They don't get it.

Only two people responded to the image I shared yesterday on LinkedIn. It was disappointing, because I felt it might be one of the most revealing images I've ever created.

My first interpretation was immediate: they just don't see what I see.

That may be true. But we rarely see the whole picture. My immediate response was a conclusion built from my beliefs, my judgments, my past.

If I step back and question it, something quite different emerges.

My post went to a fraction of my followers — one of many hundreds in a busy feed. I judged it by what came back.

What came back was not the post. It was what the feed permitted, and what people happened to make public. Not who saved it. Not who returned to it. Not whose thinking it shifted. Not who valued it and never said so.

My mind turned two likes into an illusory world, not reality as it truly is.

Now consider this: organizations do the same thing at scale.

A transformation fails. A team doesn't perform. A leader doesn't show up. The visible result is examined, but the meaning we give it is never questioned. And now that distortion is being fed into AI, where it compounds at machine speed.

This is why so many conversations have been circling for decades. We keep working on the result. The meaning we made of it goes unexamined, and it was upstream of everything.

The impulse to fix the outcome misses where the work is. That result is finished. The only thing still in my hands is what goes into the next one — the quality of awareness I bring, the question I'm asking, and whether I'm trying to get something from you or give something to you.

So today I'm not asking what went wrong. I'm asking what I was not seeing.

Years ago, Joseph Jaworski said something to me that became the seed of everything I do now: if we could see reality as it truly is, it would become obvious what we need to do.

— Bill