The Payphone | Old Tools, New Realities

Not long ago, I had a dream about a period when I was doing some of the most interesting work of my career inside a large global company. A senior HR executive was introducing me in a meeting, and everything felt familiar enough. Then I was outside, slightly disoriented, trying to figure out where I was supposed to go next, and I found myself at a payphone.

That was the part that stayed with me. By then, payphones had largely disappeared from my working life. I would have had a mobile phone and all the usual ways of getting where I needed to go. Yet there I was, reaching for something from an earlier time, until I finally realized there was a much simpler way to solve the problem I was trying to solve. What interested me afterward was the place my mind had chosen to take me.

I never actually worked for that company. I was employed elsewhere in the larger corporate system, but for several years I spent a great deal of time with one of its operating groups. I had access to senior leaders, considerable autonomy, and enough trust to try approaches that weren't always conventional. I loved the work, and I trusted my training and instincts.

Looking back, I think some of my effectiveness came from never being completely inside. I knew the people and the politics, but I wasn't embedded in the hierarchy. I could get close without being absorbed.

There's an old idea in Organization Development about marginality. The person trying to help a system change often works near its edge, with enough access to understand what's happening and enough distance to notice what people inside may have stopped seeing. Internal roles complicate this, because you can be an employee in one room and an observer in the next. For a long time that position worked in my favor. I had room to ask questions and follow an idea when I thought it might lead somewhere useful. I didn't experience the distance as a problem. It gave me freedom.

Eventually I tried to make the relationship more permanent and explored joining the organization where I was doing so much of the work. The executive I supported had a practical reaction. Why hire me when he was already benefiting from my work through the company that employed me? My own leadership saw the possibility of my leaving very differently. A boundary I had crossed easily for years suddenly became real.

Later, I found myself in a role where my sense of belonging was much clearer, but my ability to influence the work was far more limited. I had once had considerable influence in a place where I didn't formally belong. Now I belonged, and the influence was harder to find. I had assumed those two things traveled together, and they don't always.

We talk a great deal about belonging in organizations, and rightly so. People need connection, and some sense that there is a place for them. But belonging can also make it easier to absorb the assumptions of the group around us. The closer we get to the center of a system, the harder it may become to notice what the center has learned to treat as normal. Distance carries its own risk. Too much of it and perspective becomes detachment. You can see clearly and still change nothing. You can be right and irrelevant.

I don't think there's a correct place to stand. The useful position shifts with the work and the relationships, and getting it roughly right takes judgment and a willingness to keep noticing where you are. Sometimes you need to move closer. Sometimes you need to step back and trust what your experience lets you see from just outside the circle. Anyone who works across boundaries, whether they lead a team, advise executives, or sit in HR, has probably felt both pulls and at some point mistaken access for perspective or independence for influence. I know I have.

I keep coming back to the payphone. I don't think it offers a tidy symbolic answer. What strikes me is how clearly out of place it was, and that I reached for it anyway. Organizations hand us old maps too, about where influence comes from and what belonging is supposed to look like, and we can keep relying on them long after the system has changed, or long after we have.

In the dream, the simpler way was there once I stopped and noticed where I was standing. I suspect that's true more often than I'd like to admit.

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