What Happened one Sunday Morning

It's Sunday. Early. I get a text from Allie.

Are you there? Can we talk?

I call her straight back. She's in a taxi on the way to the office.

Allie is 37, MBA from a top ten US school, sharp in a way that makes rooms run better when she's in them.

She heads a project with a major review on Thursday. One of the top people is flying in from New York. The project is a spreadsheet model almost two years in the building: it pulls data from 36 countries and is supposed to produce useful intelligence for the business.

It's a mess. She inherited it from the previous manager, who bungled it and used his connections to leave before it collapsed on him.

Allie has inherited the broken model, a demoralised infighting team, and against her instincts, she’s hired an expensive outside consultant who is a petulant prima donna.

Her words that morning: I'm at the end of my rope and running out of moves.

We don’t look at the spreadsheet. That's not my skillset, and more importantly, it's not where the answer is.

Instead, I take her into the inner tools we've worked with for a few months. She finds a conference room, closes the door, and we go in.

What comes to her is a vision of a burnt-out rainforest landscape. Moving through it, she finds a patch of trees, and she knows immediately that these trees are the spreadsheet model.

She floats above them and begins to see a pattern. The arrangement of the trees shows her exactly where the linkages in the model are broken.

At the same time, a figure is moving through the undergrowth. A medicine man, clearing away choking vines.

Twelve minutes. Then she comes back.

We hang up.

She calls again around three in the afternoon.

They've fixed the linkages. The model is working.

And—what I couldn't have predicted—the consultant’s energy has shifted. No more prima donna. He's engaged, constructive, actually helping.

Thursday's review goes well.

Allie went on to use these tools on one dead-in-the-water project after another.

The senior person who'd flown in from New York eventually headhunted her internally — moved her from London to New York at roughly triple her UK salary.

I tell this story often because it shows something I want to be precise about.

In twelve minutes, on a Sunday morning, in a borrowed conference room with her eyes closed, Allie accessed a level of understanding that two years of conventional analysis hadn't reached.

Not because she's unusual. Because she used a different door.

One of the surprises of running a London Meetup over several years is how ordinary these capacities turned out to be.

The people who surprised me most weren't the ones who were ‘spiritual’. They were accountants, lawyers, executives and engineers who were doing this for the first time. And often came back from their first journey looking quietly astonished.

I've come to believe that we are both larger than we imagine ourselves to be, and participants in patterns of life that our ordinary awareness barely notices.

That’s the work I do.