06 – Decisions move through people

Organizations like to describe decisions as if they travel through structure: made at the top, passed down through layers, until somewhere along the way it reaches the people who have to carry it out. On an org chart that looks orderly. In practice it rarely works that way.

Decisions move through people instead.

During CRM courses, where I keep the audience busy with interactive exercises, I've seen the same instruction interpreted three different ways by three different teams. Each team filtered it through its own history, what it already trusted, what it already feared, what it had watched happen the last time something similar got asked of it. 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 gets built through standard phraseology and readback, and through a culture that treats a misunderstanding as a safety issue rather than 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, it's often been translated a few times already, and not always faithfully.

That's not really about intelligence. It's 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 than on how much trust already existed before it was made. In teams where trust runs 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.

On paper, decisions travel through structure. In practice, they travel through trust.