You Can Do Everything Right and Still Lose the Room

Why preparation, presence and improvisation determine what people actually receive

You can do everything right and still lose the room, or the person across the table. You may know your subject, understand the numbers, prepare the presentation, rehearse the difficult questions and genuinely believe in what you are saying. Everything looks right on paper, yet somewhere between you and another human being, something misses.

That is one of the painful realities of communication. We are often taught that preparation is the answer. Prepare more, know more, rehearse more, become more polished. I believe deeply in preparation. I also know that a moment arrives when preparation has to loosen its grip, because the room in front of you may have very different plans from the room you prepared for.

This is where improvisation enters communication. Improvisation is far removed from making things up because preparation was weak. For me, it is almost the opposite. It is preparing deeply enough to remain present when reality moves away from the script.

The room had a different plan

Many years ago, I walked into a room in Dubai to deliver a session for the sales team of a globally recognised automotive organisation. Around thirty people were sitting in front of me. The organisation had invested in the session, I knew my material and there was a clear purpose for why we were there.

On paper, everything was ready. The room itself had a different opinion.

Nobody stood up and announced that they had little interest in being there. Nobody needed to. Their posture, faces, silence and the atmosphere were already communicating something. Their bodies had arrived. Their willingness seemed to have taken annual leave.

I had a choice. I could follow the programme exactly as planned, deliver the slides, facilitate the activities, finish on time and leave knowing I had completed what I had been engaged to deliver. That would have been the safer professional route. I could also acknowledge what appeared to be happening in front of me.

I chose the second route.

The conversation became uncomfortable. Some participants later interpreted what I said very differently from what I believed I had communicated. My message concerned the responsibility we carry for what we bring into an environment, what we contribute towards changing and what choices remain when an environment no longer feels right for us. Some people received something closer to, “If you are unhappy, leave.”

Those are very different messages.

The senior leadership involved understood the wider situation and supported what had happened. The greater lesson for me came from the discomfort itself. I may be responsible for the words leaving my mouth, while another human being receives those words through a world I may know very little about. Their history, pressure, fear, dignity, expectations and experiences are already sitting across the table with them.

That room stayed with me because it raised a question I am still exploring decades later: when I believe I have communicated clearly and another person has understood something else, what actually happened between us?

Acting came back into my life

There is another part of this that I have understood more clearly only recently. I am now a student of improvisation acting, which makes me smile because I dreamed of becoming an actor when I was young.

My parents saw a different future for me. Their view came from their own experiences, responsibilities, culture and understanding of what a secure life looked like. Acting and that vision of my future never met in the same place, so the actor I imagined becoming went somewhere quiet.

Life has an amusing relationship with our plans.

Decades later, I walked into an improvisation class and realised something rather strange. I was learning improvisation as an actor, while I had already been improvising for years as a speaker, trainer and coach.

When I deliver a keynote, facilitate a programme or coach someone, I prepare heavily. I research. I know the material. I understand the purpose. I consider the audience and where the conversation may need to travel. Once I enter the room, all of that preparation has to become alive.

An audience may laugh somewhere I never expected laughter. A question may reveal that something I considered important matters far less than what is actually troubling the people in front of me. Someone's body shifts. The energy changes. A group becomes unusually quiet. A story that was nowhere in my plan suddenly becomes more useful than the next five slides.

If I hold too tightly to what I prepared, I miss what is actually happening.

Improvisation has given me language for something I had been doing intuitively for years. You enter, observe, listen, receive and respond. You work with what is present rather than forcing reality to follow the scene you rehearsed in your head.

There is humility inside that practice as well. I may feel or sense what is happening in a room and still interpret it incorrectly. A person may look disengaged because they slept badly. Folded arms may mean someone is cold. Silence may be deep thinking rather than resistance. Presence is not permission to become a mind reader.

The shift is much simpler. Alongside asking myself, “What am I going to say next?”, I also ask, “What is happening here now?”

That second question changes communication.

Preparation gives you the ground. Improvisation allows you to move.

I have watched highly prepared speakers become so attached to their presentation that the audience almost becomes an inconvenience. They have forty-five minutes of content and the room is going to receive all forty-five minutes, regardless of what the room actually needs.

Leadership can fall into the same trap. A senior team may live with a strategy for six months. They discuss it, debate it, change it, become familiar with the terminology and gradually accept the decisions behind it. Then they announce the strategy and wonder why employees are not immediately enthusiastic.

The leaders have lived with the idea for six months. The employees have lived with it for six minutes.

That difference matters.

Familiarity can quietly become an enemy of communication. Once something feels obvious to us, we easily forget what it feels like to encounter it for the first time. We start communicating from our understanding rather than entering the other person's understanding.

Salespeople experience the same thing. A salesperson who has presented the same product hundreds of times may believe the value is obvious. The buyer is sitting across the table thinking about budget, implementation, reputation, internal politics, career risk and what happens personally if this decision goes badly.

Another ten features may provide more information while providing very little reassurance.

Improvisation gives preparation flexibility. You may still know where you are going. You simply become less rigid about the route.

We communicate constantly and still miss each other

This matters commercially because communication occupies an extraordinary amount of working life. Grammarly's 2024 State of Business Communication research reports that professionals spend around 88 per cent of their working week communicating. The same research reports that poor communication contributes to increased stress for 51 per cent of workers surveyed, lower productivity for 41 per cent, strained relationships for 31 per cent and missed deadlines for 26 per cent.

For many professionals, communication is no longer something surrounding the work. Communication is a substantial part of the work itself.

Think about an ordinary working day. A meeting creates an email. The email creates three questions. The questions create another meeting. Someone then discovers that two departments understood the first meeting differently, so a document gets rewritten and everybody returns to discuss what was supposedly decided several days earlier.

We call all of this work. Sometimes it is. Sometimes we are quietly paying the repair bill for meaning that failed to travel.

There is something almost comical about modern communication. We can send words from Dubai to London in seconds, then spend three days repairing what the words did when they arrived.

The technology worked beautifully. The humans still had some work to do.

Being correct and being understood are different achievements

A leader says, “My door is always open.” The sentence sounds reassuring. Employees have also watched what happened the last time somebody walked through that door carrying an uncomfortable truth. Which message has greater authority, the sentence or the experience?

A salesperson says, “There is absolutely no pressure.” Their voice has become faster, their body has moved forward and the sales target is sitting invisibly between them and the buyer. The buyer receives far more than the words.

A manager says, “I really value honest feedback.” Someone offers honest feedback and the manager's face immediately changes. Everyone in the room has just received some very useful information about how much honesty is welcome.

This is why reducing communication to scripts and clever phrases has always troubled me. Words matter enormously. A careless sentence can wound. A courageous sentence can change a relationship. Yet human beings receive tone, timing, history, status, behaviour, intention and emotion alongside the vocabulary.

Many times our anxiety walks into the room before the PowerPoint.

The other conversation happening underneath

Psychological safety research gives us a useful lens for understanding part of what is happening here. Amy Edmondson and Derrick Bransby's 2023 review in the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior describes psychological safety as a state of reduced interpersonal risk and identifies four major themes in the research: getting things done, learning behaviours, improving the work experience and leadership.

The phrase interpersonal risk interests me because it takes psychological safety away from posters and policies and places it back inside the person sitting in the room.

When the CEO asks, “Any concerns?”, somebody may simultaneously be asking themselves what happens to their career if they answer truthfully. When the salesperson asks, “What is really stopping you?”, the buyer may be wondering whether honesty will create understanding or simply give the salesperson another opportunity to apply pressure. When a manager asks the team to challenge an idea, people may remember what happened the last time someone challenged one.

The spoken conversation and the internal conversation are happening together.

This is where compassion becomes tougher than the warm, comfortable interpretation often attached to the word. Compassion is not arranging a world where nobody experiences discomfort. Some of the most compassionate conversations I have experienced have been deeply uncomfortable. They involved truth, boundaries, disagreement, disappointment and accountability.

For me, compassion asks whether we can deal with reality while keeping the human being in the room.

The hidden invoice of misunderstanding

When communication misses, there are at least four forms of value at stake.

The first is financial value: the cost of the words that miss. A proposal is misunderstood and a decision slows down. A customer feels pressured and quietly goes somewhere else. An unclear instruction produces rework. A poorly handled conversation damages a relationship that took years to build. Communication failure rarely sends an invoice marked “communication failure”. The money still leaves.

The second is time value: the hours returned when the message lands first time. This has very little to do with speaking faster. Sometimes ten extra minutes of patient conversation saves ten hours of confusion afterwards. Time is saved when shared understanding appears earlier.

Gallup's current U.S. leadership and management data show that only 23 per cent of employees strongly agree that they have a clear definition of what exceptional performance looks like in their role. Gallup points towards clarity, coaching and meaningful feedback as part of closing that gap. Sending an instruction and creating shared understanding are not the same achievement.

The third is risk value: exposure lowered when the room trusts you enough to speak. Some of the most dangerous communication in an organisation is the communication that never happens. Someone notices a problem and remains silent. Someone questions the forecast and decides agreement is safer. Someone sees a customer becoming uncomfortable and continues with the process because stopping feels risky.

The absence of disagreement can look like harmony. Sometimes it is simply fear dressed very professionally.

Then comes identity value: the authority you carry into the next room. A title may give you permission to speak. It never guarantees that people will trust what you say. Gallup's May 2026 U.S. data show that only 20 per cent of employees strongly agree that they trust the leadership of their organisation. That figure has many causes, so reducing it entirely to communication would distort the research. Communication is still one of the places where leadership becomes visible every day: decisions, explanations, disagreement, questions, mistakes, pressure and difficult news all reveal something about the person carrying the authority.

Authority is rarely created by one magnificent speech. It accumulates through small human moments.

Improvisation needs a compass

Improvisation without grounding can become randomness. That is where Speak Like a W.I.S.E CEO becomes practical for me. The W.I.S.E Compass gives four directions: Words with Courage, Intention with Clarity, Silence with Conviction and Energy with Compassion.

• Words with Courage ask whether the necessary thing is actually being said and whether it can be said without turning truth into a weapon. Courage is not verbal aggression. Yes, the courageous sentence is firm and at times it is gentle. Courage is admitting that the conversation has moved somewhere you never expected.

• Intention with Clarity keeps improvisation from becoming wandering. What are we actually here to create? Understanding? A decision? Repair? Agreement? A boundary? A leader, salesperson or speaker can change direction in real time while remaining clear about the purpose of the conversation.

• Silence with Conviction gives another person's contribution somewhere to land. Improvisation acting keeps reminding me how much communication weakens when we are already preparing our response while the other person is still speaking. A useful silence is present. It holds the space rather than abandoning it.

• Energy with Compassion asks what our presence is creating. Pressure travels. Impatience travels. Contempt travels. So do warmth, respect and care. Compassion never requires surrendering standards. A compassionate leader can challenge. A compassionate salesperson can walk away from a deal. A compassionate manager can hold somebody accountable. Reality can remain in the room without dignity having to leave it.

The compass provides direction. Improvisation helps us navigate the terrain that actually appears.

The actor I never became may have been there all along

There is something beautifully strange about becoming an improvisation student now.

The younger version of me wanted to become an actor. That path never unfolded in the way I imagined because the future my parents believed was right for me travelled somewhere else. I could look back at that only through regret. Age has given me another perspective.

Perhaps the actor never completely disappeared.

He appeared in conference rooms, classrooms and on stages. He appeared when an audience moved somewhere unexpected and I moved with them. He appeared in coaching conversations when one sentence made my prepared question irrelevant. He appeared whenever what was actually happening became more important than what I had planned to happen. Now I walk into an improvisation class and learn consciously what I had been practising intuitively for years.

There is a wonderful circle in that.

It also reminds me that growth rarely moves in the neat straight line we create when telling our life story afterwards. Something we dreamed about at twenty may return at fifty in another form. Something we believed we had missed may have quietly been expressing itself through us for years.

Communication works like that as well. The script matters. Preparation matters. Knowledge matters. Then another human being enters the scene and everything becomes alive.

Prepare deeply enough to release the script

I still prepare heavily. Preparation is a form of respect towards people who are giving me their time. I want to understand the subject, the context, the audience and what is at stake.

Once the conversation begins, I increasingly prepare for something else: responsiveness.

What is happening here now? What am I sensing, and how certain am I about that interpretation? What has changed since I prepared? What might the other person be carrying? What assumptions have I brought into the room myself?

One question continues to humble me: What might this person be receiving from me that I never intended to send?

I have discovered impatience there. Fear. Pressure. The need to be right. I have also discovered warmth, trust and care arriving more strongly than I expected. Thirty years around communication have given me experience, not immunity from being human.

The practice is noticing, adjusting, repairing and returning.

That is why you can do everything right and still lose the room. You may have prepared the perfect communication for a room that never actually arrived.

The answer is not abandoning preparation. It is preparing deeply enough to remain free when reality appears.

Misunderstanding costs money, wastes time, raises risk and weakens authority. The opposite carries enormous value. When people understand us, trust us and feel able to respond truthfully, decisions become easier, relationships become stronger and meaningful action becomes far more possible.

For me, this is what it means to Speak Like a W.I.S.E CEO: prepare with discipline, enter with awareness, improvise with wisdom and remain human enough to respond to the person who is actually across the table.

The plan gives us somewhere to begin. The people in the room tell us what the conversation has become.

Research and sources

Grammarly, 2024 State of Business Communication Report
Communication volume, 88 per cent of the working week spent communicating, and reported effects of poor communication.
https://go.grammarly.com/2024-state-of-business-communication-report

Amy C. Edmondson and Derrick P. Bransby, “Psychological Safety Comes of Age: Observed Themes in an Established Literature”, Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 2023
Review of contemporary psychological-safety research and the concept of reduced interpersonal risk.
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-120920-055217

Gallup, Leadership & Management Global Indicator
Current U.S. data on trust in leadership, management communication and clarity around exceptional performance.
https://www.gallup.com/404252/indicator-leadership-management.aspx

Gallup, “Accountability Is Leadership's Greatest Weakness”, 2026
Research and analysis concerning clear expectations, accountability and leadership practice.
https://www.gallup.com/workplace/703379/accountability-leadership-greatest-weakness.aspx