What's The Big Idea: Priya Parker: The Art of Gathering and Meaningful Conversation
“All gathering is an act of individual and collective identity formation.”
Today’s guest: Priya Parker
Her big idea: How we reincorporate specificity and purpose into the act of gathering.
Priya Parker is helping us take a deeper look at how anyone can create collective meaning in modern life, one gathering at a time. She is a master facilitator, strategic advisor, and acclaimed author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters. Parker has spent 15 years helping leaders and communities have complicated conversations about community and identity and vision at moments of transition. Trained in the field of conflict resolution, Parker has worked on race relations on American college campuses and on peace processes in the Arab world, southern Africa, and India.
Parker is a founding member of the Sustained Dialogue Campus Network, a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Values Council and the New Models of Leadership, and a Senior Expert at Mobius Executive Leadership. She studied organizational design at M.I.T., public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and political and social thought at the University of Virginia.
Parker’s The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters (Riverhead, 2018) has been named a Best Business Book of the year by Amazon, Esquire Magazine, NPR, the Financial Times, 1-800-CEO-READS and Bloomberg. She has spoken on the TED Main Stage, and her TEDx talk on purpose has been viewed over 1 million times. Parker’s work has been featured in numerous outlets including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, TED.com, Forbes.com, Real Simple Magazine, Oprah.com, Bloomberg, Glamour, the Today Show and Morning Joe. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband, Anand Giridharadas, and their two children.
Listen to What’s The Big Idea on your preferred platform below:
Key insights Shared:
A lot of the transformative gatherings come from specific sub-communities, like black fraternities or Appalachia hootenanny. As we become more modern and more diverse, the specificity of the ritual has been thrown out.
Gatherings have become diluted and vague because they’ve lost their power of specificity. Key to revitalizing our gathering is creating meaningful rituals that are specific and unique without everyone being the same.
Meaningful ritual: Simply a transition of state. From one state to another. This can be your morning coffee (from “night state” to “morning state.”)
The question is how do you best move groups of people from one state to another? How do you change someone's mind-state from one place to another to see something that is new?
Model of relationships: anytime a group comes together, rather than trying to change what they’re arguing about, if you can change the underlying relationships you can change the world. Relationships are transformational- meaning the can change
5 elements of a relationship: identity, power, patterns in interaction, stereotypes and interests.
There are certain elements of our identity that are fixed like “race.” Certain parts of our identity are plastic like who we believe we are.
Gatherings are helpful and meaningful when the host and the guests know what the purpose is.
What does it mean to be a facilitator: Definition is “someone who eases the way” but that isn’t specific enough for the role. Priya thinks of herself as a moderator, someone who helps create the content and gives people the courage to have the conversations they need to be having.
What does it mean to create meaning through people: An older woman wanted to gather with friends for the holidays - more specifically a Christmas party. The invite read “A Christmas Country Supper” Noting that “supper” is a very deliberate use of Americana language. Giving people a reason to share meaningful conversation was done in the invite “please bring a memory of a favorite Christmas.”
Creating structure or constraints in gatherings: Illegitimate structure will invite a coup. The wrong structure forcing people to do something they don’t want to do will not work. How do you get to inviting a structure that will help people do their work?
1 know the purpose of your gathering.
2 communicate this purpose to your guest
3 the more specific your purpose, the more you need to communicate this with your guests. It’s a social contract.
Connection isn’t inherently a good thing: Connection and vulnerability is helpful when there's a legitimate purpose and when there's a relative weight placed on everyone in the room to share that vulnerability. Blind connection for connection sake is a dangerous tool without purpose.
Sustained dialog: a dialogic based model in which you bring together 12-14 people across diverse identities where the goal is to transform the underlying relationship in order to create the capacity for that group across their differences to make change outside.
Building a visioning practice: At the end of graduate school for one year, Priya attempted to facilitate 100 visioning labs. Get everyone she knows to participate gave Priya the opportunity to reflect on how successful this practice could work.
In order to figure out the vision or sense of purpose, to only self examine you might end up finding the wrong need. If it’s not connected to a real external need then it might be too self center. If you only look at the biggest need in the world like “what is the biggest market? Where is the most pain?” If you don’t know anything about it or it doesn’t inspire you, then you wont be the right person to solve the equation. You must understand both internally stirs you the most and meets the needs of others.
The epidemic of loneliness: Surgeon General under Obama said there was a natural epidemic of loneliness. This fracturing and separation has both health consequences and national security risks. Looking at the Russian attacks on the 2016 Presidential election in America, one of the pain points Russia was able to identify and exploit was the ways in which american’s no longer trust each other. We don’t know each other anymore.
Transgression in ritual: Powerful rituals have some element of transgression and boundary crossing. Particularly the rights of passages, sometimes physical. Sometimes these rituals are those that dehumanize others like in fraternities or sororities.
How can you create transgressive acts that embody the values that you wish to fulfill? How do we create rituals that allow us to re-imagine the roles that we have inherited?
To learn more about Priya and her work:
Check out Priya’s book The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters.
Visit Priya’s website here.