Organizations Remember What Leadership Forgets

A founder I was working with spent part of a session explaining a decision he had made about fourteen months earlier. The circumstances had been unusual. A key customer relationship was at risk, and the normal process for that kind of situation would have taken longer than the moment allowed. He remembered all of it, the pressure, the reasoning, the tradeoff, the conversation that preceded it. He talked through it the way people talk through things they have carried quietly for a while, making sure the details were in the right order.

What his team remembered was that the process had been skipped and the customer had been prioritized. A few months after that conversation, someone on his team made a similar call. When he asked about it later, the explanation came back simply. That was how they had handled it before. He started to say that the situations were completely different, and then he stopped.

He realized, somewhere in the middle of explaining why, that he was describing reasoning his team had never had access to. They had not been in the room when the original decision was made. They had not heard the conversation that preceded it. What they had was the outcome, the exception, and the direction things went. From where they sat, the two situations looked nearly identical, because the only thing they could see was what had happened, not why.

The founder learned from what he understood. The team learned from what they experienced, and neither of them was wrong. He was carrying context they never had. They were carrying repeated experiences that looked different to him because he still had access to the reasoning behind each one. They had been in many of the same moments and left with different memories.

He sat with that for a moment before saying anything else, then he asked a question I have heard variations of many times since.

How much of what they have learned came from what I actually meant, and how much came from what I actually did?

It was not really a question about that decision anymore, it was a question about every decision that had come before it. He was trying to separate the standards he believed he had been teaching from the ones the organization had actually learned.

The founder was carrying the reasons behind each decision. The organization was carrying the experience of living through them. They had shared the same moments, but they had not learned the same lessons.