When I started writing here, I made you a promise in a single line: the genius is already in your building, and the work is letting it show up. Over these first posts I have tried to show you what that work actually looks like, in the places it usually hides.
We started with the quarter-million-dollar retreat that changed nothing, and the hard truth underneath it: knowledge is not capability, and capability that never gets integrated into the daily work simply evaporates. We looked at the four questions every employee is silently asking, and how each unanswered one pulls a little more of a person back into reserve. We sat with the uncomfortable fact that the employee we have written off as not caring is usually someone who ran into a wall we built, and then went quiet. We met three supervisors, the Overwhelmed, the Clueless, and the Experienced-But-Stuck, and admitted we have been all three.
Then we widened out. We watched a firm try to include its people with a training program and miss the real work of integrating them into how decisions get made. We watched a brilliant, proven model for children die because the structure around it was built for silos. We saw the once-a-year performance number that teaches people their growth is an afterthought. And we followed an avoided conversation all the way to a hundred-and-sixty-thousand-dollar bill.
Different stories, different corners of the work. But if you stand back, they are all the same story.
In every one of them, the capability was already there. The diverse young professionals, the interdisciplinary trainees, the employee with the late reports, the supervisor who never got honest feedback, the quietly excellent person nobody was developing. None of them were short on genius. In every case, something in how the organization operated kept that genius from reaching the work: a program standing in for a practice, a structure built for silos, a ritual standing in for a relationship, a silence standing in for a conversation. That is suppression. And the antidote, in all of it, is the same. Integration. The deliberate, daily, often uncomfortable work of weaving each person’s full capability into how the work actually gets done.
That is the whole idea behind this newsletter, and it is why I will keep coming at it from every angle. Supervision. Difference. Structure. Performance. Conflict. Coaching. They look like separate management topics. They are not. They are all the same craft, the one almost nobody is trained for: releasing the capability your organization already has, and already pays for.
If you want the fuller argument, with the framework underneath it, that is what my book, The Genius We Suppress, is for. And if your organization wants help doing this work in practice rather than reading about it, that is what my daughter Karen and I do at Cascone Consulting. But you do not need either to start. You need only to look at the people around you with a different question in mind.
So I will leave you where we began, with the practice rather than the theory. Tomorrow, pick one person. Ask yourself, honestly, what part of them your organization is currently leaving outside the room, and what one thing you could change to let it in. Not a program. Not a form. One real act of integration. Then watch what comes back.
The genius is already in your building. It always was. The work, the only work that ever actually mattered, is letting it show up. I am glad you are here for it. Let’s keep going.
John