Something Gets Lost
Pick a large organisation. Any one will do.
Ask the CEO to describe the company’s approach to innovation. They will give you a considered answer — probably involving psychological safety, tolerance for failure, the importance of ideas regardless of where they originate in the hierarchy. Ask the same question of someone three levels below, someone who has been there five years and pays attention. You will get a different answer.
Not a contradictory one, necessarily. They might agree with the official position in principle. But their description of how innovation actually works, on a Tuesday, will contain details the CEO’s version does not. The quarterly review where the new product idea got twelve minutes before the discussion moved on. The informal understanding that you bring proposals only when you can already predict the answer. The name of the person you have to get on board before anything can happen, whose name doesn’t appear on any org chart.
This is not a scandal. It is a description of how information moves through hierarchies, which is to say: imperfectly, and in one direction more easily than the other.
Every layer of management between the CEO and the frontline does something useful — synthesizes, contextualizes, prioritizes. It also does something costly: it filters. The unpleasant observation that doesn’t reflect well on the team. The concern that contradicts the agreed direction. The question that implies the strategy might be wrong. These things travel upward with more friction than they travel down, and by the time organisational reality has been compressed into a form suitable for a board presentation, significant amounts of what was true and important have been lost. Not through malice. Through the structural logic of summarization, which rewards coherent narrative and penalizes complication.
Organisations spend considerable money hiring consultants to partially recover this information. The good ones are skilled at creating the conditions in which people say things they wouldn’t say through the regular chain of command. They find the person three levels below who knows exactly why the transformation is going to fail and has been waiting, patiently, for someone to ask the right question. They synthesize it, present it, navigate the politics of delivering findings that contradict what the senior team believes.
It works. Imperfectly, once, for one engagement, at significant expense.
The question nobody seems to have built a satisfying answer to: what if this didn’t require an outside intervention? What if the mechanism for recovering what gets lost was continuous rather than occasional — built into how the organisation listens, not something that has to be purchased separately every time a programme goes wrong?
The information is already there. It has always been there.
It just needs somewhere to go.
Actual Intelligence builds continuous organisational assessment infrastructure for consulting firms. The information that gets lost on the way up — we give it somewhere to go.