Staying with What Has Not Yet Found Its Language

I often notice that what matters most in a leader's account is rarely what appears to be the core of the matter, but rather the place where the story loses its smooth progression and lingers for a moment, as if something has not yet quite found a form that language can carry.

I am sitting across from a leader who is trying to describe a meeting that, by all visible measures, unfolded as it should, and as she speaks about the decisions, the alignment and the sense of forward movement, she keeps returning to a brief moment in the middle of the conversation, where someone began a sentence and did not complete it, and where the atmosphere in the room shifted without anyone naming it.

It is that kind of moment that stays with me, because it often holds more knowledge than the conclusions that are later recorded, and because it points to something within the organisation that is already in motion, yet has not taken a form that allows it to be spoken about with precision.

That is often where my work begins, in that part of the account where something remains open and therefore calls for a different kind of attention than the one that immediately seeks to determine what is right and what should be done.

I listen to the way the leader tells the story, to where the rhythm feels certain, where it begins to lose clarity, where something gains weight, and where something passes too quickly, and through that listening a form of knowledge begins to gather, one that does not reside in the words alone, but in the way the experience organises itself as it is being told.

I try to extract that knowledge, and at times I give it form in a simple diagram or sketch, where tensions, patterns or relationships become visible with a clarity that makes it possible to see what was already present in the account, but had not yet taken shape.

Something particular happens when that form emerges, because in that moment the experience becomes less diffuse without becoming closed, and the leader begins to recognise what she has already been part of as something that can be held, explored and later revisited.

This is where I experience the metacognitive work taking form, not as a theory applied to the organisation, but as an expansion of the leader's ability to observe and interpret what is happening while it is happening, and to gradually recognise how the organisation itself participates in creating the patterns it later encounters as problems, tensions or repetitions.

An expansion of the leader's ability to observe and interpret what is happening while it is happening.

Attention begins to gather differently, and this allows tempo, hesitation, silence, responsibility, irritation or the subtle relief that can settle in a room when something is finally said, to take on another meaning, because they are no longer perceived merely as fleeting impressions, but as expressions of how the organisation thinks, protects itself, orients itself and assigns value.

I often find that tensions reveal more about an organisation than they initially appear to, because there is almost always an unresolved need behind a disagreement, and because that need tends to surface long before it finds a language, through repetitions, interruptions, reservations, accelerations in speech, or the particular way a room can tighten without anyone explicitly stating why.

When we remain with it long enough, and when I help the leader give it form, it becomes possible to see that what previously appeared as resistance can be understood as an attempt to protect something that has not yet found a legitimate place within the organisation's way of understanding itself, and that what once felt like vagueness may in fact be the beginning of a more precise recognition.

What becomes essential in this process is rarely the resolution of the immediate situation, although that may occur, but rather the gradual expansion of the leader's frame of understanding, through which she begins to recognise the same pattern elsewhere, with greater steadiness and with a language that reduces the need for premature conclusions.

Over time, her analyses begin to change in character, becoming less driven by the need for closure and more shaped by the capacity to remain with a question long enough for it to reveal more of itself, and that change begins to show in the way she speaks, in the questions she asks, and in the quality of attention she brings into situations where others might previously have moved on more quickly.

It is a movement that travels without being announced, because it settles into behaviour and culture long before it becomes articulated as a formal principle, and it is precisely there that I find the most sustainable forms of change begin to take hold, in what gradually becomes possible to do, say and think, because a leader carries a different language and a different steadiness into the organisation.

It is a movement that travels without being announced.

With time, others begin to orient themselves toward that same way of seeing, not because it is introduced as an expectation they must comply with, but because they sense that something in the organisation has become more precise, more human and more inhabitable, and because it creates space for their own observations to emerge with greater clarity.

For this reason, this way of working appears to me more responsible and more realistic than many approaches to change that are formulated as explicit programmes, because it takes seriously that people rarely transform through imposed frameworks, and far more often through the gradual experience that something new has become possible within the way the work itself unfolds.

I therefore think of metacognition in leadership as a practice in which a leader does not simply become better at understanding a given situation, but gradually develops a more refined capacity to read how the organisation itself creates meaning, and where that capacity, once it has found a language, becomes something that can be carried forward, not as implementation, but as culture.