How to fix meetings (w/ Master Fixer Priya Parker) (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

Anne Morriss: Frances, advice we often give to companies is to have fewer, better meetings. We are seeing credible studies that estimate employee time in meetings ranging from 40% of the workday to more than 80%. 

Frances Frei: That totally tracks with what we're seeing. It's astonishing. 

Anne Morriss: It's astonishing. And meetings are a huge opportunity to get things done, to align teams, to reinforce strategy, to communicate culture.

Frances Frei: And that is rarely how we see them being used.

Anne Morriss: Right. According to the London School of Economics, more than a third of meetings are considered unproductive, and it's costing US companies more than $250 billion a year. 

Frances Frei: And I suspect they're measuring wasted time, of which it's AMAssive scale, but we can add onto that how much we're depleting one another, how much satisfaction is going down. Frustration is going up. Like, this is a huge opportunity. 

Anne Morriss: And I want us to keep that framing in mind today because we have a very provocative agenda, which is to fix meetings. 

Frances Frei: Ooh, this is like my love language. 

Anne Morriss: It absolutely is.

All right everyone. Welcome to Fixable, a podcast from TED. I'm your host, Anne Morriss. I'm a company builder and leadership coach. 

Frances Frei: And I'm your co-host, Frances Frei. I'm a Harvard Business School professor, and I'm Anne's wife. 

Anne Morriss: We like to fix things on Fixable, no surprise. And today we are getting after AMAjor source of pain inside organizations, which are meetings and offsites and retreats that are a bad use of everyone's time.

By the end of this conversation, our goal is to go from bad gatherings to great gatherings. Not just good, but truly great, and dramatically increase the engagement value and productivity of the time we spend with each other at work. 

Frances Frei: We are off the frontier. 

Anne Morriss: We are off the frontier. 

Frances Frei: And we're gonna try to get on the frontier.

Anne Morriss: Yes, that's our goal today. I am feeling ambitious, Frances, because we're gonna talk to the preeminent thinker on this topic, Master Fixer Priya Parker. So Priya is of course, the author of the very excellent bestselling book, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters. She's a highly sought after facilitator, speaker, and strategic advisor.

Her ideas have had incredible impact in and beyond the worlds of business and organizations relevant to this conversation and to the world we're all living in. Priya also started her career in conflict resolution and participated in peace processes in Southern Africa, India and the Middle East. 

Frances Frei: The real deal.

Anne Morriss: She, yes, she is the real deal. 

Frances Frei: She's the person to talk to. Unfortunately, I will not be the person doing the talking, but I know Anne is gonna do a fantastic job without me. 

Anne Morriss: Frances, I'm gonna do my best to channel you during this conversation so our listeners still get the full Fixable experience. I'm gonna say goodbye for now, and let's hear from Priya.

Priya Parker, welcome to Fixable. 

Priya Parker: Thank you so much for having me. 

Anne Morriss: We're huge fans of the work that you do, and our goal today is to fix the problem of unproductive gatherings in the workplace. So bad team meetings, bad all hands meetings, bad retreats and offsites. We are starting this conversation from a place of frustration. Because we still observe a relatively high tolerance inside organizations for treating each other's time and talent casually in the form of poorly planned and unproductive gatherings. 

Priya Parker: You are speaking my language. 

Anne Morriss: We have all been having this conversation for a long time. It got accelerated when we were all trying to do this remotely. Where are we in this? 

Priya Parker: Well before the pandemic hit, I remember reading a study that said that the number one cause of employee rage is useless meetings. Too many meetings and useless meetings. 

Anne Morriss: I feel that. 

Priya Parker: The way we meet is on autopilot. Not well planned, not thought through. People throw meetings at problems instead of thinking, right? That was happening well before the pandemic hit. I think in part because of a false notion of inclusivity, or in part because of a confused notion of participation. Everything has just bled out to just become like, oh, a meeting can solve that. 90% of success for any meeting happens before anyone shows up. It's a different type of work, which is, it's thinking before just sending out a calendar hold. Right, right? It's, it's actually creating norms and a set of skills of asking, what is the desired outcome of this meeting? It's helping people learn what a purpose actually is. 

Anne Morriss: So what I'm hearing is that the key to a great meeting is all about what happens before the meeting even starts. So the care and attention you put into planning. So we're actually getting a whole bunch of time back. 

Priya Parker: Back.

Anne Morriss: I love that. 

Priya Parker: It's actually sort of a complicated question. What kind of work is actually really good to do alone? And teaching people that skill of starting to discern when do we actually want to gather versus when is this alone time in and of itself is a skill.

I'll give an example. I was talking with a team of comedy writers. They sort of have a, a weekly show. And before the pandemic, they always wrote all of their jokes together. And during the pandemic, like so many workplaces, there was this sort of interstitial liminal period where everyone stopped doing the way they used to and they started writing jokes on their own. And then they came together in part because it was complicated to coordinate, and the quality of their jokes from the baseline were so much better. A.

B, a number of the comedians who didn't necessarily have a personality of like being a extrovert in the room or putting out their jokes first actually ended up having much more airtime, because they all looked at all of their jokes on a piece of paper first. And so part of what happened in that group is when they could pause and actually think about, in this case, creative protection out of time. It's an element of group intelligence, whatever your field is, to know whether it's teachers, right, whether it's accountants, whether it's a law firm, what do you uniquely benefit from doing together and where and how are you actually uniquely benefiting doing alone? And when you actually just start with that question, all of a sudden you stop the autopilot assumption is like everything everywhere, all at once at the same time. 

Anne Morriss: So one way to make meetings better is to prepare and to think more carefully about what is best done alone, what's best done in a group. What methods are there to improve the quality of the meeting once you're actually in it?

Priya Parker: You know, so many of these shifts are not rocket science. I'll give another example. AMAnager came up to me and she realized that one of the dynamics in her meetings, and particularly in remote meetings, was that she felt like people weren't always telling her like the bad stuff that was happening. 

Anne Morriss: Yep.

Priya Parker: Right? It was like they, they brought all the good, all of the good news, but couldn't, couldn't really have a real conversation. And she called me up, she was like, can I redesign this meeting? And I said, don't redesign the whole thing. Change the first five to 10%. I said have an opening ritual, opening exercise, where you just zip around no more than five minutes, five to seven minutes, and everybody just say they're rose and thorn of the week.

That's it. And do it 10 weeks in a row. And then call me. And, and a few months later I checked back in. I said, what happened? And she said, well, we tried it. I made it a rule. She said that people could share stuff from work or not at work, but arose in a thorn, meaning the best part of the week. And the worst few people who really loved it, there are other people, not totally sure, but we kept doing it.

And over the course of week three, week four, people started taking more risks. For some people, sharing stuff from outside of work felt safer and vice versa, but people started expanding the geography of what they felt safe sharing, and they started to get to know each other better. By week six, a different thing happened, which is the first 5% started to have an effect on the other 95% of the meeting because they started to normalize thorns.

Anne Morriss: And make problems discussable. 

Priya Parker: Absolutely. 

Anne Morriss: And I love both of these examples. It profoundly changes how work gets done and the quality of work that comes out of these settings. 

Priya Parker: So many times in our meetings also we inherit old assumptions or someone else's assumptions of what this meeting is for. Right? Like, oh, you take over the faculty department chair or you take over the heart surgeons Wednesday meeting, and I know of a executive director, she got, she joined a nonprofit. And took over and wanted to, before she joined, she happened to attend the previous executive director's final board meeting as kind of the shadowing period.

And she looked and she felt sort of like an, you know, an alien coming in from another planet, just watching what are the dynamics here? And she realized that basically the board said almost nothing, and the executive director was presenting the entire time. And at the end of the meeting she went to the staff and she was like, what, what's going on here? And they said, oh, don't, ugh, if we can give you any advice here, you wanna keep that board off your back? Do not give them any information. And she was like, that's... 

Anne Morriss: Part of my job. 

Priya Parker: Yeah, yeah. Part of my job. But also like, I need help. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. This is such a common issue when people inherit new roles, but it's important to remember that you have a lot of agency here.

You don't have to do the same things, and you don't have to do them the same way as the person who had the role before you. 

Priya Parker: Yeah. And so she went in and she told her staff, she said, I want you to, over the next two weeks, send me what you think are our biggest challenges. And, uh, collected them, chose three, and she reorganized her entire board meeting on those three challenges and everyone was shocked. Shocked. And how we spend our time at meetings, our reflections of our assumptions about power, our mental models of what we are doing as a team, and she basically shifted the social contract from the board as being somebody or people to get off your back and to keep at arms length versus a board as being your most crucial and relevant partners.

But she did that through the scaffolding of a meeting. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah.

Priya Parker: Right? It's not like meetings are these like other things in life. I often joke that meetings are the Trojan horses of the conversations we've been avoiding, because they force people to say, oh my gosh, what am I gonna say in front of this group? Or, wow, what are we gonna present? Or what should be on that deck? Or who should actually go first? 

Anne Morriss: Right. 

Priya Parker: And so when you get really elegant at being able to create and coordinate this group life, it's the meeting, it's the conference, it's the leadership offsite where your norms are created and where people start feeling and seeing, is this a place I wanna be?

Anne Morriss: Love it. Um, on the other side of the spectrum in terms of stakes is the world of improv. Uh, we recommend it to everyone. I think I have spent some time in some of the, uh, some of the sandboxes where you've spent some time, Boston Improv and elsewhere. 

Priya Parker: You've done your research. 

Anne Morriss: I did it because I was interested in this challenge of spontaneous communication.

What are some of the lessons from that world that you bring into this work? 

Priya Parker: I love so much that you are making the connection between improv and, and dialogue and facilitation, because to me it is the same thing. Whenever I coach people, I coach leaders, I almost always assign them just like seven weeks of an improv course, wherever they are in the world.

Uh, there's improv comedy, but in, there's improv kind of theater, which is basically a type of like acting exercises that theater directors came up with in the sixties and seventies and eighties when they started feeling like their ensembles, their actors were getting really stuck and really stuck on the scripts. Really non-creative with each other. But it's basically a group of collective exercises that help actors get in touch with themselves and get actors to get in touch with a group. And I use these tools in almost every type of group conflict dialogue work that I do, in part because it's fun. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. It brings, it brings joy into the room. 

Priya Parker: And conflict's not, it brings joy into the room and brings humor into the room.

People like learning a skill. So what I mean, it's, I've done this with teams, with, years ago I was working with a group of four partners, senior partners who all worked with a, were owners in a firm, and they just had a lot of interpersonal teaming challenges. And I, I flew out to meet them all. To meet them, and I had two days with them and I basically, for six hours, I didn't, they wanted to talk about, get into the weeds of all of their fights, and I said, for six hours we're gonna do nothing but improv games.

And they were very skeptical, but the, and for two hours I did one exercise and what it was, it's a very simple improv exercise, which is you put people into a circle, close their eyes and to be or not to be, and they close their eyes and to just, can they collectively say this line in a way that sounds like one person.

Anne Morriss: Wow. 

Priya Parker: And just simply doing that for 60 minutes, they, all of the dynamics of the relationships were revealed. He always leads in this certain way. She's always rushing me. This is, you always think you are the one who's actually controlling the game. I can't believe you wouldn't match my tone. You go slightly lower. You always have to do it slightly different than someone else, right? It was all there. And it was such a quick and oblique way of actually getting into the core, their core crap, but in this way where it was like fun and interesting and gave humor and they could start laughing at themselves and they could actually see what they were doing because everyone else could see, like you just did that in a German accent. Why are you putting, like we weren't using a German accent! Or you know, whatever it was, but it allowed to give it this different context, which I think whether you're AMAnager or a leader to like be influenced by other fields and be able to use different languages to help people see themselves is a powerful tool.

Anne Morriss: Yeah, amazing.

So I wanna go deeper in how to find purpose in meetings. Let's say I'm hosting an Ask me Anything event for my employees. In my mind, my purpose is to answer their questions. So can you elevate what I'm doing here? 

Priya Parker: We have a Art of Gathering digital course that, uh, students take together to reimagine a high stakes gathering in their workplace around their life.

And the first unit is all about purpose. And in all of our surveys, people often say that this unit is the most powerful unit, because they didn't, they thought they knew what a purpose was and they didn't. So answering people's questions is not a purpose, it's an activity. And so as you are thinking about what is my purpose of an AMA, I would ask you, well, why are you answering their questions?

Anne Morriss: I believe in transparency in leadership, and I want them to know what's going on in the company. I'm also interested in knowing what's on their minds, so that's helpful to me. 

Priya Parker: And what do you believe, if you are able to answer their questions, what do you believe will happen? What's your hope if they go through these AMAs? 

Anne Morriss: They'll go back and focus on their work and not be distracted by what other people are doing at the company, namely me.

Priya Parker: Because you assume that they don't know that they're distracted because they don't feel like they're connected to decision making?

Anne Morriss: No, I don't think about connection. 

Priya Parker: So what I would say truly, it depends. 

I don't know. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. And I'm just trying to channel, channel a point of view. And this is a healthy point of tension for me in this conversation.

And I don't, I'm gonna try to channel my co-host wife who's not here, but I am a full on total believer. You know, like I am an improv trained, let's make people uncomfortable. It's all good. I think she identifies on the other side of whatever that spectrum is, in not starting at the premise that this kind of disclosure or this kind of vulnerability is always a good thing in the workplace.

So if you're trying to bring...

Priya Parker: I wish she was here.

Anne Morriss: I know, I know. 

Priya Parker: I, I wish she was here because I would say I agree with her. So what I'm trying, I'm not trying to get you or you fake CEO to say I want connection. Connection is just one outcome, and sometimes people are overly connected. I've worked with teams where they have no boundaries and so much of what they need to do is be less vulnerable with each other. So connection is not an end good in and of itself. What I was trying to do there on the AMA is getting you really clear on what the outcome is for an AMA. What is the purpose for it? So is it to build trust? Is it to increase productivity?

Is it what I think? 

Anne Morriss: Lemme me earnestly channel this, is that I wake up every day and I'm trying to find a foothold to improve the performance of this organization. And a forum like that is a chance to talk about the strategy, talk about where we're going, celebrate people in the room who may have, have overcome challenges that someone else in that room might have to, to reward the people who are kicking ass publicly.

Like it is a chance for us to come together and reconnect with the reason that we have all joined this team, which is to go out and win. 

Priya Parker: I think that's a great purpose. 

Anne Morriss: Is that a purpose? 

Priya Parker: Absolutely. I think leaders who do AMAs quarterly help people metabolize what's actually going on in the company, help people feel like they, it depends on if it's in the slack or what, you know, technology you're using, help people just visually see each other's names. Help people understand how a CEO is thinking about something, the language they use to describe something. It's, AMAs are one of the most powerful low lift ways. They're also high risk. So the leaders I know who use AMAs really well often have legal counsel sitting next to them and won't necessarily answer everything but might say, I'm not currently able to answer that, but thank you for the question. Right? So it's not full transparency, it's using the right levers to be able to help a large group of people feel connected to the mission. Forget connected to the CEO or not. Connected to the mission, connected to their work. Connect, and helping them understand and dotting the, crossing the lines and connecting the dots across the things that they can't see. 

Anne Morriss: Beautiful. And if I am trying to actualize this, and I'm going into host my own AMA or team meeting, or wherever I am sitting in this hierarchy.

What does it look like? Is it a purpose that I am getting in touch with myself? Is it a purpose that I am declaring to my team? Is there some operational transparency here? Like here's why we've come together? 

Priya Parker: Yeah. I think it depends on the context and the gathering and the, and often if it's like for a large organization, there's usually an internal purpose and an external purpose.

The internal purpose is the one that you tell your team and you try to, and you try to design, design the meeting for, and the external purpose may match that, or it might be a different language, but a purpose. I wouldn't get bogged down on purpose. The purpose is just the first step. So once you know what the purpose is and once you're clear on it, then to design for that outcome and so... 

Anne Morriss: So it's an inside job. It's me getting in touch with my purpose and intention for this gathering, and then the design of the meeting. And what happens next is based on that. 

Priya Parker: So, and I would even maybe slightly change the language, is like you articulating your purpose, right? It was like, what is actually the purpose of this meeting?

And so when you have a really good purpose, first of all, it's specific and disputable, people can disagree with it. It helps you make decisions. So a really good purpose more often helps you know who not to invite than who to invite. A really good purpose excludes people. A really good purpose helps you understand who and where those AMAs are for and who should actually not be on that call.

And so a huge part of purpose isn't actually this like mushy, heartfelt thing. 

Anne Morriss: Yep.

Priya Parker: Purpose is like a, purpose crystallizes. I, I often joke, purpose is your bouncer. Right? It allows you, it helps you understand who should come in and who should come out. And one of the reasons to go back to the beginning of our conversation that people over meet is because we don't know how to exclude. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. I love how you've reclaimed the word exclusion. 

Priya Parker: Yeah. And so much of, I think why we waste each other's times is because when we haven't actually paused to say, who is this for? We also then aren't able to, when someone says, Hey, can I come to that meeting? Articulate why they can't. 

Anne Morriss: Right. Then it feels personal because I'm gonna interpret that negatively 'cause I'm a human being and that's what I do. Yeah. 

Priya Parker: One of my favorite examples is from Pixar. When Steve Jobs returned to Pixar, kind of triumphantly Ed Catmull, the CEO at the time, has this story that Pixar had this like famously creative and highly engineered in person creative meeting, like 18 creatives. And one of their deepest challenges as a company was actually after making hit, after hit after hit, it's actually very scary, right? You have Frozen two, Frozen three, Toy Story 24, like how do you get out and find like a completely new story? And that creativity, particularly among those who've had a lot of a success can actually be a really vulnerable act, as can critique.

And so they designed this 18 person creative meeting to in very specific ways, to come up with new ideas to then critique each other. Steve Jobs wanted to see this famous meeting, and Ed Catmull basically said, you can come, but then we'll have to do the meeting again. It'll just be a dog and pony show.

Right? And so what he was doing was he was excluding with purpose. It wasn't personal, it was purposeful, and Steve Jobs got it. And so a huge part of basically thinking about your highest use of, the highest thing you have is your people's time. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. 

Priya Parker: And modeling, one of the things, one of my favorite pieces, it was like a swan song to Jeff Zucker when he left CNN and you know, controversial leaving all of that. But they were one of my favorite, such a, so interesting. There was this piece written, I think it was by Mitra Kalida, one of his journalists, and it was a swan song for Jeff Zucker's morning meeting. And I think the title of the piece was, the greatest show on Earth wasn't on CNN programming, it was his, it was Jeff Zucker's morning meeting. And it was this like 2000 word piece, literally analyzing how he ran that meeting. And he would demonstrate there that he watches, right, the last 24 hours of programming and pick out some obscure thing that really worked and state it in front of the entire company. He would play people off of each other, but had enough trust so that they really felt like they could and would, he would often elevate interns and junior journalists to have their moment in the sun at those meetings. He understood this is like the core metabolism of a workplace, and so be a leader where people cancel other things to be at your meetings for.

Anne Morriss: Let's talk about being chill for a second. 

Priya Parker: Okay. 

Anne Morriss: So in your book you write, chill is a miserable attitude when it comes to hosting gatherings. Chill is selfishness disguised as kindness. So these are strong words, Priya. 

Priya Parker: Hot button words. 

Anne Morriss: So why are you taking chill away from us? By the way, when I first read this, my reaction was, well, when I have had to work for other people, then the chill manager was the dynamic that kind of worked for me. But we think about leadership as taking responsibility for the performance and emotional experience of the people around you. I feel like that's what you're saying with this point about chill, is step up to the plate on that responsibility. 

Priya Parker: I love that frame, it's taking responsibility. And I will say one thing that I gotta critique on the chill point, which is originally chill comes from black culture. And it actually meant a very different thing, which is come and be home and be present. Don't worry, you can be yourself here. And over time, like so many things. It became appropriated into white culture and it was like, yeah, I'm chill. You're chill. Like nothing to see here folks. And so the meaning itself has been distorted. And part of what I'm inviting people to see is that when you don't actually protect, you are doing no one any favors. I, you know, I went to the Kennedy School and one of my favorite examples of this, you know, that the Kennedy School, they have this sort of famous infamous forum. And the forum was this place where heads of state would come.

Anne Morriss: Very strong norms.

Priya Parker: Uh, very strong, very strong norms. And David Gergen, I don't know if he still hosts this, but for years he would host these. 

Anne Morriss: He dated my mother, if you can believe it. Yeah. 

Priya Parker: Wow. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah, he's not my father, I should say. I should say to our listeners, he's not my father. 

Priya Parker: Hey, listen, you never know you're gonna learn.

So these heads of state would come and it's this incredible experience because basically students and members from the community can get a ticket through a raffle, and you get to go and listen to like literally presidents and prime ministers on a stage. And after the, they would speak, or as a panel, David Gergen would come out with a microphone and he would always say okay, we're gonna ask questions of the community, and he's the host here and he's being not a chill host. He's practicing what I call generous authority. And he says we're gonna go and get some questions and I'm gonna remind you: questions end in a question mark. And everyone giggles nervously. And then inevitably whether speaker two or community member eight, someone winds up and starts basically like giving a monologue.

And David interrupts them within 30 seconds and says, excuse me sir, questions end with a question. And the whole crowd gets nervous and you know, sort of tittering. 

Anne Morriss: I, I'll never forget that. Questions end with a question mark. 

Priya Parker: So he did two things. One is he created a norm. Right? Maybe there's other places where there's dialogue, but not here, not in the forum. I'm the one with the authority right now. I have a responsibility to use your language. And when someone is actually breaking the norm, even though it seems to be mean or rude, he's protecting the group. No one else wants to sit and listen to five minutes with number 12, talking about their opinion on the latest, so and so.

Anne Morriss: Yeah, they could be going anywhere. 

Priya Parker: Right? We could also be, have five minutes from the head of state. Right? He's protecting something. And so gatherers, hosts, use, have power. And when I, the clearest way I would say it is when in, in, in the name of Chill and the name of trying not to be kind of imposed, we often get confused and we underhost and we don't protect people, we don't connect people, and we don't temporarily equalize them. And anything can happen in a group, right? Groups are powerful. Groups are dangerous. Groups can create harm. Groups can create joy. Like groups are a tool. When it is, there's a reason why in countries, you know, descending into authoritarianism, one of the first rights that are to go is the freedom to assemble. Why? Because powerful things happen when groups are connected. When people are connected to each other. This is a lens and it's a skill, and anyone can get better at it. I still make mistakes all the time. It's, it's a lifelong practice. And I, I have this quiz that actually teams often use to start their meetings with as an icebreaker, which is, what is your gathering superpower?

If superpower is like, you have a brilliant aesthetic, build off of that. If your superpower is, you're really good at being the life of the party, build off of that. And yet you can always, like any leader, improve. And so one of the biggest mistakes people often make is they prefer perfection over connection.

Anne Morriss: Mm-hmm. It's so seductive.

Priya Parker: Begin with your strength. 

Anne Morriss: I love that. And if I'm listening, I'm overwhelmed. I've been sitting in meeting all, all day because I'm showing up at a typical workplace right now. If I wanna do one thing tomorrow to make a meeting I'm hosting better, where would you tell me to start?

Priya Parker: Start with the first 10%. Start with changing how you open your meeting and ask your group a magical question. And a magical question is a question that everyone in the group, in this specific group, in your team, not everyone in the world, in the people you are in front of, that everyone would be interested in answering and everyone would be interested in hearing each other's answers. And just like that manager we talked about earlier, you can zip around if it's on a Zoom, you can ask the magical question in the chat box and let people answer it quickly. 

Anne Morriss: What's your favorite magical question right now, Priya? 

Priya Parker: Um, for large teams and town halls, one of my favorite ones is what's the first concert you went to and who took you?

Anne Morriss: Hmm. 

Priya Parker: One of the reasons I love it, whether it's diverse teams, particularly diverse across ages, is all of a sudden you start seeing this, like, it gives context. But it also, when the going gets tough as it does in every team, and like something blows up and you're like, you know what, lemme just pick up the phone. How bad can they be? They went to a N Sync concert. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. Yeah. I love it. One of our favorites is, tell us about a favorite pair of shoes. 

Priya Parker: I love that. I love that. On Instagram, we've been collecting magical questions from people. Some of my favorite recent ones are, when's the last time you blew up a balloon by yourself? Yourself? And why? What was the event? 

Anne Morriss: Ooh, cool. 

Priya Parker: When's the last time you used Sparkle? What is the strangest thing you ever found in your pocket? 

Anne Morriss: Oh, that's a great one.

Priya Parker: If your life was in a, was turned into a movie, what would your opening credit song be? And then you can make a, as a team, you can make a list, right?

You build a Spotify list and you put together, and everyone has their opening credit songs. 

Anne Morriss: Priya Parker, what's your opening credit song in the movie about your life? 

Priya Parker: In the movie about my life? Let's see. I would say maybe On Children by Sweet Honey in the Rock. 

Anne Morriss: Oh, nice, nice. 

Priya Parker: It's an intergenerational ballad that my mother sang to me and I sing to my children now, but it's also acapella.

Anne Morriss: Mm-hmm. It's so revealing, that answer. 

Priya Parker: What would yours be? 

Anne Morriss: Cardi B's I Like It Like That. 

Priya Parker: I love it. 

Anne Morriss: And I'm not gonna explain, I'm not gonna explain that at all. 

Priya Parker: You know, if we did this conversation in a year, our answers might change. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. 

Priya Parker: And so when you get really good at asking these questions, not only do you learn about people, but questions are one of the most powerful ways when you get really good at asking a question for the team, you have a day with the 12 most important people in your company.

What question should they answer together? 

Anne Morriss: I love it. It's a very accessible way in. A very accessible way into thinking about purpose. What is the question we wanna answer together by the end of this meeting? 

Priya Parker: And literally draft it, 'cause then you start actually seeing that's not actually the question. There's so many assumptions within questions and so become really good question asker is a powerful skill. 

Anne Morriss: Priya, for anyone listening who wants to learn more about your work, which I suspect we could round off to everyone, what is the best way to learn more? 

Priya Parker: What a generous question. The best way is to go to priyaparker.com/ted and we've put together a page for your listeners.

On there, we have a guide for how to host a better zoom and hybrid meetings. Um, we put the quiz, find out your gathering superpower on the quiz, and then I have a Art of Gathering digital course that people are taking within their teams, taking as cohorts, taking as individuals. 

Anne Morriss: Cool. 

Priya Parker: If you are running a leadership retreat or if you've been volun-told to run your leadership retreat.

Anne Morriss: We've all been there.

Priya Parker: Um, it's a, yeah, exactly. It's a six week virtual, um, self-run course to basically take an actual gathering you've been tasked with as high stakes, uh, and, and take it and work through the six lessons to come out on the other side of having a real robust, sharp thesis of what this gathering should be. 

Anne Morriss: Oh, sounds very cool.

Thank you so much for your time and insight and wisdom today. It's been super energizing to, to go deep on these questions with you. 

Priya Parker: Thank you so much for having me, and I'm so glad we learned about your mother's dating life. 

Anne Morriss: A really important reason we started this show, and we haven't really been able to get there in any other conversation, so. 

Priya Parker: You know, I do what I can. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah, this is a big win. This is a big win for me.

Frances Frei: If you wanna be on Fixable, please call us at 234-FIXABLE. That's 234-349-2253 or email us at fixable@ted.com.

Anne Morriss: Fixable is a podcast from TED. It's hosted by me, Anne Morriss.

Frances Frei: And me, Frances Frei.

Anne Morriss: This episode was produced by Rahima Nasa from Pushkin Industries. Our team includes Constanza Gallardo, Banban Cheng, Daniella Balarezo and Roxanne Hai Lash. 

Frances Frei: And our show was mixed by Louis at Story Yard.