I am writing this somewhere over the world, on my way to Europe. First stop Salzburg, then a conference week in Slovenia, then on to Italy and Croatia. Ahead of me is the thing I love most. Wandering and wondering. Sitting and soaking in front of something centuries old and letting my mind play. That, and sharing great conversations over amazing food in beautiful places.
I always travel with a question in my pocket. This trip it is about rooms.
Salzburg, where I am headed first, sells you Mozart on every corner. The chocolates, the statues, the concerts in the squares. A whole city built into a gallery for one famous name.
What a city like that does not show you is where any of it began. The arguing. The half-formed phrase played over and over until it worked. We talk about Mozart as the lone genius, the prodigy who arrived fully formed. He did not. There was a family, a circle, a city full of musicians and patrons, rooms where music got made and tested and pulled apart long before it ever reached a concert hall. The small room behind the famous name.
We get this backwards in organisations all the time.
When leaders want to shift culture, they reach for the concert hall equivalent. The town hall. The all-staff email. Leadership conferences. Those have their place. They display what is already decided. They are not where the deciding happens.
The deciding happens in the salon.
A salon is a small room with a few seats drawn close. Twelve people, not the whole organisation. It trades reach for depth. In a room that size, people can say the unsayable. They can surface the "of course" no one questions anymore. They can rehearse a new way of working before anyone has to commit to it in front of everyone. Once an idea has been pressure-tested in that room, it has the weight to travel.
This is why the work I care about most happens in small cohorts, not big broadcasts. It's why I have loved the first cohort of Leading Culture. Twelve leaders, different industries, sharing real constraints in the room. They learn as much from each other as from me. That is a salon, not a stage.
So here is what I would sit with while I am away.
Where are the small rooms in your organisation, and who is in them? Are you broadcasting culture from the stage, or crafting it in the room? And which idea in your business is still half-formed, and needs a salon before it needs a strategy?
Pour a coffee. Find a chair you do not usually sit in. See what surfaces.
I would love to hear what you notice. I will read every reply, even if it takes me until I am back on home soil.
Thank you for reading.
[If you're interested, I'll be sharing travel photos on instagram over the next few weeks]
More soon
Meredith
PS If you'd like to join me and an intimate group of women in leadership roles exploring China, you can register interest here. Please RSVP before the end of June.
and If you've been waiting for Leading Culture's next intake, we are accepting applications now to commence in August. Learn more here.
