07. What Are We Actually Trying To Become

I spent almost two hours in a waiting room once, holding documents I had not been told I could read.

The meeting was with the head of the then Marina Securities. My boss needed certain papers and I had been sent to collect them. That was the entirety of my brief. Go there, wait, collect, come back. So I sat in that reception and I waited, and I did what I always do when I do not have enough information. I turned it over. I tried to assemble the picture from the fragments I had.

I knew the broad shape of what was happening. Associated Discount House, where I worked, was going to be part of something much larger. Other institutions were involved. The whole thing would eventually become one new entity with a new name and a new identity that did not yet exist. I knew I had been drafted onto the restructuring team, which felt significant...it was significant and I had taken it just as seriously. What I did not know was what any particular meeting was for, what the documents I was collecting actually said, what my boss was doing while I sat there, or why this specific morning required me specifically.

It was only later that I understood the scale of what was being negotiated around me. The waiting room made sense after the fact. At the time it was just two hours of sitting with my own apprehension and the particular discomfort of knowing you are adjacent to something important without knowing your place in it.

That feeling. That specific feeling. I have never forgotten it.

Being on that restructuring team taught me a great deal, almost none of it intentionally.

At some point we called in branding and communications consultants to submit bids. They sent documentation. Proposals for what this new institution should look like, how it should present itself, what it was trying to become. I was asked to evaluate them.

Nobody told me what the new company was actually trying to become.

So I was sitting with a stack of proposals, trying to assess which one best captured a vision I had not been shown. I did the best I could. I read carefully. I applied whatever judgment I had.

The consultants who were eventually hired for change management left behind a set of metrics for measuring company culture. I remember this clearly because it was presented as a significant deliverable. A framework. A tool.

What I do not remember is anyone being trained on what those metrics were supposed to tell us.

What good looked like.

What we were measuring against.

The metrics existed. The training to use them did not.

Then KPMG arrived with a PDF template for SOPs. My job was to convert it into something the team heads could fill in, standardise the formatting, fix the lines and boxes, then pass it along. I spent hours on this. I had no idea at the time what an SOP actually was. Not conceptually, not practically. I just knew the boxes needed to be right.

I left for my MBA before the process finished. The organisation exists today. I could not tell you what its culture looks like or how you would know.

I have been thinking about that restructuring for months now.

Not with bitterness. I was young, I was learning, and the people above me were not withholding information out of cruelty.

They were busy.

They were managing something enormous.

They assumed that smart people could absorb context by proximity.

That if you put a capable person in the room, the room would teach them what they needed to know.

It does not work that way.

When I was at IE Business School my boss would send me to other countries for corporate meetings. Uganda was one of them. As one in International Development, I knew exactly why I was there for most of it. I had set up one-to-one sessions with prospective students, run proper presentation sessions at the Serena with a good turnout (thanks to the amazing marketing machine that helped build my leads), moved people down the pipeline.

That part made sense to me.

I understood the job and I did it well.

But then there was a bank meeting.

I sat across from a managing director I had never met, shook his hand, accepted a Parker pen, smiled for a photograph. An MOU was being discussed. I performed at the meeting well enough because that is what I do when I am underprepared — I think on my feet and I make it work on the surface.

But I did not know why we needed that particular MOU, or what pipeline it was supposed to open, or whether that was even the right bank for what we were trying to build.

I found out the purpose somewhere in the debrief back in Madrid. After the handshake. After the photograph. After the flight home.

That is a different problem entirely.

I am a change catalyst. When I go into an organisation something should be different by the time I leave. That is the only way I know how to work. And because I know that about myself, I feel in my body the frustration of every person right now who has been handed an AI mandate without a real brief.

They are sitting in the waiting room.

They have been sent to collect a document.

They know something significant is happening somewhere above them.

Nobody has assembled the picture.

The organisations buying platforms and booking sessions and filing the attendance numbers are doing exactly what my restructuring team did. They are running a process without first answering the question the process is supposed to serve.

And the people inside those organisations, capable intelligent people who could absolutely do this work if someone showed them the full picture, are sitting with their apprehension, turning it over, trying to assemble something coherent from the fragments they have been given.

A decade and a half after I spent an afternoon fixing lines and boxes in a PDF template I did not understand, I am building SOPs for my own businesses.

I know what they are now.

I know why they matter.

I know what it costs an organisation when the person doing the work does not have that context.

That is the only reason I ask the questions I ask before I recommend anything.

Not to slow things down.

Not to be difficult.

Because I have been the person in the waiting room, and I know that the document you are sent to collect only makes sense when someone finally tells you what the meeting was actually for.

Most organisations never get around to that part.