Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:04)
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:24)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:49)
This week I'm hosting an investor retreat and so thought it fitting to release this conversation with Priya Parker on the art of gathering. I've been interested in the topic of community and gathering for some time and along with the book The Art of Community, Priya's book on the art of gathering is by far the best I've read. It is both conceptually interesting and extremely practical. In the book there is literally a table for how big a gathering space should be per person sorted by the type of vibe that you're after.
We had a time constraint but I could have talked to Priya for much longer. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did and that it inspires you to do something new and different with friends, family or colleagues.
Priya, this is a completely new topic for me which is always these conversations that I enjoy most. We're going to talk about your book and the framework you lay out in it but kind of go all over the place as well. I didn't know your background actually prior to you sitting down so Art of Gathering is the outgrowth of your professional career. Maybe it'd be interesting to start there with telling people what you do and why that lets you learn about this, this way of structuring people getting together.

**Priya Parker** (1:49)
I'm a conflict resolution facilitator but for groups so rather than mediator doing one on one, my background is in helping groups that are in some kind of transition, sometimes in crisis, step back and figure out a better way forward. My work started first in the context of race relations in the US.
I worked first as a student and I went to the University of Virginia and I'm biracial and the first question that people asked me when I came onto campus, this was in 2000, was, what are you? I thought it was a very odd question and I didn't know how to answer it and I quickly realized that this was sort of racial code and I was supposed to say I'm biracial, I'm half white, half Indian and the question bothered me but more than the question bothering me, the order of the question bothered me because the questions people ask you first when they're first meeting you signal what matters in a specific context. And I had never been in such a racialized context before. And so I learned about a process called Sustained Dialogue over the course of my first year there and began to explore how do you actually change a cultural context, in this case, race that's deeply historically structurally embedded in a place and became a group dialogue facilitator. After I graduated, I worked with the Sustained Dialogue Campus Network and it was the kind of thing where we were at the right place at the right time. And we launched Sustained Dialogue, this process at UVA on September 10th, 2001 and then of course, 9-11 happened.
And so it became very needed at UVA and we expanded very quickly and then it went to 12 and then 16 campuses all within sort of four or five years. And so I learned this process of group facilitation and studied race and political theory, immigration identity at the University of Virginia. My actual major was political and social theory. So that's kind of the way you organize society.
And after college, eventually moved to India and worked with the Dalai Lama's Peace Foundation doing Sustained Dialogue but focusing on Hindu-Muslim context and conflict. And long story short, I learned a very specific way of bringing groups together who were at odds with one another and for different reasons wanted to make things better.
And did this work, it got pretty dark, and I ended up moving back to the US and did an MBA and a policy degree and basically began to realize that what I most love was facilitation and the facilitation of groups. And after graduate school, started my own practice and worked with large groups that are in transition, sometimes in crisis, but with organizations, with companies, corporations, political movements, to come in and facilitate complicated, sometimes longer term conversations among groups that are trying to figure out their identity, their interests, their vision and the way forward.