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

Welcome to the Learning Leader Show. I am your host, Ryan Hawke. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader.com, for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to learningleader.com. Now onto the night's featured leader of the great Priya Parker is a conflict resolution facilitator and author of the mega bestselling book, The Art of Gathering, How We Meet and Why It Matters. During our conversation we discuss how you can facilitate excellent leadership retreats. Then Priya goes deep on the art of asking magical questions, including some specific ones you should ask at your next gathering. And then she shares the keys to hosting a dinner party that people will remember for years. This one is so good. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Priya Parker. This episode is brought to you by Inside Global. Inside Global is a staffing and professional services company that builds world class technical teams for clients around the globe. If you need help with your applications, infrastructure or data layer, insight global's team of technical experts can build custom or manage services to deliver the outcomes you desire. Getting the most out of your technology can be tough, but growing your business with the right technical solutions can be magic. Visit insight global.com slash learning leader. That's insight global.com slash learning leader today to learn more. So I want to start with an interesting time in your life. Your parents, they met in Iowa, they fell in love, they got married, they had you in Zimbabwe. They worked in fishing villages across Africa and Asia. Then they fell out of love, got divorced in Virginia, went their separate ways after the divorce. You move this seems wild to me. You moved every two weeks between their households, won a vegetarian, liberal, insensfield, Buddhist, Hindu, New Age universe, the other a meat eating conservative twice a week church going evangelical Christian realm. Well, okay. So that goes directly from your book. How did that type of upbringing shape you? It made me a conflict resolution facilitator. Tell me more about that. My day job still is a dialogue facilitator for groups to help them have the conversations they have been avoiding, but are crucial for them to figure out their next formation. And so much of how I was raised in part, I mean, to break it down a little bit, first of all, across two very, very different cultures. And when, you know, I was in my teenage years, I probably like 12 to 18 before college when I would go back and forth, toggling between these two homes. But part of being part of two different cultures was it wasn't these two vague ideas. It was a deeply specific and they're very different. So everything from the quote, unquote, right way or obvious way to like start a dinner at one home, you would never put food in your mouth before saying grace, right? At the other, the word God wasn't mentioned ever, right? There was a completely different way to start, but they both began a meal in a way that honored the table, right? Or the gains that we would play or what would be considered like what you do when you're bored, you know, I'm sort of putting my fingers in quotes. In growing up, I also would spend a lot of summers in New Delhi. My mother is a researcher and she would often take me to India and she would go and conduct her research and I would stay with my relatives. And so much of like the time we spent together often in English called Dime Poss, like the way you pass your time, is literally just like playing cards on the bed or like everybody is like on the chaired family bed or playing Karam. And when I would go visit my, you know, grandparents in Iowa, like no one knew what Karam was. And so at some deep, deep level, I've always been interested in when and why and how people come together. How they spend that time, what they think of as normal, how people can create an invent and change cultures. And then also because of my life, how they come apart. And so I've been deeply, deeply interested in groups and in how they form and then how they break and then how they come together again. And so much of that is because of how I was raised. Let's progress a little bit further along in your story. You go to college. And once there, I believe you met Dr. Hal Sunders. What type of influence or how did Dr. Hal Sunders influence you and how has his work helped you today? Dr. Sunders passed. Gosh, maybe almost a decade ago. And I still think of him and what he taught me probably daily. And he was an American diplomat. He went to Princeton undergrad, I think in the 40s. He was on the National Security Council. He eventually became a top diplomat in the State Department. And he served five different presidential administrations. And he was part of the Camp David Accords, brokering peace between Israel and Egypt. And was part of the what was then called shuttle diplomacy. And he basically realized that through that work at the highest level of state craft, governments can create peace treaties. But on the ground, people's perceptions of each other still hasn't necessarily changed. And after he left government, he became part of the longest running dialogue, sort of what's called track to diplomacy, of working with citizens on the ground afterwards in post-conflict states. And so much of what he saw in those days was what the power of what the government can do and the use of what the government can do. And then also the power of what citizens and civics and culture and institutions can do. And I met him. I was very frustrated with race relations. I'm biracial as you laid out. And I went to the University of Virginia and one of the first questions people would ask me is, what are you? And I was like, I didn't understand what I meant. I thought they meant like a first year and I learned very quickly in that racial in that context. And I learned, in part probably because my mother's an anthropologist, that the first questions people ask you in a community or culture signify what they value. Right? So it's like, okay, race is really important here. I grew up in all these different cultures. I grew up in these different countries. It's like, okay, good to know. And I was very frustrated with race relations at UVA and the University of Virginia to its deep credit has a strong sense of what they call student self governance, which means if you see a problem, don't complain, do something about it. And I was talking to my mother actually, she's a clearly a large part of this narrative and told her how frustrated I was and she knew about this this man called House Anders and she said, you should email him. And I emailed him as a freshman and I learned that he was interested in working with American students on college campuses on race relations. And I said, well, you come train us. And he had been working with Princeton students as a trustee there. And he came and he trained like 12, 19 year olds in a classroom, you know, 2 p.m. with, you know, bad lighting. And he basically was this deeply, deeply curious human being who even in his 70s, even in his 80s, always believed that he had something to learn. And I as a teenager and then as a person in my 20s had never been taken so seriously by such a person of so much power and wisdom and experience. And he trained us in sustained dialogue. We launched it September 10, 2001. And then of course 9, 11 happened the next day. Wow. And so it was one of these things where we were at the right place at the right time where we had this container which by the way can get into our gathering conversation like all sustained dialogue was was the name of the program. It was an invitation. When I say I we launched it September 10, 2001. That means we sent an letter out to the university announcing we were doing this thing to bring together students behind closed doors to have conversations about race that they rarely get to have with people who are unlike them. How Saunders became my mentor and then my boss for the next eight years. And I learned deeply facilitations a weird field. There's no like Goldman Sachs of facilitation. It's like it's an apprentice space field. It's very fragmented. It particularly if you're not going to work at the State Department. And I was very lucky to be one of the people how Saunders took on to sort of train me as a young person in the skills of group life. Facilitation is such an interesting thing. So I do like a good bit of it within my profession now. And I never anticipated that. And I feel like I was just thinking leading up to this conversation. Like what makes a good facilitator? You know, I mean, pretty it was the perfect person to talk to. But I was thinking it through and I just love to riff on this if you're cool with it. Of course. Because of what I've learned over the years. And I think it's like this weird combination of being deeply curious slash fascinated by people and their stories and what it is about them that makes them unique and different and wanting to learn from their life experiences. Combined with being a fantastic listener asking even better follow-up questions than initial questions. Good body language. And then just a high level of emotional intelligence and a knack of a feel for the room. Both Zoom and in person knowing when to speak, when to add on, when to ask a question as opposed to give your point of view, when to teach, when to shut up, like there's just a million different things I could go on and on and on. So I'm speaking with probably maybe the best of the world or one of the best of the world at it, yet you, when I ask you that question, like what makes up a world class facilitator? The floor is yours. I'm deeply curious. What is it? You did very well. You did very well. I think that a facilitator, unlike a mediator, the first thing I would say is when I think of a facilitator, I really think of somebody who is interested in the life of a group. When I think of a facilitator, at least the way I was sort of raised as a baby facilitator, is it's really people who are interested in the infrastructure of three or more people who need to come together and ideally are changed for the better by what transpires between them. And a facilitator is somebody who thinks deeply about how to set up the conditions in order to increase the likelihood that that happens. And so a facilitator is somebody who both has a very high quality of listening, but I would add to your definition is also obsessed with and very good at language. So there's listening to kind of you make the person feel like you are really hearing them. But then one of the differences between greener facilitators and more seasoned facilitators is an obsession and an ability to hear, recall, play with language. A second is, as you said, deep curiosity. But I would also say that a really good facilitator and the difference between sort of sees green and more seasoned is a healthy relationship to an understanding of power. And so even as you were saying earlier, you know, you know when to shut up, you know when to pull people out, you know when to push people in. A big part of that underneath is actually understanding power, right? How are decisions being made here? Who is talking more than others? What is when do you actually allow for that? What is my own relationship to an ability to hold the group? A third element is our own relationship to conflict and heat. So I am a conflict diverse conflict resolution facilitator. And by racial, as I said earlier, but what you may not know about me is that I'm also third generation ostrich, which means that on both sides of my families, when conflict arises, we're really good at sticking our head in the sand. You're like, where's like nothing to see here, folks? Like, hopefully it'll just pass if no one says anything. And so a huge part of what I have tried to cultivate myself. And I think one of the reasons what really helps me is counterintuitively, I have deep empathy for the people in the room who want to flee. Even now when like the heat rises, if I'm facilitating a reckoning on Zoom or if I'm facilitating a conflict and voices rise or we start getting approaching like the core of it, my palms still get sweaty. I can feel my heart racing. I can feel like the blood rushing to my cheeks. And I've learned how to hold heat. And so so much of facilitation, some people are deeply have naturally skilled at some of the elements that are important. But it's also a deeply learnable skill. Let's say somebody is a lot less experienced than you. And they're a VP of whatever at a Fortune 500 company. And one of the things they have coming up is they're going to be in charge of like a leadership off site, let's say, it's a gathering. And they're going to run a half day of it and it's a variety of things. But basically, you're going to be up in front of the room. They may not be caught off facilitator by the big boss, but essentially that's a part of their role. So that this is facilitation 101. They haven't really done it. Not that experienced. Maybe haven't had enough repetitions to be that good at it yet. What are some of the ways that person, some of the foundational things they should think of and maybe even practice to get good at it faster than if they just kind of showed up and were winging it. So first of all, don't wing it. Yes, 100%. Another one of my mentors is a woman named Ronda Sleem. She was a houseowner's colleague for many, many years. She's she's an incredible practitioner. And one of the things she said to me, she's a Lebanese American woman is 90% of the success of what happens in the room. And as a facilitator happens before anybody arrives. And so you're a VP. You've been assigned. You've been volunteered this leadership retreat. The first most important thing to do before anything else is to determine and clarify what the purpose is. What is the purpose of this leadership retreat? A leadership retreat is just a word. It's a frame. Anything can happen in a leadership retreat. What is the deepest need and to become a precise and effective facilitator in the room? It's almost like you're building a house. And the construction of the house happens before anyone gets there. So what's the foundation? What does this team need? Who actually needs to be in the room? Are the right guests, the ones who have been invited? Do we need to actually think about more deeply? What is the right conversation for this group to have? What is the right conversation for this group to have? Is a simple and also a very complex question. And the conversation that particularly if it's a leadership retreat, that your direct reports get to have in person or on virtually, but in person at the same time at the same place is your highest real estate. And swacing your time, figuring out what to say or do in the room is actually going to make you waste a lot of time. And so a huge part of preparing for that meeting is to figure out what is the right conversation for this group to have. And how do I equip them to have it well? I've had a number of military leaders here and I'll try to weave this together on the fly here. But it feels like military leaders are really good at setting mission objectives. I'm here Michelle Kern who's a fighter pilot. That would they're just really good at the pre-mission brief and the post-mission brief, the debrief. So they basically always knew this is the goal. This is what we are striving to do on this mission. And then afterwards they would debrief and learn it so they could do better. The next mission, it feels to me, Priya, if I will bet together that that's kind of what you're talking about is you've got to have the pre-meeting brief slash additional than practice, which is a separate thing. But you got to know what are we doing here? What's the purpose? Why are we meeting? What are our goals? What do we hope to get out of this? This probably doesn't apply just for a leadership retreat. This applies for hosting a dinner at your house with friends and family, right? So maybe you could talk more about getting really, really clear on the objective and the purpose of the meeting. So the biggest mistake we make when we gather and this is true for board meetings, this is true for protests, this is true for birthday parties is we skip defining the purpose. And the more obvious seeming the purpose, the more likely we are to skip it. Oh, I know what a board meeting is. I know what a wedding is. I know what a Zoom is. And when we don't pause to ask what the purpose is, we end up replicating old outdated forms. And often the wrong people are in the room. So the first thing to do absolutely is to actually, and I wouldn't even call it a pre-meeting is to deeply, deeply ask and figure out what is the desired outcome. You have six hours or two hours or 12 hours and eight people or 40 people. There is absolutely a sequence of things you can do in that room that fundamentally transforms their relationships to each other. It's your job to figure out sometimes with them what that sequence of steps is. So for example, there was a woman I knew who ran a community hub. It was sort of a startup networking organization. It was called Hub LA. Her name was Elizabeth Stewart. It still is Elizabeth Stewart. And she really wanted to create a community for startup founders and also have it to be a place where it was truly a community and not like a shark tank or a place for sales pitches. And she would host these social occasions and think about, okay, what is my deepest purpose of these evenings? And she would invite investors. And she got really clear. Her deepest purpose for that evening was not to get as many startup funders as possible funded. It was to build trust and long lasting relationships between and across a network of people trying to start businesses and the people in the region who are wanting to support them. And so she created a pop-up rule in order to protect from what happens often in a room where there's funders and VCs and startups, which is people pitch each other. And then investors feel like they just have like dollar signs on their head and just want to, you know, flee. As she said, you can't talk about what you're selling. No pitches, right? Super counterintuitive rule for a networking night. But it created and it signified what it was she was trying to create. And so so much of how you think about like running a meeting or running anything that is the high stakes is this is a precise, surgical design that we get to decide given all these different people coming from different norms and different ways of doing things, it is your job to think about what is the purpose. And then how do I set people up so that they understand what the rules are? I'm protecting them. I'm connecting them. I'm temporarily equalizing them so that we can actually coordinate. Group life and gathering is a coordination problem. Wow. Okay. So this makes me think about the primary event I host every years from my learning leader circle members. And it's usually in May, we go to a cool location like Scottsdale so we can hike and do other things. And one of the first things I say to the group when we meet is I just put a big slide that says A plus on it. And then I say this is what an A plus meeting is. This is what we're here to do. This is the purpose of our time together. And then I'll usually two or three things, not like 10 things that you can't remember, but two or three. And so usually there's something along the lines of transformational learning. So that means learning that you intrinsically take in and then you apply. And then usually the first and most important one is that you become lifelong friends or this is the beginning of a lifelong friendship with two or three people. Now there are roughly 40 to 45 people there. It's not realistic to become lifelong friends with 40 people, but it is realistic to become the beginnings of a lifelong friendship relationship with two or three people. So that is very clearly stated. That's why you're going to sit next to the same people both today during the day and at dinner. We're going to sit you on the bus next to them when we drive to the mountain to hike and hopefully you walk side by side with them. So that it's not about becoming surface level with 40. It's becoming deep with a few because I think that can transform your life. My point of oversharing their Priya is clearly defining what an A plus is and then executing on that so that they know, oh, this was all intentionally done. So when I share all of that, I would love for you again as maybe the best in the world at this to say, yeah, that's good, but maybe you should think about this or I would be curious to get your thoughts on that kind of experiential design goal setting and then trying to execute on that. It's such a great example and I first of all just sort of break down what it is you're doing. So every gathering is a social contract. All right, so your listeners maybe listening right now and be like, he's putting people next to sit next to the same person on the bus every day like, who is he to me tell me where I'm going to sit? I'm not a 12 year old, but because you are basically creating a temporary constitution, right? I'm trained in political and social theory. So excuse the nerdiness, but this is basically what it is. Every gathering is a temporary constitution. It's a dinner party, bring a bottle of wine, right? Or if it's implicit, people find out that they've broken the constitution by like the wow they didn't even bring a house swimming gift, right? We have all of these implicit norms and often in diverse groups, which is every leadership circle, right? And I'm not even being racially diverse or ethnically cloders. I'm just saying we come from different assumptions of how a meeting is run. Right? So what you have done here is the leader of this offsite is first you've laid out your expectations. You are using the language of a plus that may or may not resonate with them. That's your job as a leader to figure out what feels aspirational and what feels you know is no longer working language wise. And then you are using your power, right? So a huge part of hosting is using your power, realizing you have power, but using it for the good of the group to achieve its purpose. So you then explain the design, hey, part of a plus is transformational learning. In my mind, Ryan, that's your job. You're almost like, I don't know as a guest how to be transformed by the learning. I just know that I'm supposed to maybe listen or engage in a way that like it increases the likelihood. But the part where you're signaling to me as a guest of what my role is is two to three lifelong friends. Okay, right? Okay, interesting. There's 40 people here. You're literally kind of giving me like a navigation map. So okay, so I have six hours here. This is really helpful. My leader, whom assuming I'm think as a legitimate, which is the question, right? Is saying, okay, so success here is over the next few. Okay, I don't have to spend my time distributing it everyone equally 38. I am purposely going to try to focus on two or three people. Got it, right? That changes my orientation. But the second thing is lifelong. I talked earlier about facilitators are really listening to language. Lifelong is an interesting assumption, right? It's also saying, I don't need to tell them everything from the get go. Or it may be like, wow, lifelong friendship, that means after I leave this place, we're still supposed to be friends. That changes my assumption of the conversations I have on that hike. So so much of what you're doing there is you're tightening and clarifying what the social contract is. And that is really helpful. And the last thing I'll just say is people might say to Koo, right? They may say, this is not what we're here for. We're not supposed to be lifelong friends. I don't want to share everything. I think it's inappropriate for work. But that's data. And so so much like leadership so much is basically creating and setting a social contract, inviting and seeing who is absolutely up for it. And then watching the data in and out and creating a relational model where people are wanting to give up some amount of power to be able to be part of something greater than themselves. And they trust you to help run it. So part of what we do as well is we go and work with like leadership teams, me and a couple of my teammates, my coaches. And we like to start those by letting them know what we're going to do and why we're going to do it by the end of that day. And sometimes it's just the beginning of our relationship where it starts in person. Then we're going to meet whatever we meet throughout the course of the year on zoom in person, whatever. I'm just curious is there ever a time where you shouldn't do that where you should say like, no, let's just go and do what we do or is laying out clearly the purpose and the why or do they need to know all of that? This is a real kind of like, I'm not really sure. A question. This is what we do. I personally, when I went to college, I did better than when I did in high school because as weird as sounds, they give you a syllabus in college on the first day of class. And on that syllabus, I see everything we're going to do. I see due dates. I can work ahead if I want to. I love knowing what we were going to do. I love seeing the schedule. I love seeing what we're learning the topics. I love seeing if I could work ahead. Right. As a student athlete. So I knew I was time crunched at time. Hey, I got a little extra time. Let's work ahead. Right. So I've learned from that and tried to implement into that when I'm working with people. Like I think people enjoy knowing where we're headed. Let's just tell them. But again, you're the master. This. What do you think about that? It depends on the context. Okay. And there are moments for surprise. There are moments for whimsy and delight. There are moments where again, it depends on what the purpose is. If the purpose, if a team is so stuck and in a say a 50 year old institution, they've always done it the exact same way. And if they don't change, they're going to die institutionally. And what you actually need them to do is build and expand their own skills for discomfort and change. If that's the purpose, right, very specifically, then perhaps one of the practices you're doing as a team, which again, maybe you tell them maybe you don't is helping them do exercises over the course of a three day retreat in which they don't know what the path is because that the purpose is to expand their ability to navigate uncertainty. Ah, good call. Yeah. So in, you know, particularly in diverse learning environments and so many of your questions are also at some level about pedagogy and education specialists would be an amazing addition to this conversation. But so much of what you're doing, what you're talking about, making it explicit, laying out one's expectations, that is deeply beneficial to particularly to people with less power and knowledge in the room. It is people who, for newer people who don't know how things work, right? It's true for people who might have other obligations, whether it's tending to an elderly parent or whether it's being a student athlete and having very fixed, you had less flexibility, I imagine, than people who weren't student athletes. And so therefore, it's actually equalizing to people who have student work, right? Say I work in a library five times a week and I have to plan my schedule ahead of time. So so much of what you're talking about, all of these are design choices, but there's certain design choices that help particularly when it's transparent and clear, equalize the room. But that may not always be your purpose. Gotcha. Okay. Let's get practical from a personal perspective and I'm fascinated by how you run these things. So let's say you and your spouse want to host a dinner and drinks party, kind of basic wherever can happen anywhere and you're going to have over five couples, okay? Maybe you'll tell me that's too many or too little, whatever. Okay, five couples. You all know each other already. Maybe some are close to the others like most social groups, but for the most part, you all know each other. And the goal of the night is we want to laugh. We want to have a good time. We want to create memories. We want to get closer together. That's the goal because everyone's crazy busy with kids and sports and life. And before you know it, if you don't plan these things, they just don't happen, right? So that's what we want to do. Okay, and this is real life for me, right? This is my life. So you're like asking for a friend. I'm asking for myself. Okay. What what what are the keys from the very start of the invitation till the last person leaves the house and whatever happens afterwards? What are the keys to hosting like an amazing dinner party with a handful of couples that you don't do a good enough job intentionally spending time together outside of all your kids stuff? Okay, so I'm going to pause and say first and I always say this, which is first ask what is the purpose and what is our need and what is it that we most want? Even before the structure of the dinner party as annoying as I might seem. And one of the things I heard you say is like I really these are people who you kind of see they all know each other, right? And we really want to have a great time and laugh hysterically. If that's the goal, a dinner party may not be the best form. Okay. A dinner party and then we'll go to the dinner party. But a dinner party is like you're often seated down. It really really depends on the conversation. Also in some ways it's almost easier to have a beautiful conversation with strangers than it is with people who have known each other for a long time. People have known each other for a long time also aren't willing to like, oh here's Ryan's like magical question again. They like dunk on each other versus like so I'm going to be like yeah absolutely I'll answer a question about for my childhood or whatever it is. So the first thing I'd say is if the goal is to like revive a friendship group, really think about like it might actually make more sense to play a kickball game in the park. It might actually makes more sense to go and book out a pickle ball court for two hours and stage a made up pickle ball championship and like put people in a teams of two. If it's like fun and laughter and doing something different and having some people deeply remember it, it might be going to like a morning rave and go like go to day break or in your city and say like this is what I want to do. It's will be done before break. So the first thing I would just really say and I sound like a broken record and whether you think about work or pleasure is really pausing before form and saying what is our deepest need and then pausing and saying what is it that like gives me energy. I recently launched a subset called group life and we do these group help sessions every two weeks where I get on zoom live with whoever with group lifers and the second session we did was called throw a gathering. How to host a gathering. You actually want to attend. The first question I would ask Ryan is do you want to throw a dinner party? I don't know. You know, right? It's like we're so boxed into thinking about like how adults and couples must hang out. That's a great great point. And so the first thing I would just think about is like do you want to actually go bowling or do you want again because I'm listening to what you said which is fun and laughter and joy. Do you want to go for a dance party? Do you want to go and have tea in your grandmother's China on a picnic blanket in the river? Yeah, one of the most recent ones we did in this kind of realm was party bus concert and man, it was amazing right? It checked all those boxes. There was no there's no real dinner maybe some snacks but like it was it was some beverages and a bus, good driver and music and yes or with a dinner party again. If you this is why I'm saying really and if like anyone listen to this like really pause and ask like what is it that I most need or what is it that the group most needs and like that's a leadership skill. That's discernment. Yes. And then ask okay or and if it's like what I most want is to become a great dinner party host then throw a dinner party right? There's nothing wrong with dinner parties but it's just one of many forms of connection. Do you like hosting dinner parties? I do like hosting dinner parties and I like it because my husband is a great cook. So when you host dinner parties do you guys cook normally? Yes, we cook and I will say my husband and very fortunate does most of the cooking. I think about the meaning and he thinks about the like the nourishment. Okay. It's a forward dinner party you know the quick and dirty as I think keep it relatively simple and so I mean some of the things we've seen is often like people will enjoy we're Indian Indian American like people some of our most successful dinner parties is literally like a big fat of Biryani chicken Biryani one dish with like yogurt on the side and then like just like a night of like stories and laughter and you know continue maybe you have some desserts versus like you know 12 dishes and so so on a dinner party really think about what's the menu and what's the menu you know I'll tell you from my lens because I really don't I'm not thinking about the food the food matters but what to come to me with is the meaning making. So the first is when you think about the food and what you want to serve think about something that tells a story. Think about something that you can relatively easily accomplish. So it could be again when you increase the meaning dial it decreases the pressure on the quality of the food. So for example I grew up this is true sorry I grew up my paternal grandparents Ruth and Lyle Parker were simple working class people who live in Waterloo, Iowa and whenever I would go and visit them they would make me BLTs and they made like my grandmother made the perfect BLT and she they had a garden in their backyard and it wasn't just like a small garden it was like rose and rose and rose and rose of cabbage and tomatoes and I grew up I have this deep visceral memory of her BLTs right if I am hosting I don't my husband isn't going to cook I can send an invitation come enjoy my best attempts at Ruth's BLTs the invitation matters right I tell the story in the email I narrow the expectations right you this is for BLTs if you don't eat BLTs maybe this is not the party for you I will have you can take out the bacon if you're vegetarian right it's also it's a social contract right no I no please don't bring your mushroom penne right no please don't in this context and so so much of what ends up happening is again you want to increase the dial menu and all I ask you to bring if you're asking if you think about what to bring bring a story of a dish that takes you back to childhood it creates the whole night it's done it's a play that plays itself I mean that sounds like it's a little thing but it's actually a pretty big thing a break bring a dish that because then you know you're probably gonna get an amazing story and you get a room full of those and that creates a lot of connection some vulnerability probably yes you're priming them you're helping them think about their own social anxiety okay that's all I need to do talk about that much yes and particularly for a group that knows each other well actually particularly for adult friends so much of the patterns of communication end up being about like what is happening in current life yeah and so one very simple way to refresh your friend group is to find ways that to tell stories that people have never heard of before and again if you want to have a dinner party and just like come and hang do that but so much of what I think of is like how do you meaningfully focus a group in a way that they want to be focused so another very simple tool I talk about this a lot of my Instagram and if you all can go to pre-aparker on Instagram and there's a whole circle there about this idea but it's called magical questions so magical question is this is what I think of as a magical question it's for a group it's a question that everyone in the group is interested in answering and everyone in the group would be interested in hearing each other's answers it's a magical equation and it's subjective it's relative right so I have a daughter my poor children know this practice very well the other day I was parenting solo parenting my husband is traveling I was solo parenting my kids and their nephews so it's me and three kids and they started like it was dinner Saturday night and they started just like arguing about what movie they were going to watch that night and I was thinking like this is not my Saturday night this is not going to be my Saturday night and so I pause and I'm like okay let's ask a magical question and they know what a magical question is and my daughter seven years old she goes she thought and she goes I have one what's the naughtiest thing you've ever done that was worth it right and like we ended up we laughed and we talked and we shared and we were there for two hours and I heard stories that they had done and they had stories that I had done recently we went to visit my father again so much of facilitation is actually figuring out connection despite obstacles right figuring out connection despite obstacles one obstacle in many groups and in particularly in families this age intergenerational connection I recently visited my elderly father in Florida and again table I was with my children I was like let's ask a magical question this time my son said I have one what's the meanest thing you ever did to anybody wow before the age of 15 right and I'm like I literally never heard this question before like this is why it's a learnable skill you can teach us your teams you can teach us to your teenagers and we all heard stories of one another and what was so interesting is he caveated by saying before the age of 15 which actually temporarily equalized the group so the 78 year old right and the 40 something year old and the you know the under 10 year olds were relatively equalized and we all shared a memory from when we were kids and so part of thinking about connection whether it's a dinner party or anything else is when the mechanism for connection is conversation which is not always you can go dancing you can play soccer game you can there's so many ways to connect but when it's conversation asking a magical question is a very powerful tool what are some of your other favorite magical questions one that I love to ask and I actually do this virtually on zoom a lot I you know as a facilitator a huge part of my growth maybe ironically was during the pandemic and so much of all of the groups I used to facilitate right the reckoning's the organizational complicated conversations it would always be in person and the pandemic hit and everything moved on to zoom and as you know there were a lot of reckoning's on zoom and I was a facilitator who was brought in along with my peers to facilitate those and all of a sudden I realized that my skill my job as a facilitator I no longer had the tools that I had to run after somebody leaving a room right to chase them into the bathroom and knock on the door and convince them to come back out to use my body to signal that it's like time to start quieting down like I was like in a little green square right and and so so much of the the single most important tool that I have learned as a facilitator of virtual groups is to create psychological togetherness how do you create psychological togetherness when people are in the same room and actually in group life my sub stack I am doing a my next session is literally on this my single most important skill as a facilitator is creating virtual togetherness psychological togetherness in a zoom and one of my biggest tools is magical questions I promise I'm answering a question and my favorite question to ask of any group and I do this all the time I do this in organizations I do this when I'm speaking for a speaking engagement to a company I'm doing it for conferences 3000 people 50 people as I ask in the chat I say open up the chat and I just want to get a sense you often can't see everybody right but it's like it's like an imaginative community I just want to get a sense of who's here okay so open up the chat list warm up our chat and I want you to tell me think a moment what was the first concert you ever went to comma and who took you and people pause and then all of a sudden you see this like waterfall of answers Bonnie Ray Madonna Michael Jackson new kids on the block Nicki Minaj and so a couple of things are happening first everyone is super interested in seeing everyone else's answers but there's so much data and context who's here wow I didn't realize they're that old oh my gosh their first concert was my first concert you also realize everyone has someone behind them my sister my mother my dad my older brother my college girlfriend right all of a sudden it expands your notion of who's there but finally particularly if you ask us the opening and openings really matter how you actually create a community or a group you're also increasing the likelihood that everyone else is realizing oh these are real people here and there's real context and by the way when the going gets tough when there's some miscommunication on the team as there is in everyone I'm more likely to pick up the phone and call them because how bad could they be their first concert was a new kids on the block concert right so all of this is like you're stitching together a community to if not be lifelong friends to be resilient in the trenches people who know enough data about each other that make them real and human that's appropriate for a work context that helps people realize hey I know something about this person I can pick up the phone wow Tom Petty seventh grade my dad it was awesome I was kind of like in shock actually of how cool it was that I didn't really know what to do he probably thought I wasn't having fun but I actually was blown away anyway how do you come up with magical questions what's your process do you just come up with a ton of questions and then throw out the bad ones like a lot of creativity works or what is your process because I don't want to just give people the questions I want to help people create the muscle so that they can come up with magical questions I do too you know no one has ever asked me that such a great question so I would say I do it in a couple of different ways the first is I practice like I test a lot out and I test a lot out on my own team right and in part because they have the shared purpose of figuring out magical questions that we then share online so the first is I I test and I practice and I really think about again it's not rocket science but I think every single time I think and I'll be sitting there feeling hostess heat at a dinner party and being like okay okay how do I ask a question what is a question this entire room this unique group like my best friend from college but also our neighbor but also my husband's sister would all be interested in answering right that's like social arithmetic what does that it means what do they have in common what don't they have in common what's the right level of vulnerability and that they would all be interested in answering right and so I really I just asked that question over and over and over again it's a it's a muscle and then I also ask my community so on group life on substack we had I actually on the chat recently I asked what's a magical question that you love and people share all sorts of magical questions that they love on Instagram I ask people to send me magical questions and they on my DMs are full of magical questions and then we put them together and when somebody recently I'm since if I can find it somebody recently sent me a DM from Brazil and he said I've tried this magical question in my group and it leads to very heated debates hold on let me see if I can find it about you're creating some tension here with a little bit of delay let's find yeah exactly I found it I found it okay you can judge if this magical or not so again this is for his group Brazilian guy I got one magical question that has been around my friend group since high school are you ready for it I am would you rather spend 10 minutes on the moon or one year traveling through Europe it is a closed ended question but it inspires heated debates wow I know I'm like they literally made that up for that group it might be super interesting for me these questions that I so I love the concert question a question that recently different mediums are good for different questions so a question that did really well on Instagram like went totally viral in this way and I'm like what the heck it's that's why I keep saying like test be curious it was what's the strangest thing you ever found in your pocket really like yeah yeah like a drawing of people like everything from like like the little retainer screw like a child's retrainers screw anybody many parents who have children or if you ever have like an expander to like I don't know like guitar pick to glitter from a concert but it just did really well if that would that do well in a room I don't know I'll just say one more thing which is this leadership ability to begin to deeply I mean one of the core skills of facilitation and it's a muscular skill is once you know what the need or the purpose of the group is is to figure out the question that helps the group have the right conversation so I have a digital course the art of gathering digital course is a six week course is pre-recorded people take it as teams you can go on my website check it out preaparker.com and one of the practices we have in that digital course is how do you connect a group across power dynamics and this is an example from that course it was the healthcare meeting and in the room was a massive hierarchy it was the CEO of the health care company it was researchers it was nurses it was anesthesiologist it was interns it was residents and the purpose of the meeting was to analyze a meta data set of maternal mortality rates okay this is quite heavy stuff but basically maternal mortality rates I want to actually show you the sophistication of like why this is such muscular work as a facilitator so in this room is a massive hierarchy and they needed to literally look read data about maternal mortality and make meaning of it and figure out what they wanted to do across all of these stakeholders and the facilitator had the task in the first hour to equalize the group so in my course I say okay take a moment and write down if you were the facilitator in that room you had an hour and you had to ask one question that would everyone would answer that would temporarily equalize the group what would it be okay so this is the question they asked what is something about your mother or mother figure that you couldn't tell by looking at her right this is a brilliant question for the need of the group why because first of all it's temporarily equalizing everyone in that room including the CEO is a child of somebody has a mother or mother figure right it's temporarily equalizing second they're looking at metadata right which means a lot of micro data has been kind of summarized so when you're looking at a data set part of what they're doing is priming what is something about your mother that you couldn't tell by looking at her right it's expanding their own context and so they ran this question and it completely transformed the group but it wasn't it wasn't gratuitous it fundamentally served the desired outcome of the room which is to use all of these stakeholders who come from many different places to look at each other with respect to look at the data with context and to be able to have a high enough trust to have a complex conversation with care so good can I run one by you a magical question that I ask every year okay so let me set the stage of how this our dinners go when we're at this growth summit again with 40-ish people we go out to a nice usually like a steakhouse type place and we get a private room and in between the main course and the dessert I tell the people this I had a time the host and the restaurants they know what's going on in between those two courses I get up and give like a very many talk and then I say here's what we're gonna do I have this box of cards and each card is a question and you're each gonna answer two questions and I have them all stand up and and do this and I go person to person and like usually make a little comment about the person or something not too long and then they all answer one question which is the same this is the champagne question I'm curious if this is one you use I got it from Jason Gayneard by the way everything I've gotten I've learned from somebody else none of it's really original so anyway I ask them all the champagne question and I give them a card and sometimes I'll just pick randomly from the box but anyway the champagne question is Priya we're meeting exactly one year from today and we are poppin bottles beautiful poppin bottles right champagne going crazy celebrating what are we celebrating that's a beautiful question right champagne questions or grapes juice doesn't whatever it just goes better if you say champagne so yeah so then the ethicist is that they're and think about like what does this successful year look like what's a big goal what's something they want to comp I want to publish a book you know like whatever okay and then the card questions so they answer they all answer that and I say one of the reasons why that's so good it's not only because it's both future oriented and again for the group it's thinking about goals but why are you popping champagne that's a visceral thing right you you you put it's an emotional reaction it's a non obligatory reaction right and you could say like what is your you know goal of year goal for the year yeah it's boring right versus and so part of the power of it is it's almost like a somatic right it's like a physical question that helps people get closer again you can see you can see it you can see it you can say like you're also like not gonna pop champagne about something that's boring correct so it's a great question okay keep going forces you think big right some of them last time they popped a bottle of champagne maybe have been like their wedding and that and for some that to been like a decade or more the second part is I've created a box again got this from Jason again or he runs mastermind talk so he hosts events I learned to remember him a decade ago and he's he's remained a friend and I've gone to like five or six of his events so anyway you get a box of cards and you hand make these cards you can use moo.com or whatever and they're colored actually intentionally so the lighter shaded cards are kind of light loose no big deal questions like basic that it's not a lot of vulnerability but the cards get progressively darker and the darker the shade of the card the more vulnerability it will force you to answer and so this gives me flexibility as the host to know I don't know if this group we should go that deep right now like let's stay lighter and I have like a hundred of them so I don't use all of the cards and so sometimes if maybe it's a smaller group or it's a group where we know each other better or we feel like yeah we can go there I'll go a little bit darker there's a lot of planning there's a lot of help there's a lot of intentionality but the questions on the cards then they read it and a lot of times they've never answered that question before so they they also never answered the champagne question so they're answering two questions they have to think on their feet a little bit and sometimes what they say surprises themselves let alone everybody through and so again a heavy facilitation a lot of intentionality a lot of planning nobody till this year understood the shades of the colors of the cards I just told them and they're like oh wow there really is a lot of thought putting this they go yes there is and so sometimes when they go back they're like oh I got a darker card he must like trust me or something even more so it's interesting to see what people put into it when you tell them about like yeah this is why we do this and I think people really really appreciate it and they do they feel like a sense of togetherness after we leave that dinner after going through that kind of moment where we all answer questions together yeah it's very it's very effective and I think part of again the responsibility gathering is about connection but it's also about power and particularly in a work context using your role as a host to also protect your guests and making sure that the questions you ask are related to the purpose you're the convening right and so you can ask questions that are too vulnerable for a work context for sure you can ask questions that aren't related to or shouldn't be you know shouldn't be asked that would be a much better question for you know a group of friends and when you are skilled at deeply thinking about you know what is the purpose even asking something as simple as particularly for groups that have been together for a long time what's a core experience from your early life that you think connects to why you do the work you do today right again it's like it helps people understand people's motivation but you're not saying like tell me any experience from your early childhood no no no no it's like connecting like why are you an activist at this organization or why are you an accountant or what is it that you why are you a ballet instructor right what what I mean we're sort of ending where we began which is questions are a sequence of words that if you ask them in a specific way it can open up the world yeah being genuinely curious and fascinated about people and their stories and their life experiences will change your life yes absolutely will change your life well I got to ask you I meant to ask you this earlier period this is a little bit of a departure to end but I'm curious you write the art of gathering how we meet and why it matters again a life changing transformational book that went mega viral how did it change your life what happened when that came out and all the sudden like millions of people are talking about are reading it are implementing it it's changing their lives like what did that do for you and your life you know what was interesting is before the book came out so much of what I felt like I did as a facilitator and would also like be so frustrated with in rooms when I could just see like oh they would just at all the ingredients are here if they would just protect their guests or all the ingredients are here if they just ask this question or if they just raise a toast and tell people why they're here it would be so good writing a book is like you get to write what like deeply frustrates you and like can try to convince other people it should frustrate them too and so one of the things that writing this book and having it having it really take was that like I grew people's frustration in mediocre gatherings and that with that I grew people's lens to see like this could be so much better our time is so short and precious and by the way like I can do this like I say this in the beginning of the art of gathering it's like anyone can gather it's like that movie ratatouille anyone can cook anyone can gather and one of the things I learned in interviewing the hundred gathers I I interviewed was like many of them identified as introverts these are gatherers other people credit with creating transformational gatherings consistently so many of them identified themselves as loners their language often on the outside of things introverts having social anxiety and they often when as one person said to me I create the gatherings I wish existed in the world and other people seem to like it and so what has been so beautiful for me and kind of honestly like a relief is that people are starting to get fed up with and expect better of how the most precious thing we have is how do we spend our time together and to realize and to give the radical permission that we can change it with some thought with some tamarity with some bumping around in relationship in conversation and that has been beautiful and the last thing I'll say is strangely the pandemic made the book even more relevant because the art of gathering the paper back came out April 2020 uh super awkward the gathering was banned it was illegal and part of what happened with the pandemic is that by taking gathering from us we began to see it we began to see that this thing that we took for granted shapes our lives right how do we wed now how do we fight battles in court now how do we host funerals how do we host a gala what is this thing and so part of what has been very interesting as I and very very helpful as it's and I'll as a conflict resolution facilitator I know that first groups things begin to change when you can get a group or a community to go back to first order questions which is when and where and why should we meet and who decides and people are now asking that question and that's a powerful question to be asking wow this is awesome where can we go to learn more about you online Priya thank you so much for asking me thank you for having me you can go to www.prioparker.substack.com so I have a substack it's called group life and we've actually created a special page for you all it's prioparker.substack.com slash learning leader let's go and we're offering your audience a 15% discount code so learning leader and group life is really my attempt to it's I just started it is it's a substack and I started because we are a washing self-help we have so many for decades we have tools for self-help we have apps we can count our steps we can count them out of sugar we intake we don't have a lot of tools for group help and we have a crisis of group life and so group life is my attempt as a substack to begin to demystify and be part of what I call a group life and group help revolution so as much as we have tools for self-help it is time to begin to really elevate group help and part of what I do on the substack is every two weeks is the first time I've ever offered this to the public is I teach I do live sessions based on questions from the audience on zoom if you become a group life where you can come and we get to go deep on many of these juicy questions together so thank you so much for having me Ryan has been you're you're a wonderful host thank you for modeling so many of these principles well thank you and I would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress Priya thank you so much I would too it is the end of the podcast club thank you for being a member of the end of the pod class club if you are send me a note Ryan at learningleader.com let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Priya Parker a few takeaways from my notes when you're hosting a leadership offsite 90% of success happens before the gathering starts you have to determine and clarify what the actual purpose is what is the deepest need as a military leader might say what is the objective of this mission get clear on that and plan the gathering accordingly by the way the same is true for hosting a dinner party or any other type of gathering and I love the magical questions conversation what are some of your favorite questions to ask that create quote psychological togetherness we all have to build the muscle to come up with those questions borrow from others test them see what works some of Priya's recent favorites what was the first concert you went to and who did you go with or the champagne question that I asked that I got from Jason Gaynard it's one year from today we are poppin bottles celebrating what exactly are we celebrating I love that one and then finally I actually want to challenge you and that's simply just to host a gathering maybe one for your friends or your work colleagues or just a few couples over dinner whatever it is but host one have a purpose use some magical questions and then do the thing and then I love it if you would send me an email Ryan at learning leader.com and let me know how it went I think you'll be glad that you did once again I say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two hey you should listen to the learning leaders show with Priya Parker I think show help people become a more effective leader because you continue to do that and you also go to Spotify and subscribe and rate and write a review and you go to Apple podcasts and do the same by doing all of that you are continually giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis and for that I will forever be grateful thank you so so much talk to you can't wait