By the time I showed up, everyone had a theory about why things were stalled.

Lack of willingness to compromise, a winner-takes-all attitude, night-shift conditions, minimum salary increase, etc. The parties were each focused on their own interests and were unable to identify a shared interest on which to negotiate. Additionally, three years of friction had worn down trust and hardened positions.

Instead of trying to push the contract points across the finish line, I started looking at the dynamic between the people in the room. What were they avoiding saying out loud? Where did they feel disrespected? What were they trying to protect? I was looking at deeper patterns that maintained the parties in a confrontational attitude.

Eventually, after getting to know the parties and working with them separately, training them in negotiation, and helping them open up their attitudes, I invited the two negotiating teams to join me at a resort. I told them we had three days to overcome the obstacles and reach a final agreement. We worked all day; we shared meals and breaks. Little by little, the atmosphere shifted; the human environment changed. By the deadline I had established, they had an agreement. The gap that once seemed impossible to overcome was finally overcome.

I’ve seen this pattern over and over.

Every time a board complains about execution, or partners argue over the organization’s direction and key strategies, or a founder struggles to hand off responsibility to the next generation, we are usually dealing with symptoms. Of course, the surface problem is usually real enough, but the diagnosis is incomplete.

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The Problem Beneath the Problem

When a problem surfaces, we usually address the visible behaviors. In fact, we tend to believe that behavior is the problem and that it is what needs to change. This is also true regarding unsatisfactory performance or slow execution. We address the symptom but not its cause.

That works often enough, but it pays to pay attention when the same issue keeps returning despite smart people trying to fix it. That’s usually a sign you’re solving the wrong thing.

What looks like an operational bottleneck might actually be a broken relationship. A broken relationship might point to a personal conflict. And a personal conflict often leads back to someone’s internal habits or insecurities.

Once, a CEO at the head of a company in the Gulf Region complained to me that his team wasn’t taking enough ownership. He wanted people to step forward. Make decisions. Take responsibility. Stop bringing everything back to him. But I became curious about what happened when they did.

I asked him what had happened in the past when someone made an independent decision. Was he trusting his people? What had happened when someone had made a mistake? What was the level of emotional security experienced by his executives and employees?

The lack of ownership turned out to be a trust issue.

Going deeper, we discovered that my client feared losing control. He saw himself as someone who always had to have an answer, to be the unfailing problem solver. He feared that an executive’s mistake might damage his reputation. His perfectionism made him skeptical of cooperation, which in turn made it difficult for him to really listen to his people.

The conversation shifted well beyond the initial problem he came to the session with. We had to dive into the invisible pattern that produced the lack of ownership as a response. He had to take full responsibility for that result if he wanted to see change happening.

Learning Not to Speak Up

My client’s attitudes and habits were shaping the company culture.

Indeed, leaders play a great role in creating the environment in which people work. The quality of their listening, how they conduct themselves when stakes are high, and how they react to pushback. People pick up on these unwritten rules quickly.

Teams do not merely follow leaders. They adapt to them.

I remember being invited once to address the executive team of a CEO. Until he joined us, people were conversing. When he entered, a thick silence dropped. No one dared to share their opinion or ask a question. The fear in that room became tangible.

The problem was not passivity among those executives. It was the result of adapting to a leadership style.

Thus, if dissent creates friction, the system learns compliance; if initiative creates risk, the system learns dependence. If mistakes threaten status, the system learns concealment.

Adaptations That Outlive Their Purpose

There is another reason why certain patterns are not immediately visible. In fact, the habits that create today’s problems are frequently the very habits that created yesterday’s success.

I believe people are fundamentally good and well-intentioned. Thus, a founder who today micromanages probably needed to oversee every detail to keep the company alive at the very beginning. The habit that was a virtue yesterday becomes a vice today. An executive who never shows vulnerability might have learned self-reliance in a high-risk environment. Those weren’t mistakes; they were effective adaptations.

Organizations are like living organisms. They naturally and necessarily change. They constantly need to adapt to outside pressures. The trouble comes when the behavior doesn’t adapt to the change.

What helped you build a startup can keep you from scaling it. Growth isn’t always about picking up a new management framework—sometimes it’s about letting go of an old survival mechanism. Instead of asking what skill you need to learn next, the harder question is often, “What am I trying to protect?”

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The Internal Boardroom

Before behaviors, the mindset needs to change.

This requires recognizing that when we talk about prudence, demand more data, or commit to high standards, we are, in reality, reacting to an underlying fear that presents itself with valid excuses to delay a tough decision. The timing isn’t right. We need to finish this quarter first. The team is under too much pressure.

Control works the same way. Micromanagement rarely feels like control to the person doing it—it feels like taking responsibility or maintaining quality. But the real question often isn’t why the team isn’t performing, but why it feels so unsafe to trust them.

What I explain to my clients is that a leader operates in two settings:

• The External Environment: Markets, balance sheets, hiring, org structures, and competitive threats.

• The Internal Environment: Fear, ego, ambition, identity, and the need for control or recognition.

The path lies in attending to both settings. In fact, when you ignore the internal side (what Jung called “persona”), you remain blind to how your own habits warp your strategy. Instead, ignoring the external side turns leadership into navel-gazing. The real work happens where the two overlap.

Questions Worth Asking

So, here I want to share a few questions worth asking when you feel it’s time to step back and go beyond the mere observable symptom (the problem):

• What am I actually protecting here? (Is it the business, or is it my reputation, status, or need to be right?)

• What conversation am I avoiding?

• Why is this situation specifically difficult for me?

• What is this asking me to let go of? (Control, an old habit, or the need to have the answer?)

• What am I missing because of my own blind spots?

When a problem keeps cycling back, resist the urge to push harder on the immediate fix. Look at the dynamic driving it. Most long-term strategic challenges are human challenges in disguise—and often, the most useful adjustment you can make is to the person leading the effort.

If this letter made you think, consider sharing it with someone who might want to think with us—or restack it here.

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Dr. Aldo Civico is an anthropologist, author, and private leadership advisor to CEOs, entrepreneurs, and leaders navigating consequential decisions and transitions. A Columbia University Ph.D. and former director of its Center for International Conflict Resolution, he has spent three decades working at the intersection of leadership, conflict, power, and human nature. The Inner Boardroom is his weekly exploration of what we might not be seeing.

Work with me

I work privately with a small number of leaders navigating consequential decisions, transitions, and complex human challenges.

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I would sit down with them and listen to their stories of violence and to the circumstances that had led them to embrace a life of violence. Year after year, I built a map of violence in my mind and became familiar with it.

Then, one afternoon, I walked through those same barrios with a congressional representative from the United States. On his agenda was a meeting with local leaders who had resisted the logic of violence by appealing to culture and the arts.

Those were young men or women who were of similar age to the death squad members I had previously met. They were born in the same circumstances. Their personal stories developed in the same milieu.

And yet they shared an entirely different tale. It was a tale of hope and of resistance. I remember in particular a very enthusiastic, sharp young man who shared how he had become a leader at his high school, promoting participation and dialogue among his peers. Of how he had created a collective of mural artists who chose art over weapons.

I was deeply impressed by their stories. But I was also disturbed. How had I failed to see these young leaders all those years?

They shared the same streets as the death squad members I was studying. They often lived next door to one another. Yet they had been almost completely absent from the map I had been assembling in my mind.

I hadn’t missed them because information was unavailable. I had missed them because I wasn’t looking for them. The question guiding my research illuminated one reality while making another almost invisible.

That experience was an eye-opener.

The question that changed the way I see

It led me to reconsider my entire approach to that analysis, to ask myself questions around agency, intentionality, freedom of choice and conditioning, and the role of emotional trauma in our decisions.

It also allowed me to see the very people I had been studying through a different lens. I asked them new questions, which allowed me to realize that most of them had been victims of violence before becoming perpetrators.

Changing the questions didn’t only allow me to see people I had previously overlooked. It allowed me to see the people I thought I already understood in a different light.

That question has followed me into very different rooms ever since.

I have carried it into ceasefire negotiations between the Colombian government and an armed insurgency; into a company trapped for years in a stalemate with its union; into organizations attempting to transform their cultures; and into private conversations with CEOs trying to navigate profound technological and organizational change.

The circumstances differ. The question remains remarkably useful: What are we not seeing yet?

The more responsibility we carry, the more consequential our blind spots become.

A blind spot in our private lives can damage a relationship. In a CEO, it can shape an organization. In a political leader, it can affect millions of lives.

On learning to see beyond the maps we mistake for reality

Over the years, I came to understand something else. Our maps aren’t built only from information. They are built from biography.

Fear, ambition, trauma, culture, religion, success and failure; they all draw mental maps. So do loyalty, identity, status, and desire.

And because these forces operate largely outside our awareness, the question, “What am I not seeing?” eventually leads to another:

Who inside me is doing the seeing?

Every leader knows the outer boardroom—the place where strategies are discussed, numbers examined, disagreements negotiated, and consequential decisions made.

But there is another boardroom. The one within us.

On perception, human nature, and the invisible forces shaping our decisions

Around that table sit many characters: experience and ambition, fear and ego, loyalty and memory, intuition, the need for approval, the desire for control, our deepest values and convictions. They all have a seat. But they don’t all have the same voice.

Sometimes fear chairs the meeting while calling itself prudence. Ego can present itself as principle. The need for control can disguise itself as responsibility. Our hunger for recognition can masquerade as ambition. An old wound can have voting rights long after the circumstances that created it have disappeared.

And sometimes the quietest voice at the table is the one that already knows. This is what I call the Inner Boardroom.

Much of my work with leaders today happens at the intersection between these two boardrooms—the outer and the inner.

Someone may come to me with what appears to be a strategic problem: a difficult negotiation, a career transition, a conflict with a partner, a succession decision, or an organizational challenge. We work on the external reality, of course. But eventually, the conversation also moves inward.

Every strategic challenge eventually becomes a human challenge. And every human challenge eventually asks something of the person facing it.

The question is no longer simply, “What should I do?” Other questions begin to emerge: What is happening inside me as I try to decide? Which assumptions am I treating as facts? What truth am I reluctant to acknowledge?

And eventually, What am I not seeing?

A Place to Think

This is why I created The Inner Boardroom.

We live in a world with no shortage of information. We have access to more data, opinions, analysis, advice, and increasingly artificial intelligence than any generation before us.

What feels increasingly scarce is something else:

a place to think.

A place to step away from the velocity of our lives. To suspend the pressure to provide an immediate answer. To examine the maps through which we are interpreting reality. To notice the assumptions we have stopped questioning. To listen to the quieter voices around our inner table.

I don’t want The Inner Boardroom to become another source of leadership content competing for your attention. There is enough content in the world.

My aspiration is different. Once a week, I want us to stop.

Here I will write about leadership and power, but also about human nature and the inner life. I will draw from anthropology, negotiation, psychology, history, contemplation, literature, and from the extraordinary human beings and situations I have had the privilege of encountering over the past thirty years.

I don’t expect every letter to provide an answer. In fact, I have become increasingly suspicious of our obsession with answers. Some questions need to be carried rather than solved.

They need space, silence, time to work on us. That is what I mean by a place to think.

And perhaps there is no better place to begin than with the question that has followed me through so many rooms for the past two decades.

Think about a situation in your life or work that matters to you right now. It might be related to a decision, a relationship, a transition, or a problem you have been trying to solve.

Before asking, “What should I do?”, try asking something else: “What am I not seeing?”

Welcome to The Inner Boardroom. Take a seat.

If this letter made you think, consider sharing it with someone who might want to think with us—or restack it here.

Share

Dr. Aldo Civico is an anthropologist, author, and strategic leadership advisor to CEOs, entrepreneurs, and leaders navigating consequential decisions and transitions. A Columbia University Ph.D. and former director of its Center for International Conflict Resolution, he has spent three decades working at the intersection of leadership, conflict, power, and human nature. The Inner Boardroom is his weekly exploration of what we might not be seeing.

Work with me

I work privately with a small number of leaders navigating consequential decisions, transitions, and complex human challenges.

Explore Strategic Leadership Advisory →

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