How can the principles of conflict resolution apply to your next gathering? Priya Parker, a facilitator, strategic adviser and best-selling author of the book “The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters,” makes the case that coming together involves more than the proper etiquette – it’s the connection between the people. In this episode, Parker instructs listeners on how to plan more meaningful gatherings, from the birthday party to the boardroom meeting.
How can the principles of conflict resolution apply to your next gathering? Priya Parker, a facilitator, strategic adviser and best-selling author of the book “The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters,” makes the case that coming together involves more than the proper etiquette – it’s the connection between the people. In this episode, Parker instructs listeners on how to plan more meaningful gatherings, from the birthday party to the boardroom meeting.
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Cardiff VO: My name is Cardiff Garcia, and this is The Next Chapter by American Express Business Class.
Hello, and welcome to the show. In each episode, we are introducing you to a bestselling book that everyone in the world of business can learn from. We are going to hear how the author’s advice has evolved since they published their work, and what they’d write for their next chapter.
Today, we’ll be speaking with Priya Parker, Priya is a facilitator trained in conflict resolution, and she’s the author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters. Priya and I will discuss how people can plan meaningful gatherings, whether it’s a boardroom meeting, or a birthday party. And we’ll also talk about how the principles of conflict resolution can apply to your next gathering. Priya’s book was named one of Amazon's Best Business Books of the Year in 2018, and back in 2020 she also hosted the podcast “Together, Apart” with the New York Times, where she examined the resiliency of the human spirit during the earliest stages of the pandemic.
I invited Priya on the show to talk us through The Art of Gathering, and how her thoughts on the topic have evolved since the book came out in 2018.
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Cardiff: Priya Parker, welcome to the next chapter.
Priya: Thank you for having me.
Cardiff: We've got to start with some basics here, and specifically with the idea that a gathering is a human challenge and not a logistical one.
This is the point you make really early in the book. So why don't you explain what you mean by that and why it matters so much for creating a really special, meaningful gathering, as opposed to just a casual hangout.
Priya: So I come to this work, not as an events planner or an etiquette expert, or even a good cook. I'm a terrible cook. For the record.
Cardiff: I like your being so revealing right away.
Priya: Let's just go for it, right.
Cardiff: This is just one of the things that you say is important in a gathering, yeah.
Priya: And I come to this work as a group conflict resolution facilitator. And I learned over many years of being trained as a facilitator to help people connect without necessarily knowing exactly what to expect, to have meaningful conversation without all being the same, to get people off their preplanned scripts and shift, a room where people are actually trying things out loud for the first time, rather than like going at their stump speeches. And what I realized is that so much of what I was trained to do as a facilitator is not actually what we're taught to do when we think about hosting or gathering. And if you could see me now, I'm doing air quotes.
Cardiff: Air quotes.
Priya: Which is focus on the food, that good hosts are almost like the iconic, woman in a kitchen with an apron to sort of this hostess archetype. And it's not that that's a bad thing. It's just such a specific form of actually thinking about what does it actually mean when a group comes together and how do you create a meaningful experience?
And so, so much of what I try to do in the Art of Gathering was to look at how do you actually create meaningful connection, how do you actually create a memorable, transformative meaningful experience for the people in any type of context that you're bringing together, whether a board meeting or a wedding or a funeral or a dinner party, or a back to school night. And at some level, this is a book that's really about group dynamics and looking at the form of human connection at the center of it rather than the stuff around it.
Cardiff: I want to ask about your own personal background because you have a personal history that's almost uniquely suited to becoming somebody who helps resolve conflicts. So to go through the highlights here, Indian mother from Varanasi, American father from South Dakota,
via Iowa. Lived across Africa and Asia before they got divorced in Virginia. And then you write that you were quote, toggling back and forth between a vegetarian, liberal incense filled Buddhist Hindu, new age universe, and a meat eating conservative twice a week, church going evangelical, Christian realm. And so I have to imagine that, yeah, that prepared you very well for conflict resolution. And I'm curious for you to like, just draw that connection even more explicitly between conflict resolution and how that led you to become a specialist in how to put on a great gathering.
Priya: So every two weeks I would toggle as I write back and forth between these two households and what that effectively meant was a number of things.
One is I had to learn at least two different cultures, right? I became a chameleon. I understood, you know, I could sing Dixie chicks and, you know, church songs and, play softball in one household and then sing and understand and recognize guzzles and read Dih nah Han. And you know, my husband used to joke, actually, it wasn't a joke, but you know, when you when in a partnership, people start seeing you in ways that you never realized? He realized that in my father's house, if somebody sneezes, I say, God bless you.
And in my mother's house, if somebody sneezes, I remove the God. I just say, bless you. Alright, these deep, deep, deep learned ways of being. And I was always interested in, in kind of when and how we come together and also when and how communities break as my parents broke. And I think with the conflict resolution piece, like a huge part of what I realized when my parents divorced.
I mean, when they said, when they shared that they were separating, Everybody was shocked because they never fought. And I realized then we are all a family of conflict avoiders. I am like third generation ostrich. You know, we had to stick our head in the sand. And, and I realized then that, that human connection can be as threatened by unhealthy peace as it is by unhealthy conflict.
And I became a conflict resolution facilitator in part, because I saw one, the way we gather and the way we form identity is invented. Right. I was a part of three families, my mom and my dad, and then the two different families. They created that identity is often shared and created through ritual through how we actually come together.
And third that people don't always say what they think, and sometimes that's appropriate and sometimes that's not, but I became incredibly interested in how we can come together. And meaningfully connect without all having to be the same. Like that's the core of my work. And I think at some level that's the core of what we're trying to figure out as a country.
How can we meaningfully connect without all, having to be the same?
Cardiff: And as it relates to gatherings, I think we could also see how, for example, an unhealthy peace could be a problem if you have a lot of people getting together. And actually the point of the gathering is for people to maybe resolve their differences or to agree on like the potential direction of an organization.
And if nobody's actually saying it out loud and it's all very passive aggressive, and people are being polite on the surface, but they're not actually expressing the differences they have, that would be a problem that seems like it would represent an unhealthy piece, which might lead to, I dunno, paralysis and making a decision or something worse down the road.
Priya: It gave me a curiosity, an empathy, a wonder of the complexity of groups. And gathering is the work of this book specifically that groups have their own life. They're complex beings. They’re like amoebas. And that gathering is all of our ability as host or as guests kind of one moment at a time to get to be part of this wondrous and complex amoeba that is a group life. And the conflict piece.
It's like, it's almost, you know, being curious and part to see whether it's your family system or family of origin, whether it's your team, whether it's your neighborhood to pause and to start looking and seeing and asking again, rather than like, how do we be here or what's the right way to be, to asking a different question, which is what is a shared need, right?
In this neighborhood, in this park, is it to pick up trash? Is it a Saturday? You know, everybody meets at the park and picks up trash day. It's a relevant need. And so much of the conflict work is basically saying, I don't know what's going on here, but I'm curious. And to start asking what the right questions are to get the right form, to help a group connect.
And sometimes that form is like Thanksgiving dinner, making some ground rules and saying, I don't want to hear your opinions, but I do want to hear your stories, right? It's like it's developing a toolkit to start understanding which groups need, what tools in order to have a breakthrough.
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Cardiff: I want to now talk about what people who run organizations can learn from this book, which is is a lot, but there's a specific example where I want to begin, which is when you were designing a quote unquote cage match for an architecture firm that you were advising where one of the people who was in charge there essentially said to you, we need a lot more heat at this meeting.
Everybody's being way too nice. We have these big decisions that we have to make and nobody's expressing their disagreements. So then you got involved and take us through what you then did in response, tell us about the cage match.
Priya: So I was brought in to help an organization that was like 60 years old, and was really trying to navigate whether or not the future of their company was to continue to be an architecture firm or to start becoming a design firm, and I was brought in to try to help them tease it out and make a decision. But they were incredibly sophisticated conflict avoiders and basically none of the prompts that I had designed were working and during a break, the client pulled me over and was like, Priya, we need some more heat.
And so I said to him, I was like, are you, are you up for doing something wildly different, and he was like, yes, please? What I would do whatever. So I was like, okay. So we, we went to the bathrooms in the hallway, took out the towels, like the hand towels there. Quickly one of the members on the team printed out two huge posters of like Rocky bodies. We posted them to,
Cardiff: Like from the movie rock from the Rocky movies, boxers.
Priya: Boxers. Posted them. And two photos of two of the architects to the people in the team who were like, we knew they'd be up for it, posted their heads on two sides of the two walls.
And people came back and they were welcomed into a cage match. And what that meant is they came back and I kind of like shifted roles and we started clapping and I was kind of like the impresario and I was like, welcome to the firm's intellectual cage match and I basically, you know, they were kind of so caught off guard, they went with it.
And I needed them to just be able to state their actual sides. And they weren't going to do that with the norms that were true of their everyday life in their offices, because their norm was what they thought of as politeness, and so I needed to create a temporary alternative world in which it was okay in which the rules were slightly different for a certain moment of time so that they could actually say what they thought.
And at the end everyone else had to pick a side. And that was actually the breakthrough because it was easy to hide and all sorts of politeness to not say which side you are actually on, but it gave them a temporary structure to help them actually have the conversations that they all needed to have, but the current norms of how they spoke was not going to get them there.
Cardiff: What I really like about this idea is that it seems to depersonalize it as well. Can you say more about the idea that if you make something personal you're in trouble, but that you can create gatherings where there is conflict, if that's the point of the gathering, and you're not going to have an outcome where everybody will leave, just hating each other, just because they disagreed openly.
Priya: Part of what made that work was that it was a worthy debate. There were some people who could see both, maybe it's architecture, maybe it's design. But the core debate was seen as a worthy pursuit. And so even before you get people in the room to first just ask what are the worthy questions?
What are the worthy grapplings that are up for debate that we actually need to look at? And how do we begin to then create a structure to be able to argue, to argue those?
Cardiff: Another idea you have is about priming guests before the event itself so that they don't just show up and then have to figure everything out. You want them to be sort of psychologically ready for what it is that you're preparing them for, for the gathering.
And so one example you have is that if you're having a brainstorming session, like a corporate brainstorming session, if you're an executive, who's hosting this thing, you should maybe send a few crazy ideas out to your guests beforehand, like something wild and strange just to get them into that mindset and say, hey, this might seem a little out there, but just think about it, just consider it.
And if you get people considering some wild ideas, maybe they'll be open to coming up with some of their own when they show up.
Priya: Invitations aren't just carriers of logistics, invitations are priming devices. What is this thing? How do we want you to show up?
Is my tone warm and funny or serious and formal? Neither is bad or good unless it's not serving the purpose. And so, don't ever send again a TBD hold calendar invitation, right? It's like the worst thing you can. Why am I coming to this? Do I say yes? Why is my calendar being blocked?
Give your gathering a name, like words, have social contracts within them. Is it a workshop? Is it an all hands? Is it a brainstorming, but also when you ask people to do some amount of work, and an appropriate level of weight, it's also getting their buy-in to see if they actually want to come to this thing.
Cardiff: It's actually amazing how even small linguistic changes in how you present something can change people's enthusiasm for attending.
Priya: Completely.
Cardiff: You give this example of how, if you call something a mixer, everyone thinks, well, this is a dorky event where everybody's going to try to get together.
It's networking. It's very inauthentic. It sounds very formal. If you just change it from mixer to happy hour. Well, now everybody's in, right?
I mean, it's, it's the perfect kind of framing device for one thing. It's just an hour. It's not usually just an hour, but you think, well, it's a temporary thing. Happy, well who doesn't want to be happy?
And you associate it with like having a drink with your friends, as opposed to like this very formal state affair.
Priya: I know a professor, who had joined, I think it was Boston University and she was in the food and agricultural department and she wanted to host office hours. She wanted to basically meet other students and her entire reason for being there was to change how people gathered and were in community through their relationship for food.
And she realized that office hours sounds really boring. She tried to host office hours, no one showed up and then she shifted the name to community table. Same time of week, same length of time. All of a sudden people were showing up. Hmm what's a community table?
And it was the shift in the language, again language matters, and it was an accurate description of the alternative world that she was trying to create, right? If she had just used, like, dance party, maybe no one I'm going to show up or maybe they would’ve, but it's like thinking about what is the social contract that you're trying to invite people into what, what is the imaginative place?
And it allows people, so office hour, I'm coming in as a student with a question. Community table, I'm coming in, yes I'm a student. Yes, I may have a question, community table. I'm coming in as a community member with a seat at the proverbial table.
Cardiff: I want to talk about conferences now. I've been to a lot of conferences. I imagine you've been to a lot of conferences, either as host or as a guest, or, you know, in my case as a journalist is covering them. You know what I associate conferences with? Dry scones for breakfast. Okay. That's what I associate conferences with.
They can be so bad. And you write a little bit about how to break the conventional conference etiquette, so to speak. And one idea you had came from Harrison Owen called the law of two feet. Tell us about that.
Priya: So the law of two feet comes from a process called open space technology. The law of two feet was a pop-up rule to shift the norm that it was rude to leave a meeting.
And basically it said, you can go to any conversation you want for two minutes or three hours. And, the whole thing is governed by the law of two feet. And this insight that often in certain places, the guests have a better sense of what they actually want to know than the hosts.
Conferences basically are this beautiful example of people often looking at form before asking the purpose and just doing things on repeat, like the panel, right? Yeah, most panels aren't good.
Cardiff: We've all had that feeling. We're in the first, like three minutes of a panel, you realize it's going to be bad, but you're stuck there for an hour because that's the time allotted for that panel.
Priya: And it's a weird form. Like it may be a form that works with very specific conditions, but the length matters. Like if you have three people and a moderator 30 minutes or twenty-five minutes, you're basically getting people to like give an opening statement.
It's very difficult to kind of get a group to catch and have a lively kind of almost dinner party, which is the ideal. If you're going to watch the people in conversation and you watch three monologues, unless they're like Nobel laureates.
And even when they are Nobel laureates, not that interesting.
Cardiff: I've been to some of those with Nobel laureates, doesn't necessarily help anything at all.
Priya: And so it's pausing and asking, given all of the people in the room, how do we connect them in ways that are helpful? And it doesn't have to be huge. Like I was advising a book festival years ago, And, they get big writers from around the country to come. And I was helping them change the structure of a one-hour gathering.
And I basically said, okay, if you have 60 minutes in the first five minutes in the first seven minutes, ask the question, ask the audience four questions. How many of you moved to the city in the last three years? Right? Raise your hand. How many of you moved to the city last week? There's always two people. Yay, welcome. How many of you are third generation you know, of the city, then those people stand great. It's giving social permission for people to look around. What was the first book you read that took your breath away? Turn to the person next to you.
Ideally someone you didn't come with and just share, right? And then turn back and then begin, it'll change the entire room. It changes people's perception of being an audience member to being part of a community. It changes what they may do when they walk out of that room. And the organizer said to me, but we can't take five minutes away from the speaker.
Cardiff: So they were too afraid of offending the speaker to try this innovative thing?
Priya: I don't even think that the speaker would have minded. It's better for the speaker to enter a, you know, a connected, warm room. It's this core assumption. That's the same reason we stick to panels that there's a form, there's a mode.
And that at some level connection is this nice to have and that it doesn't actually shift the outcome of anything, which is not true.
Cardiff: There's a theme that runs throughout this book. That's about how to assess risk essentially.
Priya: Beautiful.
Cardiff: So the idea that if you want to come up with a great, special, memorable gathering, you have to risk it being something of a disaster, but also no, really.
Priya: True.
Cardiff: And if you're the one putting it together, especially, I don't know, on behalf of a client or something, and you do something that's way out of the ordinary and it doesn't work, then everybody's going to point to you and blame you. Whereas if you just fall back on the thing that everybody has always done, well, you know, it'll suck, but at least it'll suck in the traditional way so nobody can point to you, right?
So it seems like a call to take risks and yes, it could blow up in your face, but then you'll learn how to, how to put on a great gathering next time. Anyways, like, you'll learn about like what blew up in your face. You won't learn these things unless you take the risks and a lot of people don't like taking those kinds of risks.
Priya: You got it. And, a lot of people like it's like the wrath of the risk in the moment, but over the long term, well, before the pandemic hit, we had an epidemic of loneliness, right? Like the Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy literally declared an epidemic of loneliness well before the pandemic hit.
And so, so much of this it's not risk for risk's sake. It's it's calculated risk, but it's pausing and asking, how do we want to spend our time? When you get people together how should we actually interact? How do we make people feel safe enough so that they can be brave? Why are we actually doing this?
And so often we're actually gathering too much. Like in our workplaces, I'm not saying gather more, I'm saying gather better, which is often gathering less, but it's pausing and being intentional, as I think the pandemic has really asked us to do, to actually ask where and why and when and how, and with whom should we meet and who decides.
Cardiff: Can I be honest? I also am grateful to people that end up hosting. You know, huge disasters, right?
Priya: Totally. It’s a generous act.
Cardiff: At least you remember that. Yeah. You remember that as opposed to the people who just put on another panel that I completely forgot.
Priya: Absolutely. And it's kind of funny like this isn't an act to be perfect at all. In fact, like if you have memories, like people speakers go on the stage and their voices are shaking and then they take a deep breath. They're like, oh my gosh, I'm really nervous. Like most rooms will start clapping.
Cardiff: Right.
Priya: It's like, we're all in this together. Welcome to the mess. I'm going to try something like, are you on board? The other thing. I'll say is This work is called the art of gathering. It's not called the art of hosting in part because guests have power.
Guests can make a bad gathering good. Guests can say, hey, want to head out and like grab a lunch together? Grab six people and we'll all share like what the deepest fear is we have right now. Like guests have actually an incredible amount of power to shape outcomes. And so even if you're not a host, most of us are guests much more often than we're hosts.
And these being pro-social thinking about, you know, a group is kind of too big to being the guest that stands up and like squishes everyone together and sits back down. There are ways to begin learning these principles that you don't have to be the formal host in order to help a group take off.
Cardiff: That actually reminds me of another piece of advice in the book, which is never start and also actually never close with logistics because people tend to remember what happens at the very beginning and at the end better than they remember what happens in the middle. So when you start an event, make it classy, make it awesome, make it special.
Don't make it about the Honda that's parked, uh, you know, in front of a fire hydrant that needs to be moved.
Priya: Do that second, do that second to last
Cardiff: Slide it in somewhere else. Right.
Priya: But basically we, like, I think of a gathering, any type of gathering as this, like it's a creation, right? We don't know what's going to happen.
And it's a creation of a temporary alternative world. And those first few minutes in anything in a Zoom, in a, in a conference, at a dinner party, everyone is walking in and, or moving in and entering and saying, “What's going on here? Are these my people? Like how do I behave here?” There's this sort of this anticipation and to open and, you know, take a breath into the microphone and then say, hey, there’s a car in the parking lot, it's deflating.
Tell a story, or why are we here or start with music, start with something that connects people to the purpose, to each other and allows them to decide how do I most want to engage with this?
So there's studies that show. I think this is an October Gawande’s book about, when a surgical team comes together and before doing surgery, it's a hierarchical team? There's usually people who don't know each other because they're just put together, you know, one surgery at a time when they go through a checklist.
And part of the checklist is they literally just say their name. They say their name out loud. Error rates go down. Why? Well, first of all, if you speak once, you're more likely to speak again. But second of all, in a team of hierarchy, the person who sees like the, you know, hey, that's not the kidney! Right?
Like, oh, liver is, the liver is two degrees to the left. That's usually the person kind of lowest in the hierarchy, right? It's the resident, it's the person who doesn't have the role. It's a pretty big deal to speak up across a hierarchy and actually say that. And so error rates go down in part because psychological safety has gone up.
And so how you gather how you connect people ahead of time and at the beginning and appropriate ways, shifts how they will behave, shifts what they say, shifts, the risks they take because of actually how you oriented them at the beginning.
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Cardiff: You’re listening to The Next Chapter by American Express Business Class. When we come back, I’m gonna ask Priya Parker how her thinking has changed since she published The Art of Gathering.
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Cardiff: And now let's talk about what's been happening ever since the book came out which more or less lined up with the beginning of the pandemic as well. So readers have been getting in touch, I imagine many are saying hey, I love this book, and also here’s something that it made think about. What reaction surprised you where you're like, oh, that's interesting?
Priya: I think that there are two things. One is, the number one question that I got when I was speaking with communities, pre pandemic was, does this apply to our virtual worlds? Well before the pandemic. Does this apply to Facebook groups, does this apply to… people weren't really doing Zoom meetings then but do these principles apply? And I would say then like, absolutely, this is a book about group dynamics. You need to translate it into thinking about what are the, you know, before you enter a Facebook group, what are the norms, right? What are you actually agreeing into? That is a palate cleanser.
That's an opening, right? Metaphorically into a gathering. But the second thing that I thought was really interesting was many, many, many people basically said to me, hmm, I've read your book. I've read this book. And the biggest thing it's given me is permission.
Sometimes I saw some of this stuff happening in a room, whether I understood intuitively, why what's happening or not, or I realized like we were at a bachelorette party or a baby shower and engagement party, and no one was saying anything. And I felt like someone should say something. Someone should say something, but who am I to say something?
And maybe that's not what they wanted. And this book made me realize that often people don't know what they're doing and that's okay. And if I can see something, I can perhaps take a risk to make it better. And also, I don't have to do things the way that they've always been done. But if it's working for me do that, but basically the social permission to try.
Cardiff: So now a lot of people have read your book and hopefully they’re getting better at putting on meaningful events. I’d love to take a step back and just ask if you’ve noticed anything that’s changed, that’s evolved, about the way we gather, especially in the time since your book came out.
Priya: I think there's kind of two things happening simultaneously. One is the art of gathering is becoming democratized and that's a good thing. So there's this one force in that the places and the people who used to be kind of our official meeting makers, if you will, right? Our priests, our rabbis, even our government officials, like people are leaving institutions, not necessarily a good thing, right?
Our trust in institutions is at an all-time low, not necessarily a good thing, but basically the, the places where we used to go to wed, to die, to pray to dance are becoming fractured. And then simultaneously, which means we all, were, it's kind of like, we are all meaning makers now. Like we all need to actually start thinking about how do we actually want to spend our time?
But the second thing is simultaneously, this is becoming professionalized and there are people, there are connection consultants. There are, you know, I'm a conflict resolution facilitator. There are many, many, many, many of us. And there are all sorts of beautiful people and services that are that are finding ways to give appropriate connection at the right times.
And there are also, there's like a professionalization of people who are helping people connect better in part, because the old ways and the traditions and the institutions are kind of broken. We're in flux as to where and how do we come together and, and create meaning.
And it's a moment in time for every individual, regardless of hiring people to really pause and think who am I? Who are my people? How do I want to spend my time? And how might I actually think about creating something that is nourishing for all of us.
Cardiff: And on that point of creating this informality, you given some advice for how people can have better virtual chats as well.
And I was intrigued to learn that you're actually against muting in some circumstances, you like to be able to hear the weird stuff that's happening in the background.
Priya: I like the chaos, you know.
Cardiff: Yeah. So tell, tell us about that. When should we be on mute and when should we be unmuting people and how that sort of relates to the host’s decision for how things work on a virtual chat.
Priya: So, size matters. So the size of the group matters and that's true in person that's true online, but one of the things, you know, I'm still a conflict resolution facilitator. That's still my day job. When the pandemic hit, I had to figure out how am I going to host a conversation with 20, 40, 80 people on a zoom, right?
Five slides that you're sort of swiping right. To see everyone's faces. And I realized for myself that I was missing so much information that I have when people are in the room. First of all, I realized how much I use my body. Like I literally, if someone's talking too long before cutting them off, I slightly elevate my body.
I look like I'm going to stand. Right. It's a cue. So much of that. is just cut off on Zoom. So one of the things I realized was in smaller groups with four or six, that when we mute and there's a mute all assumption, it creates an incredibly sterile environment. There's no feedback loops, right? I tell a joke, no one laughs or at least it's set seems like no, one's laughing.
And part of the like social infrastructure of trust, is actually the side comments, right? If I say something and someone sighs or someone giggles or someone rolls their eyes or someone like, ooh, right. So much of that as context to actually know what's happening in the room.
Cardiff: If you tell a joke and nobody laughs it kind of falls flat, even if it's a tremendous joke.
Priya: And, and my jokes are tremendous.
Cardiff: I believe you.
Priya: And so we started experimenting some of my co-facilitators and I with practicing when it was a small enough group of silent, but un-muted, and it's a, it's a practice, it's a discipline. And if somebody had crazy background, sounds or construction or a baby crying, they could go on mute. But we were basically willing to take the trade-off of some interruption and some background noise for the benefit of actually bringing back some of that data.
And it changed the way many of our conversations went and we had to get used to it, like, it was slightly awkward. People were sometimes like talking over one another, but it was worth the awkwardness because we were actually able to bring back some of that data and code that we, when we're not conscious, it's actually a huge amount of social interaction and understanding what's actually happening in a room.
Cardiff: It’s ironic that the one thing people tell you not to do, which is to leave yourself unmuted while others are talking on a Zoom call, may also be the thing that’s needed to bring those calls to life. I love that. What are your general thoughts on working from home and how its effects gathering?
Priya: I wrote a piece in the Times last summer and the advice I gave him that piece was to basically to ask four questions within the company, within a team. The first is to actually ask your team members over the last two and a half years, when are moments we've been virtual on a Zoom or on a Microsoft Teams or on a Skype, whatever you're using. When are times we've been virtual, where you longed for each other, you wish you were just in the room.
You wish you could just point through the screen and be like, see my post-it or, you know, have real conflict or, you know, talk over each other. Just write it down. When have you long to be in the same room? Number two, what haven't you missed? Write it down. Number three, what have we invented during this time that really works?
Number four. What might we experiment with now? And just taking a group through those four questions builds empathy for the group and part, because you think everybody's going to have the same columns, but we don't. You need to increase the skill of understanding when do we, if ever actually should teams be able to meet in person and then when and how do we design in-person connection, but also informal connection virtually. Because actually it's through the informal that trust is built, that you start understanding what people are all about, that you were like walking into the elevator and you, you meet somebody who's not in your department and you start chatting. And I think the last thing I'll just say to this, as I read this book recently called 4,000 weeks.
I mean, depressingly, it's 4,000 weeks is the amount of time that if we're lucky enough to live to 80 is the number of time we have in our life.
Cardiff: It’s like the average life expectancy or something like that. Right.
Priya: And one of the stories he tells us about this, at the Swedish tradition called the fika. And it's basically this tradition in Sweden.
Indians kind of have a similar thing around chai and office places, but the fika is basically a time during the day. It's often like 3:00 PM or 3:30 PM, whatever time it is, where everyone in the office informally gathers to have coffee. This is different than having a coffee station where you go and get coffee when you want.
This is what a sociologist calls the social regulation of time, where everybody gives up a little bit of individual freedom to come together at the same time, at the same place to destroy some individual value, to basically come together and, and be together. And there's a manager in the book that was quoted as saying, if I really want to know what's going on in the office, you go to the fika. And yes, it's Swedish.
Yes it's a very specific cultural context, but the practice is basically realizing that when there are certain moments where we can come together and everybody is there, it does something different to the metabolism. The collective metabolism. It does something different to the social system. And I think we have an opportunity right now to figure out like what should be the shared social regulation of time.
And by the way, studies show that people are happier when there's some amount of limitation to their individual freedom and have that kind of come together a certain moment in time. And where should we allow for individual choice? And that's a worthy debate to go back to our earlier question.
Cardiff: Priya Parker. Thanks so much for being on The Next Chapter.
Priya: Thank you so much for having me.
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Cardiff VO: You’ve been listening to The Next Chapter by American Express Business Class. A special thanks to Priya Parker for coming on the show today. And please tune in to our next episode where I’ll be speaking with Malcolm Gladwell, he’s the author of Blink, Outliers, The Tipping point, and he’s also now the host of Revisionist History.
Malcolm: Starting a new thing and going off in a different direction does not strike me as being risky at all. It strikes me as a response to a known risk. Similarly, when I was 30 or so I left newspapers. Some people thought, you’re leaving the Washington Post, the cushiest job in journalism what a risk you're taking. I said, that's not a risk.
Cardiff VO: Be sure to follow or subscribe on whatever app you may be using right now. And if you enjoyed today's episode, please leave us a review. Thanks for listening.