The Floor
Thirteen people showed up the first time.
Not thirteen exceptional people. Not thirteen athletes with something to prove or résumés worth reading. Thirteen people who said yes to a gravel road in southern Minnesota when almost nobody knew what that meant yet. A few of them had never ridden that far. One of them got lost. One of them didn’t make it out of town.
By the time I stepped away, nearly 1,400 people were coming.
I didn't find 1,400 exceptional people. I built something that made ordinary people capable of extraordinary things. There's a difference, and it matters more than almost anything I've learned.
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There's a version of talent theory that gets passed around organizations like it's wisdom. Top performers are 50% to 100% more productive than average performers. Hire for stars. Surround yourself with the best. Raise the standard by raising the room.
It's not wrong, exactly. It's just incomplete in a way that costs organizations everything.
The question it never asks is, what made the star?
In my experience running a race, managing bike shops and covering a territory the size of a small country, the people who look like stars in one environment look ordinary in another. At the same time, the people who look ordinary in one environment do things that astonish you when the conditions are right. The studies on it will measure output. They won’t measure what produced it.
What produced it is almost always the floor.
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The floor is what you build before anyone shows up. The clarity of the ask. The logic of the course. The way information moves, or doesn't. The degree to which people feel trusted, seen, like their presence means something beyond their function.
At Almanzo, we didn't have staff. We had volunteers who drove hours and stood in fields at dawn because they believed in what we were doing and felt it in the way the thing was run. We didn't have a budget that attracted talent. We had a culture that revealed it.
That's the thing about the floor argument that makes people uncomfortable because it redistributes credit. If your best people are performing at a level that looks like 100% better than average, the question worth sitting with is how much of that is them and how much of that is you and your systems, your clarity, your willingness to get out of the way and let the work be the work.
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I'm not saying stars don't exist. I'm saying the talent fetish is often a way to avoid the harder work.
Building a floor is slower. It doesn't make for a clean social media post. You can't point to the one hire that changed everything. You have to point to ten thousand small decisions about how the thing is run and how people inside it are treated and what happens when something goes wrong.
When the floor is high, ordinary people do extraordinary things. Repeatedly. Sustainably. Without burning out or holding you hostage.
Thirteen people came to a tiny, inconsequential park in Minnesota because someone built something worth showing up for.
That's the whole theory.