663: Priya Parker - The Art of Gathering with Purpose: Power, Preparation, Magical Questions, and the Psychology of Bringing People Together

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My guest: Priya Parker is a master facilitator, conflict resolution expert, and author of the bestselling book The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters. Priya has spent decades facilitating difficult conversations in boardrooms, communities, and conflict zones. In this conversation, she reveals the mechanics of meaningful gathering and why most of us are doing it wrong.

Key Learnings

A facilitator is interested in the life of a group. I think of facilitation as working with people who are interested in the infrastructure of three or more people who need to come together and are ideally changed for the better by what transpires between them. A facilitator thinks deeply about how to set up the conditions to increase the likelihood that transformation happens.

Great facilitators are obsessed with language. There's listening to make someone feel heard, but the difference between green facilitators and seasoned ones is an obsession and ability to hear, recall, and play with language. You have to understand what people are actually saying and be able to reflect it back in ways that unlock new meaning.

Understanding power is essential to facilitation. You need to know how decisions are being made, who is talking more than others, when to allow for that, and what your own relationship is to holding the group. When do you shut up? When do you pull people out? When do you push back? All of this is fundamentally about understanding power dynamics.

I'm a third-generation ostrich. On both sides of my family, when conflict arises, we stick our heads in the sand. Nothing to see here, folks. But I've cultivated the ability to hold heat. Even now, when facilitating a reckoning and the heat rises, my palms still get sweaty, I can feel my heart racing, blood rushing to my cheeks. But I've learned how to stay present with that discomfort. Counterintuitively, having deep empathy for people who want to flee makes me more effective.

"90% of the success of what happens in the room, and as a facilitator, happens before anybody arrives." This is what my mentor Randa Slim taught me, and it's absolutely true. The construction of the house happens before anyone gets there.

Dr. Hal Saunders changed everything for me. He was an American diplomat who served five presidential administrations and was part of the Camp David Accords. After leaving government, he realized that while governments can create peace treaties, people's perceptions of each other on the ground haven't necessarily changed. He trained me as a teenager in sustained dialogue, and I learned facilitation the way it should be learned—through apprenticeship. Even in his seventies and eighties, he always believed he had something to learn.

The first questions people ask you signify what they value. When I arrived at the University of Virginia, people k