I struggled to write this post. At first I tried to parse good, bad, abdicated judgment. The cost of compliance versus the cost of developing our capabilities. It became a very complex discussion, something resembling ROI analysis, except without the numbers.
The argument became very abstract.
After a few drafts, I finally realized I was making everything too complex. I realized the cost of judgment is really about finding out what each of us is capable of. It’s really about the future, one we can never know. The cost of judgment is developing our ability to handle it when the future shows up.
This applies organizationally and individually.
In developing our judgment, there are immediate costs. They include being wrong, sometimes in very visible ways. Sometimes it’s defending why you aren’t following the scripts or playbooks but choosing to do something different in this situation. Almost always, it’s going slower. They are the experience of learning, growing, and developing.
All focused on achieving our potential.
Compare this to the costs of bad judgment or abdicating judgment. Compliance dominates this. Following the playbook, reading the scripts, hitting activity metrics, doing what you have been told to do. We do these because it’s safe. We can win a deal, we celebrate. We can lose a deal, and it wasn’t because of us. It’s the playbook didn’t work.
We think of it as safety, but in reality it’s a ceiling. It’s limiting. What we do today will be the same tomorrow or next year. Or it’s complying with the new playbook. But this tells us what we can do in five years, because it’s what you do now.
In the real world, things don’t follow the playbooks or scripts. They are constantly shifting and changing. New opportunities are presented. Competition and customers continually change. Strategies, products and solutions change.
The cost of developing judgment today and every day in the future, enables us to deal with these changes. Perhaps to innovate and drive the change. Not investing in developing our judgment leaves us unprepared to respond.
Individually, when we choose not to invest in developing our judgment, we won’t grow. We stay stuck in the same place, we’ve hit the ceiling. We are comfortable and safe in what we currently know and can perform as long as it doesn’t change. But we are unprepared to address more complex sales or customers. We are unprepared to grow in our careers. We settle.
Organizationally, we see the same thing. We can fail to innovate and change, getting left behind by customers and competitors. We can have enormous capability, but if we lack the willingness or courage to pay the cost of acting on what we see, we fail.
Perhaps one of the most famous examples of this is Kodak. They were the clear leaders in all aspects of photography. They invented the digital camera, which transformed photography. They chose the safety of protecting the film business which seemed the rational choice. It’s not that they couldn’t see the future of photography, they chose to stick with what had made them successful.
They set the ceiling on their growth potential until that ceiling collapsed and they failed.
Now here’s where it becomes more difficult.
The “ceiling” is usually not visible. For example, we’ve seen this across most of SaaS. The ceiling wasn’t visible. While growth was slowing, win rates declining and all the data showed huge slow-downs, the ceiling wasn’t visible. And then came AI and the ceiling crumbled.
Likewise we see this individually. We may be doing the things we are told we should. We follow the script, we hit our activity goals, we seem to be doing fine. But we go for the promotion or step into the global account, or seek to manage a team. We’ve been fine for the past few years but are unprepared to address something new.
A role model for me in continuing to develop judgment is my friend Tobia LaMarca. He calls it, “Finding novelty every day.” He forces himself to learn and develop, to try new things. Whether it’s learning new ways to help a customer, or a mindset that avoids finding boredom everyday. He says he is always questioning himself.
Tobia’s example brings me to the mastery trap, which Tobia with his drive to constantly question himself never falls victim to.
Competence makes the next steps feel not worth paying. Once we’ve built a reputation and track record in our organizations, it feels expensive and risky to change. The more successful we become with what we already know, the more difficult it becomes to question it. We may still be succeeding, but in a world that’s constantly changing.
While he is a top performer, Tobia has chosen a different path. No one asks him to wake up every morning figuring out how he will find novelty in the day. In each meeting, he asks himself “How does this help the customer?” His managers aren’t asking him to do this, they just want him to hit the numbers. But it’s through constantly challenging himself and his thinking, he is able to grow contributing to customers, his team, and his own personal growth.
At the corporate level, we constantly see the mastery trap at play. The more successful we are as organizations, the more difficult it is to recognize we must change. We become the market leaders, famous brands. We fail to recognize urgency to be constantly innovating and changing. And we see what happens. A small company with nothing to lose, disrupts all our markets.
We don’t know what the future is and what it will demand.
We don’t know what our customers will need, how our competitors will change, what technologies will emerge, or what opportunities we will face. Individually, we don’t know how our job will change, what problems we need to solve.
We can’t develop a playbook for something we have never seen.
But we can develop our capacity to deal with it.
This is what we are paying for when we invest in developing our judgment. It’s what Tobia is doing every day when he wakes up.
The return isn’t necessarily better performance today.
It’s preparing ourselves to respond with what we wake up to see tomorrow.
Developing our judgment doesn’t enable us to predict the future.
It develops our ability to deal with it when it arrives.
Afterword: Again, a great AI generated discussion of this post. Where I was struggling to illustrate the ideas, they develop very powerful stories for them. One of the more interesting ideas was “developing your cognitive gym.” And their conclusion provides such a fascinating challenge to each of us. Listen to hear it.
