Every leadership team has a conversation it cannot finish. Not the one they disagree about. Disagreement is healthy and usually resolvable. The one that never quite gets resolved. It gets raised, circled, tabled, raised again. Months go by. Sometimes years. The team is smart, they care, they are not incompetent. And yet this one thing stays unfinished.
When I encounter this in a team, my first question is never 'what is the right answer?' It is 'what is it about this conversation that makes it unfinishable?' The answer is structural, not intellectual. The room cannot finish the conversation because finishing it would require someone to lose something they are not yet willing to lose.
The unfinishable conversation is not a failure of intelligence. It is a map of who holds what.
That something might be authority. It might be a relationship. It might be a story about what the business is: a narrative that one person is not ready to revise. In a family enterprise, it is often the implicit agreement that the founder's judgment will not be directly challenged, even after they have moved to the side. In a PE-backed company, it is often the implicit agreement that the sponsor's thesis is correct, even when the evidence has moved against it.
The most useful thing to do with an unfinishable conversation is to name what is making it unfinishable. Not as an accusation. As an observation. 'I notice we keep arriving at this point and stopping. What do you think is happening?' This move requires someone who is not inside the dynamic to make it. Which is usually why outsiders get called.
Lukas Naugle
Founder, Changegoat · Dallas, Texas
Goat Shit goes out when there is something worth saying.
Speak your mind, but ride a fast horse.