Conversations and projects usually revolve around an axis. It could be a goal or an urgency or a person.
It might be the boss. Wondering what they want, what they need, what sort of mood they’re in, what just happened, what might happen. “What would Jeff do?”
It might the clock. SNL goes on at 11:30, whether or not it’s ready.
It might be the bureaucracy. Figuring out what the rules are, who sets approvals, what the slowdowns might be.
In politics, it’s usually about the tussle of the day, the micro-crisis of right now.
Often, conversations at work are about (apparent) risk and safety, not possibility and innovation.
Inevitably, the center of gravity pulls attention and action from all around, straight to its core. The centered emotion and fear and objective is the silent moderator of the interaction.
Worth noting: the context changes as the day unfolds. The interactions in the operating room are different than those in the boardroom (or the lunchroom) at the same hospital.
And the center isn’t usually clearly spoken of or described. The center is less about the nuts and bolts of the tactics, and more about the fears, desires and power of the humans that have made themselves the center of the conversation–even conversations that they’re not present for.
Culture is what happens when human beings interact, and “people like us do things like this” creates standards and expectations that are built on the foundation of our shared understanding of the center.
A clear indication that this is going on is how it feels when that center isn’t in the room. When we try to center on something else, the system pushes back, whispering that the new path a distraction or moving it down the priority list. But when the center shifts, we can feel the conversations shift as well.
The most effective way to change an organization, a company or a relationship is to identify the invisible centering forces and address them.
Our opportunity is to weed out the toxic centers and get back to focusing on the work that we signed up for in the first place, the change that matters.
It begins by naming the center.