Why Are We Still Talking About This?

You are halfway through a meeting when something comes back onto the table that you could have sworn had already been dealt with.

It may be the person you thought everyone had agreed to hire, the customer problem that was supposedly settled, the investment that had been approved or the role that had finally been clarified. Whatever it is, you recognise it immediately because you have already spent time on it, probably more than once.

The thought that goes through your head is fairly simple.

Why are we still talking about this?

The trouble is that it is rarely the only thing you are dealing with.

Running a business can feel like keeping a remarkable number of plates spinning at the same time. A customer needs an answer. Someone important wants five minutes. The numbers need attention. A supplier has changed something you were relying upon. There is an opportunity you do not want to miss, a problem you would rather not have and another meeting starting shortly.

None of these things is invented. Most of them genuinely matter.

Which is why, when you finally make a decision, there is a certain relief in being able to put it down and move on to the next thing.

Except some decisions refuse to stay down.

They return a week later, or a month later, sometimes wearing slightly different clothes. The names may have changed, the circumstances may have moved on, yet somehow you find yourself having essentially the same conversation again.

That becomes tiring, not simply because another meeting has appeared in the diary, rather because the issue has found its way back into your head and there is only so much room in there.

You start asking why somebody has not dealt with it. Why nobody owns it. Why something that seemed perfectly clear when everyone left the room has become unclear again.

Sometimes somebody simply has not done what they said they would do. That happens.

Yet sometimes there is something more interesting going on.

The issue may have been talked about at length without anybody actually making the decision. Everyone may have left the room believing something slightly different had been agreed. Ownership may have sounded obvious until the moment somebody actually had to act.

Or perhaps the decision everybody was trying to make was never quite the decision that needed making.

That is easy to miss in a busy business because the business does not stop and wait for you to notice.

People keep working. Customers keep calling. Meetings keep happening. The numbers keep arriving. The plates keep spinning.

Somewhere amongst all of it, the same unresolved things continue travelling around the organisation until, eventually, they find their way back to the person they know will pick them up.

What keeps coming back to you because it was never really decided, owned or put down?

If something came to mind, start a private conversation with me about it.

Alan Branagh

Founder, The Alchemists

When the pressure is high. When the game has changed. When the next decision matters.