Like Manchester, he realized that people will do unreasonable things to come through—not for grand ideas or incentives or bosses or hierarchies or even recognition, but for each other. Smith came away from his Vietnam experience with an increased faith that if you start with basic respect for people, and you show trust by putting them in situations where they have to come through because others depend on them, they’ll summon whatever it takes to achieve the mission.

When we carry our competencies across the measurement bridge, we enter a fake and dangerous world—as a tool of assessment, order and control, they are worse than useless. But as public signifiers for what we deem most important, they are another way we can cascade meaning in our organizations, and thereby help our leaders and teams understand what’s most important.

While both sides obviously play a role, the words officers use are critical. They can communicate respect and understanding or contempt and disregard. They can calm a worried motorist down or make them more anxious.

The Stanford study raises a host of important questions. It’s easy to call police officers racist or point to this as evidence that the police are out to get African Americans. And that is certainly one way to see the results.

But the truth is likely both subtler and more complex.

Some individual officers may be racist. And given the broader actions of individual officers in particular high-profile cases, this is almost certainly the case.

But regardless, even if it isn’t intentional, a much larger portion of officers are treating White and Black people differently. Most officers likely mean well and are simply doing the best they can in difficult situations. But whether they realize it or not and whether they mean to or not, the words they use differ. And this makes the underlying problem even more challenging to solve.

The managers and financiers who destroyed great businesses in the unsuccessful pursuit of shareholder value. The architects and planners who believed that buildings could be designed from first principles, that vibrant cities could be drawn on a blank sheet of paper, and that expressways should be driven through the hearts of communities. The politicians who believed they could improve public services by the imposition of multiple targets. Acknowledging the complexity of the systems for which they were responsible and the multiple needs of the individuals who operated these systems would have avoided these errors.