This Time, with Purpose

It's not just about gelato

But wait, there’s more…

When I wrote about chimps in space, I regaled you about the time I left a bunch of new managers in a cooking studio with only a bag full of sharpies, a compass, and a set of instructions, sending them on a scavenger hunt across Toronto. They’d been busy making some sort of gelato concoction that only a tech worker could dream of calling “work”, but if we look back at the data from that event, and the work it enabled, it was most certainly work.

If you’re just catching up now, or don’t like my writing, the gist of the chimps post was that gathering is really good, and that being with others is really important.

I uncovered some real rare insights in that one, as you can tell.

In the blind dash for efficiency and optimization, it’s easy to convince ourselves we have a job to do (or a sports team to cheer for, or comic books to find…) and forget that the point of the whole thing – I mean whole thing – is being together. It’s good for our health, our happiness, and some sort of astral projection shit I don’t understand at all. TLDR: it’s good.

The thing is, we humans need a purpose to come together, even for social gatherings, and especially for business things. As nice as it is to think about “group cohesion” and “trust” and all that other stuff, even the most liberally-minded decision maker won’t (and probably shouldn’t) sign off on a giant expense that only has those outcomes listed. They’re running a business, they aren’t party promoters.

Before COVID, many of us would get out of our beds, gather our belongings, and traverse physical space in order to sit down at a desk and engage with a computer for eight hours, and then repeat the journey through physical space and return to the place where our bed is. For some of those years I even biked – 12 months of the year, through every form of Canadian weather you can imagine – just to get to a building where I’d sit in front of my computer for a lot of the day.

But of course, we’d also crack jokes and play pranks and have nice conversations with the people who’d also made this pilgrimage to stare at a screen (which, very frequently, they’d have brought with them from the place where their bed was).

If you ever claimed you were going to the office to hang out with your coworkers, you’d have been handed your notice of dismissal almost immediately, because you were going to the office to do work.

In the near ∞ parts of reality that COVID dismantled, discombobulated, and generally destroyed, it revealed that “doing work” wasn’t a clear reason to travel through space anymore because we seemed to be able to do that in the place where our beds were. We see this behind the amazing figure that a Harris poll revealed, that 60% of Canadians would take a pay cut in order to work remotely.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not using this to claim that remote work is superior. But I think that figure shows us the result of a purpose having been stripped away from one of our most common gathering-habits, with nothing adequately replacing it.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, people will travel across the planet for a destination wedding or a destination funeral, or a weeklong escapade in the middle of the Nevada desert, and we think nothing strange of it. Well, maybe the thing in the desert, but that’s beside the point. Pilgrimages have been around for a damn long time, and whether it was mama & papa Christ heading across Israel to do a census or Moses & Tribe meandering through the desert for four decades to get to Israel, we see a lot of stories of people traveling in the most famous book of all time. When given a reason, we humans will travel.

How does this all add up? What’s the point?

In my last post, when I romanticized gathering at all costs, I cited a Gartner survey that suggests the major value in leadership development programs is related to the peer relationships they garners, not to facts and methods and models and other such things that the brochure may advertise, and fiercely debated by learning & development teams in advance, during, and beyond.

A gathering needs a purpose. Invite a bunch of already-overworked managers to an event “just to get to know each other” and you don’t even need to rent a venue; not only will nobody show up, any responsible leader will nix the thing as soon as they learn of it.

But as soon as you gather your reason to gather, you’re in business. All your stars will start to align. As I said, if you’re bringing people together in a business setting, you aren’t a party promoter. You’re doing business. The good news is, you’ll be doing business more effectively if you create a sense of trust between the people who’re doing business together.

Quite likely the greatest book ever written about purposefully bringing people together is Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering. Again, if you don’t like reading, the gist of the book is what I’ve been discussing in this post: define your purpose, and then plan your gathering.

Up to this point, I’ve been pointing to the reason for gathering with purpose as some sort of unspoken code that exists between people who approve expenses, a tongue-in-cheek conspiracy that demands a reason to approve a gelato-making extravaganza or a river-rafting excursion, or doing trust falls in garishly-lit rooms. About that last one … kidding (hopefully). But there’s a far more practical reason for all this. We humans are complex. We can’t predict what others will do, and if we’re really tuned into ourselves, we realize that we show up in different ways depending on the group we’re with. Spending a day or three on a work retreat with near-strangers can be one of the most draining experiences for a person, and although there’s no Gartner data I’ve found on this one, I’d say it’s probably up there with the drain of running a marathon. Screw that, an Ironman.

Planning such an escapade can be daunting, and the simple matter of moving a group of humans through space requires a ton of energy. Add this to the fact that whether or not we call this “work”, by being in one place you can’t be in all the others. If you have a job, that means you’re not doing whatever you normally do. Gathering comes with a number of costs, including the opportunity cost of not doing your dayjob.

So the stakes are high. And yet, so many work-related gatherings are utter wastes of time because we replicate the shape of all the other offsites we’ve been to, without every asking this simple question: As a result of coming together, what do we hope to be different?

Begin there… and don’t sweat it if your answer isn’t “changing the entire world forever”. The answer to this question is your purpose, and given a purpose your boss will have a reason to say yes, the participants will have a reason to leave the place where their beds are, and all the magic of gathering can begin to take shape.