TGG BASECAMP: GATHERING WITH PURPOSE

“Gatherings are important to the human experience, but too often we don’t give them much thought.”
– Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering

It’s undeniable that the landscape of gathering has changed so much in the last couple of years since the pandemic. At The Garage Group, it has felt like a pendulum finding its new homeostasis – going from what was a primarily in-person way of operating to being fully remote to a now hybrid-work environment. As we start to settle into this new way of working, we decided to slow down some and apply our entrepreneur mindset to bringing intention, collaboration, and humility to this transition. Because changes in landscape like this can often come from a top-down approach or be implemented without a collective mindset, and that simply doesn’t align with our understanding and compassion for how much this change impacts all of us individually and as an organization.

Which brings us back to the above quote by Priya Parker, author of the book “The Art of Gathering.” We felt inspired by Parker’s work because it is more rare for us to all be together, and when we do, we want it to be impactful for everyone involved. She writes in her book, “When we don’t examine the deeper assumptions behind why we gather, we end up skipping too quickly to replicating old, staid formats of gathering. And we forgo the possibility of creating something memorable, even transformative.” We resonated with this sentiment and it ignited us to think differently about how we gather. So while planning our recent tri-annual Basecamp event, where our full remote team gathers in-person for inspiration, equipping, and connection, we started with purposeful gathering in mind and intentionally oriented our time and activities.

A few learnings from our ever-improving Basecamp:

• Regrounding our team each time in our mission, vision, and operating principles is not only core to a successful kick-off, but essential to re-setting the foundation for the months ahead.
• Be proactive about building and strengthening relationships with team members while you have the rare opportunity to do so in numbers. We found that this best comes through a mix of connection opportunities, ranging in size. While creating space for 1:1 connection (which has a lasting impact on relationships), we also put a lot of investment and intention into our larger team building activities (ex: everyone was able to share why they chose to work at TGG). We also infused conversation prompts into small group dinners of 3-4 people to create more intimate discussions, which ended up being many of our team member’s highlights.
• The importance of workshopping our shared “gathering agreements” (a more inclusive and autonomous version of “rules of engagement”) as a team for how we’ll interact with each other and reminding ourselves of these each morning; our favorite agreement was what we called “2 ears, 1 mouth” – an invitation to consciously listen first, then be open to share.
• But first, celebrate wins! While it is easy to get excited and inspired in the company of others at our Basecamps, which often leads to a lot of vision-casting conversations and talks of what we are building together, we all agreed that we must first acknowledge and revel in our progress!

The excitement, momentum and new connections of these Basecamp events really carries our team forward through the next quarter.

A couple of things to consider for starting the conversation with your own team:

• Why are you gathering?
• What is the purpose?
• Where is the meaning?

In a conversation with some leaders from Slack on Brave New Work’s podcast this Summer, they laid out that meetings are helpful when we are debating, deciding, developing, or discussing. You can listen to the podcast here.

Try “Marie Kondo-ing” your existing meetings. What we mean by that is just like pulling out all of your clothes and laying them on the bed (check an episode out on Netflix if you haven’t seen), write out ALL of the meetings that occur on a weekly, bi-monthly, monthly, semi-annual, annual, etc. basis and then ask yourself the above questions. You may not only find redundancies, but lack of meaning.

While this is a work in progress for us, we are loving where we have started and what’s next for us is to take this intention to hybrid-working, and beyond.