If You Meet in a Bar, Don't Be Surprised When You End Up in a Bar Fight

Two men walked into the meeting the way the Kray twins walk into a bar.

If you've seen the Tom Hardy movie - the pub scene, the whole room reading the temperature, everyone understanding that something is about to happen - that was the energy. Two operators, sent from London, here to inflict damage. Or so I'd been told.

They weren't gangsters. Mike was the incoming project director for our main construction contractor. Andy was his commercial director. And this wasn't a film - it was my first meeting as the newly appointed project director on an energy megaproject in Queensland that was coming apart at the seams.

I'd been thoroughly briefed before they arrived. Mike had been sent out from the UK parent company with a no-holds-barred remit. He was aggressive. He was unethical. He was, my team assured me, deliberately sabotaging the project to hold us to ransom for a better commercial outcome. By the time he sat down, I already knew exactly who he was.

The meeting went precisely as you'd expect. I led with my manufactured horror at arriving to such poor contractor performance. Far from being apologetic, Mike attacked - poor design, missed dates, site access failures, all our fault. I catalogued his team's failures in return and threatened to terminate the contract. He escalated. Two men, performing strength for their respective organisations, in a room built for exactly that performance.

We achieved nothing. Except one small thing, almost accidental: we agreed to go and look at the site together.

That agreement turned out to be the most important thing that happened in the room. Not because of what we decided - but because it got us out of it.

The boardroom was a bar

Here's what I understand now that I didn't understand then.

We didn't fail to make progress because Mike was difficult, or because I responded in kind, though both were true. We failed because of where we were standing.

The meeting was in our boardroom. My territory. Formal. Our Project Management Office and legal teams were literally down the corridor. Every word either of us said was calculated for an audience - our own people, our own organisations, the commercial dispute hanging over everything. The room rewarded posturing. It made adversaries of us before we'd opened our mouths, because that's what the room was built to do.

If you meet in a bar, don't be surprised when you end up in a bar fight.

The space you choose to have a conversation in is not neutral. It either reinforces the identities that have you locked in conflict, or it interrupts them. And most of us pay no attention to this at all. We hold our most difficult, most important, most identity-laden conversations in exactly the environments most likely to make them go badly - then we blame the person across the table.

The site changed everything

The construction site was a different world.

We walked the site together, which has a wonderful democratising effect - it's hard to perform corporate menace when you both look faintly ridiculous as shiny-arses in PPE. We were off both our territories. And we were standing in front of undeniable, physical evidence of how bad things had become.

Days earlier, a worker had almost been killed. A two-tonne machine had run out of control directly at him, and he was prevented from retreating, his back hard up against a wall. As it was about to plough into him, it just clipped a steel column, which deflected it just enough. The gap between him and death was two centimetres of steel. We stood and looked at the dent.

We talked to workers. We met the man who had survived. And I watched something I hadn't been briefed to expect.

Mike - aggressive, unethical, sent to hold us to ransom - was genuinely, visibly shaken by what he saw. Not performing concern for legal cover. Not manoeuvring. Actually distressed at the state of safety management that had allowed the incident to occur, and genuinely taking responsibility for it.

I couldn't hold my story about him anymore. The narrative I'd walked in with - the one my team had handed me, the one I'd have sworn was simply true - didn't survive contact with the man standing next to me on that site.

Nothing about the commercial dispute had changed. I still didn't trust him. But we had, without either of us naming it, found the first sliver of common ground: neither of us could stomach what this project was doing to the people working on it.

The container matters

Years later at Oxford, when I was introduced to the work of Ron Heifetz by Irwin Turbitt, I found the word for what had happened. Heifetz calls it a holding environment - the designed relational space within which difficult work can actually be done. A container strong enough to hold the heat of a hard conversation without everything collapsing.

The boardroom couldn't hold it. It amplified every dynamic that was tearing the project apart - organisational loyalty, legal jeopardy, the pressure to look strong. The site could hold it, because it stripped those dynamics away and replaced them with something we couldn't argue with.

I hadn't designed that. I stumbled into it. But once you see it, you can never again treat the choice of where as an afterthought.

And here's the thing - when I say the room, I don't only mean the room. The four walls are just the most visible part of it. The holding environment is everything that shapes what's possible between two people: who else is present, and whose side they're on. How the conversation is framed before anyone speaks. Whether there are lawyers down the corridor. How much time you've allowed. The story each of you has been told about the other. Whether you're sitting face to face across a table with the problem in between you, or standing shoulder to shoulder looking at the same problem.

Change any of those and you change the conversation.

The design of the holding environment is a leadership decision. These aren't logistics or administrative details. They're the difference between a conversation that's possible and one that isn't.

The question worth asking

Think about the hardest relationship you're carrying right now. The stakeholder you dread. The colleague every exchange with whom seems to go wrong. The negotiation that keeps hardening.

Now ask yourself where those conversations happen.

If the answer is a boardroom, a formal meeting, an inbox, a room where you're each flanked by your own people and performing for your own side - you may not have a relationship problem at all. You may have a room problem.

Mike and I went on to renegotiate the entire contract on a collaborative basis and our teams hit every target and milestone that followed*. It started with a decision that felt trivial at the time: let's not talk about this here. Let's go and look.

If you meet in a dodgy bar, don't be surprised when you end up in a bar fight.

Change the room.

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* I handed over to a new Project Director shortly after the renegotiation, as a different crisis in the Water Facilities project required my attention. The renegotiation set the new conditions for success, but required extraordinary performance from both the contractor and our own organisation going forward. What followed was years of relentless work across seven construction sites, delivered by the teams and leaders who came after me. The credit for achieving those milestones is theirs.

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This is drawn from a longer piece of work on stakeholder leadership - the R2Grid and the idea of tangential stakes - that I've been developing through the UQ-Oxford Executive Leadership Program. More on those in future posts.

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