Last week I had fewer meetings than usual. Several people were out of the office, and my calendar cleared in a way it almost never does. It kind of freaked me out at first, but once I realized that Outlook wasn’t broken, I used the space to sit back and reflect.

In adaptive leadership, Ronald Heifetz describes this as getting on the balcony. Most of my work as a CEO happens on the dance floor, where my team and I are moving fast, reacting to what is directly in front of us, and too close to the action to see the larger patterns. The balcony is different. From up there I can see the whole floor: who is dancing with whom, where the energy is building, where people are stuck.

Heifetz did not intend the balcony as a place to retreat to permanently. He and his co-author Marty Linsky describe it as a discipline of moving back and forth. You step up to the balcony to see the pattern of the whole dance floor, then you come back down to make an intervention, then you go back up to see what effect it had. The point is not to stay above the fray. The point is to keep checking your view of the fray against what is actually happening.

The harder part, according to Heifetz, is turning that same observation on yourself. It is one thing to notice that a meeting has drifted into old grievances. It is another to notice your own role in keeping it there. He describes the goal as watching the room and watching yourself at the same time, which is a much higher bar than simply taking a step back.

I have written about this same concept before, in a different form. In The Value of Tangential Work, I described how volunteer work outside my day job pulls me onto the balcony because it puts me in a different room entirely, watching how other people structure their meetings and solve their problems. Last week reminded me that you do not need a different room to gain new perspectives. Sometimes you just need enough open time in your own calendar to pause and look around the room you are already in.

Last week I had the space to think about my own role. I had been feeling stuck, and part of that was about my own approach. I am through the initial sprint of onboarding, which is mostly retrospective learning, and need to settle into working with my new team to build the future. With the extra time, I caught up on reading I had been meaning to get to and could jot notes and draw diagrams that help me see patterns. They gave me a new perspective, not just on the situations I was facing but on my own patterns in how I was handling them. I started to see different ways I could approach my team and the Board.

None of that happens automatically just because your calendar clears. The balcony is a discipline, not a side effect of a slow week. What a slow week gave me was the room to practice it, and what I came away with was a clearer plan for moving forward on strategic planning, on building a strong leadership team, and on thinking through partnerships.

How do you find your way to the balcony when your calendar does not naturally clear for you?