Leadership - Seeing

The best leaders I've worked with don't just execute strategy. They see things other people are not yet seeing — and they act on what they see before anyone has authorized them to.

That capacity is harder to develop than any technical skill. It requires being present enough to notice what's actually happening, honest enough to name it accurately, and confident enough to respond before the situation is fully legible to everyone around you.

I've been studying a forty-year archive of a mission enterprise in Hong Kong — fifty-nine newsletters published between 1961 and 1994 — and the most consistently striking thing in that record is how often the most consequential decisions were made by people who simply saw something clearly and responded to it.

In the mid-1970s, a missionary named Harold Schock noticed addicts gathering around a community center in Kowloon. Not as a policy problem. Not as a strategic opportunity. He just saw them — day after day, in the neighborhood where he was working — and eventually started talking to them. What came from those conversations was Wu Oi Christian Centre, one of the most effective drug rehabilitation programs in Hong Kong's history. Fifty percent non-recidivism in a city where heroin dependency affected one in forty residents.

No needs assessment preceded it. No committee authorized it. Someone saw what was actually happening in front of him and decided that seeing it obligated him to respond.

The same pattern appears again when a community center noticed Filipino domestic workers — thousands of women on two-year contracts, living in their employers' homes, with nowhere to go on their one day off — gathering in parks on Sunday mornings. Someone saw them. A program began.

What strikes me about all of these moments is that the seeing came first. Before any analysis. Before any plan. Before any formal recognition that something had changed or that a need existed.

The analysis and the plan matter. But they can only follow from accurate seeing — from leaders who are genuinely present to what is actually happening in front of them, rather than what the strategic plan said would be happening.

In my work with nonprofit executives and boards, I find that the organizations in the most trouble are rarely the ones facing the hardest external challenges. They're the ones whose leaders have stopped seeing clearly — whose attention is so consumed by managing the institution that they've lost contact with the reality the institution is supposed to be serving.

The question I keep coming back to: what is actually happening in your community, your sector, your organization right now — that you are seeing but haven't yet decided to act on?