We label people before we know them. It happens quickly, often without conscious intention, and it happens in every community and every organisation that has ever existed. The difficult neighbour. The underperformer. The person who never contributes in meetings. The resident who always objects. The employee who does not quite fit. The young person who is going nowhere. The older person who is stuck in the past.

Labels are efficient. They allow us to process a complex social world without having to engage fully with every person in it. But they carry a cost that is almost never counted, because the cost falls not on the person doing the labelling but on the community that loses what the labelled person carries.

John McKnight and Jody Kretzmann spent decades studying what makes communities thrive and what makes them stagnate. Their conclusion, arrived at through fieldwork across hundreds of communities, was expressed with characteristic simplicity: “every single person has capabilities, abilities and gifts. Living a good life depends on whether those capabilities can be used, abilities expressed and gifts given.”

This is not a sentimental statement. It is a practical one. And understanding why requires understanding what labelling actually does to a community’s capacity to act.

What the label obscures

A label is not a description. It is a reduction. It takes the full complexity of a person, their history, their knowledge, their relationships, their skills, their fears, their aspirations, and compresses it into a single category that serves the needs of the system doing the labelling rather than the person being labelled.

The needs assessment labels a street by its deprivation index and loses sight of the retired engineer, the experienced mediator, the woman who has raised six children in difficult circumstances and developed, in doing so, an understanding of resilience that no professional training programme could replicate. The performance management system labels an employee as a development risk and loses sight of the twenty years of institutional knowledge, the informal network of trust, and the ground-level understanding of how the organisation actually works that would walk out of the door with them if they left.

The label does not just reduce what we see. It reduces what becomes possible. A community that sees its members primarily through the lens of their deficits will consistently fail to mobilise what those members carry. A team that categorises people by their performance ratings will consistently underestimate what those people know. In both cases, the loss is invisible, because you cannot count what you never thought to look for.

The gift that has not been given

McKnight made a distinction that is worth sitting with. Gifts are not gifts until they are given. A skill that is never offered, a knowledge that is never shared, an experience that is never drawn on: these remain potential rather than actual contributions to the life of the community. And the reason most gifts are never given is not that people are unwilling. McKnight found, consistently, that people who believed they had something to offer were almost always willing to offer it. The reason gifts go ungiven is that nobody created the conditions in which giving became possible.

The label is one of the primary mechanisms through which those conditions are prevented from forming. When a person has been seen, consistently and over time, as a problem to be managed rather than a contributor to be engaged, they learn not to offer. The teenager who has been labelled as disengaged does not put their hand up. The older employee who has been categorised as resistant to change does not share what they know about why the last three change programmes failed. The new neighbour who has been treated as a stranger rather than a potential asset does not knock on the door.

The gift remains ungiven. The community remains poorer for it. And nobody notices, because the label made the loss invisible before it could be counted.

The first question

There is a practice that follows directly from McKnight and Kretzmann’s argument, and it is simple enough to begin today. It is the practice of asking a different first question about every person you encounter in your community or your organisation.

Not: what is this person’s problem? But: what is this person’s gift?

Not: what does this person need from us? But: what do they carry that we have not yet thought to ask about?

Not: how do we manage this person’s difficulty? But: what would it take to create the conditions in which what they know could be offered and used?

These questions do not require a programme or a methodology or an institutional mandate. They require only the decision to look at the people around you through a different lens, consistently, in ordinary daily interactions, over time. Communities which develop this habit, which build a culture of looking first for gifts rather than first for needs, become measurably more capable, more cohesive, and more resilient than those which do not.

The culture of a community or an organisation is not built by policy. It is built by the accumulated effect of the questions people ask each other, every day, in the small human exchanges that most official processes never reach. The question you choose to ask first is, in this sense, a civic act. It either reinforces the label or it begins to dissolve it.

Citizenship as seeing

To see the gift in every person is one of the most demanding and most important acts of citizenship available. It is demanding because it runs against the grain of systems organised around the identification and management of deficits. It is important because those systems, however well-intentioned, will never build the kind of community that McKnight spent his life describing: one where people are valued not for their compliance or their productivity or their absence of problems but for what they uniquely carry and are willing to give.

This week has explored the gifts of individuals, the gifts of strangers, the gifts of institutions, and the practice of building from what is already here. All of it rests, finally, on this single commitment: the willingness to look at the person in front of you, whoever they are and whatever label they have been given, and ask what they bring rather than what they lack.

It is a small shift in attention. It is also, practised consistently across a community or an organisation, one of the most transformative things a citizen can do.

Questions for reflection

Who in your community or your organisation has been labelled in a way that has made their gifts invisible? What would you discover if you set the label aside and asked what they carry instead?

What would it take to build a culture in your team or on your street where the first question about any person is not what do they need but what do they bring? What is one small thing you could do this week to begin?

Think of a label you have been given at some point, in a community, a workplace, or a family. What gift did that label obscure? And who, if anyone, was able to see past it?

McKnight argued that gifts are not gifts until they are given. What gift do you carry that you have not yet found a way to offer to the community or the organisation around you? What is stopping you?

If your community or your organisation committed to asking the gift question first, before the needs assessment, before the performance review, before the consultation, what do you think would change about who shows up, who contributes, and what becomes possible?

Inspiration: Kretzmann, J.P. and McKnight, J.L. (1993) Building communities from the inside out: A path toward finding and mobilising a community’s assets. Chicago: ACTA Publications.