On walking into a room sure everyone saw what I saw, and finding out they didn't.
Friday is usually my day to step back and make sense of the week. Most weeks that's a quiet exercise. This week left a bruise I wanted to understand.
If you work anywhere near EdTech, you know the season we're in. Back-to-school is the most stressful stretch of our year. Districts are scrambling, timelines are tight, and everyone is carrying more than they were a month ago. That pressure doesn't stay politely in the background. It raises the temperature on every conversation, and it pulls the emotional undercurrent of a room a little closer to the surface. I knew all of that. I still walked right past it.
Here's what happened. I had a discovery meeting on the calendar with a clear goal in my head. There was a specific part of the product I needed to validate, and I came in ready to work through it. I had my questions lined up. I knew exactly what I wanted to learn and how I planned to get there. Rational, organized, prepared.
The room had a different meeting in mind. Almost immediately, the conversation pulled toward a bigger set of questions. Why are we building this at all? What does it mean for the districts we serve? How are we going to talk about it? I kept trying to gently steer us back to the thing I came to validate, and the conversation kept drifting right back to the why.
For a while, I told myself the group was off track. We had a job to do in that hour, and we weren't doing it. It took me most of the meeting to realize the person off track was me.
I've been thinking about a book called Switch, by Chip and Dan Heath. In it, they describe change using an image of a rider on top of an elephant. The rider is the rational mind. He holds the reins and believes he is steering. The elephant is the emotional mind, and it is far bigger and far stronger. The rider can point the elephant toward a destination all day long, but if the elephant doesn't want to go, the rider is just along for the ride. Real movement only happens when the two are headed the same way.
A priority handed down from leadership moves the rider. It's a clear, rational instruction. This matters, this is what we're doing, here's the plan. But a directive doesn't move the elephant. The people in that room still needed to feel the why. They needed to sit with what this work means, wrestle with how they would carry it to customers, and arrive at it themselves. I had assumed that because the priority was set, that emotional work was already finished. It wasn't. I was pointing the rider at a destination the elephant hadn't agreed to yet.
But the longer I sat with it, the more I realized the rider and the elephant were only part of the story. The deeper issue wasn't emotional versus rational. It was context.
I had spent weeks living inside this work. Researching it, turning it over, imagining what it could become, building a detailed picture in my head of where we were headed. By the time I walked into that room, that picture felt like solid ground. Obvious. Settled. So I built my agenda on top of it, as if everyone were standing on the same ground I was.
I hadn't just shown up with a different vantage point. I'd given myself a head start. My elephant had been walking toward this goal for weeks, loaded down with information nobody else in the room had, and I strolled in expecting everyone to already be moving at my pace.
They weren't, and they had no reason to be. The people in that room spend their days somewhere I don't. They are talking to customers, sitting with district problems, hearing what is actually landing and what isn't. That is not a lesser vantage point than mine. In a lot of ways it is a more grounded one. We were looking at the same goal from very different distances, and I had mistaken my distance for the only one.
Once I saw it that way, the questions they kept raising stopped looking like a detour. They were the work. The why they wanted to talk through wasn't a distraction from validation. It was the thing that had to happen before validation was even possible. You can't get useful feedback on the fine details of something from people who are still, reasonably, asking what it is for. The gap between us wasn't a problem to push through. It was the actual first task, and I had walked in assuming it was already done.
I don't have a clean lesson to tie a bow on. I'm not sure the takeaway is "always align on the why first," though that is probably good advice. What I'm sitting with is quieter and a little more humbling. The context I carry is never as shared as it feels. The clarity I build in my own head, over weeks of living with a problem, does not transfer to a room just because I show up certain about it. Closing that gap isn't the thing that gets in the way of the work. A lot of the time, it is the work.
I'll remember this meeting for a while. Not because it went badly, but because it showed me something I would rather have known going in. Everyone was pointed at the same goal. We were just standing in different places, looking at it from where we each happened to be. My job, the part I skipped, was to notice that before I asked anyone to move.