THOUGHT ESSAYS are your weekly dose of open-ended, playfully subversive explorations that invite you to think differently about the everyday and the systemic alike.
Why is it that the most transformative contributions are often overlooked?
Consider scenarios:
A narrowly evaded public health crisis;
A city designed so well that makes movements effortless;
A leader planting a seed of confidence that shapes someone’s career;
A consultant that quietly shifts a business model so revenue compounds for years;
A manager redesigns workflows so nothing ever breaks.
The absence of friction, failure, or drama often hides immense value.
This is what I call value invisibility: the more seamlessly something is integrated or the more effortless it looks, the harder it is for others to distinguish it as remarkable. Conversely, small, obvious, highly visible gestures are easier for people to recognise, even when their impact is minor.
It isn’t universal. There are contexts where immense value is impossible to miss. But in many professional or creative settings, the bigger the value delivered, the more people assume it to be part of the baseline. This is why people often undervalue exceptional work until it is framed properly or contrasted with what might have been achieved without it.
Where value disappears
Value is prone to be invisible within more abstract, long-term-oriented settings, or where it is integrated into complex systems.
Knowledge and advisory roles — consulting, strategy, analysis, frameworks. The client sees the outcomes but rarely the depth of thinking.
Creative and cultural work — artists, designers, cultural strategists shaping experiences that are far more easily felt than measured.
Systems and operational improvements — removing inefficiencies, redesigning workflows, or implementing frameworks so seamlessly they are tricky to notice.
Mentorship and teaching — quiet guidance that subtly shapes thinking over years, often only recognised in hindsight.
Network facilitation — connecting people, building ecosystems, creating cultural capital. The value is relational an cumulative, so it’s inherently hard to quantify.
Where value shines
By contrast, some contexts make value unmistakable to spot:
Transactional environments — buy a product, get the product.
Crisis response — stop a leak, fix a PR crisis, land a last-minute sponsor. The urgency makes the value instantly obvious, and people feel the pain you removed.
Performance-based teams — such as where sales are directly tied to revenue or numbers.
Entertainment or spectacle — a performance, halftime show, or event, where the impact is immediately visible. So, people intuitively attach meaning to it.
The value here is obvious because the outcome is tangible, urgent, or instantly felt.
Making value legible
This brings us to storytelling.
The trick is to uncover value without diluting it. That’s why visibility has been such a mantra. People meticulously curate their personal brands, and organisations invest heavily in their reputation and cultural presence. Visibility ensure the value created is noticed, trusted, and rewarded.
Here is the provocation: value is not self-evident. It typically needs to be surfaced, narrated, and framed if it’s to be recognised, rewarded, and reinvested.
Invisible value is still value, but without recognition it cannot circulate. Knowing this, recognition becomes the bridge that turns intangible conditions into cultural, economic, or social capital. Future-ready leaders and brands must master the skill of making value legible, not by cheapening it into spectacle but by creating the conditions where value can be seen, trusted, and multiplied.
Learn more about how I help people and organisations navigate their brand strategy: https://rachelobrien.work/brand.