Whose Line Is It Anyway?

Organisations have a curious relationship with professional judgement.

They are enormously enthusiastic about acquiring it. They advertise for it, interview candidates to establish its presence, and occasionally pay considerable sums to people who claim to possess rather exceptional quantities of it.

Having acquired it, they are less certain what to do with it.

This is understandable. Judgement is a difficult thing to manage. It has a tendency to produce opinions, occasionally unexpected ones, and sometimes leads people to conclusions that differ from those already reached by their superiors.

Which can be inconvenient.

The difficulty is that professional judgement is most useful precisely when the correct course of action hasn't been established in advance. We employ people because we cannot anticipate every circumstance they will encounter. We expect them to recognise exceptions, weigh evidence and decide what to do when the instructions run out.

In theatrical terms, we hire them to improvise.

Then we hand them a script.

To examine this arrangement, we shall visit a fictional paper clip manufacturer. Paper clips are useful for our purposes because they are relatively uncomplicated objects, although this has never prevented an organisation from developing complicated arrangements for producing them.

Our manufacturer is a respectable business. It has a managing director, several directors, a production department and, presumably, a considerable quantity of wire.

One day, a production manager discovers that a small adjustment to the bending process would reduce waste. She examines the figures, tests the adjustment and recommends making the change.

Her director disagrees.

He prefers the existing process.

The production manager asks whether there's a particular concern. There isn't one that requires discussion. The existing process has served the company well.

Some weeks later, the managing director asks why the factory is wasting so much wire.

The director explains that changing the bending process would introduce unnecessary risk.

The managing director disagrees.

The director returns to production and instructs the manager to implement the adjustment.

She is congratulated on her initiative.

Everyone has performed their duties. The company is wasting less wire. The managing director has demonstrated leadership, the director has exercised oversight, and the production manager has displayed commendable initiative.

And so the performance begins.

Act I - The Audition

The first problem with professional judgement is identifying it.

We have developed several convenient methods for doing so, none of which involves looking too closely at the judgement itself.

Qualifications are popular. So is experience. Seniority is particularly reassuring, as it has the advantage of being visible on an organisational chart.

These things are useful indicators of knowledge, exposure and responsibility. They are less reliable indicators of whether someone is right.

A person can possess extensive qualifications and make a dreadful decision. Another can arrive at a sound conclusion with rather less ceremony. Even the outcome isn't conclusive. Good decisions sometimes fail, and poor decisions occasionally succeed spectacularly.

This makes judgement an awkward thing to assess.

Organisations prefer matters that can be assessed.

A recognised procedure, for example, offers considerable comfort. It can be followed, documented and inspected. If something goes wrong, there is at least the consolation that it went wrong correctly.

An unfamiliar recommendation presents greater difficulties. Someone must examine the reasoning, consider the evidence and accept responsibility for deciding whether it is sound.

It is generally easier to establish whether a person followed an approved process than whether the process was appropriate in the first place.

There is a related phenomenon involving consultants.

An organisation may employ someone with fifteen years of experience in a particular field, listen politely to their recommendations, and then commission an external consultant to explain much the same thing.

The consultant's conclusions arrive with the benefit of independence, a formal report and an invoice.

The invoice is not entirely incidental. Advice that has been purchased can acquire an authority that advice already available within the organisation struggles to achieve.

This isn't an argument against consultants. An external perspective can be valuable, particularly when an organisation has become too familiar with its own assumptions.

But there is an entertaining circularity in an organisation that cannot judge the expertise it possesses while remaining confident in its ability to judge the expertise it purchases.

Consensus offers another solution.

When several people agree, we become more confident that the conclusion is sound. This is reasonable, provided those people have reached their conclusions independently.

Ten people repeating the preference of one influential person do not constitute ten independent assessments.

They constitute a chorus.

The distinction matters because agreement can be produced without much judgement taking place at all. People learn which conclusions are welcome, which objections are worth pursuing and which subjects are best left alone.

Conformity has several advantages. It is familiar, easy to recognise and considerably easier to reward.

The professional who agrees with an established position appears sensible. The one who questions it may be equally sensible, but is likely to require a longer meeting.

Returning to our paper clip manufacturer, the production manager's recommendation was initially unacceptable. Later, precisely the same recommendation became an example of initiative.

The figures hadn't changed. The machinery hadn't changed. The wire, so far as we know, remained wire.

What changed was the opinion of someone with sufficient authority.

The points, it seems, are awarded for something other than judgement.

Act II - Learning The Lines

People are remarkably good at learning how to behave.

We learn through experience, observation and the consequences of our actions. Unfortunately, people do not always learn what the organisation thinks it is teaching them.

Consider someone whose recommendations are repeatedly rejected.

If the objections are explained, the experience can be useful. They may discover an overlooked constraint, a weakness in their reasoning or a better approach. Disagreement can improve judgement.

If the objections are unexplained, the lesson is different.

The professional learns that their recommendation was unacceptable, but not necessarily why.

After several such experiences, they begin to notice patterns. Certain arguments are welcomed. Certain people are persuasive. Certain proposals have a remarkably short life expectancy.

Eventually, the professional becomes adept at anticipating which recommendations will succeed.

This is a form of expertise.

It is simply not the expertise they were employed to provide.

There is a parallel with overfitting in machine learning. A model can become exceptionally good at reproducing the patterns in its training data while becoming less capable of responding to unfamiliar situations.

An employee can become exceptionally good at predicting what their organisation wants to hear while becoming less inclined to consider what it ought to hear.

From the outside, this can look rather like experience.

A seasoned professional who understands the organisation's constraints may make better decisions because of that knowledge. Another may have learned to avoid conclusions that cause inconvenience.

Both know how things work around here.

Only one is necessarily exercising better judgement.

There is also the question of effort.

Developing an independent recommendation takes time. It involves examining evidence, considering alternatives and occasionally telling someone that their preferred approach is mistaken.

The last of these carries certain risks.

Disagreement can affect relationships, reputations and opportunities. The consequences are often immediate and personal.

The benefits of being right are less conveniently distributed. They may arrive months later, be shared across several departments or be attributed to someone who happened to be present when the decision was finally approved.

Being right is not always a particularly useful currency.

Under these circumstances, a perfectly intelligent and committed professional may decide to become rather less troublesome.

They continue working. They meet their deadlines. They attend meetings and contribute when asked. Their performance may remain entirely satisfactory.

They simply stop offering the judgement that nobody appears particularly interested in receiving.

We often describe the conditions that allow people to challenge decisions in terms of psychological safety. Can someone disagree without being punished, embarrassed or otherwise made to regret the experience?

It's an important question.

But there's another.

Will disagreeing make any difference?

A person can feel perfectly safe expressing an opinion while knowing, from extensive experience, that it will have no effect whatsoever.

They can speak. They have simply stopped seeing the point.

The absence of disagreement can then be interpreted as evidence that everyone agrees. Meetings become more efficient. Recommendations arrive with fewer objections. Decisions proceed without the tiresome business of considering alternatives.

The organisation appears increasingly harmonious.

Meanwhile, some of its most independent thinkers have learned to keep their thoughts to themselves.

Others have left.

Our production manager at the paper clip factory has also learned something.

Not necessarily anything about bending wire.

She has learned that a technically sound recommendation can fail until someone sufficiently senior decides that it should succeed.

Next time, she might ask the director what he wants before beginning her analysis.

This would save time.

It would also make the analysis rather less necessary.

Experience accumulates. Whether it improves our judgement is another matter.

An organisation can spend years training its professionals to exercise judgement, then spend the following years teaching them not to.

Act III - A Change Of Cast

By now, the problem appears reasonably clear.

Organisations claim to value judgement while rewarding conformity. Professionals learn to anticipate authority rather than exercise independence. Those who persist in disagreeing become troublesome, while those who adapt become reliable.

Most of us will recognise this arrangement.

Some readers will already have identified the people responsible.

There is, however, a small difficulty.

The organisation is but a stage, and the people upon it choose how to deliver their lines.

Consider the director at our paper clip factory.

He dismissed a sound recommendation without explanation, defended his position when challenged and changed his mind when someone more senior expressed a different preference.

But his own judgement was also overruled. He was expected to exercise authority while remaining responsive to someone else's.

He was the source of interference in one conversation and its recipient in another.

Which role he plays depends upon which meeting he happens to be attending.

The same is true for many of us.

A manager can spend the morning complaining about executive interference and the afternoon revising a team member's decision. A director can resent having their recommendations challenged while routinely challenging those of their managers. A specialist whose expertise is disregarded in one meeting can dismiss another specialist's expertise in the next.

There is no particular contradiction in their minds.

When someone overrides our judgement, we see interference. When we override theirs, we see responsibility.

We know why our intervention was necessary. We understand the risks, the history, the constraints and the consequences we're attempting to prevent.

We are less familiar with the reasoning of those who interfere with us.

Their decisions appear arbitrary. Ours are carefully considered.

They don't trust us. We are maintaining standards.

They interfere unnecessarily. We are providing appropriate oversight.

The difficulty is that everyone can make these distinctions.

Someone who has spent years being subjected to unexplained interventions may develop a particular understanding of what authority looks like. Authority means being able to intervene. Responsibility means retaining control. Delegation means allowing others to make decisions, provided those decisions remain acceptable.

When that person acquires authority of their own, these habits are readily available.

They may even believe they are demonstrating good leadership.

A manager who frequently revisits decisions appears attentive. A director who questions every recommendation appears rigorous. An executive who insists upon approving minor details appears thoroughly engaged.

Below them, professionals become increasingly skilled at obtaining approval.

Decisions begin to migrate upwards.

This produces an arrangement in which responsibility for delivering an outcome remains with the people doing the work, while authority over the decisions that shape it moves elsewhere.

The formal record may indicate that a manager made a decision. In practice, the decision may have emerged from an informal conversation with someone more influential.

The subordinate leaves an audit trail. The superior leaves an impression.

If the outcome is successful, the intervention may be remembered as decisive leadership.

If it fails, the formal record remains available for inspection.

The same arrangement can develop between departments. One function possesses the influence to determine what should happen. Another possesses the responsibility for making it happen.

Success is a collective achievement. Failure is a delivery problem.

None of this means that seniority is illegitimate, that managers should never intervene or that every disagreement conceals an injustice.

There are excellent reasons to challenge decisions. People overlook evidence, underestimate risks and make mistakes. Sometimes a manager really does know better. Occasionally, so does a consultant.

The difficulty arises when the authority to intervene becomes separated from the obligation to explain, and the responsibility for consequences becomes separated from the authority to decide.

The person exercising power can regard the intervention as entirely reasonable. The person receiving it may experience something quite different.

And neither is necessarily pretending.

We are unusually well informed about our own intentions and rather less informed about those of other people.

We judge their interventions by what they do to us, and our own by what we intended to achieve.

This is not necessarily hypocrisy. We may simply fail to recognise ourselves in the behaviour we criticise.

Our paper clip director, after all, probably believes he's doing his job.

So does the managing director.

And, on another day, so might the production manager.

Epilogue - Whose Line Is It Anyway?

We learn to follow scripts we didn't write.

And, without noticing, we begin handing them to others.

There is usually some part of the pattern in which we participate.

A recommendation dismissed too quickly. A decision revisited without sufficient reason. An explanation neglected because we assume our authority makes it unnecessary. A little control retained because surrendering it feels uncomfortable.

These are not necessarily dramatic acts. They rarely announce themselves as examples of organisational dysfunction.

More often, they resemble an ordinary Tuesday.

Recognising them won't repair an organisation. Structural problems remain, and individual restraint is no substitute for meaningful accountability.

But recognition changes something.

We can begin to distinguish the occasions when intervention is necessary from those when we're simply more comfortable with our own judgement than someone else's.

Perhaps professional judgement is most demanding not when we're asked to make a difficult decision ourselves, but when we must decide whether to allow someone else to make one.

Whose lines have we been writing?