Why Gather?

I recently started a group. We gather once each month. The group is small, 3 people, probably too small. The first gathering was simply to explore ideas and gauge interest. For our next gathering, we agreed that having a clearly defined purpose for our gatherings and some structure would be helpful.

Getting clear on the purpose for gathering is much bigger than simply listing categories or defining actions.

We can name the verbs of the group. We gather to;

• celebrate

• solve

• decide

• ideate

• rethink

• empathize

• generate

• share

• describe

• publish

• create

These are indeed the actions we will take when we gather and we agreed to take these actions in between gatherings too. And yet after identifying the actions, we still did not define a clear purpose. We need to define the why for our gatherings.

In order to do that, we needed to generate questions. Our questions sounded a lot like this;

• "What do we want to accomplish?"

• "What problems do we want to solve?"

• "What do we want to learn?"

• "What do we want to create?"

These questions guided us to a shared understanding of why we gather and what our group should focus on. By responding to the questions, we not only created momentum and purpose, we got clear on each participants unique perspective for how they see their own individual intentions and hopes for the time we will spend together.

Next, we pulled all of the responses together and synthesized the common threads and clarified the gaps in order to generate one shared understanding of the purpose for our gatherings. With the purpose clarified, we now have the focus needed to take the necessary actions to move forward. We are now able to make decisions and set goals that will help us reach our collective objectives.

Gathering and being part of a community is powerful. It is even more powerful when that group and the subsequent gatherings are guided by a purpose and there is a clearly defined why for our time. The smartest person in the room is the room. When the room has a shared understanding of its purpose, the room and its participants will thrive and flourish in the community.