Your Organization's Best Ideas Are Hiding in Plain Sight

This is the second article of the "Unlocking Trapped Genius" series - How to upgrade your Leadership OS to see the genius that's been there all along 

While you're building artificial intelligence systems to capture insights, your organizational systems are systematically filtering out the human intelligence you already have. 

Consider the Challenger disaster. NASA engineers knew the O-rings would fail in cold weather. They had the data, ran the tests, and understood the risk. But their intelligence never reached the decision-makers who could have delayed the launch. The organizational system filtered out the very information that could have prevented the tragedy.  

A few decades later, with the Columbia vehicle, NASA engineers knew foam strikes were damaging heat shields. But over time, the culture transformed this critical intelligence through language: "foam strikes" became "known anomalies" became "acceptable risks." The intelligence was there, but the organizational system normalized it away until people stopped looking. 

After working with thousands of leaders, I would bet my new car that your organization faces the same dynamics every day, just with lower stakes. The intelligence you need most is already in your building, but your Leadership Operating System may be unintentionally designed to suppress it rather than surface it. 

The Two-Current Problem 

Every organization operates with two intelligence currents running simultaneously: 

The first is the surface current—the world of reports, dashboards, meetings, and official channels. This current carries what people think you want to hear, information that's been sanitized, aggregated, and stripped of its most valuable context. It's clean, measurable, and fits neatly into PowerPoint presentations. Most executives navigate entirely in this surface current, optimizing what gets measured and making decisions based on information that's traveled through multiple filters. 

The second is the subsurface current—the world of hallway conversations, workarounds that actually work, and insights that never make it past the first filter. This is where people share what they actually see, not what they think they're supposed to see. It's where solutions emerge organically, where early warning signals first appear, where the gap between "how things are supposed to work" and "how things actually work" becomes visible. 

What most executives sense, but haven’t really yet accepted is the subsurface current often contains your most valuable competitive intelligence. While your competitors are looking at the same industry reports and market data you are, they don't have access to what your EA knows about client sentiment, what your newest hire sees about industry blind spots, or what your middle manager has discovered about operational efficiency. 

But there is a catch. The subsurface current is fragile and when people sense that their insights aren't valued or that sharing what they really see might be politically dangerous, the subsurface current goes deeper underground. The intelligence doesn't disappear entirely—it just becomes invisible to leadership. In fact, the smarter your people are, the faster they learn what not to share. They quickly figure out which insights are welcome and which ones aren't. They learn to read the room, to sense what leadership wants to hear, and to filter their intelligence accordingly.  

Here are two recurring examples I see across our client systems: someone shares a pattern they're seeing and gets told "that's just anecdotal" or "we need more data." They don't just stop sharing that particular insight—they learn to stop sharing patterns altogether. Another one is when someone creates a better way to do something and gets told to "follow the process," they don't just abandon that innovation—they learn to keep future innovations quiet and take their discretionary ideas to other outlets. 

Over time, intelligent people become intelligent about what not to share. The very people whose insights you need most become the least likely to offer them. They develop an adaptive behavior of keeping valuable insights to themselves to avoid negative consequences - "learned intelligence suppression.” 

This creates a vicious cycle. Leaders, starved of real intelligence from the subsurface current, make decisions based on incomplete information. When those decisions don't work as expected, they often conclude they need better data or more rigorous analysis. So they add more filters, more approval processes, more formal channels—which drives the subsurface current even deeper. 

We Need More Data Beta!  

My partner and I enjoy skiing in the backcountry, and one thing I have learned is that in backcountry skiing, my life depends on "beta"—scattered bits of raw intelligence. A local mentions recent snowfall. Someone coming down the mountain talks about conditions on the north-facing slope or how it was “great pow all day”. Simply feeling cold walking back from the bar at night is a piece of beta about what might be beneath the surface tomorrow. Without all of these unpolished clues, I wouldn’t understand a coherent as a picture and could risk entering avalanche-prone terrain unaware. 

The backcountry community has a discipline around receiving beta. In organizations, we've lost the art of receiving beta. Instead, we demand well-curated data, analyzed and wrapped in neat presentations, before we'll listen. Such insistence filters out the unpolished, frontline insights that might reveal subtle risks or unexpected shifts. Our people are like knowledgeable locals whose beta gets dismissed because it doesn't come with a PowerPoint deck. 

Here are some pieces of Beta to look out for:  

Early warning beta emerges from people who interact with external stakeholders—customers, suppliers, partners, competitors. They often sense shifts in sentiment, behavior, or market conditions months before those shifts show up in formal metrics. Be careful to dismiss this intelligence as “narrow”, “soft” or “subjective” just because it can't be generalized or quantified immediately. As someone who spans industries, I often share something I learned from one into the other and watch as some discount the “beta” because simply because it is not industry specific. I never mean for it to be a conclusion, but as a single piece of beta, when combined with other single pieces of beta, may provide a more coherent picture. 

Operational beta comes from those closest to the operational front lines. They know which processes really work, which systems are truly mission-critical, and where the inefficiencies hide. They've often developed informal solutions that work better than official procedures, but these innovations remain invisible because they exist outside formal channels. Even worse, they have to hide these innovations from you so they are not reprimanded and made to do things inefficiently. We always do “ride alongs” or “day in the life of” in the first few weeks of a client engagement to understand how things really work on the front lines.  

Strategic beta exists in the minds of people who are in unique vantage points where there is unsuspecting data that does not usually register as strategically interesting. For example, the person who schedules meetings knows which initiatives are really getting attention and which ones are consistently cancelled or pushed out. The person who processes expenses sees where money is actually spent and where the bottle necks lie in approvals. The person who handles customer complaints understands which problems are systemic versus isolated. While the reportable data is available, the contextual intelligence is often invisible. 

Innovation beta lives in the spaces between formal roles and departments. It emerges when people with different expertise and perspectives connect informally to solve problems or explore opportunities. It happens when people are solving problems or encountering anomalies. Because they are anomalies, by definition, there is no trend to report. These cross-functional insights often represent your biggest innovation opportunities, but they rarely surface through formal innovation processes. 

As Rabindranath Tagore wrote, "The truth comes as a conqueror only because we have lost the art of receiving it as a guest." Leaders that successfully unlock the distributed genius in their ecosystem have rediscovered this art. They realize intelligence is voluntary—people choose whether to share what they know based on whether they believe it will be valued and acted upon, no matter how small. 

This doesn't mean accepting every piece of scattered intelligence as gospel. Like avalanche beta, each fragment is just one piece of the puzzle. The skill lies in treating these hints as starting points—prompts to investigate further and validate what's real and relevant. You maintain perspective, neither dismissing raw insights nor letting one snippet define your entire outlook. Instead of demanding certainty before listening, you learn to do what the master listener (and my mother), Jill Rickards advises, “gather everything and let it lie before you”. Or more urgently, gather intelligence as if your company’s life depends on it—because in a rapidly changing world, it does. 

As you take on building the organizational capacity for emergent and distributed intelligence, understand that such intelligence operates differently than artificial intelligence. First, such intelligence is discretionary not obligatory and does not respond to demands but rather genuine invitations followed by validation and appreciation. Second, interpretation of such intelligence leverages abductive reasoning—making sense of incomplete information, forming hypotheses about what might be causing something, picking up on subtle energy or mood shifts, and inferring the best explanation from limited clues. It's the "aha" moment when someone says "I think something's changing because..." based on subtle signals. This is in contrast to inductive reasoning—finding patterns in historical data and making predictions based on correlations. It's the difference between inferring what might be happening now and analyzing what already happened. Interestingly, humans excel at abductive while AI excels at inductive. When these two forms of reasoning work together, organizations can anticipate their future in ways neither could achieve alone. 

The Choice 

When you successfully tap into distributed genius, something remarkable happens: The intelligence compounds. People start connecting insights across departments, new patterns become visible, and cross-functional solutions become possible. 

But the real transformation is cultural. When people realize their intelligence is genuinely valued—not just their compliance or execution, but their actual insights and perspectives—they shift from being passive recipients of direction to active contributors to organizational intelligence. The organization becomes more than the sum of its parts because it's finally accessing the intelligence of all its parts. Real engagement comes from engaging! (PS – yes, this is how to get those eNPS scores to genuinely rise.) 

The opportunity for each of us is to acknowledge the intelligence that is already in our buildings (virtual and physical). It's in the observations our people make every day, the patterns they notice, the solutions they create, the insights they develop. The question isn't whether this intelligence exists—it does. 

The question is whether you’re going to invest in human intelligence at the same level you are investing in artificial intelligence. Your competitors are looking at the same market data you are. But they don't have access to what your people know. The question is: Do you? 

Next: Why your best ideas die in middle management, and how to create parallel intelligence networks that actually work.