the, since this is a hybrid, maybe on the chat, just pop into the chat, like where were you or what is a moment you realized this was going to be a big thing? Maybe in your head you all can think about that too. For me, it was when the NBA canceled the season.

I remember seeing that tweet and I was like, oh my goodness. And it was also the week, South by Southwest, the technology entertainment conference. They were like, I don't know if you all remember, there was like this battle between the city and the conference organizers because no one wanted to cancel or be the one that canceled because it was like $350 million impact on the local economy. It's where so many indie films get launched.

It was like a very big deal. And I remember I was supposed to do, I was doing a podcast at the time with the New York Times, but it was in pre-production. And it was supposed to be called Gathering with Priya Parker. We had brides going into their weddings with voice memo apps on.

We had birthday. It was like this whole, it was like Queer Eye for gathering. And my producer, one of my producers texted me and he said, I think we need to pause, it was like March 10th or something.

I think we need to pause this podcast. A show called Gathering is going to sound like a horror film. And we pivoted and we launched this thing as a remote team to take other apart.

But I think what the pandemic most did, basically I That week, I started getting texts, and the word gathering started just, I had a Google alert for the word gathering. And there was like some signal from the noise, right? I could see the art of gathering. I could kind of see. All of a sudden, the word gathering went from like the fringes of like community managers and facilitators and sociologists, you know, the nerds among us, all the way, basically, we ceded that territory to public officials, to governors, to the CDC.

And I could see. that basically over the next, that gathering was going to be attacked, gathering was being taken from us. And also when we could no longer gather, we would begin to see it. Oh, gathering affects our life. Oh, this is how we raise our money for our nonprofit.

Oh, this is how we teach. Oh, this is how I see my neighbors. And part of how the pandemic has changed is it has literally helped us see gathering as something that is created, as something that is invented, as something that gives us life, but also as something that has also in many places been incredibly inequitable, as forms that have actually excluded a lot of people. I remember, I'll stop here, but I remember a tweet by the researcher Sasha Constanza-Schock during that South by Southwest debate, and they said, they tweeted, Disabled people, colon, could you just put in a live stream?

Able people, colon. This was like a tweet on March 10, 2020. Able people, it's too hard. Disabled people, it's not that complicated.

Could you just put in a live stream? Able people, it's really expensive. COVID-19, like, hey, y'all. Able people, we're pleased to announce a state of the art live stream technology.

And so I say all of that, which is like, the pandemic has given us a social X-ray of how we used to gather. And it's given us an opportunity to ask, what do we want to bring through? What do we want to bury and maybe host a funeral for?

And what do we want to invent anew? Yeah. Yeah, that was something really, yeah, powerful seeing disabled people. I saw a lot of information about that where, like, Somebody was like, I feel less lonely now.

I feel more connected to community. How can we continue to perpetuate that type of connection as well? I mean, I'm not sure what you mean by that kind of question. Well, I guess for populations and communities that actually felt more connected during the pandemic.

I mean, basically, the pandemic was this massive interruption. I mean, I'm stating the obvious, but we're moving so quickly. I'm just going to say it was a massive interruption to our entire social, political, economic infrastructure. And I'm going to stay in my lane of gathering.

But part of what that did is that it had to, by necessity, loosen our ties, our threads, our assumptions of how we do things, how we wed. How many of you have been invited to a Zoom wedding? How many of you have had a Zoom wedding? Anyone married by Zoom? Anyone on the chat married by Zoom?

We'll pop you in there. So I think I see one hand back there. Congratulations. You talk about virtual meaning.

I remember seeing a tweet. I have a newsletter that is free every month. And at the end of the first year of the pandemic, I put out the top 10 tweets on gathering that shifted how I think about gathering. And one of them was Sasha's tweet, and one of them was this guy who said, it never occurred to me that all of my friends live within a two mile radius of me and my partner. And I can invite my, I could actually have people who I love who are part of my meaningful moments, and they can zoom in.

And I think that meaningful connection and who our people are, it's kind of exhausting. Like, it's a lot easier to be like, these are my people. I can walk or move to their homes like I'm good.

You know, I'm exhausted like my seven people, my seven people. I'm so happy. And your seven people, it's like Aristotle's like this Nisimian ethics, right?

There's three types of friendship and one is proximity. Proximity is like what is arbitrary. So how do you what the pandemic has helped us think about is like fundamentally, who do who am I? Who are my people? How do I want to work?

Where do I want to work? How do I want to be? And how do I create meaningful connection with people, regardless at some level of who we are, but also that in-person gathering, as you can feel in this room, is not the same as virtual gathering.

And that's OK. But to pretend that it's the same is incredibly problematic. And so I think the real conversations are what rises to the level of an in-person gathering. Where is there choice in a workspace? Where is it required versus where is it strongly encouraged?

In a conference like this example, When do you choose that you can come in virtually? When do you come in person? And how do you navigate the two?

These are fundamental questions to how we community. And as a conflict resolution facilitator, the number one thing you can do is to name that these are actually different experiences and have some discretion and discernment as to when and how you do which. Yeah, and that kind of leads into the next question, is like, what kind of mistakes do we make?

Like, classic mistakes when we gather. And now added onto that just both in-person mistakes and also virtual mistakes. So the biggest mistake we make when we gather, myself included, is at some level, the more confident we are. Well, this is probably like some U-curve that a scientist can create. But either when we're not conscious or when we're like overconfident, like I got this, is we keep assuming that the purpose is obvious.

The purpose of the gathering is obvious and shared. Oh, I know what a Tuesday staff meeting is. Oh, I know what a birthday party is. So that's, and so every single time, like it's a practice, it's a practice, it's a practice. I have a digital course we just launched and it was virtual.

And this was my team trying to figure out like, how do we create meaningful connection virtually? And what is the need here? And we started with purpose.

And it's like in every single person's, in every single person's like case study gathering. A huge part of the work. is realizing that we have a lot of assumptions of what something needs to look like. So the biggest mistake we make is we assume the purpose is shared and obvious. The second biggest mistake, and I'll go to virtual and hybrid, is we try to pretend that all of the different experiences require the same skills.

So in-person gathering is the same skills as virtual gathering is the same skills as hybrid gathering. And so just a simple, like hybrid gatherings right now. So when I say hybrid gatherings, I mean There's at least one in-person group around the same table or in the same room. And there's at least one virtual experience. And then there's a decision of, do we connect them?

And hybrid gatherings aren't one gathering. There are three. They're the virtual experience.

Right now, I can say on the chat, like, OK, I'm going to ask the audience, what is one question you want to say? So actually, let me do this. So there's a virtual experience right now.

There's a virtual gathering. They may be chatting. They don't.

We have no idea. There's this room, right? You can look around, you can feel each other's breathing bodies. It's hybrid when we connect this room with that. So I'm just going to ask, can someone yell out a question that we're going to ask the folks in the virtual room to put into the chat?

What would you like to know from the folks in the virtual room? Just pop into the chat. Where are you coming from? Like where?

Do you mean physically? Physically, geographically, let's do city and make it specific. City and state in this moment.

Just pop into the chat. Actually, we'll just do city, comma, and then the room you're watching this from. Okay, so city, comma, room you're watching this from, living room, bedroom, toilet, basement, comma, and the noise that you hear that's not coming from this gathering.

OK, so town, room, noise. Now, if we really wanted to have feedback, we'd have a screen up here, and someone's like, dog barking, air conditioner, child crying. But these are all decisions. And so the simplest thing to do in this moment of complex hybrid gathering is first ask, what is the purpose of this?

What is the need? Number two, what are the ratios? What should rise to the level of an in-person meeting? Ray Ringel is a facilitator, and she wrote a great piece in the Harvard Business Review a couple of years ago, which is a graph. When should something rise to the level of in-person meeting?

And she says, the more emotionally complex and the more intellectually complex, the more we benefit being together. And then finally, if we are hybrid, what are the ratios? Do people all have to get onto a virtual Zoom, if most people are virtual but some people are in person? Or is it all right to have them have separate experiences?

And sometimes it's OK to have separate experiences. Because connecting the two, as you just saw, takes more time and is more complicated. And so the payoff should be worth it.

Yeah, I'm noting something. I think we have time for one more. I would love to know, you know, as you've seen people kind of deal with the new ways we gather, both in person and virtually, what are some just, like...

Heartwarming examples of like when people got it right, when people really thought about purpose of this new landscape and just came out with a gathering that just knocked your socks off. Let me think. I'll share.

I'm like, do we end? OK, let me share two examples. One is. a very fun one.

I actually, if there are any newsletter subscribers in the room, this was the last newsletter. Virgos, you all remember the Virgo party? Any Virgos in the room? Okay.

So, and any Virgos on the chat, you know, show us your prize. So Virgos, I didn't know this. For those of you who don't know this, Virgos are Beyonce's star sign. And I, there's a there's a publisher, there's a group that I knew that they were, they're very, they were like a relatively close team, pandemic hits, they're all, they all go remote, and they start realizing like they're kind of like losing their magic, they're like losing their energy, they're losing their sauce, and very specific, very disputable, but they are disproportionately Virgos on that team, and every year, because there's so many Virgos, and it's like all through the publishers, like the associate publisher, or the marketer, the publisher, they would always have a Virgo party in August. And pandemic hits and they realize like we need to do a pen we're gonna do a Virgo party but we need to do it on zoom and again if they did the same thing if they try to do what they did in the room and put it on zoom it would have not made any sense so they paused and they thought how can we make this super creative and they were like okay let's do Virgos are competitive this is like asterisk asterisk asterisk this is what they told me I don't actually know anything about astrology but this is how they were pointed to me Virgos are competitive we're gonna do a competition And we're going to have non-Virgos be the judges.

There's going to be three rounds. And they got everybody on to do this competition. And they were funny, and they were warm, and they were kind of sarcastic.

And there was three rounds. And the rounds were things like, show us your refrigerator organizational system. And to not be like, people were showing them, they're like, I have beer over here.

I have gluten-free over here. I have spinach over here. Running through their homes, showing the refrigerator. And the next one was like, show us one organizing system you're really deeply proud of.

And they're like, ah! And they're going through, running through, showing their bookcase, showing their pencil things. Everyone's laughing.

There's motion. They're moving through their space. They've shifted their perception of what needs to be within a Zoom thing, but it's still appropriate for colleagues.

And then there's one more round. I can't remember what it was. And then there was a surprise round for worst loser.

And then everyone was laughing. And it was like, saw it all, all of this kind of warmth in this community. And then and.

Basically, and I heard about this gathering from so many people, Virgos and non-Vergos on the team, which was like, we remembered why we love each other. We were so static as a team on Zoom. We had lost our agency of jokes and humor and moving through the hallways.

And that is problematic for all sorts of other reasons. We enjoy some of our remote life. And I think part of why I love this example so much is because they pause to think about, who are we? How do we know who our people are?

How do we create a gathering that's innovative and that's full of care, that's appropriate, that's functional in that moment? And how do we actually think about, how do we like hack the technology that we have? Right?

It wasn't, is that a virtual gathering? I don't know. Is that a hybrid gathering?

I don't know. But they created, they stitched a bespoke gathering for their people in a way that knowing and talking to people, you may be like, this is a really weird gathering. Or it's like we, or you may be like, we are doing a Virgo party at our, you know, community. They felt seen.

They felt known. They felt like this is the reason why we work here is because it's full of humor. And they found, despite the kind of static community, the static tools, they found a way to breathe life into it. Yeah, I'm a Virgo. I loved it.

I loved the last newsletter. And sadly, we're out of time. This has been such a sweet, amazing conversation.

I'm glad you were able to make it this year. One last question. How do we continue to learn from you about gathering?

Where can we get your newsletter? Where can we follow you online? Thank you for that question.

Thank you so much for being here and for being here in community. Thank you all for your... I hear the chat is lit.

Maybe someone can drop into the chat. You can go... I have actually on... On my website, PriyaParker.com, you can download a special free guide called The New Rules of Gathering, and it's how to plan any special occasion. It's kind of thinking in this new way, as well as a guide on 10 ways to have a better virtual gathering, virtual meeting.

If you're on Instagram, we have a lot of lively conversations there at Priya Parker. And I don't know if this works or not. If you're at home or you're here, you can pull out your phone.

I'm told that if you text the word gather to 66866, You can sign up for the newsletter, and that's how you find out about the digital course. But really also, just send me your examples. We are gathering is contagious, positive and negative.

And how you gather, and so many of my examples, and so many of my inspirations isn't how I gather. It's how you all gather. So send me your questions. Send me your examples.

Send me what you all are doing out in the world, because the questions that you all are focusing on right now, thank you for having me, Jessica, and for interviewing me so beautifully. Like, these are the core. This isn't some twee fringe content anymore. This is the core, like how we meet, how we gather, how we bring together people virtually, hybrid, and in between are the core civilizational questions right now. And you all just happen to have been working on this for 10 years and 20 years and 30 years.

Like these are the questions that are actually going to shift the next generation's assumptions of how we do this. And the window won't be open forever, so now is the time to shape it. Thank you for having me.

Thank you. Thank you.

Transcript for:Priya Parker on Meaningful Gatherings

Transcript for:
Priya Parker on Meaningful Gatherings