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

In all my gatherings, whether a board meeting or a birthday party, I have come to believe that it is the way a group is gathered that determines what happens in it and how successful it is,

Embodiment

THE WONDERS OF GENEROUS AUTHORITY

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.

The tea master there told me of a phrase the sixteenth-century Japanese tea master Sen no Rikyū taught his students to keep in the front of their minds as they conduct the ceremony: Ichi-go ichi-e. The master told me it roughly translates to “one meeting, one moment in your life that will never happen again.”

Until recently, when medical teams gathered to operate on a patient, studies showed that they often didn’t know one another’s names before starting. A 2001 Johns Hopkins study found that when members introduced themselves and shared concerns ahead of time, the likelihood of complications and deaths fell by 35 percent.

Drill, baby, drill:

A gathering’s blandness is a symptom of a disease. We must treat the disease. And what is the disease? That the gathering makes no effort to do what the best gatherings do: transport us to a temporary alternative world.

I believe that everyone has the ability to gather well. You don’t have to be an extrovert. In fact, some of the best gatherers I know suffer from social anxiety.