I’ve been doing a series of articles about judgment, What It Is, The Costs Of Losing Judgment. This article is likely to hit home to many leaders, managers, Rev-Ops folks.
I want to focus on the issue, are we designing judgment out of the work.
This isn’t an argument against playbooks, scripts, dashboards, process, or the tools/AI we use. It’s a discussion of the evolution of how we use these tools.
In theory, each of these can be designed to help people develop better judgment. A playbook based on our past experiences with similar situations, helps me think about what’s really important in this situation. A script might help me put together and articulate my thoughts better. The process guides me through what is most effective, based on hundreds of past experiences.
By themselves, they don’t reduce judgment.
It’s the way they are implemented that erodes it.
Let’s take a playbook as an example. It helps guide us in the execution of a deal. It’s based on the collective experiences of what works and what doesn’t work. If we follow the playbook, we won’t waste our time on meaningless activities. We will focus our activities on the things that are more likely to result in success.
It doesn’t remove our thinking, but it focuses our efforts.
There’s another thing we don’t talk about very much. The playbook helps us recognize, “This situation doesn’t fit, something is different.” We can quickly identify the differences, adapting our strategies based on those. Without the process, each situation is “new,” we wander trying to figure it out, incapable of recognizing what works, or exercising best experience.
Perhaps the greatest value of the playbook is helping us more quickly recognize when we need to deviate from it.
But, too often, the playbook moves from providing guidance, to becoming specific instructions to be followed rigorously. These instructions remove the need to think or to exercise judgment. The judgment is embedded in the playbook.
As our tools have progressed, we have the capability of creating “living” playbooks. They have more data, can refine the recommendations. But they remove the need or ability for the person to think. The playbook provides the judgment.
Why does this happen?
It seems like a natural evolution. In reality it’s an exercise in control. We feel the more we are “in control,” or the more control we exert, the more predictable the outcome. Even before the advent of all these tools and AI, the manager saying, “Do these things….” Is an exercise in control. The more we try to control someone, the more we reduce their need to exercise judgment. Consequently, we remove the need for them to develop judgment.
Until recently, I don’t think anyone consciously thought of designing judgment out. As people kept trying to improve the playbooks, processes, scripts, tools, metrics, unconsciously, the need to develop judgment was reduced.
Then about 10-15 years ago, in the effort to create predictable revenue, leaders changed the design parameters. The focus was on predictability, efficiency, scalability, and cost reduction. Many leveraging misunderstandings of lean manufacturing—the machines don’t exercise judgment; they just do their work. The consequence of this approach was to design work that required less judgment.
We started seeing specialization. Dividing jobs into smaller pieces. Lead gen, SDR, BDR, AE, SE, CSM. People focused on becoming expert at their role, but not how the pieces fit together as a whole. And with each handoff, some context was lost.
Methodologies and playbooks evolved from tools to help us understand what was happening, to instruction guides demanding compliance.
In designing efficiency and salability into the work, we designed judgment out of the work. Since no judgment was required, they only needed the ability to follow the script and exercise the steps. And with this, we require people with lesser skill so we could lower costs.
Metrics shifted from telling us what was happening, telling us what mattered. A high impact call meant less than hitting your daily outbound goal. The focus shifted from high impact calls to hitting the daily metric.
Managers shifted from being coaches, developing the skills of their people to managing compliance. In this shift, they started losing the ability to exercise judgment. Their jobs as compliance enforcement officers did not require judgment. These managers were evaluated by how well they executed based on the dashboards.
The challenge, today, is the senior leaders were those former front-line managers. They have spent their careers managing dashboards, enforcing compliance and driving efficiency. The question, today, is how do they develop the capability and judgment needed to drive change today, and how long will this take?
Automation has been around for decades. Originally, removing routine work, freeing people up to do the work demanding judgment. But sometimes, that work was where people developed their own capability and judgment.
Today, we no longer know how to write a high impact prospecting email, AI does it better for us. But that experience contributes to our ability to connect with prospects impactfully. If we have lost that ability, can we manage a first meeting effectively?
It’s doing the work that helps us learn. We make mistakes, we struggle to figure things out. But these actively engage us in learning and developing. It creates the friction necessary to develop. But as these things are done for us, or as we follow the steps without deviation, we lose this, consequently we lose the ability to develop our judgment.
AI has enabled us not only to outsource the work, but also interpretation, analysis, critical thinking and choice making.
Where do we find ourselves today? Too many leaders have grown up in this world, not developing their own capabilities for judgment.
So now we are faced with the question, “Did this work?”
By consciously designing judgment out of the work, have we produced far superior results?
The data presents a compelling answer.
The lists are long: lower win rates, fewer reps and orgs making quota, greater turnover, longer buying cycles, more unreliable forecasts, increase in no decision made, customers wanting rep-free buying experiences, and on and on.
Whatever has contributed to these shifts, we designed for predictability and that predictability is no longer there.
The design shift has failed, unfortunately leaving too many organizations without the capability to change even if leaders decide to. We can redesign the playbook in a few months. It takes years to rebuild capability in an organization lacking it. It’s more difficult when the leaders responsible for changing this design grew up under this design.
As we look at this evolution, everything was rational and made sense. The shift came when leaders shifted their priority from designing for capability to designing for efficiency and scalability. The solutions to efficiency and scalability aren’t necessarily building capability. Instead, they tend to focus on volume and velocity.
And it worked until it didn’t.
AI has provided a momentary stop gap. As the capabilities we designed into jobs declined, AI can exercise those capabilities better than their human counterparts. So, we leverage these tools as a surrogate for capabilities we can’t build in our organizations.
But there’s the work that AI can’t do. Whether we call it the human in the middle, or the time we’ve freed up for sellers to engage customers, have we built the capability critical to success? Or have we designed it out?
There’s another underlying problem I don’t see people talking about.
I started this discussion with the need we have for control.
We seek control because it gives us greater predictability.
But it turns out we get greater predictability when we cede control and build capability and judgment in our people. Predictable outcomes come from people that can adapt to the situation they face. They are unpredictable when people execute fixed sequences in situations that vary.
Making this shift requires trust. We have to trust our people will be able to execute in a manner consistent with what we are trying to achieve.
Now we start to understand the real underlying tension in our strategies and execution.
The more control we have, the less trust is necessary. And the more we rely on judgment, trust becomes essential.
As a leader, I have to trust my people’s judgment to give them the freedom to act.
As an individual contributor, I have to trust my manager is giving me the freedom to exercise judgment, not demanding compliance.
This sets up the topic of the next post, Trust and Judgment.
I’ll leave you hanging there, it will only be a few days.
Afterword: I almost rejected this AI discussion of the post. In listening to the first couple of minutes, I thought, “What are they talking about?” But then, all of a sudden the ideas started coming together. The line, “AI has become the duct tape over the cracks” is amazing! It’s a fantastic discussion. Enjoy!
