Potential

My kids have moved into a phase of life where their projects involve complex things like cars, boats, camper vans, and an assortment of home wiring projects. This has resulted in several conversations regarding voltage, current, power, and how all this works together.

A simple way to visualize electricity is to see it as water moving through pipes. The total volume of water flowing is the power—watts (W), the rate at which the water is flowing is the current—amps (I), and the pressure pushing the water through the pipe is the potential—voltage (V).

W = V * I

If you increase the voltage or the current, you increase the power. It’s simple. However, there are some other factors that can’t be ignored. The size of the pipe (or wire) matters. In water, there is an effective maximum practical flow rate, or amount of water that will flow through a certain pipe size, regardless of the pressure applied. (The engineers reading this don’t need to email me and tell me about incompressible flow and “no max upper limits.” I understand.)

For a given potential (pressure or voltage), the only reasonable way to increase power (volume or watts) is to increase the pipe diameter or wire size. If the pipe is too small, you will have cavitation and erosion, leading to failure. If the wire is too small, resistance will lead to heat buildup and failure.

Let me say that again. If your delivery system (pipe or wire) is too small for your potential, it results in catastrophic failure (think fires and explosions).

Recently, I attended the Great Game of Business Summit. The primary message was “People have more potential than most organizations will ever know.”

We spent three days in various sessions and roundtables discussing how to tap the potential already present in the people on our teams. It was all good. The details and subtleties all pointed to a rather simple, but very difficult, root cause. The potential of the people on our teams is not realized because the leader becomes the constraint—not through malice—through geometry. A few ways this shows up:

The leader is the pipe diameter. When every decision routes through one person’s calendar, one person’s inbox, one person’s approval—it doesn’t matter how much pressure the team is building. If every gallon has to pass through a half-inch line because the leader has to sign off on it, that’s the ceiling. The team’s potential isn’t the constraint—the leader’s throughput is.

The leader adds resistance. Fear does this. Distrust does this. A culture where people hedge their language, run ideas past three people before saying them out loud, or wait to see how the wind is blowing before committing to a position is resistance in the line. And resistance doesn’t just slow the flow; it converts energy into heat and noise. That heat is burnout, cynicism, and the noise slowly erodes people who used to bring their best thinking and now bring the minimum that keeps them out of trouble.

The leader closes the valve early. Withheld trust and withheld information are often dressed up as caution. A leader who won’t hand off real authority and who keeps the context that would let someone act without asking has installed a valve that’s never more than half open. The pipe could carry it. The pressure is there. The leader just won’t turn the handle the rest of the way.

None of these are exotic failures. They’re the ordinary ways a well-intentioned person becomes the ceiling on their own team—one size, one habit, one closed valve at a time. The uncomfortable part of the Great Game of Business Summit wasn’t the diagnosis. It was realizing how many of us have spent years upsizing the pipe everywhere except in the mirror.

The question isn’t whether your team has potential. It does. More than you know and certainly more than you have tapped into. The question is what size wire you’ve installed between that potential and the work that needs doing and whether the resistance your people are running into is coming from the market, from the work itself, or from you. The fix is rarely more potential. It’s a leader willing to measure their own diameter first—the Bison Way.