Something happens. I make sense of it. And what I make of it is never only what happened — there is always something I add.
Most of the time this is invisible, to others and to me. It is also normal, human, and usually useful. It is how anyone decides anything.
It matters where the stakes are. When a strategy is set, an operating model changed, a leader appointed, a restructure announced — what I added gets built into something other people then have to live inside.
This site is about examining what is being added. Not whether the conclusion is right. Whether anyone can see what it rests on.
The idea
A read is constructed. It is taken as real. It is then required of others.
Three things happen, usually in the same instant.
I construct a read of a situation — necessarily, because a situation does not arrive already interpreted.
I experience that read as the situation itself, rather than as my read of it. Not through carelessness. This is simply what it is like from the inside.
I present it to others as how things are. And because I have not marked it as a read, they are not offered the chance to hold it as one. They can comply with it or push against it. They cannot examine it, because nothing was put forward as examinable.
What follows is predictable. A different view is no longer a different view — it is an error, an alignment problem, a lack of ownership. The vocabulary is familiar because the situation is common.
I want to be careful here. This is not a failure of intelligence or integrity. It is what happens when interpretation does its ordinary work and nobody has reason to mark it as interpretation. It runs in me as reliably as anywhere else.
Where organisations already work on this
Two points in this are visible: the situation everyone can see, and the resistance that eventually shows up. Almost all conventional work attaches to one or the other — building the case, communicating the change, mapping stakeholders, clarifying decision rights, developing capability.
That work is not misguided. Those are the only two points anyone has access to. It is also why the same problems return: what happened between them stayed private, including from the person it happened in.
My name is Andreas.
Sixteen years at McKinsey across Europe and Latin America, ultimately as a Partner. Five years as Senior Vice President of People and Culture at Danske Bank.
[One paragraph on why this and not something else.]
This site is my read. I have constructed it, I take it seriously, and I do not think it is the only available account. If it does not match what you see, I would want to hear that.
Purpose
That what is behind what we want, propose and decide is visible to and revisable by ourselves and the people living it.
What becomes possible
Not results I can promise. Conditions that either exist in a team or do not — you will know which as you read them.
- Disagreement reaches a decision before it is made, rather than after
- When a decision meets resistance, the read behind it can be examined rather than defended
- People can say what they see to the person who decided, at a cost they can afford
- A wrong read gets corrected while correcting it is still cheap
- When someone commits, you can tell it from compliance, because you know what they objected to on the way
And the cost
Decisions take longer to close and feel less settled when they do. Some things you were confident about stop being settled. A read held open is more uncomfortable than a read held firm — that discomfort is not a side effect, it is what the work consists of.
Principles
Two movements. Neither works without the other.
Inward — seeing what I am adding
- Notice what I am adding
- Distinguish what I observed from what I concluded
- Name what I want, fear and protect in this
- Test how well my read holds, rather than how well I can argue it
Outward — making it examinable by others
- Say what I am after, and what I am not
- Say what I looked at, and what I left out
- Say what I concluded, and mark it as mine
- Say what I propose
- Say who can correct it, and what would change my mind
The outward move is available immediately, without any inner practice at all. What limits it is that I can only reveal what I have noticed. That is what the inward move is for.
Moments
Not a programme. Occasions that already exist in the calendar, worked differently.
The question is not which new process to introduce. It is which existing moments are consequential enough that what gets added in them shapes what others then live inside — and whether those moments are currently designed for any of it to be seen.
Where adding is consequential
- Strategy and planning processes
- Decisions about structure, roles and appointments
- Meetings that set direction others will execute
- Performance and development conversations
- Offsites and leadership sessions
- The preparation before any of these, where the read is usually formed and never examined
How I work
[One-to-one work with a leader. Work with a team inside its own consequential moments. Design and facilitation of specific sessions. Typical shape and duration, and what you need from a client for it to be worth doing.]
If something here matched what you see, the useful first step is a conversation about a specific decision — one that is coming, or one that already met more resistance than it should have.
No preparation. Nothing to buy at the end of it. I will tell you whether I think there is something to work with, including if I think there isn't.
I have set out what I think is happening and what I think follows from it. Both are my read.
The part I am least sure of is [name it honestly].