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Sometimes it is happening in a different window entirely.

I have been in more meetings than I can count where something was said, or not said, and I found myself typing a message to someone else in the room. Not through the meeting platform, always too risky. Through Teams, quietly, on the side. Sometimes it was a question. Sometimes it was an observation. Often it was just an emoji. 🫠 🙄 🤭

The point is not the emoji. The point is what it represented.

A thought that was already there. Already formed. Already shared, just not with the room.

That internal conversation is familiar to most people who have sat in meetings for any length of time. Shall I say it? Will it land well? Will I look like I have missed something obvious? And more often than not, the thought stays private. The meeting moves on. The thinking that could have been collective stays scattered across individual heads and side channels.

And then, occasionally, someone says it out loud.

And the room shifts.

Not because it was a new idea. It was not new at all. Everyone already had it. But naming it changed something. Suddenly there was permission. The thinking that had been happening separately became shared. The conversation went somewhere it would not have gone otherwise.

I have seen this happen in rooms for years. The thought that releases the thinking was almost never the boldest or the most original. It was simply the one that got said.

What does it take to make that more likely? Not braver people. Better conditions.

That is exactly what Better Thinking Together, one of the four phases in my signature offering, is designed to do. Not fix the people in the room. Build the conditions where the thinking that is already there can finally be said out loud.

What tends to stay unsaid in the rooms you are in?

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The behaviours teams find hardest to address are not the difficult ones. They are the well-meaning ones.

I have seen this pattern more times than I can count. Someone on the team who dives in. Solves problems. Fills gaps before anyone has even noticed they exist. On the surface, enormously helpful. In practice, quietly suffocating.

Not because the intention is wrong. Simply because no one ever said anything.

And here is the part that rarely gets said: teams often let it happen. Because it is convenient. The work gets done. The gaps get filled. The discomfort of a conversation gets avoided. Consciously or not, the behaviour gets used.

Over time, “that is just how they are” becomes the explanation. Not because it is true, but because it is easier than the conversation that never happened.

And the person doing it? Often they feel it. The sense that what they contribute is taken for granted rather than genuinely valued. That eats away at people, slowly and without drama.

The cost is paid on all sides. The person never gets the chance to adjust, and never feels properly seen. The team never develops its own capability because someone always steps in. And the dynamic becomes a permanent feature of how that team works, invisible to everyone inside it.

Most of these patterns are workable when named early. Gently, specifically, before they have become part of the furniture.

Left until they are embedded, they are a different conversation entirely.

What in your team has quietly become “just how it is”?

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The habits we build around how we communicate become automatic over time. And automatic means unexamined. We stop questioning whether they are working because they feel normal. They are just how we do it.

I was reminded of this recently, in a fairly personal way.

I received feedback from a participant after a session. I read it. I always read feedback, not out of habit but because I am genuinely curious what people notice. One observation stopped me: she had noticed that I close my eyes too often when I am speaking.

My first instinct was not to agree or disagree. It was to go and look.

I watched a recording of myself facilitating. And there it was. Exactly as she had described. A habit I had no idea I had developed, clearly visible once someone had pointed it out.

The odd thing was not the feedback itself. It was realising it had been there for a while, and I had not seen it. Not because I was not paying attention. But because it had become habitual, and habits stop asking for our attention.

That is how blind spots work. They are not hidden because we are careless. They are hidden because they are familiar.

I see the same thing in teams. Communication habits that developed gradually, in how meetings run, how decisions get shared, how people give and receive feedback, become invisible to the people inside them. Not because no one cares. Because no one has looked from the outside recently.

Awareness rarely comes from intention alone. It usually needs a second pair of eyes.

What brought a communication blind spot into view for you, and did it come from inside or outside?

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There is a museum in Rome that is easy to walk past.

From the outside, the Crypta Balbi sits quietly on a street corner, its signage understated, nothing to prepare you for what is inside. I was wandering around the city a few years ago and almost did not stop.

I am glad I did.

Once you go in, you take stairs downward. And then you see it: the layers. Roman foundations at the bottom, then medieval, then Renaissance, then modern Rome sitting on top of all of it. Each era built on what came before, adapted it, sometimes without even knowing what was underneath. The people who laid those first foundations had no idea that one day, somewhere above them, someone would build the Colosseum.

I studied history, and later did my MA in Leiden. I have always been drawn to how things accumulate: how each layer makes the next one possible, not by design, but by being solid enough to build on.

I recognise that in the work I do. The clarity that gets built conversation by conversation, the small shifts that compound over time, the conditions that make the next thing possible. In work, in collaboration, in how we show up for each other. None of it looks dramatic from the outside. Often it looks like an ordinary building on a quiet street corner.

But underneath, the layers are there.What has quietly accumulated in your own work that you only notice when you stop and look?

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In 2022 I ran 136 virtual sessions.

I did not plan to learn what I did from that year. I thought I was delivering training. What I was actually doing, without quite naming it at the time, was watching the same patterns surface again and again across completely different teams, organisations, and topics.

The pattern that appeared most consistently was not about communication skills. It was about assumptions: the assumptions people carry about what good communication looks like, and the quiet pressure they put on themselves because of the gap between that image and what they actually do.

The clients often wanted the meatier topics. Challenging conversations, difficult feedback, high-stakes communication. And those matter. But what I kept observing was that the real difference was rarely made by the content of the session. It was made by smaller things.

One of those things was presence. Not mine as the facilitator, though that matters too. Everyone’s.

And by presence I do not mean high energy, or being visibly engaged, or performing enthusiasm. Some of the most present people in a room are the calm ones. The ones who observe carefully before they speak. The ones who ask the question no one else thought to ask. You need both in a team: the person who moves fast and the person who notices what the fast mover missed.

What I started asking, and still ask now, is: what is the energy you bring? Not as a judgement, but as genuine curiosity. Because when people understand their own energy and how to use it well, without burning themselves out trying to be something they are not, something shifts in how a group thinks and works together.

That understanding sits at the foundation of how I design my work now. Not the 136 sessions as a number, but what that volume of repetition made visible: the small things that consistently made a difference, and the structural patterns underneath all the variation.If I could say one thing to the version of myself running session one, it would be this: be present. It is over before you know it. And presence is not a nice-to-have. It is the work.

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We have been taught that good eye contact signals confidence, builds trust, and shows you are listening. And there is something in that. But the story is more complicated than the advice suggests.

Oxytocin, the so-called cuddle hormone, is often cited as the reason eye contact builds connection. It does play a role. But its effects are more context-dependent than the self-help industry would have us believe. It works when there is already familiarity and safety. With strangers, or in high-stakes situations, sustained eye contact can increase anxiety rather than reduce it. The love hormone is more selective than advertised.

And yet we keep coaching people to hold eye contact as though it were a universal signal of presence.

Quality over quantity. It is one of my mantras, and nowhere is it more true than here. A moment of genuine eye contact at the right point in a conversation does more than sustained eye contact throughout. One feels like connection. The other can feel like pressure.

This matters particularly now. Many younger people have grown up with higher levels of social anxiety, and for them eye contact can feel genuinely difficult. Forcing it as a standard is counterproductive. It does not build presence. It builds performance.

Presence is not what your eyes are doing. It is whether your attention is actually there.

What signals presence to you in a conversation, if not eye contact?

For anyone curious about the research behind this:

On oxytocin and eye contact with familiar versus unfamiliar people: Frontiers in Endocrinology, 2021. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/endocrinology/articles/10.3389/fendo.2021.629760/full

On the context-dependent effects of oxytocin and eye contact, including with strangers: Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/neuro-behavioral-betterment/202012/eye-contact-masks-biological-effects

On rising social anxiety in younger generations: Frontiers in Psychiatry analysis cited in All About Psychology. https://allaboutpsychology.substack.com/p/the-gen-z-stare

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Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation has been one of those recently. It has sparked important conversations about young people, technology, and how our environments shape behaviour. One observation that stayed with me was his description of how children gradually disappeared from public spaces (the slow demise of the playground), and how much more life moved indoors.

Reading it prompted me to return to an earlier book of his: The Righteous Mind.

It was published quite some time ago, but it feels remarkably relevant when thinking about conversations, judgement, and how people change their minds.

One idea in particular stood out again. Haidt describes the relationship between intuition and reasoning through the metaphor of the elephant and the rider. The rider represents our reasoning mind, while the elephant represents our intuitive, emotional responses. We often assume the rider is in charge. In reality, the elephant usually moves first.

I’ve been using that metaphor for years when working with teams around challenging conversations. When someone is strongly in their emotions, trying to reason your way through the situation rarely works. The rider cannot simply force the elephant to move.

What I appreciated in The Righteous Mind is how much deeper Haidt goes. He describes how our initial intuitions shape our judgments almost instantly, and how reasoning often follows afterwards, mainly to explain or defend the conclusion we’ve already reached. But there is an important twist to this. Change rarely happens through private reasoning alone. It happens in conversation. Someone asks a question, someone offers a perspective we hadn’t considered, and gradually our intuition shifts. Only then does the rider follow.

That idea resonates strongly with what I often see in teams. Better decisions rarely come from individuals reasoning harder on their own. They emerge from conversations where people feel able to question assumptions, challenge thinking, and explore different perspectives together. In many ways, that is the work I describe as Better Thinking Together; creating the conditions where conversation can genuinely expand how people understand a situation. Which makes the quality of those conversations incredibly important. Because if we want better thinking in organisations, we don’t just need better arguments. We need better conversations.

The diagram in the book illustrates how judgement, intuition and reasoning interact in discussion.

I’m curious: when have you experienced a conversation that genuinely changed how you saw something?

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Someone is talking, and I am listening. And then, somewhere in the middle, my attention shifts just slightly. Not dramatically. But something pulls at the edge of my focus, and by the time I realise it, the moment has already moved on.

It reminds me of that feeling when you pass someone you know in the street, they say something, and you laugh along even though you have no idea what they said. And then you pray they do not come back to it.

The instinct in those moments is to respond as though you have fully heard. Because stopping to say “I am not sure I caught that properly” feels awkward, especially mid-conversation, especially when you have already appeared to engage (and especially when you are in a hurry).

But here is what I have noticed. When that moment passes without being named, something small gets left unresolved. And the signal that it happened usually arrives a little later. Someone sends an email asking a basic question that should already be settled. Or, more telling still, they ask for a summary of what was decided at the end of the conversation.

That request, innocent as it sounds, is often an early sign that clarity did not fully land. Not because anyone was careless. Simply because the conditions for it to land were not there.

The subtlest sign that a group does not have shared clarity is usually not confusion. It is that things are not moving. Decisions hover. Energy stays flat. People wait without knowing what for.

Different words mean different things to different people. But sometimes the gap is not even about words. It is about whether attention was genuinely present long enough for understanding to form.

What is your earliest signal that something has not landed in a conversation?

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After a conversation, a meeting, or a decision thread, most people would say things were clear. The discussion happened, contributions were made, and work moved forward.

But clarity and the feeling of clarity are not the same thing.

What I notice most often is not disagreement or confusion. It is something quieter: a slight difference in how people understood what was decided, what matters next, or who carries what forward. Small in the moment. Surprisingly expensive over time.

Last week I wrote about decisions holding, and about what happens when a cup fills faster than understanding can form. Both of those things trace back to the same starting point. Clarity is not a communication style. It is a structural condition. When it is built deliberately, decisions hold, work moves, and people do not need to keep returning to the same conversation. When it is assumed, the cost shows up later, in rework, in drift, in energy spent on questions that should already be settled.

It is the first phase of the work I design with teams, because without it, everything that follows is harder.

One small habit that makes a consistent difference: before closing a conversation, ask someone to summarise the decision in their own words. Different words mean different things to different people, and the gaps between versions are usually exactly where clarity has not yet landed.

I have been structuring my thinking on this more deliberately recently, and will be sharing more about what that looks like in practice over the coming weeks.

What do you notice most often: the moment clarity slips, or the point where its absence finally becomes visible?

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One of the things I pay closest attention to in teams is not whether decisions are made, but whether they hold.

In many discussions, decisions appear clear in the moment. The conversation moves forward, people seem aligned, and work continues.

Yet the real test comes afterwards.

A decision that truly landed tends to move through the organisation with very little friction. People know what it means, what matters next, and where responsibility sits.

You can see it in the follow-through.

Work progresses without constant clarification, people move forward without reopening the same conversation, and energy carries into the next steps.

That usually happens when teams slow down just enough in the moment to make the decision explicit.

What exactly are we deciding? What does this mean in practice? And what happens next?

It sounds simple, but that small pause often makes the difference between a decision that merely sounded clear and one that genuinely becomes shared understanding.

Over time I’ve realised that many of the collaboration challenges organisations face can be traced back to the same starting point: clarity.

It’s something I’ve been paying closer attention to recently.

And when decisions truly land, something else becomes easier as well: momentum.

Thinking about the teams you’ve worked in, when have you seen a decision stay strong long after the conversation ended?