On staying with it.

When I started writing my book two years ago I thought I knew what I wanted to say. I had thirty years of material. Scenes, patterns, things I'd observed in organisations that I'd never seen described anywhere. I sat down and started writing.

And I couldn't get anything down. Not properly. What came out was flat. Like a summary of thinking rather than the thinking itself.

It took me a while to understand what was happening. The writing wasn't a way of recording what I already knew. It was a way of finding out what I actually thought. The sentence that didn't work wasn't failing because I'd expressed the idea badly. It was failing because I hadn't finished having the idea yet.

Once I understood that, everything slowed down. In a good way. I stopped trying to get words down and started staying with them. Sitting with a paragraph until it gave up something it wasn't offering on the surface. Coming back to a sentence I thought was finished and finding it was covering something I hadn't seen yet.

That process is genuinely confusing. You're circling something you can't quite see. You try different angles, different approaches, and you don't get anywhere. Or it doesn't feel like you do. You're tired. You start to wonder if you're the problem, if someone else would have seen it by now.

What I've learned is that the confusion isn't a sign that something is wrong. It's a sign that you're close to something real.

Because at some point it arrives. Not gradually. One moment you're circling and the next you can see it clearly, and you can't quite explain what changed. Something settled. Something that was moving stopped long enough for you to see what it actually was.

The deeper you go into something, the more room there is to think. I didn't expect that. I thought focus would narrow things. It does the opposite.

But you have to stay long enough to find out. And that's harder than it sounds, because the confusion always comes before the clarity, and there's no signal telling you which side of it you're on.

I think there are two kinds of focus, and we confuse them a lot.

One narrows. You commit, you cut alternatives, you stop looking at other possibilities. Useful. Necessary sometimes.

The other does the opposite. You stay with something past the point of comfort, and the material starts to offer something it wasn't offering before. A different angle. A connection you hadn't noticed. Sometimes just a clearer sense of what you actually think.

The uncomfortable part always comes before the opening. There's no signal telling you it's coming. You're just sitting in it, not knowing if you're being disciplined or just slow.

Most people read that as a sign to move on. Try something else. Get to the point.

Sometimes that's right. But often it's the moment just before something shifts, and the only way to know which one it is, is to stay.

I spent years in rooms where this same pattern played out. Different industries, different problems, different stakes. The dynamic was usually the same.

A group arrives at something genuinely difficult. For a while the conversation goes somewhere real. People push back, change their minds, follow a thread somewhere unexpected.

Then the energy shifts. Someone summarises. Someone moves to solutions. The meeting moves on.

It looks like progress. Often it is.

But sometimes what just happened is that the room agreed to accept the surface version of the problem. Not as a decision. Just as a drift. Nobody chose to stop. The conversation simply ran out of tolerance for not knowing, and resolution filled the gap.

Nobody in that room is wrong. The person who summarises is doing their job. The one who moves to solutions is doing theirs. The drift happens because everyone is doing something reasonable at exactly the wrong moment.

The opening doesn't look like progress. It looks like going in circles. And a room full of capable people will choose progress over circles every time.

There's a phrase people use in meetings when they want to stop. Let's move to a decision. It's not a bad instinct. At some point you do need to decide.

But deciding and arriving are not the same thing.

Arriving is when the problem finally shows you its actual shape. Not the shape you brought into the room, not the shape that fits the time available, but the thing itself. Sometimes that happens quickly. Sometimes it takes an hour of what felt like going in circles.

But when it happens, you know. The room changes. People stop arguing positions and start thinking out loud. Someone says something they clearly hadn't planned to say. The conversation slows down, because what's in the room now is worth staying with.

That's not going in circles. That's the opposite. And it only becomes possible if you don't call for a decision too early.

You can't manufacture it. But you can learn to recognise what it needs. Enough time. Enough tolerance for not knowing. And at least one person who isn't yet satisfied with the surface version of the problem, not because they're being difficult, but because they can feel there's more underneath it.

What gets missed is hard to name afterwards, because the decision that got made feels reasonable. It was reasonable. It was just made on the surface version of the problem.

The cost doesn't show up in the meeting. It shows up three months later, when the solution turns out to have addressed the wrong thing. Or when the same issue comes back, a little harder to read this time, and the people in the room look at each other and wonder why nothing seems to stick.

It sticks. Just not the right things.

I don't have a method for any of this. I'm not sure it can be one.

But I've started to notice when I'm leaving too early. In my own thinking and in rooms I've been in. When I'm taking the surface version of something because staying longer feels like it isn't working.

It usually is working. It just doesn't feel like it yet.

And maybe that's the only thing worth remembering.