Just People in a Room
Last week I offered the proposition that we drop the word “leadership” from our speaking and our writing for a while and see what arises in all those freed-up spaces. I heard from many that they, too, were craving a de-fuzzifying of our collective speaking, a fresh look at the qualities of participation attuned to the time we are in.
Like over-used words, so many of the trappings of the “professional” world have become unconsciously-adopted traps. They ensnare us in unexamined notions of productivity and efficacy. When we find ways to intentionally drop these trappings, we may be fortunate enough to experience moments when we realize … underneath all the positions and priorities, the momentum of the patterns of work ... we are just people in a room.
To be a bit dramatic, it’s kind of like that moment after the shipwreck, when the survivors find themselves standing in a circle on an island, keenly observing who else is in that circle and the raw, elemental reality that is the land on which they stand. Just people in a “room.”
As our shared realities outside of our workspaces become more and more rawly apparent inside our workspaces, perhaps the island metaphor is not so far off.
And perhaps, it’s time to practice the not-so-easy skill of dropping past-based routines—even in little ways like the letting-go-of-leadership experiment. Perhaps it’s time to look around and notice, “Who is here, really?” “What’s going on in our world, in the world, really?” And, “How might the way we work, work in concert with the reality we see and the shared calling we feel?”
Maybe the next time you find yourself gathered for a work meeting, in an actual room or in a Zoom or Teams “room,” try to see if you can imagine all of the trappings falling away and just, for a moment, being with the other people in your room, as if it’s your first day on the job of creating the world that you envision.
To paraphrase Margaret Mead, just-people-in-a-room “…can change the world. In fact it’s the only thing that ever has.”