There’s a time and place I return to when I’m feeling invisible and unheard: Sandy Spring, Maryland, the 1990s, between third period and lunch. A flighty young teacher I’ve never seen before with sharp eyes and a tangle of curls—we’ll call her Sarah Jessica because that’s the vibe she’s giving—is running auditions for our freshman year performance of Our Town.

Sarah Jessica is short on time, and she’s spent most of it absorbed with the sprightliest of girls and most jocular of boys, as if casting A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She tells the rest of us not to worry. There are maybe twenty of us in the class, and everyone will get a role. Kind of like every kid gets a ribbon. Except I don’t want a fucking ribbon. I want to read for an actual role.

Then the bell rings. Unfortunately for me—and the half a dozen or so other kids like me, not the loudest or most obvious ones in the room—we get cast as voiceless ghosts.

This incident has lived rent-free in my psyche for a couple of reasons.

First, I’m still bothered by my reaction—I didn’t show up for the performance. But I’m not surprised by it either, especially when I think back to what it was like being a teen, interpreting the smoke signals of adults in the room. If Sarah Jessica wasn’t going to give me the time of day, I wasn’t going to give her mine. (Remember, this was peak whatever generation: she could “sit and spin” as far as I was concerned.)

Mainly, though, I reflect on it often for what it revealed about Sarah Jessica’s perception of what it takes to be the main character—or a leader. Her narrow focus and engagement with the loudest and most obvious in the room preferenced convenience over potential, and confused performance for talent.

She wasn’t being malicious. She was doing something more conditioned and human than that: she was running on prototype. Leadership researchers call this Implicit Leadership Theory—the idea that we each carry a cognitive template of what a leader looks, sounds, and feels like, built from every boss, hero, and authority figure we’ve encountered. We use these templates as interpretive shortcuts, often unconsciously, to assess who belongs at the front of the room based on perceived traits alone—sociability, energy, the willingness to take up space. Sarah Jessica walked in with a casting sheet already written in her head.

This is something we all do. It’s why we tend to elect, elevate, and celebrate the same kinds of leaders and intellectuals time and time again. Does that make us insane? Probably. Does that make us all Sarah Jessica, in one room or another? Absolutely.

Sarah Jessica was operating through the lens of trait-based leadership—a deeply-held theory that you can see a leader before they’ve led anything, that potential announces itself through personality, presence, and the willingness to take up space in a room. It’s intuitive, deeply human, and not limited to high school auditions.

We do the same thing when we decide who gets a platform. We elevate the most visible, the most vocal, the most obviously confident, and often call it thought leadership. The seen get seen more. The unseen, less. Over time, the gap between who speaks the loudest and who says something worth saying gets wider and wider, and we mistake the volume of a voice for the value of an idea.

Prototype-based recognition can confer legitimacy even in the absence of evidence or creativity — which means we’re not just at risk of amplifying the wrong voices, we’re at risk of crowding out the right ones.

This is not just an uninformed mistake — a 2024 meta-analysis examining personality and leadership across more than 75,000 subjects found that the relationship between how a leader appears and how a leader actually performs is weak enough that, statistically, it might not exist at all — the cost is real. The most consequential perspectives, the ones that could genuinely change how we think about the hardest problems, may belong to people who never get to read for the lead role.

Imagine the Brandos and DeNiros of their fields — people whose authority is grounded in lived experience and genuine reflection — cast as voiceless ghosts throughout an entire career because they did not perform the archetype. While we keep amplifying the same confident voices, the insights that could actually move us forward are going unheard.

With that picture in mind — 1990s, Sandy Spring, Maryland, between third period and lunch — I decided to run an experiment using the Canon methodology* to ask a question I’ve been circling for a while: who has something worth saying that nobody is asking to hear?

Over the next two weeks, I’ll be applying the methodology, tracking what surfaces, and reporting back with real metrics, warts and all.

Canon is a proprietary knowledge architecture process, part methodology and part infrastructure, built around five stages: Capture, Browse, Analyze, Develop, Deploy. Everything you read, encounter, or return to gets logged and tagged: source, themes, relevance, and a personal reflection that is yours alone. Over time, Canon reads patterns across that accumulated body of work and surfaces gaps — places where the conversation has blind spots, where expertise exists but isn't landing, where there is room to say something that hasn't been said.

The Analyze stage is where you question that material: what you've been circling, what you've been avoiding, where your thought leadership edge might actually lie.

Canon surfaces. You decide.