An Amsterdam pavement, a few uncomfortable conversations and the things we teach people without realising it.
I took a photograph of my shadow while walking through Amsterdam.
Not exactly my most flattering portrait, although arguably an improvement on some photographs taken of me over the years.
I didn't think much about it at the time. Just an interesting shape on the ground.
But looking at it later, I started thinking about the shadows we cast over other people without necessarily realising it.
And after the last few weeks, that's become a rather uncomfortable thought.
I was having a conversation recently when someone expressed an opinion so far removed from my own view of the world that I wondered whether we were actually living on the same planet.
Not just a different perspective. A completely different solar system.
I could feel my reaction arriving before I'd even finished listening.
There was a rather angry little creature in my head, somewhere between a rabid dog and an outraged Yorkshire terrier, desperate to get out and have its say.
Fortunately, I managed to keep it on its lead.
I took a breath, resisted the temptation to respond with what I was thinking and carried on the conversation.
But afterwards I found myself wondering why I'd reacted quite so strongly.
Was it simply because I disagreed? Was something I valued being challenged? Or had I already decided what sort of person I was dealing with and stopped being curious?
Probably a bit of all three.
And that last possibility bothered me.
Because I spend a great deal of my working life encouraging people to question their assumptions about others.
It's slightly inconvenient when you catch yourself doing precisely what you tell everyone else not to do.
I recently read an interesting article about how human beings have evolved through culture as well as biology.
The basic idea is that we don't have to wait for genetic evolution to adapt to our environment. We learn from one another, pass on knowledge, develop habits and create ways of behaving that help us survive and succeed.
Of course, biology and culture influence each other. It's not an either-or argument.
But it got me thinking.
If we're so good at learning from the people around us, we're probably equally good at learning things that are no longer particularly useful.
Ways of thinking. Ways of responding. Ways of leading.
And once those patterns become familiar, we can start treating them as truths rather than habits we've acquired along the way.
Perhaps that's why changing behaviour can be so bloody difficult.
We're not simply asking people to do something differently.
Sometimes we're asking them to question something they've spent years learning to believe is right.
And that includes me.
Over the last few weeks I've been working with leadership teams in Turkey, the UK and the Netherlands.
Different cultures, different backgrounds, different expectations about leadership and relationships.
And there's one rather obvious limitation I bring to every one of those conversations.
I speak English.
That's it.
After more than forty years working internationally, I can confidently order a beer in about ten languages, which is a useful survival skill but hardly qualifies me as a linguist.
Yet I regularly ask people to discuss complicated things like trust, emotion, relationships and behaviour in English, often their second or third language.
And then I have to be careful not to interpret a pause, a blunt response or an unusual choice of words through my own cultural assumptions.
I can observe someone's expression, body language and choice of words. They may offer clues about what is happening.
But clues aren't conclusions.
A silence might mean disagreement. Or careful thought. Or simply someone searching for the right English word.
And, of course, what I think I'm seeing is influenced by whatever is going on in my own head at the time.
That's the awkward bit.
We don't observe the world from some wonderfully neutral position. We bring ourselves into every conversation.
Our experiences, expectations, frustrations and prejudices all come along for the ride.
Even when we think we've left them at home.
Back at KOAP, we've been having some interesting conversations about who we are as a business and who we want to be when we grow up.
Which, considering we incorporated in 2009, suggests we've been enjoying a rather extended adolescence.
We've grown, people have taken on different responsibilities, and the business needs to work differently as we move forward.
But I've started questioning some of the habits we've developed along the way.
For years I've been the person who steps in when something needs sorting.
A decision needs making? I'll make it.
A problem needs solving? I'll have a go.
Something isn't moving quickly enough? I'll get involved.
At the time, that probably helped us get things done.
But what happens when the business grows and those same habits are no longer helpful?
If people have learned that I'll eventually step in when something needs sorting, why should I be surprised if they sometimes wait for me to do exactly that?
I don't know whether that's happening as much as I suspect. I need to ask, listen and look at the evidence rather than simply assume.
But it's a possibility I can't ignore.
And here's the uncomfortable question.
If I want people to take more ownership, am I genuinely giving them the space to do it?
Or am I still hovering in the background, waiting to rescue things when they don't happen quite the way I would have done them?
It's all very well telling people to become more independent.
It's rather less useful if you keep grabbing the steering wheel.
There's another part of this that I've been thinking about.
We rarely know everything someone else is carrying into a conversation.
Over the last few weeks I've had the usual mixture of work, travel, family responsibilities and people I care about needing support.
Nothing particularly extraordinary. Just life doing what life does.
But it reminded me that everyone else has their own version of that.
The person who seems distracted in a meeting might be dealing with something far more important than the agenda.
The colleague who responds sharply might have had a dreadful morning.
Or they might simply disagree with us.
We don't know.
And perhaps the mistake is deciding we do.
That doesn't mean excusing every behaviour or avoiding difficult conversations. Sometimes things need challenging, and sometimes people need holding accountable.
But there is a difference between challenging what someone does and deciding we understand why they do it.
One invites a conversation.
The other can close it down before it's begun.
Which brings me back to that photograph in Amsterdam.
There's something rather obvious about a shadow.
It follows you around whether you're paying attention to it or not.
And it changes depending on where you're standing and where the light is coming from.
Perhaps our influence on other people is a bit like that.
We don't always see it from their perspective.
I've spent much of my working life observing how other people's behaviour influences those around them.
But people have also spent years learning from mine.
Some of what they've learned will have been useful.
Some of it probably hasn't.
And if I genuinely want things to change, perhaps I need to stop asking everyone else to step out of their familiar patterns while I remain comfortably inside mine.
The trouble with your own shadow is that you can't simply walk away from it.
Although apparently you can photograph it on an Amsterdam pavement and then spend far too long thinking about it.
