The person nobody asked was the one who knew
When an organization hits a problem, we look up. We bring in the executives, review the reports, call the experts. Their views matter, and I’m not knocking that.
But some of the most useful insight I’ve come across sat outside those meetings. The person answering customer calls knows things the rest of us don’t. So does the employee forcing a clunky process to work, and whoever has dealt with the same problem every day while the rest of us debated it.
Sometimes nobody has thought to ask them. I’ve had to remind myself of that more than once in my career.
The distance you don’t notice
The higher you climb, the more information lands on your desk. That doesn’t mean you understand more about what people are going through.
A frustrated customer gets filed as a satisfaction score. An employee stuck in a bad process shows up as a dip in a productivity number. By the time it reaches a slide, the whole thing fits in a few lines. The numbers may be accurate, but something gets lost on the way up.
Think about the customer who spends an hour on something that should take five minutes. A report can log the complaint. It can’t tell you what that hour felt like.
Employees are the same. You can study engagement scores for years without learning what makes someone’s workday harder than it needs to be.
The distance grows slowly, so you rarely notice it. You have to close it on purpose, by staying close to the people your decisions land on.
I go find the person
When I want to know how something really works, I skip past whoever designed it and talk to whoever uses it. They’ll tell you what never makes it into a presentation: why customers keep calling back, which instructions nobody can follow, what employees do to get around a process that doesn’t quite work.
I’m especially curious about the workarounds. When people keep finding another way to get something done, there’s a reason. Maybe they’ve found a better method. Maybe they’re patching a problem that’s been there for years. Either way, they learned it the hard way.
I’ve had conversations that changed how I saw a whole situation, just because someone close to it explained what was happening. Those voices deserve more attention than they get.
Early in my career, I ran the PGA golf tournament in Los Angeles. Over 2,000 volunteers on-site daily, half of them marshals. At the end of each day, rather than join the afterparties in the clubhouse, I’d go to the Manpower tent and greet volunteers as they came off their shifts. I’d sit in on the marshals daily debrief to learn what was really happening out on the course.
I learned things I would have never known any other way. And they made me a better, and more successful, leader.
Listening is practical work
We call listening a soft skill. I’ve never liked that.
It’s one of the most practical things a leader does, especially with a big decision on the table. Listening to someone who agrees with you is easy. The test comes when they tell you something you’d rather not hear: the strategy isn’t working, a process you backed is making someone’s job harder, the problem isn’t what you were told.
At that point you can explain the decision, defend the thinking behind it, or slow down and try to understand what you’re hearing. I’ve found the third usually pays off most.
It takes humility to accept that someone else may see the situation better than you do. A title doesn’t guarantee the clearest view.
The front line knows
Organizations spend enormous sums trying to understand their customers: surveys, analytics, feedback forms, journey maps. All useful. But I wonder how often we overlook the people who talk to those customers all day.
They hear the frustration firsthand and know which questions keep coming back. They can tell when someone is about to give up because getting help has become too hard. They also know what works which small gestures make people feel valued, which parts of the experience leave them feeling forgotten.
It’s the same inside the building. Employees know which processes waste time, which policies confuse people, which problems have been around so long that nobody reports them anymore.
One person’s view won’t give you the whole picture. But the picture is incomplete without the people living it. We get so busy collecting more information that we forget to talk to someone who already understands the problem.
One question I ask
When we’re stuck on something hard, I come back to one question: Who is closest to this that we haven’t heard from yet?
It’s simple, and it changes the conversation. The missing voice might belong to an employee without a senior title, a customer who’s been trying to get help, or someone who quietly found a better way to do the job.
This matters more as AI moves into how organizations make decisions. We’re about to have remarkable tools for gathering information, spotting patterns, and recommending solutions. I welcome that. But I don’t want us so impressed by what the technology can tell us that we stop asking people what they’re experiencing.
That’s part of what Original Intelligence means to me. Presence is paying attention to what’s happening. Proximity takes it a step further staying close enough to people to understand what they’re living through.
Neither needs a complicated system. It takes caring enough to pay attention and make the effort.
Before your next hard decision, ask whose perspective you’ve heard, and whose is still missing.
The person with the answer may have been there all along.
I’ve been working through these ideas in my Original Intelligence work and what it means to stay deliberately human as technology shapes more of our work. If this resonates, try the Original Intelligence Assessment a way to look at how you practice Presence, Proximity, Patience and Pulse in your own life and leadership.
When was the last time someone close to a problem showed you something you’d completely missed?
Explore the assessment: https://kevinboucher.co/assessment/
Live Deliberately,
