The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

To get the group to be vulnerable, he said, we facilitators needed to share an even more personal story than we expected our clients to. We would set the depth of the group by whatever level we were willing to go to; however much we shared, they would share a little less.

When we don’t examine the deeper assumptions behind why we gather, we end up skipping too quickly to replicating old, staid formats of gathering. And we forgo the possibility of creating something memorable, even transformative.

Specificity sharpens the gathering because people can see themselves in it.

When I raise the question of the host’s role to clients or friends, whether in preparation for business meetings or family get-togethers, 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.

Your gathering begins at the moment your guests first learn of it.

First, that a gathering starts long before guests walk through the door. The clock of the gathering starts, so to speak, from the moment a guest becomes aware of its existence.

As with purpose, it is often through conflict and disgruntlement that underlying assumptions about a gathering’s social contract reveal themselves.

The host can also set the context for the gathering. When I was invited to the sixteenth annual #Agrapalooza, continuing a summer tradition of made-up games and a drunken talent show at some friends’ parents’ house, building on the rituals and memories of all the gatherings before, I was being invited into a world, not just to an event.

And so part of the job of the pregame is to find ways, implicit and explicit, to communicate to your guests what they’re signing up for by saying yes to the invitation.