Encoding Judgment

You've watched this happen. The person who "just knows" which customer requests matter. Who can feel when something needs escalation. Who somehow always makes the right call on the edge cases.

Everyone routes hard decisions through them.

Then they leave.

And you realize: their judgment lived entirely in their heads. It walked out the door with them.

Heroes become bottlenecks. Then they become exits.

I used to think "heroic judgment" was a compliment. Now I see it as a diagnosis. It means the organization has a single point of failure disguised as a top performer.

This works until they're overloaded. Until they burn out. Until the organization grows past what three people's heads can hold.

The fix isn't rules. Rules are brittle. They break on the first edge case.

It isn't processes either. Processes optimize for the average and shatter on the exception.

The fix is encoding the judgment itself. Capturing the why behind decisions, not just the what. Making the tradeoffs visible. Documenting the assumptions that experienced people carry unconsciously.

Judgment that can't be taught can't scale.

If you can't explain why you made a decision, you can't transfer the skill. The next person will face the same situation and guess.

If you can't articulate the tradeoffs you weighed, the next person will repeat your early mistakes. The ones you learned from and forgot you learned.

Stop celebrating heroes.

Start encoding what they know before they walk out the door.