Watching someone decide doesn’t teach you how to decide

Some executives work in a way that transforms the people around them. Not necessarily because they explain what they do better than others, but because their way of looking at the business changes the conversation: they connect issues that seemed unrelated, recognise the consequences of a decision earlier, or raise a question that forces everyone to revisit what had seemed obvious until then.

Over time, some members of their team learn to anticipate their questions, recognise their priorities, and can even predict their position on certain situations. That closeness, however, doesn’t guarantee they’ve made that judgement their own. They may know the answers well and still need that person’s involvement whenever conditions change.

The difference matters because a large part of a company’s capacity is built exactly this way: by trying to make what currently depends on a few people’s judgement usable by others too, without reducing it to a collection of past answers.

A decision only shows part of the reasoning

When an executive makes a decision, the people involved can observe the information they ask for, the questions they raise, and the solution they finally adopt. What’s far less visible is the interpretation that connects all of those elements.

Experience makes it possible to recognise patterns that haven’t been put into words yet, to weigh seemingly equivalent data differently, or to notice that a secondary consequence may end up mattering more than the immediate result.

All of this is part of the decision, even though it never appears in it explicitly. The team can know what was done without ever understanding what would have led to doing something different.

Leading by example requires making visible more than the action itself

Leading by example is usually understood as consistency between what you ask for and what you do. It has another dimension too: using your own actions to show how a situation is interpreted, not only how it’s responded to.

If the example only lets people observe the outcome, the organisation will likely learn to reproduce it. The problem appears when the next situation resembles the previous one, but contains a difference big enough to demand a different response.

That’s the moment that reveals whether people had understood the judgement behind it, or had simply learned to recognise the solution their leader would normally have chosen. Imitation can work for as long as conditions hold; judgement becomes necessary precisely when they stop holding.

Making visible how a decision gets made doesn’t mean justifying every action or turning executive experience into a permanent explanation. It means letting others understand what was being protected, which consequences were considered acceptable, and what changes would have pushed the decision somewhere else.

The example then takes on a different value. It no longer teaches only a way of acting, but a way of reading the business.

Judgement has to be reconstructed before it can be transferred

A significant part of executive judgement works implicitly. It has formed through accumulated experience, conversations, mistakes, earlier decisions, and a knowledge of the business that is rarely organised into a single explanation.

That doesn’t make it unexplainable intuition. It means that, before it can be transferred, it has to be reconstructed.

That reconstruction isn’t just a matter of asking why a decision was made. The reasons that surface afterwards tend to order the outcome with a clarity that may not have existed while it was being decided. It’s more useful to observe what caught attention during the process, which connections changed the initial reading, and at what point an alternative stopped being valid.

It also matters to identify what stayed stable while the options kept changing. It could be a strategic priority, a level of risk that shouldn’t be exceeded, a relationship that needed protecting, or a consequence the company wasn’t in a position to absorb. That’s usually where you find the part of the judgement worth keeping, even if the specific answer is never used again.

As long as that reasoning stays implicit, the organisation can only get close to it by watching the person who exercises it. Making it explicit allows it to be discussed, tested, and checked against the circumstances in which it still holds.

Transferring judgement doesn’t mean turning it into a rule

When a decision has worked, there’s a temptation to preserve it by fixing how the same situation should be resolved next time.

But the latest solution contains circumstantial elements alongside others that could genuinely be useful in the future. If both are carried forward without telling them apart, the company doesn’t absorb the judgement that produced the decision — it turns one specific answer into a general rule.

Building capacity takes different work. You have to create the conditions for other people to interpret different situations from a shared framework. Sometimes they’ll need access to information that previously only reached senior management; other times, they’ll need to know the limits within which they can commit resources or change a priority. When a decision crosses several areas, they’ll also need a legitimate way to resolve consequences that none of those areas can absorb on its own.

The system doesn’t replace judgement. It gives it a place to be exercised. It defines what has to stay stable and leaves room for the answer to change as conditions change.

Judgement belongs to the company when it can produce different answers

The transfer isn’t complete when other people act the way the executive would have. It’s complete when they can face a new situation, build their own answer, and keep what gave coherence to that way of deciding.

Transferring judgement doesn’t necessarily lead to identical decisions, because two people can apply the same framework and weigh, differently, aspects where legitimate room for judgement exists. The organisation gains capacity when it can hold those differences without losing direction. People know what they need to preserve, where they can adapt the answer, and when a situation has moved beyond the space for which their judgement is sufficient.

Someone who leads this way is almost certainly irreplaceable within the system they’ve created. But their time carries an opportunity cost, and the company needs to decide where they should keep being involved, what would remain if they weren’t, and how to evolve from there. That requires others to be able to use their judgement in circumstances they never actually saw.

Until then, the company may have observed many good decisions without having yet learned how to decide.

The question, then, isn’t how much a team can learn by watching the person who leads. It’s a different one: how does a leader’s judgement pass to the company without turning into a procedure?