You have decided things the same way for years, and it has worked. That is the whole point. The method got you here. It drew a crowd when you needed one and delivered results fast, and the people around you learned to trust it precisely because it kept being right. Now something has changed. A flatter structure, a handover, a first-of-its-kind project, and you are being asked, often gently and with good intentions, to open the process up or to hand it to someone else. Your instinct, tested and proven over a long time, is to reach for the same move again. It would be strange if it were anything else.
I want to tell you about a senior city official I worked with, because he reached for exactly that move, and I watched it not work. He was brilliant at the ground-up, the 0 to 1, the standing start. Over a decade he had built momentum in his region out of almost nothing, going door to door, gathering people, making things happen where nothing was happening before. Then he was handed a long-horizon innovation programme for the city's young people, a genuinely new type of problem for him, the kind that would only show its results in ten years or not at all. He did what had always worked. He brought in influencers from Tokyo who generated a crowd and then went home, and he sidelined both his own colleagues and the local innovators who were already quietly doing the work. The mismatch was visible to almost everyone in the room. It was not visible to him.
Two ways the same thing goes wrong
Advice existed. It was offered early, and it was offered often, by me and by his own colleagues. It was not ignored because it was delivered badly. It was ignored because his identity and his public acknowledgement were tied to the method that had always worked before, and because that method carried a certain guarantee, the guarantee of at least drawing the initial crowd. That made it the organisationally safe choice, even though it was the wrong tool for a long, first-of-its-kind build. I should be careful here not to make him the villain of the story. In a way he was doing his job. He was asked to make a bang, and he was not particularly asked to include the locals. The blind spot was real, but so were the incentives that produced it.
Now hold that next to a quieter case. A young and relatively inexperienced woman took over a business in a succession, and she assumed, naturally, that she would run it the way her predecessor had. Nobody told her to. That is simply what taking over a seat implies by default. This is not the same mistake in a new setting. It is a different mechanism. The official was a proven decider misapplying a known style to a new problem. She, by contrast, had inherited a style by assumption, simply because that is what a handover hands you. What she needed was two things the succession did not supply: a team that expected something different from her, and a decision process built around her specifically. A simple permission, decide however you want, could not fix it. Building that process is part of learning how the business works during the succession, and its absence was quietly stressful in a way that goodwill alone does not reach, because the structure, not the person, was the thing left unbuilt.
Two different surface stories, one shared root underneath them. In both cases, everyone but the decider could see that the moment had changed. Nobody could see it from the seat itself. Which raises the obvious question, the one the cases cannot answer on their own. If it was so plain to everyone else, why could the person in the seat not see it?
Why you cannot see it from where you sit
Because from inside the seat, the view is always outward looking. You are looking at the market, the project, the team, the numbers. You are not looking back at yourself. So when something goes wrong, the reflex is to question the execution, not the decision, and to question the dataset, not the decision-making process that chose it. The person doing the evaluation is the same person who made the decision. That is the trap, stated plainly. Your own style, mismatched to this particular problem, is the one variable that would actually explain the pattern, and it is the single thing the seat cannot show you, no matter how honest or self-aware you are. It is quite difficult to catch it yourself.
This is why the official's colleagues could not get through, and why I eventually could. It was not that I argued better. It was that an outsider can afford to display ignorance, to report plainly what he observes without absorbing the political cost that an insider pays for saying the same words. His colleagues had offered the same read many times and had no standing left to be heard; nobody could be convincing enough, until I arrived. That is the whole value of a third eye, someone who is not a beneficiary of the outcome. Not a nice thing to have. Close to the only vantage point from which the mismatch is visible at all.
It helps to be precise about what “style” means when I say it is mismatched. Alan Rowe's work sorts decision styles into four, directive, analytical, conceptual and behavioural, and I am borrowing that only as shorthand, not as a typology to teach you. The point is not to find out which of the four you are. The question was never which type of decision maker am I. It is which type does this moment need. And that second question is the one the seat itself cannot answer, which is exactly why it so rarely gets asked in time.
Why the organisation does not catch it either
You might expect the organisation around the decider to catch what the decider cannot. Mostly it does not, and the reasons are structural rather than a matter of better people. Organisations cannot move fast enough, or hold the readiness, to reconsider the decision-making process itself in the moment a decision has to be made. By the time it is urgent, it is too late to redesign how it gets decided. Large networks that try to solve this by handing the question to a committee tend to collapse into slow voting, very susceptible to biases and misinformed decisions. And organisations default to whatever worked before, because that can be justified on paper, while what might be needed next is speculative and too expensive to seriously entertain. As for people like me, consultants can advise, but we will not decide, nor take any real accountability for the long-term outcome of the call. I have never seen decision rights fully distributed and held that way for long. It is that hard. Plainly put, nobody hires a decision maker and keeps that decision maker on board, just in case a very different kind of decision-making process is suddenly needed.
Which brings me back to the official's team, because this is where the cost shows up as something a person feels. While he was present, those four or five people had been reduced to a supporting role, and in their own words they felt belittled and unconfident. Not because they lacked the capability. Because the structure gave them no standing to be heard, even when they could see the mismatch he could not. It is tempting to say the answer is that the team should have spoken up. But a team cannot spot a style-and-problem mismatch without the big-picture view, and that view is not theirs to conjure. Making it available to them is the executive's job, an ordinary invitation into the long-term and conceptual conversation, in the normal course of work, not a thing you ask for only once a crisis has already arrived. The honest answer to what the team should do is mostly this. Wait to be equipped, because equipping them was never really their job to begin with.
What it costs to step out
The official could not adapt, and in the end he removed himself from the project. What happened next is the part I keep returning to. The four or five people who had been reduced to a supporting role reorganised into a confident, collaborative unit, and their decisions from that point covered all four of Rowe's styles between them. The programme is still running, eight years on. The fix was not a better decider replacing a worse one. It was a structure that stopped depending on one person's style being right for everything.
I should implicate myself here, because I have sat in an operational seat and faced the same thing. I took a deliberate break to ask whether I still fit the phase the business was in, and I decided that I did not, and I stepped out. Some people called that lucky. Some said it was smart, and I take those comments as being able to be courageous enough to ask myself some inconvenient questions. I genuinely do not know which reading is the right one, and I have made my peace with not knowing. It is the same difficulty, only this time from the inside, where it is hardest to see.
So the instinct I named at the start, the reach for the proven move when a new kind of decision arrives, is not a flaw in your character. It is close to structurally guaranteed by the seat you occupy, which is why it takes something from outside the seat to catch it, a team equipped to see the whole picture, or a third eye with nothing at stake in the outcome. Decision making is not a show of authority or intelligence. The quality of a decision is a sum of the data, the experience, the perspective and the understanding of the complexity, and the bigger the decision, the more you have to rely on the team.
