1: Comedian Baratunde Thurston was in a tight spot.  

He was hosting a comedy event that was part fundraiser, part party.  The location?  The Brooklyn Brewery.

“On the evening in question, it was cavernous, rowdy, loud, and full of people full of beer,” Priya Parker writes in The Art of Gathering.  “There actually wasn’t a stage, or even an elevated platform.

“People had been eating and drinking for a while already; … continue reading

There was a key in the envelope and a note that read: “To be continued.”

That was it. Four months earlier, Felix Barrett, a prominent London-based theater director, had gotten engaged. After receiving the envelope, he heard nothing else for many weeks.

“It was blissful torture,” he later recalled, “the whole world suddenly took on a heightened hyper-real feeling, and everything was shrouded in mystery,” writes Priya Parker in The … continue reading

“Parking for your Landspeeder, Sandcrawler, or other transportation vehicle will be provided,” read the invitation to the Star Wars: The Force Awakens premiere.

“Simple as that,” writes Priya Parker in The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters. “This gathering will be playful, and it is for die-hards who live and breathe Star Wars.”

Yesterday, we looked at how we can intentionally prime the mindsets … continue reading

The short answer? Yes.  

Our gathering actually begins at the moment our guests first hear of it. “This may sound obvious, but it’s not,” Priya Parker writes in The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters. Our guests have been “thinking about and preparing for and anticipating” our event from what she calls “the moment of discovery.”

Typically, we focus on logistics. Where will the event … continue reading

Professional facilitator Priya Parker was leading a two-day retreat for a group of twenty consultants just outside Bangkok.

1: “In Thailand, and particularly at this firm, there was a very strong etiquette among the consultants that the client always comes first,“ she writes in her book The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters. “Accordingly, it is understood that they pick up the phone at all … continue reading

1: It’s the first day of class at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.  About one hundred graduate students find their seats.  Professor Ronald Heifetz, a popular professor and well-known authority on leadership, sits in a black swivel chair in the front of the classroom.  

He doesn’t take attendance or begin his lecture.  He just sits there, staring at the ground “with a blank, slight bored look on his … continue reading

Imagine we are in a movie theater. The people in the row behind us are talking to each other. Or, perhaps the person next to us is sending and reading texts distracting us from being able to focus on the big screen.  

What are our options? We can attempt to ignore what is happening or say something. Then what? Perhaps the other person stops. Or, maybe an argument ensues, ruining … continue reading

Question: Why do party guests often end up hanging out in the kitchen?  

Answer: We humans don’t like big, open spaces. We “instinctively seek out smaller spaces as the group dwindles in order to sustain the level of density,” writes Priya Parker in The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters.  

Priya was running a two-day gathering to brainstorm ideas for the future use for the … continue reading

1: The famed photographer Platon’s signature style is to shoot his subjects so close we can see their pores.

“Platon has photographed every sitting U.S. president from Jimmy Carter through Barack Obama.  He has done multiple portraits of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, well before they were presidential candidates,” writes Priya Parker in The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters.

“He has photographed world … continue reading

1: The two companies had been negotiating for more than a year.  The issues were complex, but the $20 billion merger between Alcatel and Lucent finally seemed to be lining up.  

There was one final step in the process: a face-to-face meeting between the executives, writes Priya Parker in The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters.

“This deal was supposed to be a marriage of equals,” … continue reading