YouSaid · the spoken record

Priya Parker

lines on the record: 57
first: 2019-05-21
most recent: 2019-05-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“The first event I facilitated, I think, the actual group. So the first event we hosted was the launch opening announcements that sustained dialogue was going to happen. And I'll give two stories. And it was in an auditorium at UVA and it was probably 150-seat auditorium and it was packed. And I had gotten, my co-founder's woman named Jacqueline Switzer, and she and I had gotten friends from all different parts of our social circles to agree to be in a skit. And we wrote the skit and we tried to make it as real, but also controversial as possible to name the things that people often say behind closed doors, but not to each other. And so there was 10 of us at the front of the room. And instead of just talking about, hey, we should all get involved in these race dialogues to help improve race relations. We just started the entire thing as a cold open, which I write about in the book. And it was probably a two and a half minute skit of people.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decide to get involved. You have to decide to figure out an invitation. You have to decide who's going to be in the room. You have to decide what the power dynamics are going to be. You have to set the preconditions. And then the second thing was you start with story. So one of the biggest things I learned as a facilitator was not to start with strategy, but to start with people's personal stories and lived experiences. And to actually take some of the pressure off, not by trying to solve anything, but to just spend time actually cultivating listening to each other's, not perspectives, but experiences. And that was the most transformational part for me. And through starting to listen to each other's stories, if you have a group that's diverse enough, the theory goes, you start actually developing a more accurate map of what's happening in your community. Because if you're, say, you know, a white student at UVA that is, you know, on frat row a lot versus a black student who sings in black voices and has never been to a frat party, you have very different perspectives of what you VA is, for example. But if you start listening.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing it from practice. I mean, both. The process I was trained on is called sustained dialogue, and it was created by a man named Hal Saunders, who was Kissinger's Assistant Secretary of State, wrote the Camp David Accords, saw what governments could do to create peace, and then was also disappointed by what governments could do to build peace, that even through peace treaties, relationships and trust between citizens on the ground don't necessarily change. And he coined this term sustained dialogue after working with citizens for 10, 15 years, first with US and Soviet citizens during the Cold War, and then in Tajikistan. And the first thing I learned was if you want to bring a group of people together, the natural process when people commit to come together over and over again usually unfolds in five stages. First, you decide to engage. And that's a stage we often skip. But the fact is that you have to actually”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did this work. It got pretty dark, and I ended up moving back to the US and did an MBA and a policy degree. And basically began to realize that what I most love was facilitation and the facilitation of groups. And after graduate school, started my own practice and worked with large groups that are in transition, sometimes in crisis, but with organizations, with companies, corporations, political movements, to come in and facilitate complicated sometimes longer term conversations among groups that are trying to figure out their identity, their interests, their vision, and the way forward. So very early in the book, you talk about this notion of”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sustained dialogue, this process at UVA on September 10th, 2001, and then, of course, 9 11 happened. And so it became very needed at UVA and we expanded very quickly. And then it went to 12 and then 16 campuses all within sort of four or five years. And so I learned this process of group facilitation and studied race and political theory, immigration, identity at the University of Virginia. My actual major was political and social theory. So that's kind of the, you know, kind of the way you organize society. And after college eventually moved to India and worked with the Dalai Lama's Peace Foundation doing sustained dialogue but focusing on Hindu-Muslim contexts and conflict. And long story short, I learned a very specific way of bringing groups together who were at odds with one another and for different reasons wanted to make things better.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Onto campus. This was in 2000 What are you? And I thought it was very odd question and I didn't know how to answer it. And I quickly realized that this was sort of racial code. And I was supposed to say I'm biracial, I'm half white, half Indian. And the question bothered me, but more than the question bothering me, the order of the question bothered me because the questions people ask you first when the first meeting you signal what matters in a specific context. And I had never been in such a racialized context before. And so I learned about a process called sustained dialogue over the course of my first year there and began to explore how do you actually change a cultural context in this case, race, that's deeply historically, structurally embedded in a place and became a group dialogue facilitator after I graduated, I worked with the Sustained Dialogue Campus Network and it was the kind of thing where we were the right place at the right time. We launched”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sopria, this is a completely new topic for me, which is always these conversations that I enjoy most. We're going to talk about your book and the framework you lay out in it, but kind of go all over the place as well. I didn't know your background actually prior to you sitting down. So Art of Gathering is the outgrowth of your professional career. Maybe it'd be interesting to start there with telling people what you do and why that lets you learn about this way of structuring people getting together. I'm a conflict resolution facilitator, but for groups. So rather than mediator doing one-on-one, my background is in helping groups that are in some kind of transition, sometimes in crisis, step back and figure out a better way forward. And my work started first in the context of race relations in the US. I worked first as a student and I went to the University of Virginia and I'm biracial. And the first question that people ask me when I came.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source