Together Apart: Priya Parker
In this episode. we talk about how power works in group gatherings and how to facilitate without getting in the way of the magic.
Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters and host of the new Together Apart Podcast, says in every group there is a beautiful conversation that could actually change people, you just have to find out what that is.
She is inviting us into an inquiry about how to unleash the unique and necessary conversations that we are meant to have. She calls for good controversy - saying it helps us examine what we hold dear, our values, our priorities, and our non-negotiables.
As we navigate this moment, we’re being challenged to imagine new ways of connecting and organizing to determine how to best move forward together. The art of gathering is essential to remembering who we are, why we are here and what is possible when we come together apart.
-Check out Priya’s new podcast Together Apart
-Get her book The Art of Gathering
-Sign up for her newsletter
-Submit gathering ideas or inquiries for coaching from Priya on her podcast
-Follow her @priyaparker on Instagram and Twitter
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Photo credit: Jeff Allen
+ Read Transcript
Kerri Kelly: Welcome to CTZN Podcast. This is Kerri Kelly. This podcast is right on time, especially since we are all learning right now how to gather meaningfully despite the obstacles. Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters and host of the new Together Apart Podcast is inviting us into an inquiry about how to unleash the unique and necessary conversations that we are meant to have.
Kerri Kelly: In this episode we talk about how power works in group gatherings and how to facilitate without getting in the way of the magic. She says in every group there is a beautiful conversation that could actually change people, you just have to find out what that is. She calls for good controversy and says it helps us examine what we hold dear, our values, our priorities and our non-negotiables. As we navigate this moment which Arundhati Roy calls the portal, we are being challenged to imagine new ways of connecting and organizing so that we can determine how to best move forward together. The art of gathering is essential to remembering who we are, why we are here and what is possible when we come together apart. Check it out.
Kerri Kelly: Priya, thank you so much for being here.
Priya Parker: Thank you for having me.
Kerri Kelly: I'm a huge fan of your work, The Art of Gathering, but the conditions of gathering have changed since the pandemic. So this conversation about how we gather, how we connect across difference, now, how we connect across distance feels more resonant than ever. And I'd just love to know how you're connecting, right, digitally or connecting across distance right now. If you have any rituals that you've created online that keep you connected and gathering.
Priya Parker: It's a strange time to... I've spent many years studying gatherings when the world seems to be ungathering. And the way I've started to think about my relationship to this moment, at least kind of professionally and I would say also as a citizen is, my core training is as a group conflict resolution facilitator, and to get really nerdy, specifically group dialogue. That is the core of my training. And so much of what I practiced and have learned over the years is how to get a group to meaningfully connect despite obstacles. And in my training, the obstacles are often identity-based or race or ethnicity or religion or related to access to power. And as we are all are kind of fumbling through this corona moment, I've realized that at some level we're still doing much of the same thing, which is how do we meaningfully connect despite obstacles. But the obstacles in this moment look somewhat different.
Kerri Kelly: Fumbling I think is the right word. I feel like I should just tell the rest of the group that it took us 30 minutes to figure out the tech on this call.
Priya Parker: Yeah. It's like, what are my rituals to connect to tech? Don't pull my hair out.
Kerri Kelly: It's like compassion is my ritual and it's-
Priya Parker: Exactly.
Kerri Kelly: Are you finding that people are getting more creative about how they're gathering online or are we inventing new ways of connecting meaningfully across difference and distance?
Priya Parker: I think that we're at the beginning of this. And this particularly meaning finding meaningful ways to gather in a way that connects the community but also is for progress. So in offline gatherings we have an ability somewhat to kind of set the frame of the gathering, right? So I know a lot of your listeners are facilitators and sort of think about group dynamics. If you're creating any type of meeting or retreat or frankly even town hall, there's a lot of different tools you have to set a context or to think about power dynamics or power relations. Like where you want to seat people, where you want to put them in a room, the elevation of the room, who has the mic. And as we're translating these skills into the online space, we have these inherited structures that weren't actually meant necessarily to gather in all of these ways we're now trying to gather.
Priya Parker: And when I say that I mean Zoom, Skype, Google Hangout, Google Meet. So the first layer I would say or the first level of it is like gathering or together apart version one. I think what I'm seeing is many people trying to kind of take what they're doing offline and put it online as best as they can, but these sort of diluted versions. And I think version two is hacking the system you have. So I recently got an email, I saw a piece by a facilitator actually, about how to hack Zoom to create the feeling of a cocktail party. And it's this lovely piece. It's super simple but the reason why I like it is because it's actually insight on power dynamics and choice and agency within the inherited structure of Zoom, within the actual interface of Zoom.
Priya Parker: So his name is Misha Guberman and he wrote this piece, it's on Medium. And he basically says if you make everybody a cohost, if you... The best way around kind of the breakout room problem and the fact that in any type of Zoom, it's hard to basically control who you want to talk to, right? So right now on zoom if there's like 20 people on zoom, usually the host controls the mic or the mute button or it's total chaos. And he says, a way to get around this, you can't just kind of bump into whoever you want to unless you make everyone a cohost. And if you make everybody on the call a cohost, that actually creates sort of the same spontaneity that you can have offline. But his caveat is you have to know and trust everyone.
Priya Parker: So I go into this example for a bit just to say that I think right now we're at the second layer where once we kind of got... and we is an asterisk, there's still a lot of people who aren't digitally connected, but once we've got onto Zoom, now we're in this phase where people are trying to hack Zoom. And I think the next evolution is to really think about, "How do we actually not just try to dilute offline gatherings into these inherited structures, but how do we create completely new types of gatherings for this moment in time?" And a huge part of that question is online is the role of power in these gatherings when it's kind of clunky to coordinate.
Kerri Kelly: Yeah. I love that we're already going there because I do feel like this is one of the key takeaways for me in your book is that so much about how we gather meaningfully and provocatively has to do with an understanding and an analysis of power. And I know this has been a big inquiry for you in your career, how power works. And it's a question we lean into all the time on this podcast, right? Because we know that power is at work all the time, right? Social and institutional power that either privileges or oppresses, but also personal power, right? In the way in which we own our purpose and remember who we are and who we are to one another. And so I'd love for you to share a little bit about what have you learned about how to navigate power in creating gatherings because I hear you saying this already, that actually contributes to the redistribution and the restructuring of power.
Priya Parker: So I would zoom in a lot on just first looking at power within gatherings. And the way I think about power in a gathering is I define power very simply as decision-making. The ability to make a decision. And this is true for offline gatherings and online gatherings. I define a gathering as any time three or more people come together for a purpose with a beginning, middle, and end. right? So I'll just do a little table setting first. So gathering is different than a community. Communities have gatherings and gatherings can build community, but I really think about gathering as a unit of time where people come together for a purpose and it ends. And I think about that in part because it gives us an anatomy to study and to continue to improve. And because we're all part of these gatherings all of the time, all day long, right now it looks a bit different, but many of us are on Zoom calls multiple times a day or phone calls or different parts... or with whoever you're quarantined with.
Priya Parker: So in a gathering power is decision-making and there's different phases of that gathering. So first is the gathering begins from the moment it's conceived, the gathering doesn't begin when the guest walks in the door. The gathering begins, or I think of it as beginning at the moment of discovery. So when the guest understands that there's this future kind of promised happening. So decision making at the very beginning and particularly in Zoom calls are things like before anyone even comes into the door. So there's decision making ahead of the gathering and then there's decision making in the gathering. There's power ahead of the gathering and there's power in the gathering.
Priya Parker: So power ahead of the gathering looks like seemingly technological decisions, and I'm in air quotes, which things are what platform are we going to have this on? Right? Who can access that? Right? Do you need a landline? Do you need a wifi? Is satellite strong enough or do you actually need high speed WiFi? Do you need an iPhone to be able to access a certain type of... or Apple in order to access a certain type of app? Right? So that's decision making but power actually, it affects who can actually literally access your event. What time of day it is and who might be able to access it based on where they are in the world or what their obligations are to, if they have children or people that they are caretaking for.
Priya Parker: But then also what is the purpose of this gathering? Who is this for, what time of... all of that kind of thing. And all of those are just simply forms of power. You can simplify it to a family trying to decide where to go to dinner at night. And it's like, "Do we go to Indian or Italian or Chinese," and who decides? Is it always the sister? Is it always the dad? Is it always the mother? But you can actually watch power dynamics through the ways people make decisions.
Priya Parker: And so to me it's just a very clear clarifying lens for all of us to think about who and how are we making these decisions before anyone enters. And then, and I'll pause here and let you respond, there's the power dynamics in the gathering. And that's a completely different can of worms, right now given the tools we're using.
Kerri Kelly: I feel like what you're describing is counterculture in some ways. How do we design for gatherings in a way that is counterculture and in a way that understands how power is organized in dominant culture and do something differently. Is that correct?
Priya Parker: Yeah, I mean, I would separate culture and power. And I think that they absolutely interact. So when I think about culture, I think I would define it as a set of beliefs, norms and practices that are normative. I mean, I don't even know if they're normative, but that are enacted over and over again by a group of people.
Priya Parker: And I would say that power, like who decides what culture is appropriate and what culture is transgressive? Who decides who speaks the most? Who decides who in a wedding can actually hold the power of officiants? Who decides who in a church or in a synagogue or in a mosque can be a source of authority? All of those elements are informed by culture, meaning our deepest sort of beliefs, but they are not power. Power informs who carries power, who carries the ability to make decisions, interacts with our culture to make us think that certain things are literally normal or abnormal.
Kerri Kelly: I want to give a special shout out to our community of supporters on Patreon who are making it possible for us to do this work, especially during this pandemic when we are being called to work harder than ever to expose the inequities of our systems and advocate for the policies that take care of everyone. We could not keep going without you. CTZN Podcast was designed for truth seekers, bridge builders, and emerging activists who are yearning to make a difference. We're not afraid to ask hard questions and have radical dialogue about politics and patriarchy, white supremacy and worthiness. And we're serious about showing up for one another and taking action for the wellbeing of everyone, but we can't do it alone.
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Kerri Kelly: So how does that impact the role of the facilitator or the host? And this very much feels much more like facilitation to me than hosting, right? Because you're not passively hosting the kind of gathering that you're talking about. It's really about moving a group towards something, towards transformation, towards a meaningful conversation, sometimes towards conflict, which you talk about in your book. How does a facilitator hold space for that experience without getting in the way of it? Right? Because as the decision maker and the originator of a gathering, you have a ton of power. You have power in the design and the idea, in the naming, in the marketing, in the language, in the invitation, in the how you invite people into the space, in the how you start the space. I'm just curious how do you check yourself as a facilitator, right? To hold the container with leadership but also not to get in the way of what can emerge from the group when actually change happens.
Priya Parker: So, I love the list of questions that you kind of spit out so eloquently. But gathering is a series of choices, right? By the way, so is art, right? So gathering is a series of choices made by a number of different people for an outcome. And so as a facilitator... This book is called The Art of Gathering, not the art of facilitating because facilitation is only one part of gathering. And the first step to not get in the way as a facilitator is to ask, "What is the purpose? What is the deepest need for this community?" And then, "How might I or we design a structure around it to help us get us there?" And then to ask, "Within that structure, how heavily or lightly do I need to facilitate?"
Priya Parker: So I'll give a simple example going back to our culture and power conversation. And it's an example of ritual. So, I'm half Indian. My mother comes from UP, from Banas and she is a radical feminist and has spent a lot of... She's a poverty researcher and she's spent the last five years of her work really looking at what does it mean to be a good woman in the context of India. And as she's been doing this research, I've been really interested in how wedding rituals are changing in India and particularly among the Hindu communities. Because in a Hindu wedding one of the most famous rights, and I write about this book, are the pheras, which is basically you go around the fire seven times traditionally. And if you actually speak the vows... So this is a structure with an intended purpose to make a couple a union, right? To get married.
Priya Parker: And the actual vows, the rights that are inherited in the ceremony are deeply misogynistic. And if you kind of look at them, most of them are about traditional gender roles and making sure that basically the woman is taking care of the home and the man is sort of being out in the world. There's oaths of loyalty that the woman needs to take but not the man and whatever version you read... I'm paraphrasing.
Priya Parker: And so if you're going back to the intersection of culture and power in that case, I think in many gatherings it's not totally clear who the host is, right? So in a wedding is the bride and this is for a heterosexual couple, but whether it's gay or either way, are the couple being married, are they the hosts? Is the person paying the host? Are the parents the hosts? Is the officiant the host? And then who gets to decide, right? If you go back to power, where are the decisions being made and how is that family deciding who gets the final say?
Priya Parker: And so if that couple wants to do these inherited vows, they still want to get married, but they don't want to use those vows. They want to rewrite their vows so that they still walk around the fire they've come, they've rewritten vows so that they reflect the norms that they want as a couple, that doesn't need to be facilitated, right? That is actually designed, that's a choice that they make within a vow, within a specific structure at a moment in a ceremony that they may actually decide to go through or they want to maintain certain elements of the ritual to honor their past. But the transgressive act, the breaking of culture to use your language, happens just at the moment of the vows.
Priya Parker: And so as a facilitator, a huge part basically is to ask, "What to me at least... how can I create caring and simple enough structures to help a group do its work? And how tight or loose do they need to be? How controlling or not controlling do the structures need to be or how much am I needed? In every gathering, it's not clear what the facilitator's for. So just as you should ask, what is the purpose or the need of the community to then ask for each one, and I do this in my work, it's like what is the deepest need of a facilitator for this gathering? And sometimes it's like, there isn't one.
Kerri Kelly: It's funny because it reminds me, and I love what you were saying earlier about dialogue and I remember this from your book and I've heard you say this that, "A big motivation and intention of this work is to bring forth a conversation, a meaningful conversation." I don't know if this is a word you would use, but that's riskier, right?
Priya Parker: Yeah.
Kerri Kelly: Where people are taking risks, where people are leaning into discomfort. And I'm just thinking about, is that the role of the facilitator to be of service to that?
Priya Parker: Right. And I don't think of Art of Gathering so much as a framework, as a series of questions. And the core of what I believe creates meaningful, transformative gatherings first is to make sure that you're actually addressing a real need. Right? So if you're kind of hosting somebody and nobody wants to be there and nobody wants to do it, that's information. And then it's like, okay, once there's a real need who actually absolutely needs to be there. And you kind of still build on layers based on that original need. So it's not so much that structures... I think structures can be loose or tight if they're fulfilling a need.
Priya Parker: So for example, you're bringing together in person a group of let's say a multi-generational family that holds a legacy role in their community or in their country and you've been trying to have them to come together and over generations and trying to mend something, and finally, finally, finally... Or say a former president and their clan, their group. In that case, in certain cases it might be enough heat to just literally be in the same room. Right? And you may want deep, tight, tight, tight structure to actually mitigate the risk that they're all feeling kind of finally deciding to come together. So it's not so much that I think more or less structured, the structure should match the need. And, what was the last question that you asked? Oh, conflict.
Kerri Kelly: Yes.
Priya Parker: So I think conflict is one of the things... People often are asking me these days like, "What are we losing by migrating online?" And I think we're losing healthy conflict. I think we're losing the benefit of touch and the benefit of actually what all of the things that happen when bodies are in the room. But I think it's really complicated right now and I believe we will evolve to a place where we're perhaps this also will be invented. I think that when you are having a really... When you're working with a group and you've found the right question that hits a note that kind of wakes everybody up.
Priya Parker: So in a church it could be like, how are tithes being spent? In a newspaper it could be what do we actually put on the homepage or the front page? Right now in many companies and businesses around the country, like what do we do with our staff? What do we do about salaries? What do we do about our funders? What is the strategy here? Right? Complicated conversations that require heat. I think that you have to... So first of all, in an in-person gathering, it's harder to exit, right? There's a lot of different ways can kind of stay still engaged. I mean, you could leave, you could literally walk out the door, but you have a lot of tools to kind of keep people in the work. And I think it's harder when you're digitally apart to keep people in the work, right? You can just basically walk away from your desk or turn off your laptop. You can't reach across and say like, "Hey," touch a hand and be like, "Hey, stick with it."
Priya Parker: I think that we are also in a place where it's a moment to actually collectively organize. I loved your last newsletter talking about, Arundhati Roy's, Framing of a Portal. And what is it that we're going to actually use this moment for and how do we actually build a new. And I actually think one of the deepest opportunities right now is, what does it actually look like and mean to organize in a way in this time when you can't come together? And I think we have precedent, right? So whether it's you go all the way back to Howard Dean or whether you go back to what Obama campaign did, what now feels like a forever ago. Each of the ways that each of these campaigns digitally organized was completely novel at the time. And I think we now have an opportunity to begin to think not just for an election but for that also. But how do we organize in ways while we're together apart in ways that actually create real structural change after corona? Because it is an opportunity but we need to figure out how to do this.
Kerri Kelly: Well, and in some ways it makes me think that we have to make our digital organizing and our digital gathering a lot more meaningful. We actually can't waste time with sort of the more surface stuff because it doesn't seem to resonate as much across the internet when we're trying to like engage people and call them in and call them up. We're always in reflection around what are we organizing around, right? What are we centering in our organizing?
Kerri Kelly: And one of the things that I've heard you talk about that I love is this balance between love and power. I don't know if you would call that an organizing principle, but it does feel like essential ingredients in the recipe right now of how we move people collectively towards action in a way that is both healthy and mutual. Right? Because love... I forget how you said it, so maybe you can help me, but love without power is anemic, right? And power without love can be really harmful. And you can tell me if that was your framing. But I'm just curious, how do you see those two things in relationship with one another as maybe like a value, if you will, that we can rally around as we think about how we want to move forward together?
Priya Parker: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I wish that was my quote. But I learned about it in a deeper way. It's often attributed to Martin Luther King Jr, but I learned about it through Adam Kahane's book, Power and Love. And he builds this entire book... He's a facilitator and he builds this entire book. It's a facilitator's book. It's a facilitator... It's like a facilitator facilitator's book. I love it. I've given out like 20 copies of it. And he frames this work around Paul Tillich's work. And Paul Tillich was a Christian theologian who wrote a book called Love, Power and Justice. And he basically said, and he inspired Martin Luther King and he basically said there are these two twin forces and all group life, power and love. And what I love about it is the way he defines power, he says, "Power is the desire to self-actualize, no matter what and love is the desire for the separated to be in union or to be whole." W-H-O-L-E.
Priya Parker: So to put it in an extreme way... Well and with the power, like self-actualize come what may, right? "I have this vision, I don't care about anything else in this way. I'm going forward with it." And he says, "Power without love is abusive," but, and this is a part I deeply love, "Love without power is anemic." Meaning it's without blood, is without life source.
Priya Parker: And I think in our gatherings, and that's been a deeply helpful frame for me as a facilitator because I kind of intuitively tried when I'm doing my core work as a group facilitator in larger groups, kind of not mitigating conflict, I work with a lot of groups on the left because those are my values. But that's a framework that's very helpful for me. But it's also a framework that I often say to my participants so that they can understand what it is we're trying to go for. A lot of the core... The possibility right now online is how do we actually bring these two elements into our gatherings. So let me give an example of an offline gathering that I saw when the Bernie Sander's campaign was still happening. He was a surrogate and I don't know his name, but he basically has a video of him going into a town hall and to open the town hall, he basically asked a series of questions.
Priya Parker: It was almost like a benediction. He got up at the top of the room, it may have been a gym or something and he had everybody close their eyes and then hold hands. And he was, if you can watch the video, he was also exquisitely deft at kind of making people comfortable and taking a risk every 30 seconds. And then he read a series of prompts, like if you've ever been scared for your country, if you have a loved one incarcerated, if you have a family member in the police force, if you have ever suffered from alcoholism, if you or anyone you've loved has tried to commit suicide, if you worry about paying rent next week. Those may not be the exact prompts, but they were kind of like that. And if they were true for you, all he asks is you squeeze the hand of the person next to you.
Priya Parker: And I often do this in a lot of my gatherings in a different way, which is I have people stand up and sit down and ask a series of prompts just to kind of build community and help people see who's in the room. But what I loved about his innovation was it was a collective experience, but he turned down the volume of the collective witnessing. You only had to decide if you're going to squeeze your hand but you were telling the person next to you left or right a number of things about you that you weren't planning on revealing. And to me in those three minutes, what he did as a gatherer was literally create and remind everybody of the purpose of the Sanders campaign. And that though they were in it together, that they may have similar experiences or different experiences, but there is a lot of pain in this country.
Priya Parker: And I am looking for now ways to create, not that experience literally, but what is of the equivalent emotional organizing moment of how do we actually collectively do this online remembering and actually witnessing each other's pain. I mean, right now we are in a social x-ray of all of our social, psychological, economic inequalities and infrastructure. But we actually need ways as storytellers but also as gatherers and organizers to collectively continue to both see it and hold it and then organize around it.
Kerri Kelly: Yeah. It's funny because it's making me... Well, it's reminding me of The Power of Story.
Priya Parker: Yes.
Kerri Kelly: But what I love about it, and I have seen your masterclass, I haven't seen it in person, but I watched it online and I really love that exercise. And we do a lot of those kinds of things too because we find that it also reminds people of their humanity, of their shared humanity, which I think often, especially in political context, we forget a lot. We forget it to the ideology, right? But it's just reminding me of like The Power of Story and the power of witnessing to not just create an experience of shared humanity, but it does bring up I think the kind of friction and heat that you're talking about without it being so confrontational.
Kerri Kelly: And it makes me think about the culture of civility in America, right? The culture of polite politics, the culture of don't talk about politics at the kitchen table and then how we've been conditioned to believe that conflict [inaudible 00:34:10] love. And in many ways conflict gets at love even more so than evasion.
Priya Parker: Absolutely. Conflict is almost the trick... Healthy conflict is love tapping fear on the shoulder and saying, "It's okay. I got this." And I loved what you said earlier about sometimes sharing of stories or doing these kinds of collective walks or stand up or sit down or any of these exercises that we all have been trained in allows for some heat to build, to see people's lived experiences around you without direct confrontation.
Priya Parker: And just to tease that out a little bit, confrontation is very powerful when it's the right tool. And I think one of the things as facilitators, as organizers that I've always tried to do is understand each tool and know which tool is helpful for which need. And then also to know which tool do I have kind of a gift for, I understand and which tool I'm really clumsy with. Right? And how, and who can I learn from to sharpen that tool in my toolbox.
Priya Parker: And I think this question of how high do you turn up the heat and how do you definitely allow for heat. Is one of the things that I've been really curious about. And I think heat can be a number of different things. Heat can very simply be risk, like the level of risk in a room. And there's a lot of forms of risks, psychological, social, physical. One person I've learned a lot from and who's in my book, Ida Benedito is an underground experience designer. And she did her graduate work on transformative experiences. And she focused on adventure like outdoor adventure, wilderness trips, funeral parlors and sex parties as these kind of three centered locations of different types of facilitators playing with different types of risks.
Priya Parker: And one of her core insights is that transformation cannot happen without some level of risk or some level of disequilibrium. But the power of the facilitator or the host, or she describes herself, an experienced designer, is to understand what level of risk is the healthy level of risk. And she has these four questions, she asks, she says, "First, what is this group avoiding? Number two, what is the gift in helping them face it? Number three, what is the risk in helping them face it? And number four is the gift worth the risk?" So with all of these elements of heat, it's like part of our job as facilitators is to actually become sophisticated knob turners to understand how and when, what is needed.
Priya Parker: I have one more story that you made me think of. I grew up in a deeply conflict-averse family, right? Sort of ironically, maybe not so ironic. We kind of figure out our pain through our work. When my parents divorced, my father's white American, my mother's Indian, and when they divorced, when they told me they were separating, I was shocked. They never fought. I had no clue, I had no inkling. And then they both each remarried other people, people who were in many ways reflected kind of the worldview from which they originally came. And then they had joint custody. And so every two weeks I'd go back and forth between these two very, very different homes.
Priya Parker: And I've talked about this before one is Indian, British kind of Hindu, atheist, Buddhist, vegetarian, landmark for me, meditating, [crosstalk 00:38:10], Democrat, liberal, progressive household and the other one was and is white, evangelical Christian, conservative, Republican, twice-a-week church going family. And I learned about... So, I was raised with, don't talk about politics, religion or sex at the dinner table more culturally. It was something I heard a lot and sort of considered polite.
Priya Parker: And I think as a facilitator and I think about this every time like adrienne maree brown’s question, I think about this every time I'm in any group, even with friends or my cousins, which is like there's a conversation that needs to be had here. What's the most beautiful version of it? And I don't mean like though, everyone's avoiding, I just mean these... And every group you are in, there's a beautiful conversation that could actually change people. You just have to figure out what it is.
Priya Parker: And with this politics dinner and politics sex and money thing, it's not that you have to say like, "I'm a this and you're that." Or like, "How much money do you make?" or these really like blunt questions. Blunt meaning not sophisticated. It's more how do you begin to structure conversation so that we can actually explore questions together.
Priya Parker: So for example, with money, things like, "What were the cultural beliefs about money in the family in which you were raised?" Right? Or like, "What is it that if you had to say what your father would say and one guardian would say in one line about what we believed about money, what would that be?" "How has your relationship to money changed over time?" "What are the three adjectives that you would describe as money." And it doesn't have to be an exercise, but there are beautiful questions to kind of get in and around these elements that are actually the core of life without just hitting someone over the head with how much money they make.
Kerri Kelly: Right. Yeah. I love what you're saying about the sophistication and I'm also hearing like discernment required for a facilitator.
Priya Parker: Yes.
Kerri Kelly: And it's even making me think about radical self awareness, right? Because risk is different for different people in conversations and in gatherings. And I'm not... I'm a pretty provocative facilitator, I'm not afraid to bring the heat. I'm also white and deeply privileged in society. Right? And I'm just thinking about how that too intersects with the skill and the sophistication that I employ as a facilitator depending on who is in the room and what we're talking about. And I'm just curious if you have anything to share about how identity and consciousness around one's identity plays into how we hold space for heat and for conflict.
Priya Parker: It's fundamental. I mean, you can't escape yourself and neither can your group. And identity, if we think about it first just through the lens of power, it goes back to our earlier conversation where depending on the need of the group, I mean, and this is now if I'm thinking about more political conversations or conversation about race or conversations about power in any of its access to privilege or not, who is facilitating that conversation really matters. And that's a design choice, right? That's a use ahead of time. If we are going to have a conversation about immigration or if we are going to have a conversation on organizing around corona in cities, I'm making this up, but whatever it is, who actually should be co-facilitating that conversation, not just from the level of skill but also in terms of their levels of privilege, their levels of trust within the community, their social capital, their identity and their awareness of that identity, whatever it is?
Priya Parker: And then I think there's also just skills that you have in part because however you're raised, your personality. When I was a baby facilitator, one of my first co-facilitators is a woman named Summer Kanani, and she's Arab-American, and we came up together in college. Sometimes when we would facilitate or co-facilitate sustained dialogue trainings, she was really, really... She's great at heat. And the room would start warming up and getting to some provocative topic and she'd kind of start leaning in and was so ready and excited and was like, "Here we go." And my palms would get sweaty and even though I knew it was good, I started breathing heavily and she taught me, I watched what she would do, I watched how she'd hold it, I'd watch how she'd lean in with care and I'd watch her and she was also a friend and I'd watched her in how she moved through the world. And that was, she was welcoming of conflict. And I'd never, because of my family context, I'd never met anyone who was welcoming of conflict. I thought it was a bad thing.
Priya Parker: And then the inverse of that is, I've always felt very comfortable and love holding kind of emotion and if people are... And grief or just simply like sadness. And it's just something that I just know how to do instinctively and I've been trained and she didn't as much. She kind of stop it or try to steer it or in the instant. And so my instinct was to be able to hold and then she could learn from me. Right?
Priya Parker: So part of this is also, yes, there's an element of power and privilege and identity and race and gender and knowing who you're speaking to. But I think the second thing is also our conflict styles affect our groups. And if you have power, whether you're an organizer or whether you're a team leader or whether you are the head of the volunteers somewhere, your conflict style is going to be mirrored by the group if you have power. And so to be actually aware, "Am I conflict-seeking or conflict-averse? And whichever I am, how do I also turn the knob up of the opposite so that my shadows aren't covering the group disproportionately?"
Kerri Kelly: I love that. And I love that it's not just what is the tool, it's who is the messenger for that particular tool based on everything that you just said. I want to close by, you just mentioned that your gift is your ability to hold space for grief. And I feel like we're also in a moment right now where we're experiencing a great deal of collective grief about not just what's happening in this moment, but what's been happening for all of time in this country. I think a lot of what we're seeing is just being exposed, but it's been at work all along.
Kerri Kelly: And I know that you said in your book that collective rituals often help us navigate a hard conversations and help us deal with grief. Right? And with the healing that needs to come along, I'm assuming adjacent or with some of the conflict and heated conversations that we're trying to get at. Do you have any... I'm thinking about like now that we're kind of coming to the close of our conversation, I'm thinking about what are rituals or tools that you employ in some of your gatherings that help... I know it's not like completing a conversation ever because there's never closure to the conversation, right?
Priya Parker: How do you end?
Kerri Kelly: Are there rituals for closing that help people either gain perspective or gain ground or remember their shared identity or find some access to healing that allows them to leave and continue the work?
Priya Parker: Yep. Beautiful question. I'll just touch on grief first. And I would say that as a facilitator, I think my instinct is actually even more just being... Is comfort with emotional vulnerability. And then grief is one of the deepest forms of that. And I think we are in a moment where we are going to be starting more and more to be figuring out how to collectively grieve and whether that means imagining or re-imagining what a funeral looks like in a moment of social distancing or memorials and this is going to be deeply, deeply important to figure out how to do because it's going to be traumatic.
Priya Parker: And I think the two resources that I learned from, one is the Dinner Party. They are a group of 20 and 30-somethings who originally started by having dinners all over the country, self facilitated to... For [crosstalk 00:46:53].
Kerri Kelly: [crosstalk 00:46:54]?
Priya Parker: Yeah, exactly. Has she been on?
Kerri Kelly: No, but I know her.
Priya Parker: Yeah. And they are now realizing kind of over time that more than just the loss of a loved one, they've become facilitators in loss. And they have a wonderful new handbook out. And the other person who I think is thinking about this in very creative ways is Valerie Kaur. And I don't know when this podcast will be out, but tomorrow evening, she's experimenting, she's hosting a live collective grieving on Instagram. And again, I'm just curious what that even looks like. And I think grief and funerals are forms of endings and marking endings. And I think some rituals that I do to mark a close is, at first I start signaling that there will be a close 10% before it's closed.
Priya Parker: So I often say gatherings don't often end they stop. Meaning like, "Oh, it's three o'clock, okay everyone you can get your luggage here and the last shuttle is leaving. You better go run in here. Thank you so much. We'll send out an email." And so the first thing is to just pause and be conscious that "I need to actually close this up." And I've been experimenting with different ways on Zoom. I was facilitating a call a couple of weeks ago and we've been starting to, with one group I'm working with to shorten our calls. So we have had a number of day long gatherings canceled and trying to figure out what can we now ask of our participants to kind of push the social issue forward and have decided to limit it to one hour calls at least for now in part for everyone's sanity.
Priya Parker: One hour is very short time to get anything across if you're trying to do kind of really serious work in a larger group. So we're running out of time, I was supposed to have 10 minutes for the close, I had like 30 seconds. And I think I had a checkout question, I think it was going to be something like, "What is one word or phrase that you would like to put into this group that you believe is going to be crucial for us to now do this work and this new reality?" And because we had 30 seconds left, I just said that and I said put it into the chat box. And we had 14 words kind of pop up. And it was a small hack and it's not rocket science.
Priya Parker: But it's like no matter how much time you have, even if it's just the last little squeeze of the minute, I always think in my head, I'm thinking two things. One is, "How can I make meaning of this time we spent together and how do I want to hold my power as a facilitator to remind people of that and to distill and discern, going back to power to make decisions of what I think happened here and to tell them that?" And then number two, "How can I give voice to the people in the room in a way that doesn't take three hours?" And so it goes back again, was like, what's the closing question? And ideally each time it's a little bit fresh and doesn't feel like you're going on autopilot, that would allow people to leave in a way that they're a little bit shifted by what transpired.
Kerri Kelly: Thank you, thank you, thank you for not just for your work but for how you continue to push the edge of it forward. I see you doing that with your new podcast Together Apart, which is all around how we gather online, right? How we're gathering in this moment where we're separated physically, but what we're trying to find social solidarity. Your book is brilliant and I just can't wait to see where you go next with this work. I will for sure be following.
Priya Parker: Thank you. Thank you so much and thank you for inviting us to have conversations at the intersection of power and culture and healing. And to get into the weeds of it because change happens in the weeds.
Kerri Kelly: Well, this podcast is coming to an end. Our work in the world is just beginning. This week's call to action is to reimagine how we can be together apart. And a good place to start is by subscribing to Priya's new podcast Together Apart which is part guide, part reminder of the resiliency of the human spirit to still creatively gather even while we have to be a part. You can subscribe on her website at priyaparker.com and submit gathering ideas or inquiries for coaching on the podcast. Priya's book, The Art of Gathering will change you and how you bring people together so be sure to buy it. And you can follow Priya on Instagram @priyaparker.
Kerri Kelly: Special thanks to DJ Drez for the amazing soundtrack. You can check out his music@djdrez.com. And to our executive producer who puts it all together and makes it sound great, Trevor Exter. And thank you for being here today. You can stay in the know and engaged by subscribing to our free weekly newsletter, welread@ctznwell.org. CTZN Podcast is community-inspired and crowd-sourced. That's how we keep it real. Join our community on Patreon for as little as $2 per month so that we can keep doing the work of curating content that matters for citizens who care. And don't forget to rate us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play. And share the love y'all by telling your friends to check us out.