Waiting Out the Rain

Elevation Gain | Post 5 of 6

Last night it rained, and I did something unusual for me. I waited.

No rerouting the evening. No contingency plan with three options ranked by weather resilience. I made the best of where I was and let it rain.

When it cleared: the most beautiful sky of the entire trip, and this trip has not been short on sky. I knew, watching it, that in most previous versions of my life I would have missed it. I'd have already been somewhere else, executing the backup plan.

My FOMO can be debilitating. It's something I actively regulate. The cruel math of it is that the fear of missing the other thing pulls you out of the thing you're in, until you're half-present in both and fully present in neither.

The moments I've loved most this month were mostly not the big engineered adventure days. They were the thing ten minutes away. No logistics, no reservations, no version of me operating at project-manager capacity.

Every senior team I've worked with has the same FOMO, and it looks like a calendar.

The CEO can't step out of a single meeting because something might happen. The COO is on three committees that should be one. The team meets weekly, and the weekly meeting is updates, and the updates are things everyone already read. Then a crisis hits and the team discovers, mid-crisis, that it has never actually talked. It has only ever reported.

Ask a health system executive team when they last spent sixty minutes together with no agenda except the question "how are we working, and what's getting stuck between us." The answer is usually the retreat. The retreat was fourteen months ago. It had a facilitator, a lake, and eleven action items, ten of which are still open.

The retreat is the big engineered adventure day. The thing ten minutes away is a monthly hour, on the calendar, where the team talks about the team.

Who's carrying too much. Which decision keeps bouncing between two people. What the new CNO needs and hasn't asked for, because see Post 1. Where the CEO is still holding a decision that belongs three levels down.

That hour beats the retreat. It costs nothing. Every team I've watched actually do it, month after month, gets measurably better at the thing that quietly drives most of what happens in a hospital or a health center: whether the people at the top can make a decision together and have it hold.

Before I left, I said my brain needed a break. This is it. Not the trip as a concept. The sitting still while it rains. The not optimizing.

Teams need the same thing and they don't get it by accident. Somebody has to decide that the hour matters more than the next thing. Usually that somebody is the CEO, and usually the CEO is the one most convinced she can't spare it.

The sky only shows up for the people still standing there when the rain stops. Same for teams.