Part 2 of 2 — On what happens after you successfully bet on the wonky one

Part 1 was about how to see a spike when most panels cannot. This piece is about what happens to that spike six months later.

The hiring decision was the easy part. The harder problem is that the org you bring the spiky person into has its own immune system. And the immune system does not distinguish between a difficult person and a person who is right about uncomfortable things.

It rejects both.

Picture a founder in early days.

He is an insurgent. He picks insurgents. He picks people with a spike and a valley and possibly no clean fit. He creates a role around the spike. He takes a punt — what I have, I will use to the best by positioning it best. The org is built around what people can do, not what their CV claims they can do.

The org grows.

The first wave of polished, primmed-and-proper people arrive. They have the right pass marks in everything. They look like the kind of people grown-up companies hire. The leader, now busier than before, is more impressed by what the CV says than what the person is.

These people then hire their own replicas. They do not know how to evaluate a spike — they do not have one. All they know how to evaluate is fit. And fit means people who look like them.

Now the org has two kinds of people. The original insurgents with spikes and valleys. And the new layer of well-rounded folks who scored solid on every dimension a panel could test for.

The second group is uncomfortable around the first. The spiky ones are too direct, too dismissive of process, too unwilling to wait for someone slower to catch up. They have no patience for people they do not respect. They put others in their place sharply. They move at the speed of light when convinced and skip the stakeholder-alignment dance.

The polished layer cannot work this way. So they find ways to make the spiky ones less of a problem.

Not by firing them. That would require justification.

By routing around them.

The party-pooper PM.

He was the closest to the customer of anyone in the company. Everyone agreed on this. He had the truth-detector — the rare PM who knew what users actually wanted, not what executives believed they wanted.

He pushed back on arbitrary work. He called bullshit on initiatives the room was excited about. He did not soft-pedal. He did not rephrase his disagreement to make people feel comfortable.

The room labelled him a party pooper.

That label did the work. The org did not have to defend the initiatives on their merits — those debates would have been embarrassing. The org just had to keep finding ways to route around the negative person. Stop inviting him to brainstorms. Send the doc for review only after it had been approved. Move him to a less central area where his style "would fit better."

Most of the initiatives he called bullshit on quietly failed or got killed within a year. Nobody connected the dots. The org absorbed each failure as bad luck or bad execution and moved on.

He left eventually. The org noticed nothing changed in the months after he left, which the org took as evidence he was not valuable in the first place. The next dumb initiative shipped without anyone in the room qualified to stop it.

The deep-notes writer.

He did the actual analysis. When a question was complex, he wrote it out in full. He linked the data. He built the argument. He took the question seriously enough to give it the depth it deserved.

People stopped reading his emails.

"He writes too much." "It's hard to follow." "Why does he need to say all of this?"

The world loves YouTube shorts. It does not love long-form, hard-core analysis that takes effort to read. The room had degraded to a level of attention where his work product no longer landed — not because it was wrong, but because nobody was willing to do the work required to receive it.

His deep notes were probably the best thinking in the org. The room consumed them at the depth of a tweet. Then complained that he was hard to work with.

He was still there, drawing salary, sending notes that nobody read. He had become a non-entity inside the org while still showing up to work. The decision quality of the org dropped quietly — not because he stopped contributing, but because his contribution stopped being received.

The truth-tellers.

I have watched this play out many times across many companies. The exact details vary. The pattern does not.

People who called out the truth too many times. People who always saw what was missing. People who did not soft-pedal because soft-pedalling meant pretending something half-broken was working.

In each case, the organisation slowly redefined them. The same behaviour that had been clarity in year one became abrasiveness in year three. The same instinct that had been catching what others missed became complicating what should be simple. The person had not changed. The org had changed around them. What the org needed at founding was not what the org wanted now.

They either quit or stayed and went quiet. Present at work. Alive somewhere else.

The reason is not that the polished people are weak or jealous. The reason is more mechanical than that.

The polished, well-rounded person built their career by being uncontroversial. Their value proposition was I will not embarrass you. I will not say something that lands wrong. I will not have a strong opinion that turns out to be unpopular. This is a real and useful skill. It is how careers get built inside large institutions.

But it is the exact opposite skill from the one the spiky person has.

The spiky person's value proposition is I will see what you missed and tell you, even when it is awkward. That value only works if the org will tolerate the awkwardness. The polished person has spent twenty years optimising to remove awkwardness from rooms. When the spiky person enters their room, the polished person's instincts kick in. The awkwardness must be smoothed. The disagreement must be reframed. The truth-teller must be coached to deliver feedback "more constructively."

What the polished person experiences as helping someone communicate better is what the spiky person experiences as being asked to file down their only weapon. Neither person is acting in bad faith. They are running incompatible operating systems.

The problem is that as the org grows, the polished operating system spreads faster. It is easier to teach. It is easier to reproduce in hiring. It is easier to promote. The spiky operating system does not scale — every spiky person has to be hired and protected individually.

So the polished layer wins by default. Not because anyone decided it should. Because the math of organisational reproduction favours the easier-to-reproduce pattern.

This is what Chris Zook calls the Rise of Averages in The Founder's Mentality — the warning sign of a company losing its edge. He saw the same pattern from the outside that I was watching from the inside. If you want the rigorous version of this argument, read his book.

But here is what Zook gets at less directly. The Rise of Averages does not start in the metrics. It does not start in the dashboards. It starts inside the building, in the calibration meetings, in the email threads, in the moments a leader has to choose between defending a difficult person and saving political capital. The dashboard is the lagging indicator. The leading indicator is which kind of person stops getting invited to meetings.

I wrote in Part 1 about a sentence from The Vulnerability Paradox — the moment a team member says "don't worry about this part, boss, I've got it covered, you're not great at this anyway."

That sentence is the test of arrival as a leader. It is also the test of whether you have hired correctly.

The mirror version of that sentence is the one the org never speaks aloud:

"Don't worry about him, boss. He's just difficult. I've worked around him."

That sentence sounds like helpfulness. It is actually the sound of the org rejecting the spike you successfully hired. The colleague is not protecting you from a difficult person. The colleague is protecting themselves from someone whose existence makes their own averageness visible.

When you hear that sentence, you have a choice.

You can accept the framing. Spend less time defending the difficult person. Let them get routed around. They will leave eventually and you will tell yourself the fit was wrong.

Or you can refuse the framing. Walk into the next calibration meeting and defend the spiky person on the merits. Tell the polished colleague no, I think his read on the customer is the most accurate one in the building, and the rest of us are uncomfortable because he is right about something we did not want to hear.

That sentence costs political capital. Most leaders will not say it. The ones who do are the only ones who keep their spiky hires.

The trigger is not a dramatic one. There is no meeting where the leadership team decides let's stop hiring insurgents. Nobody announces a shift.

The trigger is the moment not-rocking-the-boat starts feeling more valuable than winning.

In a young org, winning is existential. There is no boat to rock. The boat is something you are still building. You take the spiky hire because you have to — there is no margin for hiring someone who looks safe but cannot deliver.

In a mature org, there is a boat. The boat is comfortable. The boat carries reputations and bonuses and political capital. The polished layer protects the boat. The spiky person threatens it — not by trying to, but by saying things in meetings that would force the boat to change direction.

The leader, now invested in the boat, starts unconsciously discounting the spiky person's input. Not maliciously. Just slightly. "Yes, but we need to consider the other stakeholders." "Yes, but the timing isn't right." "Yes, but let's not kill momentum."

Each yes-but is small. Across a year, they add up to the spiky person being deprioritised in every decision. Across three years, the spiky person leaves and the org has become flatland.

The dashboard catches up to that decision in about three years. Average margin. Average NPS. Average customer. Everyone wonders where the edge went.

The edge went the day the org chose comfort over signal. Hiring is the front door. Routing-around-the-spiky-person is the back door. Most orgs lose their edge through the back door.

The first move is the unglamorous one. Notice when the polished layer is routing around someone you originally hired for spike. Notice the "don't worry about him, I've worked around it" sentence. Notice when calibration discussions start using words like abrasive, difficult, complicates things, doesn't simplify. Notice when someone stops getting invited to forums where their input used to matter.

When you notice it, name it. In the room. "I think we are routing around this person because their style is uncomfortable. Their substance is correct. Let's stop doing that."

That sentence costs political capital. You will lose some. The polished layer will be unhappy. They were getting their work done more comfortably without the spiky person in it. You are about to make their lives harder again.

The second move is to audit who you are no longer hearing from. Every quarter, look at who used to push back in your meetings and stopped. Who used to send long emails with deep analysis and now sends short ones — or none. Who used to disagree and now goes silent. The silence is not consent. The silence is the spike learning that you are not worth the cost of speaking up to.

The third move is the slow one. Reset your hiring panels so they are not all polished, well-rounded people. Put at least one spiky person on every senior interview. They will spot the candidates the polished panel would have missed. They will also embarrass the polished panel by approving candidates the panel would have rejected. That embarrassment is the price of fixing the funnel.

The fourth move is the hardest. When the org's polished layer tells you that someone is "difficult" or "not a culture fit" or "needs to develop their EQ," ask what specifically the person did. Make them point to the moment. Often the moment will be one where the spiky person was right and the polished person was wrong. The label of difficulty was the polished person's way of refiling that loss as the spiky person's character flaw. Do not let the refile happen.

I started this piece with the founder picking insurgents and ended it with the org full of pen pushers. That arc is real but it is not inevitable.

It is inevitable only when the leader stops paying the cost of protecting spike. The cost is real. Defending a difficult person in calibration is exhausting. Reading the long deep-notes email is more work than reading the polished short one. Sitting with the party pooper's no on an initiative everyone else loves is uncomfortable.

The leader who pays that cost keeps an org with edge. The leader who stops paying it gets a comfortable ride to flatland.

Most leaders, eventually, stop paying.

That is why the Rise of Averages is so common. It is not because most leaders are bad. It is because comfort compounds. Every quarter you can save political capital by not defending the spiky one. Every quarter the dashboard does not yet show the cost. Until one day it does — and by then the spiky people are gone, the panel is full of replicas, and there is nobody left who could tell you what to do about it even if you asked.

A vast flatland of no risk and no return. Pen pushers. Not insurgents who make things happen.

That is what most companies become. Not because the founders wanted it. Because the people who came after the founders preferred not to rock the boat.

Not the only way. Probably not even the best way. Just one practitioner's version that worked.

~Discovering Turiya@work@life