The Question of Who Is Missing From This Conversation
Launch library · evergreen read
A room full of confident agreement can feel productive while quietly leaving out the perspective that would have complicated the discussion in exactly the way it needed complicating, simply because the person who held that perspective was never in the room to begin with.
Asking who is missing from this conversation, and meaning it seriously, forces a pause before a decision is finalised, an acknowledgement that consensus among the people present is not the same thing as a genuinely complete picture of the situation being discussed.
Organisations and communities that build this question into their regular practice tend to catch blind spots earlier, before a decision is made and becomes far more costly to unwind than it would have been to simply widen the conversation from the start.
Asking it early, before a plan has hardened into something harder to revise, costs relatively little. Asking it only after a decision has already been made and criticised tends to cost considerably more, in both credibility and the effort required to fix what was missed.