A few weeks ago I wrote about a decade split between commercial work and the New Zealand Army Reserves, and a piece of doctrine that never left me: authority sits with whoever’s closest to the situation, provided their orientation has been properly updated.
Get that wrong, act fast on a stale read, and you get what I called noise with confidence attached. Decisive, wrong, and dangerous precisely because it doesn’t feel like a mistake while it’s happening.
More recently I wrote about a different decade, this one spent years advising boards, on formal committees, credentialed expertise in every chair.
And I described a gap that had nothing to do with anyone’s competence: rooms full of people who knew exactly what governance was supposed to mean, and a recurring sense that knowing it wasn’t the same as being able to act on it. Vocabulary, fluent. Standing to make it operate, somewhere else, or nowhere at all.
I wrote those two pieces weeks apart, about experiences twenty years apart, and didn’t notice until a reader pointed it out that they’re the same failure, just breaking at opposite ends of the same mechanism.
Both are failures of the same basic loop, observe what’s happening, orient to what it means, decide, act. The Army version fails at the front half: initiative is live, the authority to act is right there, but the orientation feeding it is wrong or stale. Fast, confident, wrong.
The boardroom version fails at the back half: the orientation is excellent, better than excellent, some of the sharpest diagnostic thinking I’ve sat in a room for, but there’s no reachable path from correct orientation to an actual decision. The loop has first-rate input and nowhere to discharge it. Correct, and still nothing happens.
I think the second failure is much harder to see, and that’s worth sitting with for a second.
The first one announces itself. Something breaks, visibly, and you can trace it back to a bad call made in a hurry. The second one never announces itself at all. Nothing breaks. The committee adjourns, everyone agrees the analysis was sound, and the next meeting picks up more or less where this one left off.
A loop that can’t complete doesn’t fail loudly. It just quietly never finishes, meeting after meeting, for years, while everyone in the room remains entirely right about what should happen.
I’ve started to think most institutions are extremely well defended against the first failure and almost undefended against the second, because the first one is the one every leadership course warns you about, don’t be the person who acts without checking.
Almost nobody warns you about the opposite trap: being the room that checks perfectly and never gets to act, because the standing to act was never actually in the room to begin with, and nobody thought to ask before the meeting whether it was.
That question, who actually has standing to close the loop, not just describe it correctly, is the one I keep finding wherever more than one legitimate source of authority is in play at once, which is most places if you look closely enough, and is close to unavoidable in some of the settings I’m now working in directly. I don’t have a tested answer yet.
I have a shape that keeps recurring, in a military doctrine and a decade of boardrooms, different enough contexts that I’m fairly confident it isn’t just me seeing what I expect to see.
Chris Argyris named something adjacent to this back in the 1970s: the difference between single-loop learning, which corrects an action without ever questioning the deeper structure producing it, and double-loop learning, which is willing to interrogate that structure itself.
A lot of governance committees, on this account, are extremely good single-loop learners, excellent at refining the analysis, never quite reaching the harder question of why the analysis never converts into a decision.
That’s the loop I’m interested in now, not the one that fails by moving too fast, the one that never gets to move at all.
Reference: Argyris, C. (1977). “Double Loop Learning in Organizations.” Harvard Business Review. Real and well-placed here.