Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences:

We can overlook our abilities because they feel ordinary to us. Yayoi Kusama’s dots invite us to consider what we might develop from the things we take for granted about ourselves.

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I discovered Yayoi Kusama today. I was drawn in by a piece of art that someone shared and was intrigued by how this Japanese artist, was described as the queen of polka dots.

Curious – I went in search of her other works. What was particularly intriguing to me is the simplicity of the thing at the centre of so much of her work. A dot. Something any of us could put on a page without giving it another thought.

Who would imagine that dots could hold enough meaning to sustain a lifetime of work?

That they could become paintings, sculptures and rooms people step into? That someone could use them to express a philosophy about our place in the universe?

Kusama did. She described the earth as “only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos.” Through her work, a small, familiar mark became a way of exploring something almost impossible to comprehend: infinity.

Her relationship with those patterns was deeply personal. Since childhood, she experienced hallucinations involving repeating forms. Those experiences informed the dots and nets that became central to her art. They were part of how she experienced the world and what she tried to give expression to through her work.

There is no need to romanticise the distress involved to appreciate what she created. What interests me is how much she developed from something that, seen without its context, we might dismiss as ordinary.

Which brings me to this question:

What do we dismiss in ourselves?

There are things we notice repeatedly. Questions we find ourselves asking. Ways of explaining something that seem obvious to us and help someone else understand it for the first time. We may give these things very little consideration because they are so much a part of how we operate.

We assume that if something comes readily to us, there cannot be much to it. Surely everyone notices that. Surely anyone could make that connection. We move past it in search of something that looks more substantial.

Yet our familiarity with an ability tells us very little about its value.

Someone who can help a confused group identify the question it needs to answer may think they are simply having a conversation. Someone who notices where a process keeps breaking down may assume they are pointing out the obvious. Someone who can explain a difficult idea in everyday language may underestimate how much understanding they have made possible.

Understanding ourselves requires attention to these things.

What do we keep noticing? What do people consistently turn to us for? What interests us enough that we continue exploring it without being instructed to do so?

These are useful questions when we are deciding what to develop, which work to pursue and where to place our effort. If we overlook what we already bring to the table, we can make those decisions without a complete understanding of ourselves.

Recognising something, though, is only a beginning.

Kusama’s body of work involved years of practice and experimentation. The simplicity of the dot did not remove the work of discovering what she could do with it.

That matters too. We may dismiss an idea because its first expression seems small, expecting its full possibility to be visible from the beginning. Sometimes we discover what something can become by spending time working with it.

Yayoi Kusama died on August 14, 2026, aged 97, with her death announced today, August 27. How easily I could have looked at the image that intrigued me thinking there was very little to understand. How much more depth there was regarding the person behind the dots.

Perhaps there are parts of ourselves that deserve the same attention.

Strategic Reflection Prompt

What do you regularly dismiss as “just something I do,” and what might become possible if you gave it more attention?

About Giselle

Most costly decisions begin with a wrong read of the situation.

I’m Giselle Hudson — writer and Pre-Fixer. I don’t fix; I pre-fix. Most advisers jump to solutions before they’ve found the real problem. I find it first — the part that isn’t fully visible yet. Once we see that clearly, everything else falls into place, and confident, right action can follow.

Through my daily Strategic Alignment Journal, I explore leadership, decision-making, and the patterns that shape organizations — helping leaders make sense of complexity before they commit significant time and money to the wrong thing.

What’s the one thing about your business that frustrates you most — the thing that, despite your best efforts, you can’t seem to resolve?