I have a Coke No Sugar habit, others might say addiction. The sort I keep meaning to deal with and do not. So you can usually find a box of it in my shopping trolley.
At the self-checkout, before I had even started scanning the small things, an attendant came over. She did not ask. She reached in and tried to start putting the Coke No Sugar through for me and I told her I would do it.
The attendant was not helping me so much as making sure that Coke No Sugar got scanned. It came across as if it was store policy, and she was doing exactly what she had been told to do.
Immediately afterwards the screen offered to show me how to scan heavy items from the trolley, by pressing a button I have pressed a hundred times. To top it off, I knew I was being recorded at the checkout.
Walking back to the car, I worked out what had bothered me most. The store did not introduce the self-checkout years ago as a gesture of trust. It did it to save on staffing. The sense that I was a capable adult and they should leave me to get on with it was mine, not theirs.
Since self-service was introduced, people have almost certainly been walking out with heavy items without paying, so a check has been added.
From the store’s perspective it is about loss prevention. From mine it reads as though I cannot be trusted. It is the same situation, read two completely different ways.
Organisations send these signals all the time, and the people who receive messages like these are often capable and trustworthy.
The control that lands on everyone
When something goes wrong, the instinct is to add a control. A new approval step. A sign-off that was not needed before. Each one is introduced for a sound reason, but the control lands on more than the person who caused the problem.
It lands on everyone, including the people who were never going to be the problem. What they hear is that their judgement is not trusted.
The cost that never makes it onto a risk register is people who stop offering to exercise their judgement because they learn someone else will check it.
And when conditions shift and you need them to read a situation and move before you have spelled it out, the discretion you trained out of them is the very thing you are now asking for.
By the time you notice the cost, it does not look like a control problem. It looks like decisions slowing down, a team that waits to be told, capable people going quiet, and you wondering why no one brings you options any more.
I see the same thing across health, community and human services. A leader adds a control to manage a risk, then cannot work out why capable people have stopped bringing them options.
In the 2025 edition of their book Humanocracy, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini make the case that bureaucracies run on rules in place of trust and waste the judgement of the people inside them, citing that even among US physicians only a third say they have any meaningful input into decisions on practice management.
The people with the most judgement to offer are the ones a rules-first system is least likely to ask.
In conversation with your own echo
It happens person to person too, and a chief executive I worked with showed me how invisible it can be. He would make an off-the-cuff comment in a big meeting and weeks later a fully worked-up proposal would land on his desk, and he had no idea where it had come from.
To him the remark had been nothing. To the people who heard it, it was an instruction.
He was in conversation with his own echo. The work that turned up was a response to a signal he did not know he had sent. He could not trace it back to himself, so it became a fact about them instead, and it shaped what he made of the people reporting to him. What they had done was take him at his word.
Before you read it as a fact about them
When a capable person reacts in a way that puzzles or frustrates you, the instinct is to take it as information about them. Before you do, and before you reach for the next control, look at the signal first.
As Reed Hastings, who built Netflix, puts it, the aim is to:
Give capable people the context and trust their judgement, rather than reaching for one more rule to impose.
Many controls stand in for judgement you do not yet trust. The more you doubt the judgement around you, the more rules you add, and the more rules you add, the less judgement your best people are willing to offer. The loop feeds itself. It runs the other way as well. The stronger the judgement around you, the less you need to control.
You want people whose judgement you can rely on, who read what is being received, not just what is being sent, and bring you options instead of waiting to be told. That is what Lead Through Convergence builds. It is a 90-day program for senior leaders in NGO health, community and human services. It begins in Brisbane on 30 July.
If you have found yourself adding controls because you cannot quite trust the judgement around you, that is the problem it goes after. And, if you are the senior leader who wants to be that judgement your organisation can rely on, you can put yourself forward too.
