Last week, I walked into a building in Washington, D.C. I had never been in before, and I paused. The Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream has a ceiling that demands you tilt your head back and stare. Intricate coffered plasterwork, gold detail, and soft blue panels making aware that some professional cared deeply about every inch of this entrance. Hanging from that ceiling was a bold, modern, hot-pink sculptural installation spiraling through the air like a ribbon caught mid-flight. And scrolling along the balcony below, in illuminated letters: Women Outnumber, Outvote, and Outlive Men.

I was there because my friend Holly Page invited me. Holly is a connector, a strategist, and a co-founder of No Labels, and she’s crazy fun. She’s someone who has spent her career bringing the right people into the right rooms at the right moments. When Holly thinks something is worth your time, you clear your calendar. She’s currently co-founding a new initiative with journalist Kevin Cirilli called Meet the Future, a platform dedicated to the serious conversations mainstream media too often skips: space, security, economics, and what it genuinely takes to protect freedom’s future. Spending a day in Holly’s orbit means you leave thinking bigger than when you arrived and laugh a lot as well. That day last week was no exception.

I was attending a conference called Engage: Promoting Women’s Economic Security. Engage’s founder, Rachel Pearson launched the conference with a phrase that stayed with me for the rest of the day. She wanted, she said, to open the aperture on women and economic security.

“When you open the aperture, there’s no going back to the narrow view.”

In photography, an aperture controls how much light gets in. Open it wider and you see more — more depth, more context, more of what was always there, hiding in the shadows. What Rachel was really saying is that we haven’t been seeing the full picture. And she brought together senators, delegates, leaders, and even Kevin O’Leary from Shark Tank to widen our lens.

That word aperture is one I keep returning to in my own work helping organizations fundamentally rethink how they operate. So much of what limits businesses isn’t a lack of information but too rigid or narrow a frame or mindset: a too-small aperture. Leaders making decisions based on a cropped version of reality, unaware of how much context sits just outside the edges.

What I witnessed in that room that day at the Engage conference was a masterclass in what happens when you deliberately widen the lens. The data shifted. The assumptions cracked. The conversations that followed were not the ones anyone walked in expecting to have.

That’s exactly what great program design does. What coaching and facilitation does to transform workplaces. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing what I heard, and what I believe every leader is hopefully considering. The data was striking. The speakers were sharp. And best of all was the way the program stipulated new thinking and connections.

Because once the aperture opens, there’s no going back to the narrow view. Once you know, you can’t “unknow.”