Well, who agreed that?

“We’re here today,” my colleague and I confidently announced from the front of the room, “to talk about what technology is going to do to the business, and how you should respond to it.”

A brief pause.

“Well, who agreed that? I don’t think that’s what we should be talking about at all.”

Ninety seconds. That’s all it took. With breathtaking speed the leadership team rearranged itself into two factions and got busy arguing about everything: the tech, the agenda, who got to decide what, who’d even decided they should be there. You name it.

Our workshop had descended into World of Warcraft. And we were fast in danger of becoming NPCs.

“Stop,” I said.

“What just happened?”

What did just happen?

At one level, the answer is assumptions. We’d assumed, because one person had told us, that this was a team broadly agreed on where it was going, even if it couldn’t yet agree how to get there.

The problem with assumptions is that they stay out of view, right until the moment they don’t. Sometimes they never surface at all: they just sit there, shaping events, like a malevolent backroom operator. That didn’t happen here, of course. The assumptions had burst through in glorious technicolour.

Note to self, I thought: never let a single view shape anything again.

But there was something else, hidden in the ease with which this group had descended into what looked like open conflict. Might this have been a team for whom this sort of conflict was a comfortable place? Perhaps, consciously or otherwise, it suited them to keep their assumptions to themselves until an opportune moment arose. Perhaps it even suited the person who briefed us to bring in a stranger the whole team could line up against.

Tuning in… ah, there it is: the voices are raised, but the energy feels quite… easy?

What if this wasn’t war at all? What if this was just a war-game, played to avoid the real conflict?

So what do you do with a team like this? Well, for a start, you don’t referee the argument. That only legitimises the war-game. That form of argument is the safe one, the one everybody can have without anybody getting hurt.

The work is to find the disagreement it’s a substitute for: the one with something at stake. That means reading the signal rather than the noise. Real conflict is uncomfortable. If a disagreement feels easy, it probably isn’t the disagreement.

The way in is to name what’s happening, in simple language, in a way that points to the issue rather than the people. “You’re all arguing as though this matters. But nobody in here looks remotely uncomfortable. So what is the thing that we’re not talking about?” 

Then you hold what follows, because the discomfort isn’t in the way of the work. It is the work.

The catch, as ever, is that this dynamic can be difficult to see from the inside. A team mid-war-game might experience it as the real thing: the stakes feel genuine, the positions sincerely held. The tell was never in the volume. It was in the comfort. And the people most fluent in the performance can be the last to know they’re giving one.

“Let me tell you what I think just happened,” I said. And then off we went, in search of the conversation that really needed to happen in the room.

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