Your framework is missing something

“I think your framework is missing something.”

2024, a leadership team away-day. The focus: a culture that wasn’t holding together across two continents, under investor expectations that kept climbing.

The session had not got off to a good start. The team seemed listless, disengaged – and to the extent that they did pay attention, prone to sparring with each other rather than focusing on the work of the day. And now I appeared to be getting an invitation to join the joust.

“Sorry?” I said.

A smile. “Yeah, it’s missing something. It needs an additional category. You see, it’s quite clever, your framework, but I can see a weakness in it.”

I thought for a moment.

“See, I think it’s really interesting. We’ve been at it for an hour now. You asked me to join you today because you’ve got some pretty gnarly challenges. But you’d rather try to pick holes in the framework of the guy who’s come to help you than get into what brought you here. I mean, I don’t mind, but I just wonder what’s going on.”

Laughter.

“You’re right. Sorry. It’s just I never know where to start with these sorts of conversations. We always just seem to talk around the houses and never get anywhere.”

“Well,” I said. “Perhaps today can be different. Tell you what, here’s a deal: give me until lunchtime to see if we can get anywhere useful, and over lunch I’ll let you try to tear my framework apart.”

In work as well as life, the little things predict the big things. And few are more telling than how an organisation engages with the help it has asked for.

Leaders who can’t look squarely at their challenges learn to deflect, to change the subject while looking fully engaged. And at this level the tactics get clever (even if they’re often unconscious). So, for example, people challenge the premise of a question rather than answering it. If you’ve ever been on the end of a poised, performative “what’s the real problem we’re trying to solve?”, you’ll know what I mean.

And they do this in the workshop in the same way they do it in the business.

The first step to breaking the pattern is noticing it. The second step is the more taxing: calling it out. This is sometimes called a ‘pattern interrupt’. A pattern interrupt needs both clarity and the nerve to act on it. There is an alternative, of course, and this is how most meetings run: the old familiar script, here we go again, repeat to fade.

The way out is not some grand intervention, or even a better meeting agenda. It is to say what’s happening in the room. 

When a meeting is going round the houses, ask what’s going on. “We’ve spent an hour on this minor HR problem and not on the thing we came for. What’s that about?” 

Asked with curiosity and without blame, a question like that acts as a pattern interrupt. Most rooms never manage it: everyone clocks the pattern (and sits there bored of it), no one names it.

The catch is that it’s far harder to do about a meeting you’re in, with a team you know inside out. You can be playing your part too, and the deeper into it you are, the easier it becomes to forget you’re on the stage. Which is sometimes why it takes someone from outside to break the fourth wall and say the unsaid thing.

We never did talk about the framework over lunch, by the way. It turned out that there were other, more pressing matters in the room.

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