Standing Outside the Circle

The venue was one of those conference centres that could be anywhere. Flat carpet, strip lighting softened to the point of dimness, the particular smell of coffee that's been sitting on a hotplate since 6am. Registration desks with lanyards sorted alphabetically. Banners for sponsors you half-recognise.

I'd been coming to these events for years. Knew the format. Knew a lot of the faces. But walking through the foyer that morning, I felt it again — the thing I'd been trying to name for a while. Not boredom, exactly. Not cynicism. Something more like distance.

I stood near the back of the main hall during the opening keynote, holding my coffee, watching. The speaker was good — polished, confident, doing the thing where you ask a rhetorical question and then pause just long enough. The audience was nodding. And I thought: I've heard this talk. Not this specific one. But this talk. The language was different — "AI-first" instead of "digital-first" instead of "omnichannel" instead of "multichannel" — but the shape was identical. New label, same architecture of ideas.

Someone I hadn't seen in a few years found me at the break. We talked. It was good to catch up. At some point she said, not unkindly: "You seem a bit aloof."

She was right. But not in the way she meant it.

Aloof, or just outside?

There's a version of being in an industry for a long time where you become an elder statesperson. You lean into the cycle. You nod wisely at each new trend and say "yes, but" and people quote you on LinkedIn and invite you onto advisory boards. You belong. You're the industry's memory, and it values you for it.

There's another version where you watch the cycle repeat and something in you goes quiet. Not cynical — you still care about the work. But the performance of belonging, the enthusiastic nodding, the panels where everyone agrees in slightly different words — you can't do it any more. Not won't. Can't.

I'm in the second camp. Have been for a while.

It's clarifying, actually. When you stop performing enthusiasm, you start seeing the room differently. You notice what's not being said. You notice who's selling and who's thinking. You notice that the questions from the audience are sharper than the answers from the stage, which tells you something about where the real intelligence in the industry lives.

What the circle looks like from the outside

From inside, the CX industry feels dynamic. New frameworks every year. New technology. New vocabulary. AI is the latest accelerant, and it's a genuine one — I'm not dismissing it. The shift is real.

But from outside the circle, you see something else. The same consulting firms repackaging the same maturity models with new labels. The same conference structure: inspirational keynote, vendor panels disguised as thought leadership, networking drinks, everyone goes home and nothing changes. The same gap between what gets discussed on stage and what actually happens in the operations of the companies in the audience.

That gap has been there for as long as I've been in the industry. It might be wider now.

The operational people — the ones running contact centres, managing teams, dealing with actual customers — sit in the audience and listen to people who haven't taken a customer call in a decade tell them what the future looks like. And they're polite about it. They network. They take the free pen.

But they know. They know the gap is there. They just don't say it, because saying it puts you outside the circle, and outside the circle is a lonely place to be if your career depends on being inside it.

The thing about not belonging

I'm not aloof. I'm just not performing belonging.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. Aloofness is disengagement. What I'm describing is a different kind of engagement — one that doesn't require agreeing with the room. One that lets you hear what's actually being said instead of what's supposed to be heard.

The most interesting conversations at that conference happened in the corridors. They always do. Two people admitting they don't know what to do about AI. A team leader saying her best agents are terrified. An ops director saying he's been asked to cut headcount by 40% and pretend it's "transformation." These are real conversations. They don't happen on stage because they don't have tidy conclusions.

I'd rather have those conversations than sit on another panel.

Not a departure

I should be clear: this isn't a leaving story. I haven't gone cynical. I haven't decided the industry is hopeless and I'm above it. That would be its own kind of performance — the dramatic exit, the LinkedIn post about "moving on."

It's more that I've found where I actually belong, and it's not inside the circle. It's at the edge, where you can see both the industry and the customers it serves, and the growing distance between them. Where you can build things without having to pretend that the current conversation is adequate.

Standing outside the circle doesn't mean you've left. It means you've stopped pretending the circle is the whole world.

The coffee was terrible, by the way.