Some years ago I bought fifty copies of Priya Parker's book and gave one to every person on my team.
I did this because I had just finished reading it and felt, with some urgency, that the people around me should read it too. Parker's argument is deceptively simple: that most gatherings fail not because of poor planning or insufficient resources, but because nobody has asked the most basic question -- why are these people here together, and what is this gathering actually for? The venue, the food, the schedule: none of it matters if the answer to that question is unclear or unconsidered.
I had grown up with gatherings that always seemed to know their own purpose, even when that purpose was never stated aloud. In Ireland, the house was always open. Extended family, friends of friends, neighbours, people who had just arrived from somewhere else -- everyone was welcome and there was always enough, or close enough to enough that it didn't matter. Those evenings had a particular shape: long meals that became longer conversations, and then, almost always, music. Not organised, not announced. Someone would sit down at the piano. Someone else would start to sing. A guitar would appear from somewhere. Classical, jazz, folk, whatever the person in front of you happened to know -- all of it welcome, all of it offered freely, all of it received. You stayed until it was over, and it was never really over, just gradually, reluctantly concluded.
When I read Parker's book I recognised something in it that I had always known but never had the language for. Those evenings worked because somebody -- my grandmother, an aunt, whoever was hosting -- had made a decision, usually invisible, about what the gathering was for. Not a formal decision, not a programme. A disposition. An intention to create the conditions in which people could be genuinely present with each other.
What struck me later, when Taillefer and I discovered we had both read the book and been shaped by it in similar ways, was that this was not a coincidence. It felt, and still feels, like something closer to confirmation. That what we were each, separately, trying to understand and build toward was the same thing. That the company we were beginning to imagine together was, at its root, an attempt to design those evenings on purpose. To bring together people who deserve to know each other, in places that have something real to offer, and to create the conditions -- unhurried, considered, generous -- in which something genuine can happen between them.
That is still what we are trying to do. Everything else follows from it.