Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

Miles: Nineteen forty four. The United States Navy, under pressure, finally agrees to commission its first Black officers. Sixteen men are selected. They're trained in a segregated class, taught by instructors who mostly expect them to fail, and given a fraction of the time and support their white counterparts receive. They study together every night, drilling each other, refusing to let anyone fall behind. And when the examination comes, they post the highest section average in the history of the training program.

Miles: The Navy's response is to assume they cheated.

Miles: Today: Hidden Potential, by Adam Grant. In two sentences: we're extremely bad at spotting talent, because we look for people who are already good rather than people who are capable of getting better. The distance travelled matters more than the starting point, and almost no organization measures it.

Miles: Sixty Books. Presented by Stoar Consulting and Coaching.

Miles: I'm Miles, and this is Sixty Books, coming to you from the reading room. Over sixty episodes we read sixty management books, the finest of the last hundred years, one at a time, for leaders and teams who think differently and for jobs where AI is now in the mix. The research comes from Nora.

Miles: Nora, that opening story does a lot of work.

Nora: It does two things at once. It shows what happens when people are given a real chance, and it shows the institution refusing to believe the result.

Miles: Finish it.

Nora: They retested them. And all sixteen passed again. Twelve were commissioned as ensigns and one made a warrant officer, and they became known as the Golden Thirteen. Grant's point isn't that they were secretly brilliant all along. It's that the selection system had no way to see them, because it was measuring where people already were rather than how far they could travel.

Miles: And the general claim.

Nora: That potential isn't a fixed quantity you either have or lack. It's a function of opportunity, character, and the design of the systems around you. And that if you want to find it, you have to stop measuring altitude and start measuring the climb.

Miles: The author, briefly, because he's different from most of the people on this shelf.

Nora: Adam Grant is an actual academic. Organizational psychologist at Wharton, where he became the school's youngest tenured professor, and he publishes peer reviewed research rather than only writing about other people's.

Miles: Which changes how we should read him.

Nora: It raises the standard, and mostly he meets it. His books are Give and Take in twenty thirteen, Originals in twenty sixteen, Option B with Sheryl Sandberg in twenty seventeen, Think Again in twenty twenty one, and Hidden Potential in twenty twenty three.

Miles: And the human detail.

Nora: Two. He was a competitive springboard diver as a teenager, and by his own account not a naturally gifted one, which is the personal engine of this book. And in college he worked as a professional magician, which he's said taught him about how people's attention works.

Miles: A magician who grew up to study how organizations miss things.

Nora: I wouldn't push the metaphor, but it does sit there.

Miles: The framework. What are the parts?

Nora: Three. Character skills, which are the engine. Structures called scaffolding, which are the support. And systems of opportunity, which decide who gets to try at all.

Miles: Start with character skills.

Nora: Grant's distinction is between cognitive skills, what you can do, and character skills, what you do with what you can do. He names proactivity, discipline, determination, and the willingness to be uncomfortable. And his claim is that character skills predict growth better than starting ability does.

Miles: Give me the concrete practices.

Nora: Three that are actually usable. Be a sponge, by which he means actively absorbing information and, crucially, filtering it rather than soaking up everything. Seek advice rather than feedback. And deliberately court discomfort rather than waiting to feel ready.

Miles: Stop on the second one, because I think it's the most valuable sentence in the book.

Nora: Seek advice, not feedback. Grant's argument is that asking for feedback points people backward, at what you did, and tends to produce either vague praise or a verdict. Asking for advice points them forward, at what you should do next, and produces something you can act on.

Miles: And that connects directly to the last episode.

Nora: It connects to Kluger and DeNisi, which we cited in episode six. Their meta analysis found that over a third of feedback interventions made performance worse, and that effectiveness drops as attention moves away from the task and toward the self. Asking for advice is a mechanical way of keeping attention on the task. You've changed the destination of the conversation by changing one word.

Miles: Now the neurodivergent read.

Nora: This is a coaching move I'd hand to almost anyone. If your history with evaluation is bad, and for a lot of people diagnosed late it's very bad, then any request for feedback tends to arrive as a referendum on you. Asking what should I do differently next time isn't softer. It's more useful, and it lands somewhere survivable.

Miles: Scaffolding.

Nora: Borrowed from developmental psychology, and originally from Vygotsky's work on learning with support. A scaffold is a temporary structure that lets someone build something they couldn't build alone, and is then removed.

Miles: And I want to challenge the word temporary.

Nora: You should, because that's where this book and neurodiversity part company, and it's worth being precise rather than cross about it.

Miles: Start there.

Nora: Grant's framing assumes the scaffold comes down. You use the structure until the capacity is internalized, and then you don't need it. That's true of a lot of learning. It isn't true of accommodation. A person with ADHD using an external system to hold deadlines isn't building toward a day when they won't need it. The system is the capacity.

Miles: So is the concept useless here?

Nora: The opposite. Take out the word temporary and scaffolding becomes the single best word for accommodation that exists, because it carries no implication of deficiency. Nobody thinks a building under construction is weak because it has scaffolding. What they think is that something is being built.

Miles: And Grant isn't hostile to that reading.

Nora: He's not, and he writes about designing conditions for other people at length. But a leader who reads the chapter and takes away that supports should be phased out will do damage with it, and will do that damage while feeling developmental.

Miles: Right. The third part. Opportunity.

Nora: Which is where he's at his most pointed. He argues that most organizations run selection systems that reward prior access, then congratulate themselves on meritocracy. He looks at the Finnish school system, at how teams identify high potential people, and at the fact that the people we call late developers were frequently just people nobody was looking at.

Miles: And the finding from episode four returns.

Nora: Straight back. The relative age effect. The youngest children in a school year are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, and the effect shows up in teacher ratings and not parent ratings. That's a system identifying a difference it created, in exactly the way Grant is describing, with a consequence that lasts decades.

Miles: Two more ideas I want in.

Nora: Imperfectionism, which is his term for knowing when good enough is genuinely good enough. His argument is that perfectionists tend to excel at things that don't matter, avoid unfamiliar tasks where they might be bad, and treat any error as evidence about themselves.

Miles: And that description is going to be uncomfortably familiar to some listeners.

Nora: It maps closely onto a pattern a lot of neurodivergent adults describe, especially those who compensated their way through school by being right about everything. The cost is that the range of things you're willing to attempt narrows every year.

Miles: And his fix isn't just relax.

Nora: It's deciding, in advance, which dimensions of a piece of work actually deserve excellence, and consciously accepting adequacy on the others. That's a decision made once rather than a feeling summoned repeatedly, and that difference matters enormously for anyone whose emotional regulation isn't on tap.

Miles: The other idea.

Nora: Deliberate play, as a companion to deliberate practice. He looks at Brazilian futsal, played on a small hard court with a heavy ball, where the constraints force enormous numbers of touches and improvisation. Skill develops through varied, engaging, unpredictable play rather than through drilling.

Miles: And why that matters for us.

Nora: Because interest driven attention isn't a defect to be trained out. If a person learns furiously inside something absorbing and stalls inside something dull, deliberate play says design the absorbing version. That's the Goldilocks idea from episode two, arriving from a different direction.

Miles: Two more mechanisms before the critique, because they're the ones a leader can act on tomorrow.

Nora: Backwards design, which is the practical form of scaffolding. Rather than starting from where a person is and hoping they arrive somewhere, you start from the destination and work backward to the supports required at each step. It sounds obvious. Almost no development plan is written that way.

Miles: And for people who think differently?

Nora: It replaces the standard instruction, which is get better at this, with a sequence. And a sequence is something executive function can actually hold. Get better at this isn't a task. It's an atmosphere.

Miles: Huh.

Miles: The other one.

Nora: Collective potential, which is his term for the fact that teams have hidden potential too, and that the usual failure is a group where information doesn't move. He's drawing on the psychological safety research, and we'll do Amy Edmondson properly later in the series, so I'll leave it there except for one point.

Miles: Which is.

Nora: That psychological safety is measurable and has been studied properly, unlike most of what's on this shelf. When a chief executive uses that phrase, they're standing on firmer ground than when they quote a two by two, and it's worth knowing which is which.

Miles: What hasn't held up? And this one is harder, because Grant is a researcher.

Nora: Harder, and the criticisms are more interesting. Start with the fact that this is a synthesis. Grant is summarizing other people's findings and connecting them with stories, and some of those literatures have had a rough decade.

Miles: Name one.

Nora: Grit. The largest meta analysis, by Credé and colleagues, found that grit's predictive power is modest and overlaps heavily with conscientiousness, the long established personality trait. Character skills, as a category, sits close to conscientiousness with better branding, and Grant doesn't fully address that.

Miles: What else.

Nora: The individual and the system. He argues persuasively that opportunity structures determine who's seen, and then most of the book's advice is addressed to the individual, about their own discomfort tolerance and their own sponge behavior. If the system is the problem, telling the overlooked person to be more proactive is a strange remedy.

Miles: The stories.

Nora: Selected on outcome, as always. The Golden Thirteen succeeded, so we hear about them. The same conditions applied to other groups who didn't, and the book can't tell us how often the recipe works, because it only contains cases where it did.

Miles: There's also a structural problem with the title.

Nora: The phrase hidden potential implies the potential was always there and simply unseen, which is generous and also slightly misleading. Some of what looks like unrealized potential isn't hidden. It's unbuilt, because the conditions to build it never existed. Those are different problems with different remedies, and conflating them lets an organization feel virtuous for looking harder rather than for changing anything.

Miles: One thing he gets right that most do not.

Nora: Learning styles. He states plainly that matching teaching to a supposed visual or auditory learning style hasn't held up, and that's correct and worth saying, because it's one of the most durable myths in education.

Miles: With a caveat for our audience.

Nora: An important one. Learning styles are a myth. Processing differences are not. Auditory processing difficulty, sensory load, working memory limits, are real, measurable, and unrelated to that discredited idea. A leader who has heard learning styles are nonsense and files everything under that heading will refuse a real accommodation on the strength of a correct fact about something else.

Miles: Which tier?

Nora: The best sourced book we've covered so far, written by a working researcher, still assembled from other people's studies and chosen stories. Better than most of this shelf, and still not evidence for the specific claims it makes.

Miles: So the recap, read the way this show reads things. Hidden Potential says stop measuring where people are and start measuring how far they've come. If you're a neurodivergent leader, or you lead people who are, here's what to do with it. Your selection systems are probably measuring prior access and calling it merit, and the relative age finding tells you that starts before anyone reaches you. Ask for advice rather than feedback, because it moves the conversation off the self and onto the task, where it's more likely to help. Treat scaffolding as the right word for support and drop the assumption that it's temporary, because for a lot of people the structure is the capacity. And decide in advance what deserves excellence, so that adequacy elsewhere is a choice rather than a failure.

Miles: Run it against AI.

Nora: Grant's three parts give us a clean way to sort it. Character, scaffolding, opportunity. The caveat we used to attach here is read after the credits now, unchanged from one episode to the next.

Miles: Take them in order.

Nora: On character skills, very little. Discomfort tolerance and proactivity aren't things a tool supplies, and there's a real risk it removes the productive struggle that builds them. If the model does the hard part every time, the capacity doesn't develop, which is the same warning we gave about Marquet in episode five.

Miles: Scaffolding.

Nora: This is where it's strongest, and it's close to the best argument for these tools that this series has produced. A scaffold is a structure that lets someone produce work they couldn't otherwise produce. Task decomposition, a first draft to react to, an explanation repeated a fourth time without impatience, a summary that takes the load off working memory. Those are scaffolds, they're available at three in the morning, and they don't require asking a colleague for help.

Miles: And on opportunity.

Nora: Ambiguous, and I wouldn't oversell it. It lowers the cost of producing polished work, which helps people whose ideas were being discounted for their packaging. It also makes polished work cheap for everyone, so the signal degrades. And if hiring systems start screening with these tools, we should expect them to reproduce the pattern Grant is complaining about, faster and with a veneer of neutrality.

Miles: The cautions.

Nora: Two. Don't let the scaffold remove the desirable difficulty, because that's the part that builds the capacity. And the one Grant would insist on: a tool that measures where someone already is, and screens on it, is the Navy examiner assuming the class cheated. If you point it at the climb instead of the altitude, it's on the book's side. Pointed the other way, it's the problem with a faster processor.

Miles: That's Hidden Potential.

Miles: Next time: Grit, by Angela Duckworth, and what happened when the most famous idea in modern psychology met a decade of replication attempts.

Nora: And Duckworth ran some of those replications herself, which makes it a fairer fight than most.

Miles: Nora, appreciated.

Nora: I'll have read it by then.

Miles: Next book tomorrow.

Miles: Stoar Consulting and Coaching makes Sixty Books. Logan Williamson is a Licensed Professional Counselor in Texas and Louisiana. Everything you heard today was about a book, and it was education, aimed at leaders and teams. We weren't coaching you, we weren't counseling you, and we hold no opinion about you.

Nora: The transcript is on the episode page, and so is a source for each claim. We'll have a new book tomorrow.

Miles: You've been listening to two synthetic voices. Nobody named Miles or Nora exists; neither voice holds a license, and nothing we said concerned you. AI helps draft these scripts; Logan Williamson, a Licensed Professional Counselor in Texas and Louisiana, at Stoar Consulting and Coaching, reads, edits and signs off every one.

Nora: And one note about the AI segment. The evidence that these tools help neurodivergent people at work is early. There are controlled trials now, but they measure things like conversation skill rather than how a job actually goes, and for work itself most of what exists is individual providers reporting success. So take it as promising and not proven. The tools also get rebuilt every few months, so whatever you set up today is built on something that moves.