Catching Intelligence [Part 2 of 5]

That moment when someone says "I don't understand" in a meeting?

That's not confusion. That's your canary in the coal mine.

If the smartest person in the room is lost, your customers are too. But we've trained people to nod along instead of admit confusion.

We're discarding intelligence without realizing it.

Here's what we discard when we mishandle human errors... (and why each costs more than we think):

The "This Feels Wrong" Signal: Experienced people's unease catches what data misses.

That nagging feeling?

It's pattern recognition your spreadsheet can't see.

The "What If We're Wrong" Signal: Questioning assumptions gets labeled "not being a team player."

But assumptions kill strategies.

The "I Have a Crazy Idea" Signal: We filter out breakthrough insights for being too weird. (And these insights almost never come from expected sources.)

The best innovations sound ridiculous until they don't.

The "I Made a Mistake" Signal: People hide errors until they become crises.

Early mistakes are cheap fixes.

Late mistakes are expensive disasters.

Each represents intelligence your team is losing... not due to lack of insights, but because we've built systems that treat human uncertainty as system failures.

Remember our error handling systems from Part 1?

We need them for intelligence, not just safety.

Winning teams don't have fewer "errors"... they have better ways of catching the valuable ones.

Here's what I've learned... intelligence isn't enough.

You need to know the difference between being right about the details and being useful about the direction. (More on that in Part 4.)

Think about this for a moment... what intelligence is your team wasting right now?

In Part 3: Why the loudest person is usually wrong—and how to hear the important insights.