Nov 18, 2025Organizational Culture & Change
The meeting that changed my mind
I walked in to manage a conversation. I walked out with a genuinely new question about whose expertise counts in a room.
I had a plan, an agenda, and a quiet assumption that I was the person in the room who knew what good looked like.
Ten minutes in, a first-year teacher described a pattern in her data that none of us had named, and the whole conversation reorganized around her. I had almost scheduled her out of it.
Expertise in that room was not distributed evenly. It was distributed invisibly — which is worse, because you can't invite what you can't see.