I walked into that meeting prepared. There was a specific problem on the table, questions had been raised beforehand, and I had done the work: thought through the considerations and landed on what I believed was a reasonable path forward.
When the Question Gets Lost
Then the conversation started moving around the room, and each perspective added another consideration. The original question expanded into other questions, which created more questions of their own. I kept waiting for it to come back around. When do we talk about what we came here to discuss? When do I get to share what I found?
We never did come back to it. A decision got made, but it had very little to do with the conversation I thought we were there to have. The problem had grown so much bigger and more complicated that the work I'd prepared wasn't relevant anymore. I remember sitting there thinking: what am I actually here for?
That experience changed how I think about collaboration.
I don't think its value comes from how many people are in the room. If anything, I've seen the opposite. As more people enter a conversation, it gets easier to lose sight of the question that started it. Everyone brings their own expertise, priorities, concerns, and history, and those perspectives can sharpen the thinking or they can turn one problem into ten.
Sometimes we widen the circle because we genuinely need more perspective. Sometimes it keeps widening because nobody wants to own what happens when the conversation ends, and from the outside, both look identical. Getting another perspective, pressure testing an idea, seeing what everyone thinks: there's nothing wrong with any of that. I've said all three myself.
The problem shows up when decisions get reopened every time someone new enters the room, when agreement only lasts until the next person disagrees, when more input creates more ambiguity that requires another meeting to resolve. At some point, gathering more opinions stops improving the decision and starts postponing it.
Someone Still Has to Own the Decision
I think that's where leadership actually matters, not in having all the answers or making every call alone. Some of the best decisions I've been part of came from people willing to challenge each other, change their minds, and admit their original thinking was too narrow.
But a productive conversation still needs boundaries. The group has to know what question it's trying to answer, and someone has to be willing to notice when the conversation has drifted past it. The people closest to the work need to actually be heard, not just invited into the room to fill a seat. And eventually, someone has to be willing to own where the conversation lands.
I've led a company long enough to know I don't want people around a table just agreeing with me. I want to hear from the ones who aren't first to speak; being quiet isn't the same as having nothing to say. I want people to come prepared, debate ideas, and pressure test what we're assuming. I want someone to be able to change my mind, and I want the same freedom to change theirs.
But the conversation still has to move the work somewhere.
Is the Collaboration Actually Useful?
Maybe that's the real question. Did the right people have a real voice, including the ones who don't usually dominate the room? Did the additional perspectives sharpen our understanding of the problem, or did we lose sight of what we were actually trying to solve? Did we leave knowing what happens next, or did we just generate more questions because nobody was willing to make a call?
I still think about that meeting sometimes, not because the problem itself was particularly unusual, but because I've been in enough rooms since to know it wasn't really about that one problem. It was about how easy it is to mistake more voices for better thinking, and how rarely anyone notices the difference until the meeting is already over.
