We feel the shift in the room. We just don't say it. Here's why, and how I try to, every now and then.
Hello friends,
I want to tell you about a meeting I sat in five years ago. I still remember it. Eight people on Teams. A reorg announcement. The most senior person opened with: "I want this to be a real conversation. Push back. Ask questions. Anything goes."
We nodded. We muted. In the end of the call three of us typed "thanks for the clarity 👍" in chat.
The reorg fell apart eight weeks later. Not because the strategy was wrong, actually the strategy was fine. It fell apart because the eight people on that call had silently disagreed with one piece of it, and never said so.
I think about that meeting a lot. And honestly, I've been the person in that meeting more than I'd like to admit.
What I notice in the room (and in myself)
This isn't only a business meeting thing, by the way. It happens in team off-sites, in dinner conversations, in family WhatsApp groups. Anywhere a group of people gathers and there's something obviously in the room that nobody is naming.
Something is in the room, a hesitation, a disagreement, a bit of fear, a tiny piece of grief about what's being lost. It's perfectly visible in the body language of three of the eight people. Sometimes my own body picks it up first. The chest tightens. The stomach drops. Something gets a bit colder.
And nobody, including me, often enough, says anything.
What you get instead is polite agreement. Polite agreement looks like alignment. It is not. It's six different versions of "I'll do my best to make this not crash, quietly, by myself."
Why this is so hard
Noticing is the easy part. Saying it out loud is the hard part. And the reason is, mostly, fear.
Fear that if I name what I'm sensing, I'll be wrong about it.
Fear that if I name it correctly, I'll embarrass someone.
Fear that I'll look like A Person With Feelings in a room that's trying to be all-business.
Fear that I'll be seen as the difficult one. That next time, I won't get invited.
Fear of the silence I'll create, and then have to sit with.
I notice all of these in myself, regularly. So when people I work with tell me "I just couldn't find the right moment to say it," I really do get it.
The deeper thing, I think, is that most of us have learned somewhere along the way that naming what's actually in the room is a risk. Naming gets you labelled. Naming creates emotional and social work that the agenda, or the dinner, or the reunion, doesn't budget for.
So we don't.
What helps (sometimes)
I don't have a clean five-step practice for this. I'm not sure one exists. But here's what I've seen help, sometimes, and what I try to do myself.
The phrase "I noticed something" gives the brain something concrete to hold onto. It's neutral. It's not an accusation. "I noticed when we got to slide six the room got quiet." You don't have to be right about why. You just have to name what's there.
It also helps to name the weirdness of naming it. "I'm aware this is a strange thing to bring up, but I'm noticing the energy shifted when we talked about timelines." Saying that out loud lowers the stakes for everyone in the room.
And it helps, weirdly, to be a little imperfect. "I might be reading this wrong, but…" gives everyone permission to disagree. It's much easier for someone else to add a true thing when whoever speaks first has already gone in with an uncertain one.
The thing I keep coming back to is that this isn't really a technique. It's a small, repeated act of choosing to risk the room being a little uncomfortable, in exchange for the room being more real.
It's hard. I don't always do it.
But the times I have, and the times I've watched people I work with do it, are almost always the moments where the group starts trusting itself again.
A small note about size
You don't need to do this every time you notice something. You probably can't. Even doing it once a quarter, in the conversation that matters most, teaches the room something they'll remember: the unspoken thing is allowed to exist here.
That's the whole change. It's hard, honestly, but why don't we try to practice it 2% more. 🥰
Have a lovely day,
P.S. I'm putting together a free Toolkit, five small tools for moments like this, including a chapter called Foundation, You can't fake safe, which pairs directly with this. Going live on zen-and-go.de soon.