The Drama Is Real. It Isn’t The Whole Story.
Watch an executive get defensive in a steering committee. Someone asks a direct question about the go-live date, and the sponsor’s jaw tightens, the voice sharpens, the justification arrives before the question has finished landing.
Everyone in the room reads this as decision-making. It isn’t. It’s chemistry.
Before there’s a defensive answer, there’s a need (protect the decision I already made), an emotion (something reads as threat), and only then a decision dressed up as reasoning. The felt urgency, the tightened jaw, the sharp voice — that whole sequence is a chemical reaction inside the body. It feels like judgment. It’s biology responding to a trigger.
The trigger is the catalyst. And the catalyst is where the actual control lives.
Four groups of catalysts feed every reaction an executive has in a room. Environment — who else is present, whether the meeting follows a hard call with the board, whether the room itself signals courtroom or conversation. Inputs — what’s in the body: caffeine, no lunch, three hours of sleep before a governance meeting that needed a clear head. Condition — age, health, financial pressure that day; a sponsor carrying personal financial strain reads a cost overrun differently than one who isn’t. Programming — years of social norms, the belief that admitting drift equals personal failure, the wiring that treats “I was wrong” as a threat instead of a data point.
None of this shows up in the minutes. All of it is running the meeting.
Most executives try to manage the drama directly — control the tone, rehearse the message, coach the emotional response. That’s managing the stage after the chemical reaction has already fired. It rarely works, because by the time the emotion is visible, the reaction is already underway.
The leverage sits earlier. A sponsor who knows a governance meeting always runs hot moves it off the slot straight after a difficult board call. An executive who notices their programming treats “you’re behind schedule” as a personal attack can name that pattern before the meeting, not defend against it during. None of this changes what’s true about the project. It changes whether the person receiving the truth can actually hear it.
I’ve sat across from sponsors who could not process an accurate status update because every catalyst in the room was working against them that day — tired, cornered, primed by a culture where admitting delay reads as weakness. The information was correct. The chemistry made it unreceivable. That was never a communication problem. It was a catalyst problem, and it was controllable, if anyone had been looking for it.
Which catalysts are you managing, and which ones are managing you?
