Think Fast Talk Smart: Communication Techniques - 174. Fix Meetings: Transform Gatherings Into Meaningful Moments

Episode Date: December 17, 2024

Turn any meeting or get-together into a chance for deep connection and collaboration.Whether you’re holding a team meeting or hosting a family get-together, the success of any gathering, says Priya Parker, isn’t about the perfect agenda or venue, but about the intentionality behind how you bring people together.“90% of the success of any gathering happens before anyone enters the room,” says Parker. As the author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, and a strategic advisor who has helped organizations worldwide reimagine their gatherings, Parker believes that thoughtful preparation can turn any meeting, whether professional or personal, into a meaningful and memorable experience for all involved. “Intentionality is the first step,” she says, “to pause and ask: why are we doing this? What is the purpose? What is the need in this community or in this classroom or in this team?”In this episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, Parker joins Matt Abrahams to explore the art of meaningful gatherings, sharing practical strategies for everything from crafting invitations that prime engagement to designing powerful closings that leave a lasting impact. By being more thoughtful in bringing people together, we can transform ordinary meetings into extraordinary opportunities for connection and collaboration.Episode Reference Links:Priya Parker Priya’s Book: The Art of Gathering Ep.124 Making Meetings Meaningful, Pt. 1: How to Structure and Organize More Effective Gatherings Ep.125 Making Meetings Meaningful, Pt. 2: Key Ingredients for Effective Meetings Connect:Premium Signup >>>> Think Fast Talk Smart PremiumEmail Questions & Feedback >>> [e-mail] Transcripts >>> Think Fast Talk Smart WebsiteNewsletter Signup + English Language Learning >>> FasterSmarter.ioThink Fast Talk Smart >>> LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTubeMatt Abrahams >>> LinkedInChapters:(00:00) - Introduction (02:35) - Intentionality in Everyday Conversations (04:21) - Questioning the Purpose of Gatherings (06:29) - The Power of Great Questions (09:32) - Managing Heat in Conversations (11:41) - Encouraging Participation Beforehand (14:21) - Creating Impactful Endings (16:47) - The Final Three Questions (20:55) - Conclusion ********Thank you to our sponsors.  These partnerships support the ongoing production of the podcast, allowing us to bring it to you at no cost.Strawberry.me. Get 50% off your first coaching session today at Strawberry.me/smartJoin our Think Fast Talk Smart Learning Community and become the communicator you want to be. 

Hi, Matt here. I wanted to remind you that for each episode, we provide English language learning support, where we share useful information to help you develop your English skills. Check out these English language learning and other resources, along with our newsletter and deep dive videos at FasterSmartre.O under Resources. Now a word from our sponsors. Their support covers the cost of production, allowing us to bring you this episode free of charge. know that I only recommend products I truly believe in. If you've listened to the show for a while, you know I am all about clear, effective communication, especially in writing, emails, and documents. All of these influence how we show up professionally. But writing well, consistently, isn't always easy, especially when you're moving fast.

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where you work. Learn more at superhuman.com. That's superhuman.com. Being purposeful in the way we come together, in the way we gather, can decide and define the success of our group communication. My name is Matt Abraham's, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Today I'm looking forward to to speaking with Priya Parker. Priya is best known for her book, The Art of Gathering, How We Meet, and Why It Matters.

She's an expert facilitator and strategic advisor. She's worked with organizations and individuals worldwide to reimagine how we come together in both personal and professional settings. Priya, thanks for being here. I'm so excited for our conversation. Thank you so much for having me. All right.

Shall we get started? Let's do it. Okay. In your book, The Art of Gathering, which I really have enjoyed. You emphasize the importance of intentionality when bringing people together. How can we apply that same level of intentionality

to smaller, more everyday conversations and gatherings we have so that we can create more meaningful connections with those we're interacting with? A huge part of what I was trying to do with The Art of Gathering was interrupting the autopilot scripts that we are on in modern life, whether it's the assumption of how a meeting is run, whether it's an assumption of how one weds or how one mourns or how one parties. And so much of the invitation to that interruption is to

actually pause and ask the question, why are we doing this? What is the purpose? What is the need in this community or in this classroom or in this team that by bringing together a specific group of people, we might be able to address. And that same relationship, looking at what is the need here, what is the purpose, why am I doing this is as applicable to everyday conversation because our everyday conversations are also on autopilot. Our everyday conversations are also on scripts. And scripts can absolutely be helpful. But in modern life, so many of us are looking for more meaning, more connection. If you're working in any modern workplace or join any type of association or club, we're not all the same. And so we don't have shared inherited ways of being together.

So intentionality is the first step to actually pause and ask and to look, what is happening here? And what is my intent? And how do we begin to make something anew? I really like this notion of being intentional with the meetings and gatherings that we have to take a pause and think about it. We all know that there are many meetings and gatherings that aren't needed. And then there are probably many that aren't happening that would be very beneficial. So taking that moment to pause and to think about what's important and what's not really makes a lot of sense. Do you have advice and guidance and criteria perhaps that we should think through as we're thinking about is a gathering warranted here? So I'm a conflict resolution facilitator.

And so I think a lot about communication and helping people meaningfully connect through dialogue. and I started writing the Art of Gathering in 2012, came out in 2018, and two years later, gathering was canceled. Part of what happened when the pandemic hit was that in most of our collective life, everything was temporarily interrupted. And part of what happened, particularly in our workplaces, was when every meeting collectively stopped, we began to actually ask these first order questions, which is, when and where and why and how should we meet and who decides.

And so part of what has happened over the last four years, so many of our institutions is we got off of autopilot because we couldn't meet in the same old ways. So whether it's a nonprofit asking traditionally raising 90% of its revenue one night a year at their gala, do we do this on Zoom? Asking these core questions, what happens when all of the board members can't be in the room?

do we put everyone on Zoom, even if they're in the same room? Life is a series of coordination questions. Communication is a series of coordination questions. How people sit and what room they're in. And facilitators and communication experts and sociologists have thought about questions like this for years. But what the pandemic did is it democratized these questions and made everyone have to actually ask, how do we coordinate so that we can be efficient? How do we coordinate so that we can fight well?

How do we coordinate so that people are off their scripts and not just giving their stump speeches? I hadn't really thought of it this way, but the pandemic actually was a catalyst and an accelerant for some of the things you talk about, because it did force all of us to all of sudden disrupt our scripts and think really about what's important. And I think people are still remembering that and challenging the way they think about meetings and gatherings today. In your work, you often talk about the power of asking the right questions when hosting a gathering. What advice do you have to ensure that we ask questions that have impact? Being a good question asker opens the entire world. If there is one skill that you can just get really good at as a parent, as a boss, as a teacher, as a friend, it's almost like sorcery.

It opens up their sense of self, a whole entire new world of possibility, imagination, and it's a learnable skill. And when we're bringing people together who don't know. necessarily want to be brought together, but realize they need to, is what is the right question? What question are we asking this group? What is the right amount of vulnerability? What is the right amount of relevance? And a very simple equation I often write about is called the magical equation for good questions. And here's what it is. A good question for a group is one that everybody is interested in answering and everybody is interested in hearing each other's answers. So I'll give a simple example.

One of my favorite questions to ask in a Zoom, particularly in a large group where you're just trying to warm people up and put it into the chat boxes, what is the first concert you went to and who took you? Particularly in work context when there's dozens of people, all of a sudden there's so much shared context. Oh my gosh. Tony Braxton? Wow. Madonna? Michael Jackson?

I didn't realize they were that old, right? And this waterfall of so much information. And then also who took me, my mom, my dad, my older sister, my step sister after my parents divorced. It was the first activity we did together. And so all of a sudden, when you have the right question, it should be appropriately bounded for the community, appropriate for work, or appropriate for intergenerational family or whatever your context might be. But learning to ask a question that sparks a group that helps give them shared context and meaning and expands their notions of each other is a really powerful skill. I really like framing questions as this magic sorcery because you're right. It opens things up. It allows you to connect. It allows you to explore things very well. And your guidance of a good magical question is a question that everyone is interested in answering and everybody is interested in hearing others' answers makes a lot of sense. I have to know your first concert and who took you. My first concert was Sweet Honey in the Rock. They are an all women's acapella group in Washington, D.C., and I saw it in a church.

And it was my cool, older step-sister who was 10 years older than me, right after my parents, my mother and her father got married. And she took me with her friends. And I just thought it was so cool. You've facilitated conversations in some high-stakes environments. When emotions run high, how do you recommend that we maintain focus on what truly matters without losing sight of the human element and getting sucked into all of that emotion? I mean, this is like the $10 million question that is relevant to.

to every team that's relevant right now in whatever nation you're, you know, listening from, which is how do you hold heat without burning the house down? And I'm biracial and bicultural. I'm half-Indian, half-way American. In both sides of my family, we are very good at when heat arises. We're very good at just sticking our head in the sand, right? Nothing to see here, folks. And I'm a conflict resolution facilitator, but I'm a conflict-averse resolution facilitator. And my deepest instincts, to this day, 25 years into facilitating. My hands get sweaty. My heart starts palpitating when I can feel heat, you know, rising in the room. And what I have most learned, I think I'm a relatively effective facilitator because I have deep empathy for the people in the room who also want to flee.

And I have built skills as a facilitator to train myself to stay in the room. And so the first thing is, when you are holding, whether you're a manager, whether you're thinking about holding a conversation with an extended family, whatever set of friends, you can only hold a conversation as deep or as hot as the facilitator themselves can hold. And so the first thing is to start to becoming aware of your own kind of relationship to heat. The second is heat is relevance. People get upset about or people get worked up about things that matter to them. And so at some level, like being a homing device for heat is something that is,

it's a way of knowing like what matters to these people? What are the lines in this community? What are our shared values or our values where we are actually apart? And so part of having a relationship to heat is realizing when heat is in the room, it means you're talking about something that matters. But the last thing I'll say is you can grow cultures of heat and different cultures are attuned to whether or not something is seen as dangerous in terms of conflict. And in any type of team, you can grow people's muscles to normalize heated respectful exchange. First, I love this notion of holding heat without burning the house down and just calling it heat rather than conflict, rather than. than many other terms we might use, I think is really important. And really, I like that notion of

heat is all about relevance. It means you're touching on something that's important to people. So don't run away from it, lean into it. I find it ironic, as you pointed out, that you, as somebody who helps people engage in conflict, resolve conflict, manage conflict, are conflict-averse. You don't have to be embracing of conflict to be good at managing conflict. And that's a powerful lesson. I appreciate you sharing that. I'm curious about the communication strategies you recommend for how hosts can actually encourage active participation and genuine engagement for everyone, particularly when the groups are large and some people's voices might get overshadowed by others. The first thing, when I was a baby facilitator, one of my mentors would often say to us,

90% of the success of any gathering happens before anyone enters the room. And when you applied to gathering, that means that at first of all, when you're thinking about participation and inviting participation, don't begin at the moment people enter the room or the Zoom. They're thinking about and being primed for what is expected of them and how to be a successful guest from the moment they receive the invitation. And so as you're thinking about, what kind of participation am I hoping for? first of all, really good gatherers are really good namers. The language between the difference between a meeting versus a workshop, right? Just the social contract between a meeting, which is sort of a vague term versus a workshop, right? You're already going to roll your sleeves up.

There's an inherent invitation to workshop. And this is absolutely communication. Like invitations are such missed opportunities because we think they're a carrier of logistics, right? Name, date, time, and place. And so the first way to begin to think about participation is, what is the purpose of this meeting? Who actually needs to be there? Does it need to be this big? If it is this big, what are the different roles we're asking people to play?

What are we actually calling this thing? And the second thing is an invitation at some level as a story versus just like everyone getting onto a Zoom and be like, hey, everyone, there's 150 of you here. We hope everyone gets a chance to ask a question. Come one, come all. You're not actually priming them. you're not setting them up for success. It's a false notion of democracy.

And so this is why I said earlier, gathering as group coordination. It starts with language, but then it is also thinking about the structure of the group, the sequencing, where and how power is shared, and who can and should be listening

based on what the purpose of the meeting is. In many ways, we're going back to our discussion about questions. As somebody who is doing the gathering, there are some critical questions you have to ask yourself as you just identified. What's the arrangement? What's the power? who has to be there, what's the environment like, and those questions can help. That language sets

expectations for how the interaction will happen and how people will be treated. The work happens before the gathering. The invitation is critical. So few of us actually pay any attention to the invitation of the calendar invite, and you've highlighted so many ways that it can be empowering. We've talked a bit about what we do in advance, the inviting and how important that is. I'm curious, do you have thoughts on what happens after the gathering to help really cement it? You know, how things end really impact how we feel about things. What thoughts do you have about at the conclusion of the gathering, but also after the fact, are there things you recommend we do? I'm a lifelong student of improv and one of my early teachers used to say, good actors think

about how they enter the stage. Great actors obsessed over how they leave. You enter the stage, you have this big opening, and then when your lines are done, you're like, okay, I'm done here, right? Nothing to see here, folks. And similarly, in our gatherings, absolutely obsessed over the first five percent of the opening because it sets the track for the rest of it, but also think about the last five percent. And studies show, including communication patterns that over the course of a meeting or an experience or a conversation, people disproportionately remember the first five percent, a peak experience, and the last five percent. And as you said, most gatherings, most meetings don't end. They stop, right? I've got to go. Okay, wait, see you next time. I've got to go. I've got to go to jump to my next call.

And I'm as guilty of it as anyone else. But when you think about and plan for the last five percent, the closing 10 minutes, the closing five minutes, to close, to just help people. Whenever I speak with organizations or companies, when there's people actually on the Zoom or webinar, the last five minutes, they'll say, how would you like to close? And I always say, we've spent 55 minutes together. Can you pop into the chat? One thing you're taking from today. What is the one, what is one insight or one ma-huh? And then you see, I get to see, I get to see. what resonated. All sorts of things happen in a meeting. And if you don't debrief at the meeting, they're going to be debriefing on the Uber ride home. Debrief with the group, make meaning with the group. What happened here? What's the meaning of this conversation? Was that the worst conversation we ever had or was that a breakthrough? I love this distinction between ending and stopping, because most of us just stop. And what you're talking about is a sense of closure, a sense of ending. And often these endings serve as beginnings or preparation for the next

gathering. Most of the time, these things get revisited, and it sounds like there's a lot of work we can do in the end of the gathering that sets us up for the beginning of the next one, and I really appreciate that. We'll be right back to finish our conversation, but first, a quick word from one of our sponsors. Their support allows us to bring you this show free of charge. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. One pattern I see a lot, especially with people who have strong ideas, is that the hardest part isn't the idea itself. It's getting started. Turning something in your head into something real that others can actually see and engage with. That's where tools really matter. Squarespace makes it much easier to take that first step. It's an all-in-one platform where you can build a

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Recently, I joined host Jeff Berman to talk about communication, how to think on your feet, structure your ideas under pressure, and make your message land. We had such a practical, wide-ranging conversation that I wanted to share it with you here, so please take a listen. And then, tune in every week to Masters of Scale to learn more about the strategies and mindsets behind extraordinary growth. Find Masters of Scale wherever you get your podcast. And now back to our conversation.

Priya, before we end, I like to ask all my guests three questions. One, I make up just for you. And two, I ask across everybody. Are you up for that? I'm up for it. You've shared with us lots of great ideas and activities. Do you have a really quick, short icebreaker you like to use or you like to participate in in gatherings you're a participant in?

There's one that I actually attended for a dinner that I thought was hilarious. And I started borrowing it, which is what is an unpublished? popular low stakes position you hold. Right? And so people are like, ketchup is a terrible sauce. Or mustard is really the unsung hero of condiments. It creates actually some of that banter and some of that heat

and allows people it's equalizing. Everyone has a low stakes unpopular opinion. And it allows people to laugh and starts to just warm up the crowd in a way that then actually counterintuitively shows we can hold. different opinions than each other. Yeah, I see the value in that, and that it sets the stage for discussing different points of view, but it does so in a way that has less heat.

Question number two, who is a communicator you admire and why? Congressman Alexandriac Ocasio-Cortez, I think she is one of the greatest communicators of her generation. First, she deeply understands, like, great communicators, the different tools at her disposal and when to use what, when to post a video on Twitter versus when to go on a morning show versus when to ask me anythings on Instagram. So she's incredibly versatile in her tools, which is unusual.

She deeply listens and assumes that people are coming with the best of intent even when they're angry. And she just so deeply, deeply knows her stuff. I agree that she communicates very well. And I encourage people to look at the authenticity, the directness. and the appropriateness of content and channel through which it's delivered. Question number three, what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?

Getting clear on intent, getting clear on desired outcome, and listening and paying deep attention to the other person. So really being clear on where you're coming from and being open to listening and understanding where the other person is coming from. Thank you, Priya, so much for your time and for your insight. The purpose-driven approach to gatherings is incredibly helpful. We need to spend more time, not just in the gathering itself, but in the orchestrating of the gathering and making sure that it ends well. Your advice and guidance are incredibly helpful. It's been a pleasure to be your guest. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast.

To enjoy more from Priya Parker, check out Think Fast TalkSmart premium at Faster.io slash premium. To hear her full deep think episode. To learn more about gatherings and meetings, please listen to our two-part miniseries, episodes 124 and 125, with Karen Reid, Joe Allen, and Elise Keith. This episode was produced by Jenny Luna, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder, with thanks to Podie. podcast company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us.

Before we wrap up, I just want to say thank you for listening. It really means a lot to hear how people all over the world are using these ideas in their own lives. It inspires me and the whole team that brings you this show. If you want more episodes and resources, feel free to follow, subscribe, and explore past conversations. We're grateful for your support of Think Fast Talk Smart.