Depth
Before the bike, there was a Monday morning meeting.
Our CEO came in energized. He had been thinking all weekend, and you could feel it. He described an idea: give our members access to museums, concerts, cultural events. Something enriching. A gesture of dignity. A handful of members had mentioned wanting more activities and outings. Not many. Not loudly. But enough to build a story around.
The room responded the way rooms do. People leaned in. Nodded. Signaled alignment. The idea had momentum before anyone had examined it.
Something felt off.
I sat with it for a moment, then said what I was thinking: I think we should slow down. I am not sure the logic holds across the populations we serve.
The room paused. Not heavily. Just enough for the momentum to become visible as momentum rather than as certainty.
The idea did not die. It exhaled. It went from obviously right to worth examining. And examining it revealed something that the surface reading had obscured: the members who had asked for outings were not representative of the population we were designing for. The need was real, but it was not the need we thought it was. What most of our members required was structural, not cultural. Harder to name. Harder to deliver. Less satisfying to announce.
We had been responding to the surface of what we heard, not the depth of what our members lived.
Nothing in that meeting was careless. No one was acting in bad faith. The idea, like our CEO, was generous and well-intentioned. And still, it drifted from reality faster than anyone noticed.
I have thought about that morning more than I expected to. Not because the idea was wrong, but because the pattern was familiar. A surface reading that feels clear. An alignment that feels like agreement. A confidence that substitutes for understanding. And underneath it, a reality that is more complicated, less comfortable, and more important than the story we were telling ourselves.
That pattern does not only show up in conference rooms.
Ken Wake is the author of Thinking Design (forthcoming) and a Professor and Entrepreneur in Residence at Georgetown University. His work explores systems, technology, design, and meaning. Tour de Ken is his weekly log.
