The Conversation Factory The Surprising Power of Two Hour Mid-week Cocktail Parties
In 2019 My friend Philip invited me to a 2-hour cocktail party at his tiny apartment in the Lower East side. True to his word, the gathering, which was on a Tuesday night, started at 7 PM sharp, and at 9 PM he kicked us out onto Orchard Street to enjoy the rest of our night and/or to get to bed on time (since it was a weeknight, after all!)
I met a whole bunch of awesome people, and if I’m honest, I thought Phil was super cool for bringing such a lovely group of people together. The food and drinks were nothing to write home about, but no one cared. Phil stopped the party two or three times to get us to circle up and introduce ourselves and respond to an icebreaker prompt. It was pretty fun.
He mentioned during the party that he was following an early draft agenda, a recipe if you will, for such gatherings, that was being developed by his friend Nick Gray, who I knew of through other friends. Nick had started a company called Museum Hack that had blown up - in the good sense. They were leading creative tours in Museums around the city, so I guessed this guy Nick knew a thing or two about getting people together.
Cut to 2022 when Nick Gray’s book “The Two Hour Cocktail Party: How to Build Big Relationships with small gatherings” came out. Here it was, four years later! I was fascinated to talk to Nick because I thought “How much could there be to this? Isn’t it all in the title!?” How much could the form have evolved over 4 years of prototyping and testing?!
I’ll tell you folks…this is a polished gem of a book.
If you’ve followed my work, you know that I’m a bit of a nerd when it comes to gathering/facilitation/conversation design. I love card decks about it, books, diagrams, narrative metaphors to fuel creative innovation in gathering science for skilled facilitators to bring diverse stakeholders together to tackle wicked problems. I have coached leaders on this skill, all over the world. I hosted many, many cohorts of my 3-month Masterclass on Facilitation that people lovingly described as “drinking from a firehose” of facilitation while somehow being spacious and deeply mindful of how we gather. Managing complex gatherings is a crucial skill!
Companies that can’t come together to discuss and decide on actions for their biggest challenges will not survive! And I love these types of gatherings - they are never the same, they have to be absolutely customized, and deeply considered.
Nick, on the other hand, has designed the “CheckList Manifesto”, the “Design Sprint” or the “Joy of Cooking”...not for any and all types of gatherings - but for one, single, Life-changing, surprisingly powerful gathering - a 2-hour, midweek cocktail party.
Nick’s book is designed with absolute beginners, or those hesitant or nervous to lead gatherings in mind…but masters of gathering will be pulled in too…I was.
Nick designed this insanely in-depth book to cover everything from snacks to drinks to how to write an invitation to…everything. Where to put name tags. How big those tags should be. You get the idea.
While I am a nerd in the sense of being an omnivorous gathering nerd, Nick is an obsessive-compulsive nerd of this one form…and for good reason.
Nick believes, and I now do, too, that if more people felt more comfortable with having more gatherings we would all be more connected. The midweek 2-hour cocktail party just might save the world.
You can get the gist of the form from this conversation (I mean, even from the title!), but if you’re a gathering nerd like me, you'll absolutely enjoy Nick’s insanely thorough guide, which I found myself flipping through regularly as my wife and I prototyped our own first midweek, 2-hour cocktail party, which we titled a “Serendipity Salon”.
I think we all need more serendipity in our lives, and that’s why I loved the opening quote I pulled from my conversation with Nick - the ability to take a short conversation with someone and turn it into a deeper one, to create a space where your old and new friends can connect with each other…only good things can happen from creating more of that type of serendipity in our lives. My wife and I have hosted two parties like this already and, as Nick has advised, we have our next one in the books! I hope you will, too.
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