I found the word “hostmanship” during a late-night reading rabbit hole. The kind that starts with a question about psychological safety and somehow ends at 1AM with you ordering a book from a Swedish publisher you’ve never heard of. The book was Gunnarsson & Blohm’s Hostmanship: The Art of Making People Feel Welcome, and the first time I read it, I had the strange and slightly embarrassing experience of recognizing my own thinking in someone else’s words, written years before I’d formed it.
A few months later, I did something similar with Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering. Different book, different author, entirely different world. But the same feeling. Priya Parker had named something I have been circling around without knowing its name.
This article is a homage to three books. Gunnarsson & Blohm wrote a second one, From Boss to Host, which hardly anyone in my field has read and which turned out to be the most useful of the lot. The article is not a summary nor a comparison but an honest account of what they gave me and why I keep returning to them every time I walk into a room full of people who are about to do something together. Both at home and as a professional.
The man who refused to be a bus driver
Hostmanship opens in an airport shuttle bus in Umeå in February, with snow blowing across the tarmac. The driver, a man named Peyman Nawab, collects stray luggage trolleys from across the car park before departing (visitors to his city deserve a tidy welcome). He detours to drive two frightened young women home in the dark. He pulls over a learner car on a country road to tell them their brake lights are broken.
Gunnarsson is so struck by all this that he later phones the bus company to find him. And when he asks how long the man has been driving the shuttle bus, Peyman corrects him. He is not a bus driver. He drives people around; he makes people happy; he creates meetings. It just happens to involve a bus.
That refusal of the job title is the whole book in one move. And when Gunnarsson presses him on why he works this way, the answer is not personality, not culture, not a sunny disposition. It is a choice, remade every morning. Nobody can ruin his day without his permission.
I read that and something in my professional life clicked into place. I have stood in rooms as a Scrum Master where the job title described maybe a third of what I was actually doing. The other two thirds had no name. It was the work of making a room feel expected. Of noticing the person who arrived carrying something heavy. Of deciding, before anyone spoke, what this hour was going to feel like. Gunnarsson gave that work a word, and more importantly, he gave it a mechanism. If welcome is a choice, then welcome can be practiced. And if it can be practiced, it can be taught.
There is a second gift in the book, and it sits in the part almost nobody reads. The final movement of Hostmanship is not about guests or colleagues at all. It is about welcoming yourself. Gunnarsson argues that every encounter starts in the host’s own interior and that the simplest way to learn to give is to learn to receive.
I did not expect a Swedish hospitality book from 2008 to describe my own household. My partner and I host constantly and are hosted rarely, and we have learned to seek out the receiving end on purpose (the good restaurant is not a luxury; it is maintenance). I had arrived at that conviction privately, through tired Sunday evenings. Finding it waiting in the source, as a structural part of the argument rather than a footnote, felt less like reading and more like being read.
The one that slips through unnoticed
A few years later Gunnarsson & Blohm wrote a second book, and almost nobody in my world has heard of it. From Boss to Host: The Art of Welcoming Leadership is a different animal entirely. Where Hostmanship is a creed, this is a single narrated day. Five executives, one consultant, a Friday, and a dinner. If you only ever read one of the two, and you host rooms inside an organization for a living, read this one.
It turns on at lunch. Gunnarsson is working with the management team of a large convention centre, whose brief to him was gloriously complacent (we have made a lot of progress on service, but we would like to improve even more). At lunch, an English couple from the big conference sits down at an unset table by the window, drawn by the view. A waiter, friendly and older, walks over and tells them they cannot sit there. It becomes a small, awful stalemate about the bill and the table setting, in which he cannot even find the English word for forks. The couple gives up and trudges back to their flock.
The executives are appalled. At the waiter. His age, his English, his manners. And Gunnarsson puts a slide up that I have not been able to unsee since. A lack of hostmanship is always a sign of poor leadership. The waiter is not the problem. The waiter is a reading. He had been told to expect top management and a guest lecturer, and he protected them exactly as he had been taught. The right question was never why he behaved like that. It was why the bosses were sitting at the best table in the first place.
That single move (treat bad hosting as data about the conditions, not as a verdict on the person) is the closest thing to a working method I have found anywhere in the literature. It is also, quietly, the whole thesis of my own discipline, written by someone else in 2011. A silent retrospective is not a room full of disengaged people. It is a reading.
The book then hands you the sentence that named my most persistent professional problem. Gunnarsson calls it the hats. You sit in one meeting as a member of management and in the next as one of the team, and the temptation on the ride home is to switch sides, to become one of us against them, to let the team enjoy a common enemy for half an hour. It is enormously popular. It is universally destructive. And his rule for it is hard, unfashionable and correct. Agree and get the job done, or disagree and get the job done.
Every Scrum Master I know lives in that exact position, and the agile literature has no good sentence for it.
And then he does the thing that makes the book worth more than its ideas. He ends the day by taking the executives to a small restaurant in town, borrowed from a friend, where he chooses the menu, seats them himself, pours their wine and clears their plates while their real host works the other tables around them. The teaching is the hosting. The CEO says it out loud before the end of the evening, more or less: you are our host at the same time that you are leading us. I read that scene and understood what any Hostcraft training will have to survive, being measured against. You cannot teach the craft of conditions in a badly conditioned room.
Never start a funeral with logistics
Priya Parker comes from a different world entirely. She is not a hotelier or a restaurateur. She is a facilitator, trained in conflict resolution, the person you call when a room is stuck or about to explode. Her book is about the design of gatherings, and its best-known scene is a funeral.
A packed church. A man who had towered in his field. People who had been connected through him, greeting each other in the pews for the first time in years, many already crying. The minister rises. Everyone leans in for words of comfort. And he opens with parking arrangements for the reception.
In seconds, Parker writes, the potential energy of the moment was gone. Her chapter title became a rule I now carry into every session I run. Never start a funeral with logistics. Nobody’s funeral opens with parking on purpose, and yet nearly every conference, town hall and Sprint Review opens with it.
Two more of her ideas rearranged my head. The first she states in five words. A category is not a purpose. Ask most people what their gathering is for and they will describe what happens at it. The networking night exists to network. The book club exists to read books. Now try it on Scrum. What is Sprint Planning for? To plan the sprint. What is the Retrospective for? To reflect on the sprint. That circular logic is not a bug in how teams talk. It is written into how the events are taught, and it quietly hands the design of every session over to a template. The template does the thinking the host declined to do.
The second is her phrase “generous authority,” and it resolved a contradiction I had lived with for years. As a Scrum Master, you are told to be a servant leader and also to protect the team, uphold the framework, and stop the Sprint when it needs stopping. Those two instructions sit in permanent tension, and most of us resolve it by shrinking. We go neutral. hold space. We become what Parker calls a chill host, and her verdict on that host is the most uncomfortable sentence in the book. “Chill” is selfishness disguised as kindness. The host who will not intervene is protecting how they will be perceived, at the cost of how the gathering will go. Parker’s alternative is authority exercised with a firm hand but for the guests’ sake to protect them, to put them on equal footing, and to connect them. The authority is justified by the generosity. I have made peace with the harder edges of my own facilitation because of that one idea, and I say her name every time I use it.
Where the books stop
Here is the thing I saw after reading them side by side, slowly, with a notebook.
They all make the same promise. Gunnarsson insists that hostmanship is a choice available to anyone. Parker declares, in her introduction, that everyone can gather well, that it does not rest on charisma, and that some of the best gatherers she knows have social anxiety. I believe both of them. It is the founding belief of everything I am building.
And none of the books keeps the promise. Gunnarsson proves that hosting is possible through a parade of people who seem to have been born doing it. Peyman on his bus. A telephone nurse who has learned to see with her ears. A Turkish restaurateur who calls his building his country. Not one of them is ever shown learning the craft. Even From Boss to Host, with all its models, shows you a room full of executives having a revelation and never shows you one of them practicing anything afterwards. Parker gives us a portrait gallery of the world’s best gatherers, built from more than a hundred interviews. And not a single exercise, progression, or account of what a person who cannot yet do this should practice on Monday morning.
Two founding voices. Both say anyone can learn this. But neither shows one person learning it.
There is a second gap, and it took me longer to see because I live inside it. Parker’s world is the bounded occasion. The gathering convenes, it is designed, it ends, everyone disperses, and she flies home. Gunnarsson’s world is the opposite: the standing relationship, the colleague you see every day, and the guest who returns. Neither of them describes my own typical Tuesday. An Agile Coach lives in a standing relationship punctuated by designed occasions. The same twelve people, every day, for eighteen months, interrupted by retrospectives and plannings and the occasional very hard conversation. Parker’s rules work because they expire when the guests go home. My room comes back on Wednesday and remembers everything. She can raise the temperature and leave. I have to live in the heat I raise.
Naming those gaps is not a criticism of any of the books. Gunnarsson wrote an inspiration book and a book about leadership, and neither of them claims to be a curriculum. Parker wrote a design book and it is a masterpiece of its kind. The gaps are simply where their work ends and where somebody else’s has to begin.
Hostcraft standing on shoulders
I am building on somebody else’s work. I call it Hostcraft, the craft of conditions, and I want to be precise about what it owes these books because the debt is large and I would rather state it myself than have a reader discover it.
From Gunnarsson, it takes the founding permission. Hosting is chosen, and what is chosen can be trained. It takes from one book the claim that a host who is never hosted runs dry. And it takes the working method of his other book, the one that treats a cold room as a reading rather than a verdict. From Parker it takes the conviction that gatherings are authored, that purpose comes before format, and that the host’s authority, generously used, is a gift rather than a power grab.
With Hostcraft, I intend to, and must, move beyond. Else, Hostcraft would be a rehash of the same concepts, with a Dutch accent. The three books showed me what masterful hosting looks like. They never showed me how an ordinary, willing professional becomes capable of it, week after week, in a room they cannot leave. That is the work. Building the pedagogy the founding texts never wrote for the practitioner, none of them describes.
I will get parts of it wrong, and I intend to be wrong in public, because a discipline about welcome that locks its doors would refute itself. But every piece of it will trace back, one way or another, to a snowy car park in Umeå, a waiter who could not find the word for forks, and a minister talking about parking.
One taught me that the room begins inside the host. Another taught me that a bad room is telling you something about the people who built it. Yet another taught me that the room is built before anyone arrives. Somewhere between those three sentences is every room you will ever walk into, including the one you are sitting in right now. Look around it. Somebody made it feel this way, on purpose or by neglect.
Which one was it?
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This blog post is part of a series on Hostcraft: the craft of conditions. Presence. Reading the room. Recovering energy. Creating the conditions in which the true thing can finally be said. None of that is personality. All of it is practice.