The meeting lasted nearly two hours.
Every explanation made sense.
Nobody disagreed with anyone.
The room was full of smart people.
By the end of the meeting, every department had answered every question directed at them.
And yet one question remained.
Not because the information was missing.
Because the explanations never became one explanation.
That's the meeting I remember.
Not because anyone was wrong.
Because everyone was right.
The reports were accurate.
The explanations were accurate.
The business itself remained unexplained.
The problem wasn't that we needed more information.
We already had it.
The problem was that nothing connected those explanations into a single picture of what the business was actually doing.
The next meeting started differently.
We stopped asking each department to explain its own numbers.
We started asking one question.
"What explains the business?"
That question changed every meeting that followed.