The Objector

He pushes back on slide three. He pushed back on slide three last week, and in the quarterly, and in the review before that, and he will push back in the next one, and the room has stopped experiencing this as courage.

Once it was. There was a meeting, years ago, where he said the difficult thing and it cost him something real, and the project changed, and he was right. That meeting is the origin of everything that followed. He learned that the objection was his contribution, and he has been making it ever since, and somewhere in the making of it the objection stopped being a response to the work and started being a response to the room being full.