What gets lost on the way up
The quality of executive decision-making depends on how much truth survives the journey upward.
The first interpretation of an issue often determines how it travels through the organization. The person closest to it decides what deserves attention, while each layer above decides what to keep and what to leave out.
That filtering can improve clarity, but it can also remove the context leadership needs. This is especially likely when the people relaying the information lack the expertise to recognize its significance or when the facts challenge an established view.
By the time the issue reaches senior leadership, the facts may still be accurate. What has changed is their meaning. A recurring problem can look isolated. A serious concern can sound routine. A well-founded warning can come across as a guess.
Good governance helps preserve enough context for leaders to understand what they are seeing and know when they need input from someone closer to the issue.
Two questions are especially useful:
What does leadership need to understand to make the decision?
Who has the expertise and authority to assess the issue, and when does it need broader review?
Answering those questions consistently gives leaders a better chance of seeing an issue clearly while there is still time to act.
The Ripple
The same underlying problem can surface in different parts of a business and still be treated as separate issues.
Engineering patches a symptom. Finance records the variance. Sales flags a customer concern. Customer success handles the account locally.
Each response may be reasonable on its own. The problem comes when no one is responsible for asking whether those events are connected.
Governance has to help information move across the company as well as up the reporting chain.
Consistent reporting makes it easier to compare what different teams are seeing. Clear ownership makes someone responsible for connecting those observations and deciding when an issue needs wider attention.
A useful test is to ask:
Has this happened before?
Is another team seeing something related?
Does the issue extend beyond one team’s ability to resolve it?
Does it change what leadership understands about risk, performance, customers, or strategy?
These questions turn separate updates into a more complete view of what is happening across the business. They can reveal a recurring issue before it becomes harder to address.
The Question
Before your next leadership meeting, pick one report you usually accept at face value.
Ask:
Who made the first judgment about what was important here, and what did they leave out?
Then ask:
Who closest to the issue might see something the report does not?
Be Safe. Be Inspired. Be You.
-Joe Morgan
