Who should speak next

It was one of those meetings where the silence felt heavier than the words. We’d just hit a point where someone needed to give an update, and everyone was just… looking. At the table, at their notes, anywhere but at each other.

The weight of a quiet room

I remember my own pen, tapping a soft rhythm against the pad. It wasn’t a decision about strategy or a major risk. It was just about who would go first. But in that stretched-out moment, it felt like everything.Choosing felt like picking a side. Like declaring a winner in a game nobody wanted to play. I could see the same hesitation in the slight shift of a colleague’s chair, the way another person cleared their throat but didn’t speak.

A simpler kind of fairness

That’s when I thought of the wheel. Not as a gimmick, but as a release valve. It wasn’t about finding the best person or the most eloquent. It was about removing the burden of choice from any one of us.The fairness mattered more than the outcome. It was a neutral party, a way to say the decision came from somewhere else. Somewhere that held no bias, no history, no unspoken office politics.It created a space where the result was just accepted. There was a quiet relief in that. The energy in the room shifted from ‘who will it be’ to ‘okay, it’s settled.’

The moment of the spin

You just set it and let it go. There’s a brief, almost childish pleasure in watching it whirl, a tiny suspension of the usual overthinking.

After it stops

And when it lands, there’s no debate. No second-guessing. Just a name, and then the meeting can finally move forward.