The morning I wrote that down, I also wrote: the confrontation does not have to be dramatic to be necessary. Necessary things can happen quietly. I can say to Marian, at the next dinner: I want to tell you a little more about what I actually do. I can say to Beth: let me clarify something Daniel may have gotten slightly wrong. I can do this without announcing that Daniel lied, without a scene, without anyone needing to be the villain.
I wrote that down. Then I did not do it, because two days later the Northbridge email arrived and the situation changed entirely.
But the morning mattered. The writing it down mattered. It was the moment I admitted to myself that the waiting had been a choice, not an inevitability, and that the choice had not served me.
## Preparing for the Workshop
I prepared for the Northbridge training the way I prepare for any workshop: by doing my homework on the company and tailoring the framework to their specific context.
Linda Cho sent me background materials: an org chart, a brief overview of their core services, the top three issues their team leads had flagged going into the training day. The top three issues were: unclear ownership of client communication during account transitions, a work order tracking process that the facilities team found inconsistent, and a meeting structure that account managers reported as not useful for their actual workflow.
None of these were unusual. The account transition communication issue is a handoff problem I see in probably eighty percent of the service companies I work with. The work order tracking issue was more specific and more interesting. The meeting structure issue is almost always a symptom of something else — either the meetings are a substitute for a communication system that doesn’t exist, or they exist because a previous leader required them and no one has asked whether they still need to.