Before you read my articles of listen to more field notes I want to be precise about one word, because it's doing all the load-bearing work in this series, and left undefined it'll simply become whatever each viewer wants it to mean.
The word is interference. It comes from a simple equation: performance equals potential minus interference. Most organisations spend their effort trying to raise potential — more training, more skill, more effort, more grit. Few spend serious effort locating and removing the interference that's already suppressing the potential they've got. That's the gap many of the field notes and articles live in.
Interference isn't always loud. Often it's invisible precisely because it's structural — built into a room, a role, a form, a habit of language — rather than sitting in any one person's bad intent. So before I take you into organisations, here are three quick sketches, at three different scales, of what I mean.
Personal. You're mid-task, fully capable of the work in front of you, and some part of your attention is elsewhere — you've got a narrow window to make a call to a family member, and it hasn't happened yet. Nothing about your skill has changed. Your available attention has simply been reduced by something unrelated, running quietly in the background. That's interference at its smallest scale.
Team. Two people fell out three weeks ago. It was never resolved, just left. Nobody names it in meetings, but it shapes who speaks after whom, who gets copied in, who gets the benefit of the doubt. The team's actual potential is fully intact. What's reduced is what's available — because a share of everyone's attention is quietly being spent managing the unspoken thing instead of the work itself.
Organisational — where I want to spend the rest of this note, because it's the scale most consultancies talk around rather than into. Decades of working with a very wide variety of organisations in an equally broad spectrum of sectors demonstrate that several show up, again and again. These may happen in any organisation. Here are five common examples:
One. Incentives that reward the opposite of what's asked for. An organisation states a value — collaboration, safety, quality — and then measures and rewards something that quietly competes with it. People aren't confused about the stated value. They're responding, accurately, to the one that's actually being paid for.
Two. Accountability that's been diffused until nobody owns it. A critical function — safeguarding is the clearest example I work with — gets treated as one department's technical specialism rather than everyone's live responsibility. The interference here isn't that people don't care. It's that responsibility has been structurally arranged so that everyone can reasonably assume someone else has it.
Three. Language nobody has agreed the meaning of. Words like "resilience," "engagement," even "interference" itself, get used constantly and mean something different to each person using them. Strategy gets written in these words. Everyone nods. Everyone is picturing something different. This is precisely the trap I opened this note trying to avoid.
Four. Institutional memory that's unspoken but still governing. Something happened — a restructure, a departure, a failure — long enough ago that nobody mentions it, recent enough that it's still shaping caution, silence, or over-correction in the present. The organisation is, in effect, still negotiating with a ghost, without ever naming it as one.
Five. Power that has quietly placed itself outside the normal accountability chain. Somewhere in the structure sits a role — sometimes formal, sometimes just long-tenured — that the usual checks don't reach. Everyone else in the system, often including the functions meant to provide oversight, ends up serving that role rather than checking it. This is the one people find hardest to say out loud, and it's usually the one doing the most damage.
There's a sixth, underneath all five of these, that I've deliberately left for another article, because it deserves its own room rather than a place in this list. It's this: the thinking that first defined the problem is very often the same thinking used to design the solution — which means the solution quietly carries the problem's own assumptions back into the organisation, and the problem persists, dressed as progress. That one is the most invisible of all, because it isn't hiding in a policy or a room. It's hiding in the very act of trying to fix things.
None of the five above announce themselves either. That's the whole point of the word. Interference, almost by definition, is the thing operating on you that you haven't yet been able to see. The work these field notes and articles describe — mine, and anyone doing this kind of work honestly — isn't adding more potential into a system. It's learning to see what's already quietly subtracting from it, and having the judgement to know what can be named, what can be shifted, and what, for now, can only be walked around.
That's the frame. Many other articles here explore other examples.
Oh, and by the way, I'm not by any means suggesting developing potential isn't worth it. It very much is, and a lot of our work revloves around it. However, I am saying that without looking in more depth at what may be going on in a system, focussing only on developing things that can fuel progress can end up being at best hard work, and at worst a waste of time and something that reduces discretionary effort and desire to change. Buyer beware.