They made it to day four of their holiday before their phone vibrated. When it did you could watch the whole decision happen on their face before they’d even focused their eyes on the screen. They knew who was calling. They knew why. And still, they answered.
I’ve had to make a phone call like that myself in past roles, to someone senior enough that only they’d know what to do with it. I’ve also been the one answering it, sat somewhere hot and hyperfocused on a good book.
The interruption itself barely registers now, looking back. What stays with me is how reasonable everything leading up to it had been. Nobody on the team had cut a corner. They’d followed all the guidance that existed, made a sensible call with the information in front of them, done exactly what a capable team does when the documented approach is lacking. It just wasn’t enough, because the details they needed had never been written down anywhere. It lived in one person’s head, and that person was hundreds of miles away with a paperback by a pool.
The same gap caught people in smaller ways too. I watched it happen more than once with this team over a few months. A junior worked through a problem carefully, using everything the team’s best practice told them to use, and still got it wrong, not through carelessness, but because the approach that would have worked depended on something nobody had thought to teach them, something nobody noticed was worth teaching.
Someone made a promise to a client on a call where the one person who’d have flagged the risk was in another meeting. A delivery date went out that nobody senior had actually pressure-tested. At one point, someone rebuilt a complex process that already existed. On paper, their situation didn’t quite match the guidance they’d been given, close enough that I could see the overlap, different enough that they couldn’t, and they started again.
Four situations with a thread running through them all. None of it was a skills problem. The team was good. In fact several of them were better than I was at their stage.
What they were missing wasn’t ability. It was judgement that had only ever been taken by one or two senior team members. For a long time, it didn’t need to exist anywhere else.
When teams were small, everyone picked those critical judgements up simply by being in the room often enough. They overheard the reasoning behind a decision, or caught a senior person hesitate over something that looked routine. Over time, that built into an understanding of a hundred small calls, without anyone deliberately teaching them.
Nobody documented any of it, and nobody needed to. Growth was what changed that. Once a team was too large for everyone to be in every room, the knowledge didn’t disappear. It just stopped reaching the people who needed it, and stayed with the people who already had it.
The instinct, understandably, is to reach for a checklist. Turn the judgement into a process, write the rules down, clarify the exceptions, close the gap with documentation.
I’ve tried variations of this myself, and it’s not wrong, but it’s smaller than the problem. A checklist only covers the situations someone’s already run into. Whatever nobody’s hit yet slips straight past it, and there’s a cost even in what it does cover, more to maintain, more to onboard people into.
The junior who got it wrong wasn’t missing a checklist. They were missing the version of the senior person who’d have looked at the same situation and felt, before they could have explained why, that something about it deserved a second look.
I don’t think that’s solvable in a nice neat way. I’m not sure judgement built over years compresses into a document without losing the thing that made it useful in the first place.
What I’ve started doing instead is paying closer attention to where it’s still concentrated, noticing, before the holiday phone call, which decisions in a team only get made well because of who happens to be in the room that day. That’s a smaller, more honest question than “how do we document everything”, and it’s the one I keep coming back to with this team.
The practical aspects of this are the kind of content I write about over on Agency Tactics. For now though, I’m more interested in mulling over exactly what the gap reveals.