Read the Room, Not the Brief
Every new assignment begins with a story someone is eager to tell you. A tidy list of challenges. A retrospective wrapped as a warning. Or, occasionally, a glowing biography of the person who came before you—meant to reassure you that the role is important, the team is special, and the problems are manageable.
I’ve learned not to believe any of it.
The brief—spoken or written—always skims the surface. It tells you the problem the leaders wish they had. It paints a picture clean enough to hand to an outsider without embarrassment. It reveals almost nothing about how the place actually functions.
You don’t find the truth in the handoff.
You find it in the room.
The tone. The gaps. The silences. The people who reach out privately. The people who won’t look each other in the eye.
That’s where the real story lives.
This is exactly what I walked into at a travel technology company in the early days of COVID—when travel was collapsing and the entire industry was running on anxiety, duct tape, and whatever small pockets of operational hope they could find.
I was hired by the VP of Product to steady a struggling team responsible for building a conversational agent—one that suddenly needed to scale overnight. He talked a lot about the heroic work done by my predecessor, the chaos of the early pandemic, the volume of customer feedback, the absence of a project management system, and the kinds of alignment issues you expect when everything is on fire.
But he didn’t name anything as a problem.
He simply described the wreckage in a bright, neutral tone, as if it were all a natural disaster no one could be blamed for.
And even as he talked, you could almost hear what was missing. The things he wouldn’t say. The fractures he avoided. The parts of the truth that shimmered for a moment but then dissolved.
So, I left that meeting with a new task: to discover what was really happening.
