The Art of the Art of Gathering

Not a typo! great ideas never came from staring at a Google Doc

✨ Thank you for joining the community craft conga line that is GROUP HUG! I am so glad you are here.✨

the magic of a museum brainstorm // from the vaults of emily hope dobkin

When I worked at the museum, my absolute favorite days were brainstorm days. Corny but true.

Someone would roll out a fresh slice of butcher paper, colored markers would get dumped and roll in fourteen directions, someone else would write the event theme we were planning for in the center in a big starburst: Magic. Borders. Radical Craft. Blue. We’d lean in around the table, sloshing coffees and balancing oatmeal on knees, curators and fundraisers and program leads and teenaged interns, and shout out every single wild idea, adjacent collaborator, or I-know-a-guy-who-might-know-a-guy-who-can-make-a-piano-out-of-bananas as we scribbled them down in hot pinks and purples. 

The energy was just as frenetic, improvised, and clever as the events themselves felt four weeks later. That was the whole point! It was like enjoying a home-cooked meal after arriving and seeing the cook was already having a blast in the kitchen making themselves drinks and cranking music; the food just tastes better.

But I was a foolish 22-year-old then and didn’t know how bad it could be. How many times I would be at the precipice of designing a new gathering, party, meeting, strategy, whatever – with someone who might say they want to generate some ideas, riff, go back to the drawing board, make something really special…and then sit back in their chair and wait for someone to speak a perfectly shaped idea into thin air. Maybe we are all staring at the plan from last year. Maybe it is literally an agenda item in an already 90 minute long meeting. Maybe we are looking at an empty document (jump scare) with a pulsing cursor. 

Shouldn’t it feel better than this? If we’re creating transformative experiences for other people, why don’t we give ourselves transformative conditions to make them in? 

another gem from emily’s vaults

I remember the power of reading Priya Parker when The Art of Gathering came out; your birthday party this year doesn’t have to be like the one you had last year just because. Heck, funerals don’t need to go any one way just because you’ve experienced a certain template again and again. Experience Designers like Abraham Burickson explode these ideas with even more nuance, atomizing each experience into its component parts of framing, narrative, and modality. Priya Parker asserts the gathering doesn’t begin when the party starts; it begins at the invitation.

What if it starts one step earlier? 

It could begin with the planning experience itself. Maybe you’re dreaming up something one-off, like an event or meeting or party or getaway with other friends, or something setting the stage for a bigger effort, like a retreat or organizing kickoff. You might be brainstorming alone, scheming with a partner or two, or co-creating something with a larger group. How do you shape this space to be joyful, generative, and curious? Is there any shaping at all? 

Sometimes it feels like we put ourselves through a ringer of austere, joyless planning and delay the actual delightful, meaningful experience for the thing itself. We shortchange ourselves as planners and designers, and save the joy for others.

To be clear, we are not talking about the strategic planning retreat itself – we are talking about how it feels to plan that experience for others in the first place. Brainstorming for the brainstorm. Kicking off to plan the kickoff. Organizing a meeting to talk about the organizing meeting. (If this sounds boring or frustratingly meta-admin or Meetings Magazine to you, I’m either jealous of you or slightly worried about the quality of the experiences you’re designing.)

Creating experiences for other people is an art; it deserves the same sacred conditions as artmaking. 

This is great news. If you’re looking for inspiration, there’s plenty to find from art and artists. They know what’s up! 

From a letter from the late Steve Albini (RIP) to Nirvana sharing his philosophy to work on In Utero (emphasis mine):

I have worked on hundreds of records (some great, some good, some horrible, a lot in the courtyard), and I have seen a direct correlation between the quality of the end result and the mood of the band throughout the process. If the record takes a long time, and everyone gets bummed and scrutinizes every step, then the recordings bear little resemblance to the live band, and the end result is seldom flattering. Making punk records is definitely a case where more “work” does not imply a better end result.

Planning should be as electric, joyful, curious, or generative as the experience we are planning for. Community practitioners deserve the same conditions they wish to create for others, plain and simple. 

17 SIGNS YOU HAVE CREATIVE CONDITIONS FOR MAKING CREATIVE CONDITIONS

How it feels to create delightfully generative spaces for yourself while making things for other people – think brainstorming the brainstorm, kicking off the kickoff, organizing for the organizing meeting, etc 

• You don’t have to raise your hand to share your idea; it is explicitly, loudly invited or simply contagious because of the energy of many people contributing

• You get to share parts of an idea rather than the whole; you don’t have to come up with something fully baked. Maybe it’s just a name or a feeling or something cool you heard about somewhere else

• There are no templates, no documents from last year, and as little constraining context as humanly possible

• FOOD IS THERE

• Laughter and “YES!” is happening, sometimes more than talking

• It’s happening while doing something seemingly “unproductive”, like over a dinner table or on a walk 

• No one person dominates the space

• You are warmed up/wined and dined a bit before jumping into discussion itself – planning an experience is not another agenda item to be rushed into

• Materials support the feeling - one idea per post-it for max generation, colorful markers or paper for fun, personal lined paper for reflective or curious ideas (this is all possible to do over online mediums too)

• Ideas can be shared in other mediums than just speaking or writing - drawing! Dropping in pictures or links from other inspiration! collaborative playlists to set a tone or vibe! 

• The shared space doesn’t look like it usually does; if you usually sit in rows, maybe you’re in a circle. If on zoom, maybe you’re sitting outside or (my personal fave) placed in a silly immersive view context, like clouds

• Qualities beyond “agenda” or “timing” are being used as a framework, like stories you’ve heard from other people, emotions and a sense of safety, smells, surprises, flow

• You are physically at an inspirational site snapping pictures and squinting up close at things you want to replicate – maybe signage, fun art hanging, layout of a physical space, handout materials

• Time feels plentiful – or intentionally and motivating-ly boxed

• You contribute something completely different than what you originally thought going into it

• You have a wild idea – something very out there – decide not to share it because it’s silly, almost say it, hold back again, and then feel it rush out of you anyway 

• Or even better – you are different coming out of it. You get a little preview feeling of the feeling you hope to create in others. Maybe your mind was changed, or you were reminded of the magic of the group, or you came in tired and left feeling that post-belly laugh looseness

Across all these feelings is disruption of the usual, intimacy with interesting inputs, plurality of voices and contribution. 

Hopefully many of these same qualities will be true for the experience of the thing we plan. 

Maybe that’s a good exercise in itself; what emotional quality do we want to be true for the thing we are planning together? Curiosity, excitement, celebration, playfulness? Great – now pull that feeling forward so you get to feel some of it in the imaginative stage itself. You deserve it y’all.

• At Mother’s Day this weekend I talked to my parents for 3 hours about the ongoing assault on Palestine and student protests. We hadn’t talked this deeply about it all yet. I am grateful that they were generous about what they knew, didn’t know, and wanted to know. Not every family member or friend is like that. I tried to be generous too but I’m sure I annoyed and/or frightened them. We connected most deeply over our shared feelings – our sadness, rage, exhaustion, heartbreak, helplessness. It reminded me how, as adrienne maree brown writes, “confusion is a colonial tactic” which smokescreens devastation, oppression, and most of all – our feelings about it all. Our feelings that connect us to each other and thus our shared power, all of it a tiny antidote to the profound disassociation of watching so much violence being committed in your name with your money. I get furious about how we can’t even talk to our own friends and family members about Palestine and how it makes us feel (particularly if we haven’t talked to them about it yet/recently); it feels like doing the work of polarization for free. If you ever want to talk I am here, thinking and feeling and learning about this devastation, and wishing every day for a ceasefire. 

• Related: It is only shocking when it happens in certain places by

  Garrett Bucks
  . “Where is violence such a tragedy that we know all the victims’ names and stories, and where do we accept that it will be measured only in statistics?”

• Also (much less) related: Why Matt Damon doesn’t want to work for the NSA (what I think I sound like when talking to my parents)

• Another Steve Albini gem on a non-extractive relationship with creative community

• Can’t explain why Reverend Billy and The Stop Shopping Choir brings me such deep joy and hope – they are a wink, they are loud in their reverence, they invite everyone with them, that’s why! But anyway I love every update they’re sending now from their tour with NEIL YOUNG! (thank you Ariana for sharing with me in the first place <3)

• Hosting Capacity as a Measure of Agency by

  Richard D. Bartlett
  WOW gotta dig into this more

  

• “You come with me/So they'll find two less freaks at sea” 🎵