There’s a moment in almost every important meeting that goes one of two ways.
Someone says something that lands a little sideways. It may challenge an assumption. It could be a real disagreement. The room gets quiet for just a beat.
And then the moment gets blown right past.
The leader says, “Well, I guess no one has any thoughts on that,” and they move on. Everyone exhales. The possibility passes. And something that needed to happen didn’t.
Or you’ve been in the other meeting. The one where two people keep pushing back, keep disagreeing, and it feels like things are about to come apart. The leader I was coaching described it as people blowing up, disrupting the whole room. But when we talked it through, what was actually happening was more subtle: it seemed like an attack, whether it was or not. It may not have been.
Two different meetings. Same result. Nothing got resolved, nothing grew, and many left a little more guarded than when they walked in.
There is a better option. It’s activating a space, a zone, where people can connect.
The Two Walls
Most of us have default moves when things get uncomfortable.
Some of us go quiet. We smooth it over, agree to keep the peace no matter what, and tell ourselves it wasn’t that important anyway. We get very good at making avoidance look like professionalism. I’ve worked with leaders who honestly believed they were being respectful by listening from behind a wall of careful politeness, completely unaware that their own silence played into avoidance and played into the possible shutdown they were trying to avoid.
Some of us push back hard. We defend, we debate, we shut it down. It can feel as if we are being direct and decisive. It can also feel, to everyone else in the room, like a defensive attack, even when that’s not the intention.
Here’s what’s true about both: they’re not character flaws. They’re reflexes: fight or flight, dressed up in business as usual. We’ve been running these patterns so long, and been told so consistently that they’re the right thing to do, the professional thing to do, the polite thing to do, that most of us don’t even realize we move behind a default wall. We’ve also convinced ourselves that staying behind it is the same as being in the conversation.
It isn’t.
The Zone Between
Between the wall of avoidance and the wall of attack, there is a space, a zone. We call it the Messy Middle.
It is not a compromise between the two walls. It’s an invitation to being present. It’s the space where you stay in conversation even when it gets awkward, even when it gets sticky, even when the silence is uncomfortable, and you’re not sure where things are going. It takes skill to be there. It takes some courage. And it is extraordinarily productive.
Think about tires on a road. On a smooth, easy stretch, your regular tires do just fine. Take that same car off-road, or onto ice, and you need a different tread. You need more friction to get traction. And here’s the thing: that friction isn’t a problem. It’s the solution. It’s what keeps you moving forward instead of spinning out.
The same is true in our teams and organizations. Friction, the productive kind, creates traction. It moves us forward. The question is whether we have the right tread for the road we’re on.
The Messy Middle is where we can allow that friction to become fertile. Think of it as a garden between the two walls. Gardens are not tidy without interaction. They need intentional tending. They need a gardener who knows when to prune, when to let things grow, when to add some fertilizer, and when to let the ground rest. The garden can look wildly different depending on who’s cultivating it and what they’re growing, but the conditions for growth in a conversation are always the same: presence, patience, and a commitment to stay in the messy.
What It Looks Like in Business Interactions
Messy Middle moments don’t have to be dramatic. They look like someone who simply chose to stay in the conversation.
It’s the leader who gets challenged in a meeting and responds with an acknowledgment and a question instead of a defense. It’s the team that keeps talking after the first uncomfortable silence instead of moving to the next agenda item. It’s the peer who disagrees, and because they stay in it, the disagreement opens the door to something better than either of them had originally proposed.
It also looks like what could have become a hard conversation that actually happens, and it’s easier than expected.
I’ve worked with many leaders who were so focused on managing what the other person was doing, so trained to be aware, careful, and measured, that they had become completely unaware of their own presence as a player in the conversation. They thought they were being respectful. What they were actually doing was phoning it in from behind the wall, which meant they weren’t really in conversation.
And I’ve seen the other version too. A situation arises on a team, something that matters, something that’s affecting people, relationships, and outcomes. It gets reported and brought to the leader’s attention. And the leader says, “I haven’t seen that myself. I’d need to see it with my own eyes.”
It sounds reasonable. And sometimes that’s a very sophisticated avoidance wall. And if left unchecked, it shuts down needed communication.
Fruitful Friction® invites us out from the comfort of camping out behind the avoidance or attack walls. Into a conversation that doesn’t have to hide behind politeness or protocol. Into the garden, together, navigating it carefully and kindly. Not nice and polite, which meets social expectations and allows us to primarily take care of ourselves. Rather, kind and honoring, which tend to the relationship and keep us present.
A situation to watch for: not every conversation benefits from being in the Messy Middle. Some are transactional. Some relationships have already passed the point of redemption. Some people can’t meet us there, at least not right now. Part of the skill is learning to read those signals, to notice when you’re not getting traction, when things aren’t growing, when this isn’t the right garden for this particular moment.
Why We Avoid Friction
Often, any friction, any moment of tension or discomfort, gets labeled as conflict. And conflict, we’ve been taught, is what leaders must prevent. So we invest enormous energy in avoiding the very conversations that would move us forward.
We’ve been trained to equate smooth with successful.
Move fast. Keep things going. If there’s no friction, we’re doing it right. The thing is, on a team, smooth almost always means someone isn’t talking. A key voice is quiet. An important idea never surfaced. And we called that efficiency.
Here’s the reframe: friction and conflict are distinct, different, and distant. Friction is not failure. Friction is the fuel. The teams and leaders who understand this don’t try to eliminate friction. They develop the skills to make it fruitful. And over time, something interesting happens. The Messy Middle starts to feel familiar. Not easy, exactly, but familiar enough that when you land in it, something in you recognizes it. We’ve been here. This is where the good stuff happens. Let’s stay.
That familiarity is built through practice. Through learning the tools. Through showing up for the conversation more than once and discovering that you came out the other side with something better than what you walked in with.
The Payoff: Fruitful Friction®
When you stay in the Messy Middle, when you tend the garden instead of abandoning it, the outcome is Fruitful Friction®.
Growth. Innovation. Alignment. Real connection. Teams that move forward together because they’ve actually worked through something together, not around it.
This is where successful teams thrive. Not in the absence of friction. Rather, in the skillful, intentional use of it.
We have been so thoroughly taught to avoid this friction that we mistake as conflict that we walk away from the most fertile opportunities for friction in the messy middle. The conversations that can change things. The relationships that could deepen. The ideas that needed a little resistance and challenge to become something great.
The Messy Middle is waiting. And so is everything that grows there.
Commit to the Possibility
What conversation have you been avoiding? What wall are you hiding behind, the smooth professionalism of avoidance or the defended certainty of attack?
There is a zone between those walls, full of possibilities.
Come find out what your team is capable of when you stay in it. Join us for a workshop. Bring us in for a keynote. Or start right here: get in touch and let’s talk about what Fruitful Friction® could open up for your organization.
Hilary Blair is a leadership keynote speaker based out of Denver, CO, and is the co-founder of ARTiculate: Real & Clear. She is also a highly regarded actor, improviser, facilitator, voice-over artist, and voice expert coach.
