Tune In
Every aerial on this rooftop is doing the same thing, yet each points in a slightly different direction. Together they receive more than any single one could alone; and that is precisely the point.
Teams work the same way. People in the same room, working toward the same broad purpose, are rarely receiving identical signals from the same environment. One person sees what is changing; another sees what must be protected. One is focused on past results; another is forecasting the future. One sees the risk; another sees the opportunity. That variety of orientation is not a problem to manage. It is an advantage to protect.
The challenge is not choosing between diversity and alignment. It is holding both simultaneously. The aerials don’t stop pointing in different directions when the picture appears on screen. What changes is that someone has to make sense of the combined signal, finding the picture that no single aerial could have produced alone. Different signals. Shared picture.
That is the leader’s job. Not to make everyone point the same way, but to hold the different signals together and trust that the range of what is received determines the quality of what is shown.
When did you last check whether the signals in your team are being synthesised into the best possible output?