06 – Decisions move through people
Organizations like to describe decisions as if they travel through structure. Made at the top, passed down through layers, and somewhere along the way it reaches the people who have to carry it out. On an organizational chart that looks orderly. In practice it rarely works that way.
Decisions move through people.
During CRM courses, where I tend to keep the audience busy with interactive exercises, I have seen the same instruction interpreted three different ways by three different teams. Each team filtered it through what they already trusted, what they already feared, and what they had seen happen the last time something similar was asked of them. Nobody disobeyed anything. They just heard it through a different history.
Flying is less forgiving about this. A clearance from air traffic control has to mean exactly one thing, to everyone, immediately. There's no room for a version of the instruction that quietly adapts as it passes from one person to the next. That precision doesn't happen on its own. It's built through standard phraseology, through readback, through a culture that treats misunderstanding as a safety issue and not just a communication detail.
Most organizations don't have that discipline. So decisions travel through interpretation instead. Someone hears a decision and quietly wonders what it means for them. Someone else wonders what it means for their team. By the time it reaches the people who actually have to act on it, it's often been translated a few times already, and not always faithfully.
That's not really about intelligence. It's just what happens when meaning has to pass through people who each carry their own history with the organization.
How faithfully a decision travels seems to depend less on how clearly it was written, and more on how much trust already existed before it was made. In teams where trust is thin, every instruction gets re-examined for hidden intent. In teams where trust is already there, people fill in the gaps the way they were meant to be filled.
Direction moves through relationships more than through hierarchy, I think. A decision can be technically correct and still arrive distorted, simply because the people carrying it didn't trust each other enough to pass it on intact.
Leadership is rarely just about making the right call. A lot of it sits in the years of behavior beforehand — the ones that decide whether that call still resembles itself by the time it lands on the people who have to live with it.
Decisions travel through structure on paper. In practice, they travel through trust.
