“Meeting, after meeting, after meeting,” Addison lamented. “If it’s not a meeting about this, it’s a meeting about that.”

“Management is about meetings,” I replied. “If you stood back from all the meetings your company has, what is the big subject area for most?”

“That’s easy,” she nodded. “Most meetings are about some shortfall, some underperformance, a debrief on why something went wrong, a meeting to fix something next time. If you listed all the meeting subjects, you would think we were a company of incompetent stooges.”

“When there is a meeting about underperformance, how would you characterize the conversation?” I asked.

“Again, that’s easy. It starts by looking for the reason why. It ends up attempting to blame someone or some thing. It gets defensive right away, everyone CYA. No real accountability for the consequence.”

“You described the play as a group of incompetent stooges. Setting aside the stooge part, is it a problem of competence?” I wanted to know.

“Yes, you could say it that way,” Addison stopped her thought. “The blame conversation usually describes someone not paying attention, or someone skipping a step, or someone too lazy to double-check. But, I don’t know if its just an unwillingness to pay attention, or a lack of skill in paying attention.”

“Is there a skill in paying attention?”

“If you break it down,” she explained. “What should catch your attention? How often do you pay attention? What distracts you from paying attention? How do you know when you are paying attention?” A few seconds of silence lingered. “We train on the steps. We train on the sequence. We train on the quality standard. But, we never train on paying attention. And, not paying attention causes most of our problems.”