What it means in practice
The organisation has attempted to transfer a judgement that was never made explicit, and has successfully transferred only the portion that could be written down — a checklist of red flags, a rough sense of preferred sectors. What resists transfer is the rapid, integrated weighing of dozens of small signals that an experienced founder does almost unconsciously. New decision-makers, working from the explicit portion alone, make reasonable individual choices that nonetheless drift, in aggregate, from what the founder would have chosen.
Paul Rogers and Marcia Blenko’s research on decision rights at Bain adds a useful complication here. Their finding — that only around 15% of organisations believe their decision-making outperforms competitors — is often rooted in decisions whose ownership was never formally assigned in the first place, simply inherited informally by whoever happened to be doing the job. A founder’s engagement-acceptance judgement is a clear example: it was never a “decision right” in any formal sense, because there was only ever one person who could plausibly hold it. As the firm grows and this judgement passes to others — often quietly, without anyone explicitly deciding to delegate it — the firm discovers it has no established process for a decision that, until recently, did not need one, because the ambiguity is baked into a decision that has just started, for the first time, to need clear ownership.
Why it happens
Expert judgement of this kind is often what researchers call tacit — known and reliably applied, but not fully accessible to conscious articulation even by the person holding it. Asking a founder to explain their instinct for good-fit work typically produces a partial, retrospectively rationalised account rather than the actual decision process, because much of that process happened below the level of conscious reasoning. A firm growing past the point where the founder can personally review every engagement is, in effect, growing past the reach of a form of judgement that cannot simply be copied.
This is compounded by a timing problem. The founder’s judgement was built gradually, over years of encountering individual cases and updating quietly from each one. The successors inheriting the decision, by contrast, are often asked to apply sound judgement from the outset, without the extended run of individual cases that built the original instinct. The firm has effectively compressed a multi-year learning process into a handover, and some erosion in fit quality during that compression should be expected as a structural feature of the transition, rather than read purely as a sign that standards have slipped.
Where this varies
The gap is narrower where a firm has deliberately built shared decision-making earlier — junior partners sitting in on pitch reviews for years before taking them on independently, for example — because that exposure transfers more of the tacit pattern recognition than any written criteria could. It is wider where growth has been rapid and delegation sudden, leaving little time for the kind of extended, side-by-side exposure that actually builds equivalent judgement.
There is a further wrinkle worth naming: the founder often does not realise how much of the criteria remains unwritten, because from the inside, the judgement feels complete and consistent. It is only when someone else applies the written portion and reaches a different conclusion than the founder would have that the gap becomes visible — and even then, it is easy to misread the gap as the successor’s inexperience rather than as evidence that the original judgement was never fully captured in the first place.
A practical marker worth watching is the type of engagement where drift shows up first. It is rarely the obviously good or obviously bad opportunities — both remain easy calls under almost any reasonable criteria. Drift concentrates in the ambiguous middle: engagements that are commercially attractive but carry some subtler misalignment with the firm’s actual strengths, the kind of case a founder would have declined on instinct without necessarily being able to say exactly why. These are precisely the cases where written criteria, built from the explicit portion of the founder’s judgement, are least equipped to help, because the reasoning that would have flagged them was never the reasoning that made it into the checklist.
Where this shows up
People working in professional services firms will probably recognise this pattern first. The wider Professional and Knowledge-Based grouping and the other sectors page show how it presents elsewhere.
Questions worth considering
- What part of this firm’s most important judgement calls has never been written down — and could it be, even partially?
- How much of current business-development decision-making rests on inherited written criteria versus direct exposure to how those decisions used to be made?
- Is poor-fit work increasing because standards have slipped, or because the judgement behind the standards was never transferable in the first place?
Your team is facing similar challenges?
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