A Hundred Blogs Glimpsing the Same Wisp?

‘Can I have a word?’

Four words. Nothing remarkable about them. You might hear them across a desk, at the end of a meeting, walking past someone in a corridor. You look up. Perhaps your breathing changes slightly. Your stomach tightens. Your attention moves from whatever you were doing to the person who said them. Before they have said another word, you may already be wondering what you have done.

Or perhaps you aren’t. Perhaps you assume they want your advice. Perhaps you are pleased they have finally come to speak to you. Same four words. Something happened between hearing them and whatever you did next. I have been interested in that space for a long time. I just didn’t realise quite how interested.

This is the hundredth blog I have published here. I didn’t start with a plan for a hundred. There was no grand architecture pinned to the wall, waiting for me to fill in the pieces. I wrote about what interested me: leadership, resilience, communication, safety, persuasion, organisations, relationships, meaning, identity, stories, change, what happens to us under pressure, what happens between people when things become difficult. They looked like different subjects. Looking back, I’m not so sure. I have been writing about one thing from many directions:

the gap between what happens and what we do next.

We tend to skip over it. Something happens. Someone says something. An email arrives. A number changes. A face shifts. A colleague goes quiet. Then we respond. Written down, it looks almost mechanical: Stimulus → Response. Put a little space between the two and something interesting appears:

Stimulus → [ ] → Response.

The idea that there is a space between stimulus and response is not new. It is often attributed to Viktor Frankl, though the origins of the familiar formulation are uncertain, and Stephen Covey did much to popularise the idea. What has held my attention is less that the space exists than what fills it. The brackets look empty. They aren’t.

Go back to those four words. ‘Can I have a word?’ The sound reaches you. Of everything available to your senses at that moment, something gets through. The chair beneath you, the hum of the air conditioning, the light from the window, the conversation two desks away may disappear almost completely. Those four words do not. Nor do they arrive alone. There is the person who said them, their face, their voice, their timing, what happened yesterday, what you know about them, what you think they know about you. Something has been detected and, among everything else that could have mattered, this matters.

A stimulus is not yet a cue. The gap between stimulus and response is where a stimulus becomes a cue. We do not respond to everything available in the world around us, and we couldn’t, because there is too much of it. Some differences register while others do not. Some acquire significance. We relate them to what we already know, fear, expect, remember or want. Meaning begins to form. The body is not waiting politely for all this to finish. Breathing changes, muscles prepare, attention shifts. The field may open or narrow. Things that seemed possible a moment ago may no longer occur to us. Call this range: the set of responses still available to us at that moment. Then we respond.

Written as a sequence, it might look something like this:

Stimulus → Sensing → Cue → Meaning → State → Range → Response.

It is tidier on the page than it is in a person. State affects what we sense. What we already believe affects what becomes significant. What becomes significant affects our state. Under pressure, attention can narrow, fewer things get through and the thing already occupying our attention grows larger. Then our response changes what happens next, especially when another human being is involved.

You look worried when I say, ‘Can I have a word?’ I see the change in your face. That becomes available to me. Perhaps I soften my voice. Perhaps I become irritated. Perhaps I conclude that you already know why I am there. Now you have something new to notice. Back and forth it goes. We continuously alter one another’s cue fields.

And this is where the hundred blogs begin to look different to me. I have written about what pressure does to people, about the moment someone in a meeting draws breath to speak and doesn’t, about the conversation after the conversation, about trust, resilience, persuasion and psychological safety, about what happens when people stop saying what they can see, about how groups make meaning together, about the strange fact that two people can inhabit the same meeting and leave with quite different ideas about what just happened. I thought these were separate questions. Increasingly, I see the same territory beneath them.

What did we notice? What did we miss? What became significant? What did we make it mean? What happened to our state? What remained possible after that? And what did our response make available for someone else to notice?

Some time ago, I began calling the space in which this happens the Five-Second Gap, not because it lasts five seconds. Sometimes it is over before conscious thought catches up. Sometimes we can spend three days inside one. The name is simply a reminder that between what happens and what we do next, something happens. Quite a lot, as it turns out.

The gap is where the world becomes the world we respond to. It is where a stimulus becomes a cue. It is where what happens becomes what happens to us. That matters because by the time behaviour becomes visible, much of the action is already over. We tend to locate leadership in the visible part: the decision, the conversation, the presentation, the instruction, the response under pressure.

But before any of those came what the leader noticed, and what they didn’t. There was what they made it mean, what happened in their body, what remained available to them once pressure arrived, the other explanations they could still entertain and the actions they could still imagine taking. The same is true outside leadership. An argument rarely begins with the sentence that appears to start it. Withdrawal rarely begins when someone finally goes quiet. Trust is not built only from the information exchanged between two people. Long before the visible response, something has already been selected from everything that could have mattered.

a cue is born.

So perhaps the useful skill is not learning to control the gap but learning to protect it: to notice what happened before rushing to what it means, to notice what your state has made easier to see and what may have disappeared, to become curious about the difference you did not select, to leave enough room for reality to tell you that the story you have made from it is incomplete. Perfect perception isn’t available to us. Correction is.

Perhaps writing these blogs has been one way I have tried to do that. Something catches: an explanation that should work doesn’t, two ideas that appeared unrelated keep turning up together, a distinction becomes difficult to ignore. I write to look at it for a little longer. Sometimes the thing eventually gets a name. Lately, I have begun using another one: Cuecology, the study of cues and of what happens as they move within and between us. If the Five-Second Gap is the place, Cuecology is the attempt to understand what goes on there: why some differences get through and others don’t, how cues acquire meaning, and how one person’s response becomes another person’s cue.

It is early, and there is much more to work out. But perhaps that is fitting. A hundred blogs ago, I wasn’t setting out to build a theory. I was noticing things. I still am.

‘Can I have a word?’ The words haven’t changed. But between hearing them and what happens next lies sensing, memory, expectation, meaning, state, possibility, another person and a world that keeps answering back.

I thought I had been writing about many things. I may have been writing about one thing from many directions: the gap between what happens and what we do next. A hundred blogs in, I think I am only beginning to see what’s in there.