The Arithmetic of One

Last week I wrote about burning tires. Which somehow also included achievement, urgency, service, the four cardinal virtues, institutional betrayal, moral injury, Lord of the Flies, Billy Joel, and probably three other ideas I have conveniently forgotten.

My friend gave me feedback that, while translated lovingly, basically amounted to: Will, there is a very good essay in here. Unfortunately, you have put six other ideas on top of it as well.

Fair.

A few weeks earlier, a colleague at work had told me almost exactly the same thing about how I communicate a vision. Also fair. Apparently the universe has moved from subtle hints to coordinated messaging.

If someone has ever asked you a relatively simple question and your brain immediately opened seventeen imaginary whiteboards to properly try to explain the answer, welcome. You are among friends. I have spent a lot of my life doing this, and a lot of my career buffering for it. And recently, a lot of my time learning to understand it.

Picture someone is standing on the other side of the street asking how to get somewhere, and instead of just walking across and helping them, I am yelling through six lanes of heavy traffic:

"OKAY, BUT FIRST I NEED TO EXPLAIN HOW THE CITY WAS ZONED."

Because my first instinct is to believe context matters. Because their destination may not even be the right destination once we examine the underlying requirement or goal. Meanwhile, this poor person just wanted to find Target.

But the coordinated universal signal I’ve been picking up, pointed at something bigger than my tendency to over-explain. I do this with impact, too.

I have spent much of my career looking at large systems. Organizations, policies, training, culture, and all the complicated ways people interact inside them. When something is broken, my instinct is to zoom out. Find the pattern. Map the system. Build the framework. Fix the “thing”.

For people whose brains are always running toward problems, scale feels important. If ten people are hurting, fix the program. If a team is struggling, fix the culture. If the marriage is failing, fix the spouse. If an organization has a problem, fix the system. If enough things are coming apart, apparently we just need a larger whiteboard.

We carry pieces of the people who have led us, loved us, wounded us, made room for us, or showed us another way. I like to believe we are formed by what passes through other people, and we are constantly passing something onward ourselves; often without realizing either is happening.

But I think I've had some of the arithmetic wrong.

Years ago, my daughter entered the world in circumstances that were anything but simple. There was fear. There was chaos. There were things my family needed that I could not solve through competence, planning, working harder, or better problem solving.

During that season, my boss, and now friend, Chris, did something I have never forgotten. He made space for us. Chris was the kind of leader whose message, spoken or not, was simple:

Not I'll fix everything. Not here are the seventeen steps. Not let me explain what you should do. Just: I got you.

He gave my family time. He gave us room. He showed up without requiring me to first become the polished, capable version of myself I was accustomed to presenting to the world.

I needed that more than I understood at the time. Without his leadership, and really stewardship, during that season, I genuinely do not know what our story would look like today, or if my daughter would be here at all.

For years, I thought of that as something Chris did for me. I don't anymore. He wasn’t trying to teach me anything in those moments. He was being the person the moment required. Only years later I realize he left this example behind that helped me. Then, something happened reflecting no this I never really understood until a few years ago.

I picked it up. The way he treated me became part of the way I understood leadership and stewardship. His words eventually found their way onto a plaque. His example followed me into rooms he never entered. Years later, I began hearing people say versions of the same thing about their experiences with me.

That wasn't entirely mine. Some of it belonged to Chris.

That is the strange arithmetic of one person. Some of the best things in us were entrusted to us by somebody else. Chris helped one person. That person became responsible for other people. Those people became responsible for still others. Some went home to spouses. Some raised children. Some led teams. Some were able to help that poor individual find Target that I couldn’t help with my shouting from across the street. Some made decisions affecting people neither Chris nor I will ever meet.

There is no dashboard for that. No metric captures it. You cannot draw a clean line showing where one act of, or lack of, leadership ends. That is what I missed when I used to hear phrases like "one person at a time." It sounded small, almost apologetic, as though going deep with one human being was the trade-off you accepted because you couldn't reach thousands.

I see it almost exactly backward now. One person is not the limitation of impact.

But the opposite is true too, and I think about it as much as I think about what Chris did for me.

A leader who is unraveling rarely keeps it contained. Fear walks into the meeting a step ahead of them. Insecurity gets mistaken for a decision. Unprocessed grief lands on an organization unaware of unresolved pain in an individual. Exhaustion follows them home and becomes someone else's dinner table. How we experience leadership at work can shape how we show up in our closest relationships.

I have been that person more than once, and I have also stood close enough to someone else's unraveling to feel it become my environment. Not just my morning. My baseline. What I expected from a room before I even walked into it.

And everyone standing nearby has to live inside whatever they bring with them, good or bad, on purpose or not.

That is a transmission, a restoration moving through a relationship, in either direction. And I think that is increasingly the question underneath everything I am exploring here with this new project:

Sometimes the answer is enormous. Policies matter. Institutions matter. Systems and culture matter. I’ve spent enough of my life inside large organizations to know how deeply they shape us. But eventually, every system is experienced by a person.

Leadership is experienced by a person. And so is marriage, community, belonging, and restoration. That is where I keep coming back to.

That is why I believe so deeply in working with one leader, or a small number of people, at a time. Especially the high-performing, always-on people others have learned to depend on. The ones with extraordinary gifts who, somewhere along the way, may have started being ruled by the very things that made them so capable in the first place.

One leader can find their way back to themselves and walk differently into their home. Their marriage. Their team. A hard conversation. The life of someone who may someday lead others of their own.

And that is how restoration begins to travel through transmission.

I have no idea how far Chris's decision to make room for my family has traveled by now. I doubt he does either. That's the strange arithmetic of one person: you never get to see the whole sum.

Maybe that is the thought here this week. Maybe some of the things that help us find our way back are like that. Small markers left by people who may never know we carried them with us. Small little waymarkers. Not fixing everything at once, but becoming the kind of person whose way of moving through the world gives someone else a little more room to find their way back too.

One person at a time is not small. It is how togetherness begins to return.

—Will

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