Just the other day, I listened to an interesting podcast with the author of “The Art of Gathering”:
Here is a link to the podcast:
Thanks for sharing this! I’ve had Priya’s book on my reading list for a while and after listening to the podcast, I think it moved up quite a bit.
I like how she speaks about gatherings rather than meetings.
I also liked how she thinks of hybrid meetings as three meetings: One is among the people in the room, the second is the virtual meeting (on Zoom or wherever) and the third is the meeting between those two meetings. And she suggest that that third meeting may be less important than we think, depending on what the purpose of the gathering is. There may be situations where the online folks can talk to each other and the IRL people do the same in their room.
Here is another quote from her from the podcast. It’s about how the pandemic
I think what this global pandemic did is at the simplest level, by taking gathering from us, we began to see that gathering actually shapes our life. So when we couldn’t meet at work to exchange information, we couldn’t gather to wed or to mourn or to celebrate or to fundraise, we began to actually just see that this thing we called gathering is something that is fundamental to how life and work and love happens. Institutions primarily were looking at virtual gathering, virtual meetings, virtual town halls. How do we actually create meaning? There were a series of moments in which tech companies, global companies started denouncing back-to-work plans. (…) And I think part of what is now happening in this next phase is there is a deep rethinking and negotiating and grappling with where and when and why should we meet and for what purpose and how do we do it in a way that ideally is better than it was before the pandemic?