What's Passive Disrespect?

A strategy is agreed, and the meeting is meant to begin the work. Then one familiar question puts everything back on the table. A reflection on the quiet ways doubt can stall progress, and what changed when I stopped starting again.

For a while, I had the feeling that someone was undermining me in meetings.

It was difficult to explain, even to myself. They weren't openly hostile. They asked questions, expressed doubts, wondered whether we were ready. All things a person is allowed to do, and sometimes things a person should do. But I would leave those meetings with the strange sense that work we had already done had become uncertain again, and that I was somehow responsible for making it solid.

I wondered if I was being paranoid.

Eventually I went back over a run of meetings, paying attention to what happened after each person spoke. A pattern I had struggled to describe became easier to see. One colleague would cast doubt on an idea, and the discussion would move away from what we had come to decide or do.

I could also see how readily I followed them. I would start explaining, then find myself trying to recall details from weeks or months of work while everyone waited. There was always something I couldn't summon precisely in the moment. I'd mix up a date, or the wording of a decision, or who had been in which conversation. The work itself hadn't become less sound, but I could hear myself making it sound tenuous.

Often someone else would join in with another concern. Then another. By the end, we'd have agreed to hold another meeting to go over things we had already discussed.

I had thought the problem might be that I needed to prepare more thoroughly, listen more generously, explain myself better. I did all of those things. But the questions kept coming, often at the point when we needed to move from deciding into doing.

One of those moments came at the kickoff for a strategy I had spent months developing with others. The person was part of that process. There had been discovery, discussion, changes, and a great deal of work to reach a conclusion. The strategy had been endorsed. We were meeting to begin.

Then they said something like, "I don't think we really know what we want to do, though."

I recognised the feeling immediately. I could almost feel myself preparing to go back through the whole process: who we'd spoken to, what we'd tested, why we'd chosen this direction. And I knew how it would go if I tried to reproduce all of that from memory in the room.

So I didn't.

I acknowledged that there were still questions, then reminded the group of the discovery work and the decisions already made. I said I felt we had enough to begin.

They hesitated.

That rarely happened. Usually there would be a long account of everything that might still go wrong, and the room would open up around it. This time, there was a little space. We carried on with the work we had come to start.

It felt enormous to me, although I doubt it looked like much from the outside. I hadn't delivered a perfect rebuttal or produced a fact nobody could dispute. I had simply stopped treating a broad expression of doubt as a reason to put months of collective work on trial again.

They tried it in later meetings. I didn't give those moments the same airtime, and other people seemed grateful for it. Eventually it stopped.

I've thought about why I called this passive disrespect. It wasn't because I believe a strategy should be protected from questions once it has been agreed. New information can change things. A good objection deserves attention, including an inconvenient one.

What troubled me was the repeated suggestion that we could not move forward, without anything specific enough to examine. The question sounded open, but it had the effect of undoing other people's work. It asked me to prove, from memory and on demand, that a process everyone had been part of had actually happened.

I can't know exactly why that person kept doing it. I felt at the time that they needed the room to keep looking to them for the answer. Perhaps they would describe it differently. But I can describe what happened to the work, to the room, and to me when I kept accepting the invitation to start again.

That day, I didn't accept it. And we began.