Stillness

The room is full. There are nine people around the table and one on the screen and the person on the screen has a hard stop in twenty-two minutes, which everyone knows because she said so at the top, and the air in the room has the particular density of a meeting that needs to make progress.

Someone says: let’s just look at the data.

The laptop is already open. The cursor is hovering over the dashboard. The dashboard will load in about two seconds and the room will turn toward the screen and the next forty minutes will be spent reacting to whatever the dashboard happens to show, and a decision will be made, or something that resembles a decision, and everyone will leave the meeting feeling that work has occurred.

The practitioner with the first virtue does something small. He does not stop the meeting. He does not give a speech. He says, before we open that, can we take sixty seconds and write down what we’re trying to decide?

The room is annoyed. The room is annoyed in a particular way that has no name but that everyone in operational work has felt: the irritation of being asked to slow down when slowing down feels expensive. Someone checks a phone. Someone sighs in a way that is meant to be heard.

He waits.

The sixty seconds pass. Two of the nine people in the room realize, in the silence, that they have come to the meeting with different ideas about what the meeting is for. One of them says so. The other agrees. The dashboard is not opened. The meeting goes a different direction than it would have gone, and the direction is the right one, and three weeks later no one remembers the sixty seconds because the sixty seconds did not feel like a contribution. They felt like a delay.

This is the first virtue. Not patience. Patience is waiting for something. Stillness is waiting with something. Sitting with the problem in the room, refusing to outrun it, holding the silence open long enough for the shape of the actual question to come into view.

It is the hardest of the virtues because it looks like nothing. It produces no artifact. It cannot be put on a slide. It is invisible to every system the organization uses to measure who is contributing.

The practitioner with stillness is contributing more than anyone else in the room.

The room will not know.

The room does not need to.