Gathering Together
At the end of a week-long training session in London my colleague Bill turned to me and asked if I wanted to go up on the roof of the building and “see if we can see it”.
“See what?”, I asked.
“Where the Beatles performed their last live concert!”, he replied.
The perplexed look on Bill’s face matched the embarrassed look on mine since I considered myself a long-time Beatles fan who confidently asserted — to anyone who would listen, and to many who wouldn’t — that I knew their history very, very well. “Name the B side of the single for “Let It Be” and the name of the producer used in the lyrics” being the sort of trivia question this particular Beatlephile was ready to answer.
Yet here I stood in an office on Saville Row, two doors away from the Apple Building at number 3, oblivious as to why anyone would want to stand on the top of our building.
I picked up what was left of my ego and joined Bill as he asked our head of business development if she wouldn’t mind us going out of her office window and up the fire escape.
She replied, “Sure.”
There really was no other possible response.
Peter Jackson’s documentary The Beatles: Get Back captures 468mins out of the 21 days the Beatles spent writing, recording and rehearsing for a film, album and concert. It provides a window into the relationships, creative process, personalities and (particularly in the case of Glyn Johns) fashion of the time. It is a glimpse of a band pregnant with the talents that would launch successful solo careers for John, Paul (including Wings, “the band the Beatles could have been”), George and Ringo.
It is also a film that shows how people gather in order to produce or achieve some common goal. In fact, what looks like one long gathering is actually a series of gatherings, sometimes within the same day, focused on different outcomes for the group and project as a whole.
For example, there are wonderful moments of collaboration such as when Ringo shares an emerging “Octopus’s Garden” with George and he offers, in turn, options for where he can take the melody. There is, of course, the sublime moment when George and Ringo patiently witness Paul conjure “Get Back” out of nothing. These are gatherings focused on creation and are moments where the participants are matched in terms of space to contribute and expectations about what they are trying to do as a group.
There are moments where those expectations are mismatched. Early on in the series George shares what will eventually become “All Things Must Pass”. He appears to think he is gathering with John and Paul to collaborate on this song. John and Paul, however, seem to behave as if this is a different sort of conversation and proceed to talk about the governance of song selection for albums, almost dismissively referring to George’s contribution as another “Harrisong”. George decides to leave the group shortly thereafter, prompting John and Paul to hold yet another gathering with George focused on reconnecting with him and bringing him back into the band.
There is an episodie where Billy Preston joins the band in the studio and adds a magical quality to the creation of the set list that would eventually be performed in the famous rooftop performance at the end of January.
Interspersed with the musical rehearsals are more formal meetings with music publisher Dick James and a series of (what I found to be rather hilarious) exchanges with filmmaker Michael Lindsay-Hogg on what to deliver in the way of a film based on these sessions.
Time and again, different gatherings emerge, retire, and morph from one theme to the next. In some cases, the group is engaged in creation. At other times, the purpose of getting together is to communicate (i.e., share a new song, update everyone on status, etc.). In other moments we see people gathering together to manage the creative process by huddling together so “see how the song sounds” on tape.
I credit two authors for providing this lens through which to view and appreciate a film like The Beatles: Get Back. Priya Parker and J. Elise Keith, and their respective inquiries into how and why we get together, come together and do things together, served as fresh reintroductions to, and a useful reframing of, what it means to gather. Parker’s The Art of Gathering starts off with an elegant, succinct, and almost Beatlesesque definition of this social phenomenon:
“(T)he conscious bringing together of people for a reason.”
This definition shifted me away from thinking about meetings as a single, undifferentiated archetype describing how people work together, and towards a consideration of the essence of why people might choose to spend time together. What is the purpose for two or more individuals to spend time working on something or doing something together? What is the nature of their work product, or are they gathering for some other reason? What spaces and discourses will facilitate the desired outcomes for the people involved (and what spaces and discourses will inhibit them)? What options for gathering are available? Do each of the participants in the gathering share the same assumptions about what they are working together to achieve? What experience might be designed or facilitated in order to maximize the outcomes for participants?
Needless to say, I was inspired. My Every Little Model podcast co-host, Tricia, and I spent some time thinking about the ways in which we gather in organizations and landed on six genres for gatherings: Gathering to Connect, to Communicate, to Create, to Control, to Coordinate, and to Learn.
We explore these in a little more depth in our inaugural episode, which you can find here:
