When the Person Who Knows Is Not the Person Who Decides

About this collection

The real value of experience is that it allows someone to notice a problem before everybody else can prove it. An auditor who has worked through hundreds of similar files can look at the next one and know that something is wrong. She may not yet have the evidence to prove exactly what it is. That is part of what twenty years of experience gives her. By the time the evidence is complete, everybody can see the problem. Her value was seeing it earlier, while something could still be done. That creates a difficult question for any large institution. Early warnings often arrive before certainty. They can sound like instinct, caution or disagreement. The person raising them may have less authority than the person making the decision. If only fully proven arguments are taken seriously, an organisation can spend years building experience and then use it only after the answer has become obvious. People also learn from what happens when they raise something difficult. If a concern is dismissed, ignored or treated as a nuisance, the next concern is raised more carefully. After enough repetitions, it may not be raised at all. The person is still employed. They still know the work. They still attend the meetings. The organisation simply receives less of what they know. The leader receiving the challenge is part of the same equation. Nobody has to say, “Do not disagree with me.” The message can be sent by interrupting, demanding certainty too early, rewarding agreement, or never returning to the person who raised the concern. People notice these things very quickly. SARS already understands something important about behaviour. Taxpayers respond to what is clear, what is easy to do, and what happens when they do not comply. The same question is worth asking inside the organisation. What do employees learn from what happens when they question a decision, challenge a senior colleague or raise something inconvenient? Automation makes that question more important. As systems take over more routine work, people are increasingly valuable for the work a rule cannot settle: spotting the exception, questioning an output, joining pieces of information that do not yet form a complete picture, and saying that something may be wrong before the data makes it obvious. The speakers on this page examine different parts of that problem. Speak So You Are Heard turns it into practice. Senior people work on a real organisational question and learn how to make difficult judgement clear enough to influence a decision. The leaders receiving those arguments work alongside them, because the organisation needs both sides: people able to say what they know, and leaders able to hear it before it is too late.