I’ve been doing this for a while, and to be completely frank, I keep noticing that the meetings that feel amazing are quite often the ones that blow up later.
Someone maps a process, everyone nods, decisions get made. You leave thinking you’ve solved it. And yeah, that’s the goal, right? But it never works that way. But the reality of it is operations are just messier than whatever you map out in a few hours.
Here’s what happens in real life. You get different people…operations person, compliance person, maybe a manager, and someone who really does the work. They’re not thinking about the same thing, because they all have different end goals. Operations wants volume, compliance is worried about something breaking, managers want visibility. And the people doing the work? They just don’t want it to get harder.
So you hit friction. And surprise surprise, that friction is actually good. It means something real is happening.
But then sometimes everyone just…agrees. To tell you the truth, when that happens I get a little suspicious. Because it usually means the conversation didn’t get there yet. We talked about the business as usual details, but we didn’t spend enough time sussing out all the weird stuff like the exceptions, the cases that don’t fit…we either didn’t have time for it, or it never came up.
Nobody’s intentionally hiding anything, it’s just that people don’t mention what they assume is already understood.
I’ve watched this happen in my travels. The team agrees on a design, and three months later someone says “Oh, this product type has a completely different team that has different assignments but also needs to be a part of the bigger process”. Or “there’s some regulation that only hits certain transactions”. This wasn’t a malicious omission. It usually happens because the conversation never got there, or we didn’t have all the right people in the room.
Over the years I started paying closer attention to the spreadsheets people would casually mention during workshops. You all know the ones I’m talking about. The spreadsheet that’s supposedly just a tracker. The spreadsheet that’s only used for special situations. The spreadsheet that “isn’t really part of the process.”
More often than not, that spreadsheet turns out to be the entire process. I’ve seen teams describe a workflow that looked clean and straightforward, only to discover that key decisions, assignments, exceptions, and follow-ups were all being managed outside the system in a spreadsheet that nobody thought was important enough to bring up earlier. Again, it wasn’t maliciously omitted…they just simply viewed it as part of the job rather than part of the process.
Those moments are always revealing because they highlight the gap between how work is supposed to happen and how work really happens.
The funny thing is that the moments that feel like they slow things down are the moments where you truly learn something. When someone says “my team doesn’t work that way”, or "wait, there are these exceptions we’re not talking about”, the room gets tense but suddenly you’re seeing actual constraints and dependencies. What really happens vs. what’s supposed to happen. That stuff changes everything…it has to.
So I think about it different now. It’s not about getting everyone to say yes to the same thing. Alignment needs to include being able to intimately understand the problem together. You can have a whole room of people aligned on something that’s just incomplete, or even wrong. You need to be making sure you’re all looking at what’s truly there before you start saying yes.
So when I’m sitting in a workshop and consensus just shows up out of nowhere, I don’t celebrate yet. I start looking for who’s being quiet. Like, which person here (or not here) would push back on this if they weren’t worried about looking difficult. Or who just operates completely different from what we’ve been talking about. Because there’s always someone. Always.
Here’s what I know now: quick agreement might mean you figured something out…but more often it means you’re all only agreeing about half the problem and nobody realized it yet.