I have sat in some version of this meeting more times than I can count. It is Monday morning and the executive team is discussing next month’s OKRs. Revenue is behind. The CEO wants to leave the room with a decision on what the team is focusing on. The CRO thinks the target is unrealistic. The CFO agrees with him, although she has not said that directly. Product thinks the real problem is Sales. Sales thinks Product has spent the last year building things customers do not want.
A good set of meeting notes could accurately capture what happened: revenue is behind plan, pipeline needs to improve, Product and Sales need greater alignment, and the team will come back next week with a revised forecast. But those notes would miss something important. The team avoided deciding whether anyone actually believed the number. Two executives who had privately said they did not believe the plan never said so in the room. As disagreement increased, the CEO took more control, and as he took more control, everyone else took less. By the end of the meeting, he was frustrated that his executives were not taking enough ownership. Nobody decided to create this dynamic, but they created it anyway.
There are always two meetings happening
The Conscious Leadership Group uses a distinction I find useful: content and context. Content is what the meeting is ostensibly about: revenue, strategy, hiring, the product roadmap, an acquisition. Context is what is happening between the people while they talk about it.
Context includes who speaks and who stays quiet, what happens when someone disagrees with the CEO, whether the group becomes more curious or more defensive under pressure, which subjects create energy and which make the room go flat, and whether people say in the meeting what they later say to one another outside it (i.e. Gossip).
Most executive teams spend nearly all of their time working on content. When something goes wrong, they change the strategy, restructure the organization, hire someone new, redesign the meeting cadence or bring in a consultant. Sometimes that is exactly what is needed. But sometimes the content changes while the context remains almost entirely untouched.
The new CRO enters the same system as the old CRO. The new operating cadence inherits the same avoidance of conflict. The new strategy gets discussed by the same people, occupying the same roles and repeating the same patterns. Six months later, everyone wonders why things feel strangely familiar.
The group has a life of its own
In the 1940s, the British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion became interested in what happens to people when they form groups. Through his work with groups during and after the Second World War, he observed that a group could appear to be doing one thing while simultaneously organizing itself around something else.
He called one level the work group: the group engaged with the task it had gathered to do. Alongside it, he described unconscious group dynamics that could pull people away from that task. A group might become dependent on a leader to provide the answer, organize itself around fighting or escaping from a perceived threat, or behave as though some future person or idea would eventually rescue it. Nobody needed to agree to any of this. The pattern emerged through the interactions of the group.
Bion’s work became influential in the Tavistock tradition of group relations and helped establish an idea that still feels provocative in organizations today: a group may have dynamics that cannot be adequately explained by studying its members one at a time.
We are much more accustomed to thinking about individual psychology. The CEO is controlling. The CFO avoids conflict. The CRO gets defensive. We coach each person to become aware of their pattern and make a different choice. That work matters, but it does not necessarily explain what happens when those people are put together.
Go back to the Monday meeting. The CEO becomes more forceful when he feels uncertain. The CFO responds to force by becoming quieter. He experiences her quietness as disengagement and pushes harder, which causes her to retreat further. Neither person alone contains the whole pattern. It exists in the interaction between them.
Over time, other people begin adapting to it. Someone becomes the mediator. Someone takes on the role of challenging the CEO. Someone learns that difficult subjects are better handled outside the meeting. Someone else stops trying. Eventually, the individuals are not simply creating the pattern. The pattern is also shaping how the individuals behave. The systems thinker Nora Bateson has a word for this kind of mutual shaping, symmathesy, which describes how the parts of a living system learn one another through their interaction until none of them can be understood on its own.
So whose pattern is it?
I have spent years interested in individual awareness. Underneath the different modalities, theories and frameworks I have studied is a relatively simple possibility: we can become aware of something happening inside us before we automatically act from it. I can notice that I am becoming defensive before I defend. I can notice that I want approval before I organize my behavior around getting it. That awareness creates a small amount of space and in that space there is more choice (this concept is often attributed to Victor Frankl).
Working with executive teams has made me increasingly interested in the collective version of this. If one person can learn to notice a pattern before acting from it, perhaps a group can too. Can a group learn to see itself?
The team in our Monday morning meeting might, for example, stop halfway through the revenue conversation and notice what has happened. The CEO is taking over. The rest of the team is giving him more of the problem to carry. Sales and Product are defending themselves. The people who privately disagree with the plan still have not said so. The question is no longer who is causing the problem or who needs coaching. It becomes: what are we creating together right now?
A team that can see its own pattern while it is happening has access to a different kind of choice. Instead of waiting until after the meeting to diagnose what went wrong, the group can become aware of itself while it is still creating the dynamic.
Pausing a revenue conversation to talk about what is happening in the room can sound like a detour from the “real” work. The Monday morning team meeting shows why it is not. Because nobody said what they actually thought, they left with a forecast that at least two executives did not believe. The real conversation moved to the hallway, and gossip followed. Every hiring plan, budget and board update built on that number will now carry that doubt, which means the pattern has quietly left the room and is weaving its way into other parts of the business.
What is happening between us?
Many fields try to explain what happens in this space. Psychodynamic traditions describe projection and unconscious group processes, somatic practitioners pay attention to what happens in our bodies in relationship with one another, and complexity science studies how larger patterns emerge from interactions. Underneath all of them is a question I cannot fully answer: is there information and intelligence in the space between us that cannot be understood by studying each person separately? I don’t know but I have seen how much changes when a team gets curious about that space.
Imagine the Monday morning meeting again. Twenty minutes in, as the conversation speeds up, the CEO stops and says, “I notice I’ve been doing most of the talking and I’m not sure I’ve heard what any of you actually think about this number.” There is an uncomfortable pause. Then the CFO says she does not believe the forecast and the CRO says he does not either. The meeting gets harder for the next ten minutes and far more useful for the rest of the year.
What made that moment work is that the CEO named his own part (or responsibility) before anyone else’s. When someone points at another person’s pattern, the room gets defensive and the conversation becomes content again. When someone names their own responsibility, it gives everyone else permission to do the same. This move is available from any seat. An executive can say, “I realize I haven’t said what I really think about this plan.” A board member can ask, “What are we not saying in this room right now?”
The simplest way to build the habit is to reserve the last five minutes of an important meeting for the second meeting. Ask what happened between you. Who became bigger and who became smaller? What was said at the start that stopped being said? What is being withheld? Expect the first answers to be polite. Honesty tends to arrive around the third or fourth time a team does this, once people have seen that telling the truth about the room is safe.
Most teams will keep changing the content because content is what they know how to change. The teams that learn to see the second meeting (the context) gain something no new hire, restructure or offsite can give them: the ability to change the pattern while they are still inside it. The next time a meeting feels stuck, the question is simple. What is happening here right now?
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