“This needs to be a time of deep experimentation and bets,” gathering expert Priya Parker told us in June 2021, as many organizations were beginning to figure out their office returns.

Two years—and many hybrid gatherings, return-to-office battles, and meeting resets and reckonings—later, we went back to Parker, author of the book The Art of Gathering and a digital course of the same name, for her thoughts on how that experimentation has played out. Here is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity: