We'd flown to Nice for an offsite. I'm sitting in a boardroom - a big one, the kind with a table you could land a small aircraft on. We're there for our annual strategy session.

 

We'd built something significant: a substantial IT business with real scale and real market presence. On the agenda were the big questions - it was all very secret but you already know the questions:

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• Who do we want to be?

• Where is the market going?

• How do we stay ahead?

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Someone was drawing a 2×2 matrix on the whiteboard. Someone (called Porter?) was creating a SWOT analysis - or was it a PEST? ... PESTLE? ... PESTLID? There may have been an APOSTLE involved!

 

We'd covered the walls in Post-it notes and were converging, with great solemnity, on our strategic direction.

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We were going to be ... the world's number one something-or-other.

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And then it hit me.

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It didn't matter what was on the axes of that 2×2. As long as our bubble was in the top right-hand corner and bigger than everyone else's!

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Nobody writes on a Post-it note that they want to be number two. Nobody flies fifteen people to an offsite to agree that they'd quite like to be adequate.

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We were hiding behind vocabulary, consumed by performative word salad.​

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I looked around the room at a group of genuinely intelligent, experienced people and thought: we have spent two days producing a sentence. A sentence that tells us nothing we didn't already know, commits us to nothing we'll actually measure, and will be forgotten by February.

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The strategy wasn't the problem. The room was. The conversations that weren't happening. The things people thought and nobody said. The decisions that had already been made before anyone arrived, waiting politely for the process to catch up.

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That was the moment I started paying more attention to what happens in rooms than to what's written on the walls of them.

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I've seen that pattern play out hundreds of times since, where the smartest people in the building couldn't agree on anything because nobody was actually listening. Worse than this was a tacit assumption of agreement and complicity. A making do. Teams - who rather than trying to seize the day - are content to just survive it.

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I saw the pattern in the startup I built - SoshiGames, eighteen people, a million and a half users. The moments we nearly broke were never about the product or the funding. They were about whether the team in the room that day could be honest with each other.

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I saw the pattern in the ten years at Bruntwood SciTech, working with hundreds of founders and scale-ups, watching brilliant ideas stall, not because the market wasn't there but because the team couldn't frame the right challenges under pressure.

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It took me a long time to accept that the answer isn't strategic. It isn't structural. It's human. It's about whether the people in the room are genuinely present with each other. Whether they listen before they speak. Whether they take responsibility without being asked. Whether they create space for the person next to them.​

 

I take everything I've learned about what actually happens in rooms - under pressure, when the stakes are real, when people are tired or scared or competing - and use it to help teams become genuinely excellent at working together.​​