chill
Green Lake, Seattle. Photo by the author.
“Connection doesn’t happen on its own. You have to design your gatherings for the kinds of connections you want to create.” Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering
The third chapter in Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters begins with a succinct and unsubtle heading:
“‘Chill’ is selfishness disguised as kindness.”
For Parker, chill hosting isn’t problematic because of the nature of chilling itself or because of its attractive absence of neuroses. It’s problematic because it’s an abdication of leadership. When this happens, she writes, “You don’t eradicate power. You just hand the opportunity to take charge to someone else…you are not easing [your guests’] way or setting them free. You are pumping them full of confusion and anxiety.” Sure, adopting an attitude of chill might sidestep conflict or the possibility of failure (failure to live up to one’s own expectations or others’ examples), but it’s ultimately self-serving. Parker’s advice is straight-forward and elegant, if not simple or easy: “If you are going to host, host. If you are going to create a kingdom for an hour or a day, rule it - and rule it with generosity.”
I don’t typically love appeals to medieval political systems and patriarchal metaphors (I mean, is a “kingdom” even a thing anymore? How many monarchs today actually retain more than symbolic authority over the citizens of their realms?), but, in this case, it’s an easy demonstration of the kind of power that hosts wield but typically fail to recognize: governing authority. The ancient rules of hospitality are written into our bones, the product of centuries of social convention and psychological conditioning, and at some very basic level we understand and respect the authority of a person or group inside their established boundaries, the authority of a king (or queen) over his (or her) castle (or condo). When it comes to gatherings, the hosting sovereign sets the parameters, models the customs, acquires and distributes resources, diplomatically navigates the gathered, and anticipates their needs and desires. How’s the old saying go? With great power comes great responsibility…for hosts, Parker distills this into three discrete goals: protect, equalize, and connect their guests. Still, Parker observes, hosts who approach the task with chill at the fore shirk their authority and fail their guests. In her analysis, chill functions as a safety net for folx who are uncomfortable with holding authority or even acknowledging power dynamics at play. It’s a good thing that we live in a time of growing awareness of social power dynamics, but avoiding or denying the power one wields because of discomfort with the topic or with the very fact that one possesses power (especially if it is not earned or deserved) is, at best, disingenuous and, at worst, damaging to one’s credibility and relationships.
In my experience, Parker is spot-on, but I think she misses an important companion to power at the heart of the problem: authenticity. It’s not just discomfort with wielding power that breeds failed hosts - it’s also discomfort with the expectation of fulfilling a prescribed template or mimicking the masters. Who can match the party prowess of Truman Capote or Anna Wintour, the crafty perfectionism of Martha Stewart, the diplomatic genius of Henry Kissinger or Madeleine Albright? Without significant time and practice, who could possibly live up to Parker’s own projection of what comes with good hosting? The inclination toward chill, especially in an era dominated by stylized and idealized self-depictions in social media, reflects both a fear of failure, of not living up to the standards set by the most popular or most visible exemplars and a lack of exploration and cultivation of one’s own unique capacities and values.
An example that Parker cites to demonstrate the power vacuum that results from abdicated leadership illustrates this authenticity factor as well. In the first class meeting, Harvard Kennedy School of Government Professor Ronald Heifetz begins his course with an experiment.
Instead of walking into the room and taking attendance or launching into a lecture, he sits in a black swivel chair in the front of the classroom and stares at the ground with a blank, slightly bored look on his face. Dozens of students sit in front of him. He doesn’t welcome any of them. He doesn’t clear his throat. He doesn’t have one of his assistants introduce him. He just sits there in silence, staring blankly, not moving an inch.
Parker describes students’ reactions, moving from a heavy silence and nervous laughter to stilted attempts at conversation and problem solving. After five minutes that seem, to the group, an eternity, “Heifetz looks up at the class and, to everyone’s great relief, says, ‘Welcome to Adaptive Leadership.” Stepping out of his prescribed role, he disrupted everyone’s expectations and rather vividly demonstrated what happens in the absence of leadership.
Heifetz’s practice reminded me of a rather unique experience from grad school. I took a course on group dynamics rooted in a theory of the collective unconscious and how groups, and by extrapolation organizations, formed and functioned. The theory proposes, in short, that any group develops a collective unconscious, that members assume explicit and implicit roles within the group according to their personal valences, and that a group is vulnerable to dysfunction if its most essential aspects - its boundaries, system of authority, roles, and tasks - are unclear or eroded. The theory was (and remains) compelling to me - it resonated as much with my experience as a teacher and administrator as it did with my understanding of ritual and, more broadly, cultural construction - and the four essential aspects of group life (boundary, authority, role, task) constitute a kind of diagnostic tool, a starting point for understanding how (and how well) a group, whether it’s a clique of tweens or the European Union, is (or isn’t) functioning.
Participation in a three-day group relations conference was a requirement of the course. The schedule moved us between sessions with the large group of about 150 people and sessions with smaller groups. The earliest large-group sessions had no theme or agenda - instead, the “consultants,” the conference’s leadership team, designed different seating arrangements, giving us a chance to experience and observe what different kinds of proximity and juxtaposition eked out of our collective unconscious. The first and final sessions adhered to a traditional conference setup (a long row of consultants anchored by a center podium, facing straight-line rows of participants), but other sessions’ seating variations included scattershot (chairs randomly placed with no attention to flow, direction, or focus), clustering (circles of small groups), and, my personal favorite, a single spiral starting at the center of the room. As the doors were opened, our only instruction was to take a seat. Virgo that I am, I arrived early enough to be able to watch others enter, assess the setup, and then choose how far into the spiral they’d squat. Anticipation about who would occupy the first seat at the center built steadily. Who, we wondered indiscreetly, would have the gall, the gumption to claim the more visible end of the line (though few paid attention to who might claim the last seat)? After about two thirds of the group was settled, a cisgender, heterosexual, white male took the prime seat (surprise, surprise) to some light applause and nervous laughter.
Instead of a topic to spark conversation in each session, or even an appointed facilitator, we just waited, gave ourselves over to the collective unconscious we’d been slowly revealing, and then…something always happened. Someone was moved to say something - an observation, how she was feeling, a response to something from a previous comment or even a previous session. Some people tried to be funny; some people actually were. Others were provocative, aggressive, even, in their comments. I found myself letting go of any cynicism and self-consciousness, trying to be fully present and open to whatever our collective unconscious needed from me. Despite this, I found myself ensnared in a grudge match with the lead consultant, calling him out among the large group for insensitivities that affronted me and many others in the conference, but no one remembered our sparring matches. Instead, everyone remembered the “big, black cock.”
You read that correctly. You see, in addition to my small cohort and other students connected to our university, the conference included various individuals and groups from outside the school, including a cohort from another university who arrived with their advisor, a prominent voice in the group relations academic world and a consultant for our conference. They stood out - in every single session, at least one of them would provoke the group, framing their prodding as committing to candor and honesty or “leaning into discomfort.” Because everyone loves being told, “You know what you need to do? You need to lean into discomfort.” #howtomakefriends About half-way through the conference, about half-way through the spiral-seating session, and about half-way through my friend John’s comments, one of these provocateurs, seated not far from the center, conspicuously put his coffee mug and notebook on the floor and wordlessly stood atop his chair, executed a full body, vertical stretch, and then just as conspicuously dismounted, picked up his notebook and mug, and sat back in his chair.
Still mid-sentence, John was visibly pissed - not because what he was saying was so important but because of this other guy’s obnoxious intent to continue the pattern of disruption he’d already established. He’d already deliberately self-identified to the whole group as Black and as gay with a tone that almost challenged people to ally with or against him. He might’ve wanted to stir something up, but the unspoken consensus in the room was that he’d gone too far. He was that guy, the attention-seeker, the tantrum-thrower. The majority of eyes were still on John, feigning interest in the rest of his words and poorly disguising our collective disgust and shunning of the provocateur. John finished his comment, and as we returned to now-very-uncomfortable silence I shared a few healthy eyerolls with friends scattered around the room.
A few minutes later, another member of that guy’s cohort spoke. A cisgender, heterosexual, white woman, she said boldly and loudly, “I don’t know why no one is talking about the big, black cock that was in the middle of the room.” Now I was pissed. Did I blink? What did I miss? She went on, clarifying that she meant the provocateur and expanding her accusation to insist that our collective silence and non-reaction to his action, indicated our individual and collective discomfort in the presence of a gay, Black man. She was right to identify our general discomfort, but wrong about its source. Our discomfort stemmed from the sudden shift in the conference. What had started like a Jungian Quaker meeting, inspired by the unconscious instead of the Holy Spirit, had become an overly-intellectualized and wildly polarizing Lord of the Flies. The incident of the big, black cock didn’t just disrupt the session - it profoundly informed our experience in the time that followed. It was a pivotal moment for the entire group, and the emotional intensity of the rest of the retreat was otherwise-inexplicably high. Some saw the moment as proof that the entire experience was ridiculous; others felt it was a useful catalyst to keep peeling back our individual and collective layers.
A few weeks after the conference, word got around that that guy’s cohort and their advisor arrived with the intent to disrupt. They intentionally poked and prodded - toward what end? I’m not sure. A group relations conference is a laboratory, a clinical space that enables experimenting, iterating, and testing hypotheses toward gleaning some insight into patterns and functions of human social behavior, but a scientific laboratory depends on controls that ensure the integrity of the data. Any tampering with those controls dilutes whatever might be gleaned and discredits the experiment. In this case, the integrity of the experiment and its data depended on each participant’s adherence to the principles of the conference, each participant’s commitment to be part of the experiment and not to bend it around their desires. The efforts of these rogue scientists, surreptitiously conducting an experiment within an experiment, didn’t completely discredit the experience, though we did yield unpredictable results. On one hand, one might say that they heightened our understanding of the value of earnestness and ethical adherence. On the other, they demonstrated the vital importance of authenticity and the havoc inauthenticity wreaks.
While Heifetz’s classroom experiment opened his students’ eyes to the chaos and power-hunger that often simmer just below the surface of social engagement, the manipulations of that guy’s cohort demonstrated exactly how social power gets snatched. For Parker’s purposes, Heifetz’s initial persona illustrated the “bad host,” the host whose chill has advanced to frozen, but that guy’s cohort illustrated “bad guests.” The responsibility for a successful gathering doesn’t depend solely on the efforts and forethought of the host; it depends equally on guests’ ability to (ugh…here’s that patriarchal metaphor again) be good subjects in the kingdoms they visit. That endeavor begins with self-awareness, awareness of what one brings to relationships or to a group and awareness of one’s limitations. If a host is responsible for protecting, equalizing, and connecting their guests, then a guest is responsible for arriving with an openness to being protected, being equalized, and being connected.
