Reading the Air

Keeping the Beat #

Recurring meetings become suspicious to me when they start getting easier. No one interrupting, fewer people with puzzled facial expressions. Not quite enough moments where somebody goes on some tangent because the last topic didn't quite resolve or tie out for them.

Sometimes this is good. A team that works together long enough should get better at understanding one another, so one might expect subsequent meetings to get easier and easier. Every meeting doesn't need to become a parliamentary crisis to prove there are attendees there, and they are engaged.

But there is another version of the same smoothness where people have simply learned what just isn't worth pressing on anymore.

From inside the meeting, you can squint and not quite know which one it is. Those two things can look remarkably similar. Which is annoying.

Once you see it or hear it, you're hooked and will start paying more attention to everything happening all around the formal conversations.

No little thing you notice proves all that much, and your spidey sense can absolutely misfire. Maybe somebody is just tired. Or maybe the thing bothering you was resolved yesterday and nobody remembered to tell you, which isn't the interesting explanation you hoped for.

Still, after a while there can be enough little pieces floating around that I start thinking about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. That's probably a deeply unfair framing for meetings. A lot of times meetings are the work or where it gets done. But the thing I like about the garbage patch analogy is that no individual piece of garbage floating along in the middle of the ocean tells you much. It's only when you zoom out and can see what the totality of the currents produces that you see a larger story.

What you're looking for is whether things keep getting carried in the same direction for long enough that the room starts to feel downstream from whatever is actually moving the work.

There’s a Japanese phrase I’ve always liked: “reading the air.” I prefer "air" to the more familiar “reading the room,” because a room sounds more knowable in a way all the air, the entirety of the atmosphere around us, usually isn’t.^[1] You can walk into a kitchen right after two people have quietly whisper-argued and know you're missing something, immediately feeling something in the Force, even if both people are now politely discussing dinner.

Of course, garbage can float the wrong way for a while; anyway, it shouldn't be in the water in the first place. You can read significance into somebody being quiet when they are, in fact, thinking about what to have for lunch. But calendars and formal agendas are much, much slower to register what's floating around in the air currents. Rituals can long out-survive the initial reasons they existed.

My two favorite sports to watch are soccer and basketball. Is this team actually good, that player, that coach? In every analysis and opinion we build on as fans, there's a debate that will never be truly resolved: system or player? In both games, one player can completely take over a game, but watch enough, and you notice that usually happens only because everybody else is doing just enough of the right things around that player. We all notice and appreciate the spectacular takeover game, the Klay Thompson "Hand of God" destruction of Oklahoma City, because it's so easy to notice.^[2] But the conditions that made it even possible don't get enough credit.

I was basketball-sports-fan blessed to live in the Bay Area through the rise and dominance of Steph Curry. So I watched a lot of Golden State possessions. They didn't hit a 3 on each one, and the ones where they didn't were interesting in their own right: the spacing was off, even a few inches wrong, or somebody held the ball instead of moving it side to side, or a cutter went through the lane at the wrong moment and dragged a defender into someone else's way. You could feel the incoming timeout, could feel Steve Kerr fuming.

In soccer, I'm not a Liverpool fan, but I used to marvel at the heavy metal football pressing of the Jurgen Klopp era, where so much of the useful work for that team happened nowhere near the ball. A press is simply when a team applies direct pressure to the opposition, versus sitting back and letting them kick it around in non-dangerous areas, and it depends on several people moving almost together, each of them trusting that the others have seen the same thing. When it works, it's as beautiful as a goal; you can see the field constricting and confusing the other team. There's nowhere to go. But when it fails, the pressing team has missed something, and now the opposition is darting into lanes and all of a sudden their striker is in on goal. All it usually takes is one player slightly out of place, another having to cover, and a disastrous domino effect.

“The timing was bad” sounds pathetic and frankly stupid when you're being paid millions of dollars to coach a team and somebody has stuck a microphone in your face asking you what, exactly, went wrong in front of millions of viewers.

But a lot of the time, that's it: the timing was bad.

That timing met the real world, and the playbook didn't help. It can't account for all the things not in its pages: one of the defenders leaning an unexpected way, or the fact your teammate has seen something you haven't and has the ball an extra half-second.

The system and the player aren't really competing explanations at all; the system creates the opening, and the player still has to see it. At some point the players have to do stuff according to what the air tells them.

Sports puts the whole thing in front of us. Really good coordination is one of the reasons, if not the reason, we watch and enjoy team sports, even if it's almost invisible. The players don't need to stop and explain what they're doing because they're seeing the same game, all together.

But a team that's lost that coordination can get quiet too. The culture enforcer or captain or whoever stops pointing and correcting the player that didn't make the run, didn't press the right way. Something is now seriously off. And here's what it is: everyone isn't reading the same game anymore.