A few weeks ago, I wrote about what happens when self-awareness slips under pressure and how the leadership behaviours that can cause the most friction (volatility, absolute certainty, the power trip) often aren't character flaws. They're often what happens when someone's just moving too fast, and is under too much pressure to notice themselves doing ‘the thing.’

I've spent time this week training on water literacy - building the same kind of topic knowledge for water scarcity that I already have for climate, so I can bring this into workshops with those audiences this really matters to. This is another topic where I expect to see a group of committed, well-intentioned people, each one moving fast, each one under pressure but who could be unconsciously drowning each other out on exactly the issues that most need everyone's voice.

Climate. Water scarcity. The stuff that's big, urgent, but easy to feel powerless about - and get stuck on.

It's rarely disagreement about the goal

In my experience facilitating conversations like these, the sticking point is almost never, "do we all agree this matters?" Everyone in the room usually does. But, what slows things down is something else – and it’s often not just one thing…

Priority - it's urgent, but not today's urgent, when there are countless other fires burning (no pun intended).

The way forward - everyone is heading for the same destination but not everyone agrees on the route.
Power in the room - the loudest, most senior, or most confident voices can dominate the room and quieter ones - often the ones with the most useful challenge – can get talked over or never heard.
Trust - people who've sat through workshops and consultations before, have watched nothing tangible come out of the discussion and have just stopped believing that their time and effort in engaging with things, changes anything.

So the third one on the list - power in the room - is where that self-awareness piece comes back into play. It’s very rarely someone with bad intentions who’s deliberately shutting people down. Instead, it's usually someone under pressure, moving fast, without the spare capacity to notice they're dominating. There’s limited self-awareness. It’s the same thing, but it’s showing up in a group instead of individually.

Why this matters beyond the room

Nobody needs persuading that climate change or water scarcity are big problems - everyone can see that. What's much harder is the belief that anything can actually be done about these issues, especially when someone watching from outside sees decisions stall, once again, in a room they're not even in.

That's why the work in the room matters more than it might look like from outside. When a stuck room reaches consensus - when priorities are discussed honestly, disagreement gets worked through properly, and quieter voices don't get lost – it’s not just a good meeting. It's very visible proof to people outside that room, that something can be different. It's the antidote to "there's nothing I can do about it," which is a sentence I’ve heard (again) just this week.

Where the evidence comes from

Over two decades of senior facilitation work, I've seen this pattern play out again and again - a room full of people who are genuinely committed, stuck in competing priorities and too many perspectives, often each one absolutely certain they're right. What shifts it tends to be someone independent in the room, with no stake in the ‘politics’, making sure the quieter voices are heard alongside the loudest and keeping the discussion on track. Agreement is so much more likely, more quickly.

Building the substance, not just the method

This is part of why I spent this week on a Water Literacy course - not because I'm switching focus, but because water scarcity has exactly the ‘shape’ of issue I care about: urgent, widely agreed on in principle and… easy for the conversation to stall on the way to actually deciding anything. I wanted to build the substance as well as the method of doing it, so I’m ready for when that room needs facilitating.

So, where have you noticed a room - or a wider conversation - get stuck, not from disagreement about the goal, but from something else completely?