Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences:
Reading Adam Gidwitz’s The Inquisitor’s Tale, illustrated by Hatem Aly, introduced me to medieval illuminators and an unexpected connection to my own understanding of bringing light into people’s lives. It also revealed a fascinating parallel with organizational life, where what appears in the margins may tell us as much as the official story.
I just started reading a children’s book set in France in 1242, and instead of the familiar words “illustrated by,” I saw “illuminated by Hatem Aly.”
The book is The Inquisitor’s Tale: Or, The Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog, by Adam Gidwitz. Under the heading “About the Illuminations,” I read:
This book has been illuminated – as a medieval text might have been – by artist Hatem Aly. Some of his illustrations will reflect the action, or the ideas in the story. Some will be unrelated doodles, just as medieval illuminators often doodled in the margins of their books. There may even be drawings that contradict or question the text. That too, was commonplace in medieval manuscripts. The author and the illuminator are unique individuals, with unique interpretations of the story, and the meaning behind it.
I was gobsmacked. Discovering that there were people called illuminators felt unexpectedly personal. Until that moment, I had known nothing about illuminated manuscripts or the people who created them, much less that illustrations in the margins could offer another interpretation of a story.
For years, I have carried a sense that I am meant to be a light in the lives of others. I have understood it as a spiritual calling, expressed through loving, supporting, encouraging and bringing some happiness into people’s lives. The word illuminator seemed to give an unexpected historical form to something I had long associated with my own purpose. Yet it was the reference to the margins that opened another line of thought.
The author tells the story through words. The illuminator may bring another understanding to the same page. The illustration does not always agree with the text. It may reinforce it, question it or invite readers to notice something different.
Two people engage with one story, but they do not necessarily see the same thing.
“Is this what happens in organizations?” was my next thought
Every organization has a central text. It appears in strategy documents, policies, dashboards, performance reports and the accounts leaders give of how things are going. These are necessary. They provide direction and help people coordinate their efforts, but they are representations of organizational life, not the entirety of it.
The margins tell other stories.
Each detail, taken alone, can look too small to matter. They emerge in the conversation after the meeting, the workaround that keeps an awkward process functioning, the complaint repeatedly dismissed as an exception, or the employee who stops raising an issue because previous attempts produced no change. They are also present in the gap between what leadership intends and what customers or employees actually experience.
A leadership team might interpret missed targets as a failure of accountability. People doing the work might point to conflicting priorities, decisions that arrive too late or systems that make the expected performance difficult to achieve. One account should not automatically displace the other. The task is to understand what each reveals and what evidence can help explain the difference.
When problems recur, organizations often respond by rewriting the central text.
- Another policy is issued.
- A new system is introduced.
- Expectations are restated, responsibilities reassigned and performance measures revised.
These actions may be necessary, but if the explanation for the problem lies elsewhere, the new text will not resolve it.
What if the margins reveal what the central narrative has failed to explain?
That does not mean every comment from the margins is accurate or significant. The same care needed to examine an official account is needed to assess an alternative one.
Illumination is not about declaring one perspective right and another wrong. It is about bringing more of the picture into view, testing interpretations and recognizing what an accepted narrative may have left out.
I return, too, to what illumination means in everyday relationships. Bringing light into someone’s life can be an act of kindness or encouragement. It can also mean listening in a way that helps another person recognize something they had not seen before. Neither requires taking over their story or deciding how it should end.
What intrigues me about the illuminator is that the work does not erase the words on the page. It adds another way of seeing them.
We may measure contribution too narrowly when we focus only on the answers offered, the decisions made or the solutions implemented. Yet sometimes our most meaningful contribution is to bring another perspective into view, one that challenges what has been accepted, reveals what may have been overlooked, and changes how a situation is understood.
Strategic Reflection Prompt
What might the margins of your organization be revealing that its official story has yet to acknowledge?
I’m Giselle Hudson, The Pre-Fixer™.
For nearly three decades, I’ve worked with business owners and leaders across the Caribbean who carry important decisions largely on their own, often when problems keep returning, solutions fall short, or implementation stalls.
When I ask business owners what problem they can’t seem to solve, the answer is usually “people.” So I ask them to tell me more, because people and businesses are rarely as simple as they first appear.
I help them understand what’s really causing the problem before they spend more trying to fix it. And where needed, I help design the solution and guide their teams to put it into practice.
Get Clarity before the Fix.
What are you trying to make sense of right now?