The unspoken "not my problem"

Have you ever been in a meeting where a critical gap is identified, and you can almost feel the invisible wall go up?

In my years of consultancy, I have seen it often. No one actually says the words - especially in a professional UK environment, where we tend to be more reserved - but the shift is palpable. People lean back. They check their phones. They suddenly become very interested in a different part of the spreadsheet.

It’s the "unspoken opt-out." It’s the feeling that everyone in the room is thinking, "I hope someone fixes that, but I’m making sure it isn't me."

We’ve all had that experience. We see a problem that is "adjacent" to our work, and we quietly step around it, hoping it doesn't trip us up later.

We’ll explore exactly why we do this - and how to fix it - in a moment. But first, a quick update on the book.

A milestone reached

The manuscript for The Zero-Sum Illusion is officially now with copy editing! It is a significant milestone to have the heavy lifting of the writing behind me. I had four brilliant beta readers who helped me stress-test the ideas, and their feedback was invaluable in getting the text to this stage.

While the early beta reviewers is now closed, I am still happy to share an excerpt of the current draft with anyone who is curious. If you’d like a head start on the material, just reply to this email and let me know.

The most expensive thought in your organisation

So, let's return to that silence in the meeting.

In a recent LinkedIn post, I talked about "That’s not my problem" being the most expensive sentence in an organisation. But the truth is, the thought is just as costly as the words.

When we feel that reflex to disengage, it isn't usually born of laziness. It is a protection response. What it really means, deep down, is: If I help, I lose. Either my time, my focus, my clean handover, or my chance to leave on time.

Based on the research for the "Me" section of the book, I’ve found that we are usually trying to protect three things:

• Cognitive Load: Our brains are already full. Adding one more problem feels like the final weight that will bring the whole stack down.
• Identity and Competence: We fear that if we step into a gap, we become responsible for the outcome. If it fails, we’re the ones holding the "hot potato."
• Energy Scarcity: This is the Zero-Sum Illusion turned inward. We believe that scope is finite, and so is energy, and protecting both is how we survive a system that asks for too much. Every unit of effort spent on a colleague’s "adjacent" work feels like a unit stolen from our own progress.

The logic is understandable, but it is incomplete. The things we try to protect - our boundaries, our energy, our scope - almost never stay protected.

The work seeps through the cracks anyway.

The handover that someone else fumbles becomes the rework that lands on your desk. The meeting someone else lets drift becomes the decision that doesn't get made and the project that stalls. The colleague who's struggling eventually becomes the colleague you're covering for. And the slices people are protecting turn out to be one pie all along.

The solution? It's a shift to a "What would help here?" team, that I explain below.

The "What Would Help?" Framework To move a team from a defensive silence to a collaborative one, the more useful sentence is harder to say but much shorter: "What would help here?"

Here are three questions you can ask yourself (or your team) when you feel that opt-out reflex kicking in:

• Whose work is this actually adjacent to? Most gaps aren't on the other side of the world. They touch your work. Recognising that a failure "over there" will eventually cause friction "over here" changes the calculation.
• What is the cost if no one solves it? The cost is often invisible at first. A meeting that drifts today becomes the project that stalls next month. Ask: Who does this land on in two weeks?
• What would actually help here - even something small? This is the most useful shift. Helping does not mean solving. Sometimes, a single minute of clarity or sharing a relevant template is enough to bridge the gap without overdrawing your own energy account.​

What shifts when the team learns to see this? When a team stops stepping around gaps and starts stepping toward them, the "Zero-Sum" friction begins to evaporate. I see three concrete changes:

• Problems are named earlier, when they are still "cheap" and easier to handle.
• Trust accumulates instead of eroding, because people see colleagues actively sharing the load rather than defending their turf.
• **The work moves faster **because the energy previously spent on "defending scope" is repurposed into delivering impact.

About the book This newsletter deals with one specific reflex inside the "Me" section of my upcoming book, The Zero-Sum Illusion: An Actionable Toolkit to Stop Conflict Winning in Life, Work and Society.

The book is structured into three parts:

• Me: Managing your internal operating system.
• Them: Understanding the strategic needs of others.
• Us: Building collaborative, high-yield action.

The book comes out in July 2026. To see how these sections fit together, just reply to this email and I’ll send over an excerpt!

Best wishes, Grant

PS To chat about how these ideas apply to your own work or leadership, reply to this email. I’m booking 15-minute virtual coffees and would love to meet you. Book it directly in my calendar here.

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