There is a capability gap, so you hire for it.
Someone with the track record, the judgement, the scars. A proven operator. And six months in, they are escalating decisions you expected them to own, hedging the calls that matter, leaning on you for cover.
The easy read is that you hired wrong.
Usually, you did not. You hired a strong person into a role the system made impossible to carry.
Because judgement is not a fixed quantity someone brings with them. It is partly contextual. It formed inside another system – with that system’s boundaries, its clear lines, its support, its trade-offs already held somewhere. Move that person into a system where the boundaries are vague, the decision rights unclear, and the trade-offs unresolved, and the judgement that looked so solid does not simply transfer. It was always partly a property of the conditions.
Not only the person.
Which means a strong track record tells you less than it seems to. It is a record of judgement exercised under particular conditions, not proof it will travel to yours. The question is never just “is this person capable?” It is “can their judgement form and hold inside this specific system?” – and that depends as much on the system as on them.
There is a second thing the track record hides. Roles differ enormously in how much uncertainty they ask a person to absorb, and that has almost nothing to do with seniority or title. Two roles at the same level can carry completely different judgement loads. A role can quietly demand that someone resolve, alone and repeatedly, ambiguity the system never settled anywhere else. That is not a hard job.
It is an uncarriable one. And no hire fixes a role that is asking for more judgement than its design allows anyone to hold.
When a role asks for more than can be carried, the misfit does not stay contained to the person. The system adapts around it. Escalation paths widen, because the calls keep coming up. Oversight increases, to catch what the role cannot hold. Authority drifts upward, where it feels safer. The role still exists on the chart, but its real discretion narrows – and the judgement that was supposed to live there migrates somewhere else.
That migration is the actual cost, and it is almost invisible. Not turnover, though that may come. Not dissatisfaction, though it builds. The cost is that judgement quietly leaves the place the system most needs it to live, and concentrates upward, in the few people who can absorb what the design keeps asking. The organisation looks stable.
It is just thinning at exactly the edge where it has to be sharp.
So the same pattern repeats. Another gap, another hire, another strong person underperforming a role no one could carry as built. Each round reads as a people problem, which sends you back to hiring – when the thing that needed redesigning was the role, the boundaries, the placement of the decision, not the person sitting in it. Where in your organisation are roles demanding sustained judgement from individuals who cannot carry that uncertainty without escalation, avoidance, or compensation?
This question closes a chapter of The Architecture of Commercial Performance, where the thinking behind it is developed in full.
