Small scenes at work that no one notices or questions.
The new CEO had chosen to meet each department head separately, not as a method but as an intuition, because he sensed, without quite being able to articulate it, that some things would never be said around a table, that certain truths needed an enclosed space, a face-to-face without witnesses, in order to exist without being immediately negotiated away.
The meetings had followed one another throughout the day, doors closing and reopening on accounts that, taken individually, made perfect sense, each offering a fair, reasoned, often brilliant reading of the situation, to the point where the CEO found himself almost systematically agreeing, noting mentally that every person he had just listened to was right, genuinely right, without this producing any usable direction whatsoever.
The CFO spoke of compressed margins, of a cost structure that had become incoherent, of postponed decisions that had ultimately cost more than the difficult decisions that had been avoided, and everything he said was exact, precise, relentless, to the point where one could believe the answer lay there, in a rigorous, almost mathematical adjustment of the trajectory.
The Head of Sales described a more aggressive market, more volatile clients, teams exhausted by promises they could no longer keep, and he too was telling the truth, deeply so, with the energy of those who live pressure daily and know exactly where the system cracks, even if they cannot always explain why.
The Head of Marketing spoke of brand, perception, external coherence, of the growing gap between the official narrative and what clients were actually experiencing, and once again the diagnosis was right, almost too right, as if each department had developed a perfectly functional local clarity within its own perimeter.
Then the COO came in.
He did not speak about his department. He spoke about the others.
He spoke of invisible dependencies, of decisions that seemed technical but created cascading effects, of arbitrations never made that forced everyone to improvise downstream, of old tensions between functions that had never been named and that kept resurfacing to block every attempt at transformation, and as he spoke, the CEO felt something change in texture, not because the speech was more convincing, but because it made all the other explanations, taken in isolation, impossible.
For the first time that day, it was no longer about being right, but about choosing. And that was precisely when the vertigo appeared.
Not strategic vertigo, the kind one learns to master, but a deeper, more intimate vertigo, the kind that arises when one understands that deciding does not merely mean making a choice, but immediately becoming someone else’s problem, losing useful alliances, cracking a still fragile image, giving up the comfortable posture of the new leader who listens, who is rational, open, liked.
He understood very clearly that if he followed that reading, the one that connected everything, he would have to arbitrate against people he had barely just met, against seductive narratives, against partial truths that each person held onto as proof of their own value, and above all that he would lose that form of benevolent neutrality that still allowed him to exist as a point of balance rather than a point of rupture.
So he said nothing. He said nothing because he knew exactly what it would cost him.
The next meeting took place a few days later, this time around a full table, and the CEO spoke of convergence, of time needed, of complexity, of the necessity not to shake a system already weakened, and everyone nodded, relieved, because that decision forced no one to lose immediately.
The Queen of England’s decision had just been made.
Seedz / Silent Guest
Not a coach. Not a therapist.
A clear mirror — to see clearly, before choosing.
