WHEN DID LEADERS STOP DECIDING WHAT REALLY MATTERS?
THERE IS A SENTENCE I hear surprisingly often these days: “Things are changing so quickly that there is no point making a three-year strategy anymore.” It sounds contemporary. It sounds agile. It may even sound wise. But think about it for a moment. If the world has become more uncertain, does that reduce our need for direction, or increase it?
from, what capabilities must we build, what will we deliberately not pursue, and what principles will guide difficult choices? The details can and should change as reality changes. In my earlier writing I have called for strategy to be Flexible, Fluid, Functional and Futuristic. But flexibility without a strategic centre is not agility. It is drift . The leadership team that repeatedly says, “We will figure it out as we go along,” may occasionally be demonstrating adaptability. If it becomes the normal operating philosophy, however, it may simply mean that leadership has stopped doing one of its most important jobs: exercising judgement about direction.
A ship entering turbulent waters does not need less of a compass. It needs a better one. Of course, its captain may have to alter speed, change course, respond to weather and occasionally abandon the original route altogether. But none of that removes the need to know where the ship is trying to go. Somewhere along the way, we seem to have confused flexibility of movement with absence of direction. And I increasingly wonder whether this is the first great abdication of judgement in modern organisations.
The second abdication happens almost immediately after the first. Even where senior leaders have a strategy, how many people further down can actually explain it? I don’t mean repeat the five priorities from the annual presentation. I mean explain what those priorities require from their part of the organisation. This is where strategy has to travel. If the organisation has a two- or three- year direction, each year should begin with clarity about what that direction means now. Functions should translate it into initiatives. Teams should understand what they must deliver. Individuals
Strategy was never supposed to be a prediction of the future. It was supposed to be a considered choice about how we intend to meet it. A credible medium- to long-term strategy should therefore provide a sufficiently stable compass: what business are we really in, what are we trying to become, where will growth come
should know what contribution is expected from them and why. The middle layer is crucial here: its job is not merely to receive strategy from above and forward slides downward. It must exercise judgement in translation, turning enterprise direction into operational meaning, swiftly and coherently, all the way to the last meaningful level of execution.
When this translation does not happen, something fascinating occurs. Thousands
of intelligent people begin compensating for the absence of clarity. Meetings multiply. Priorities are continually renegotiated. People seek approvals for things that should already have been understood. One leader interprets the strategy one way and another interprets it differently. Employees become very busy while the organisation becomes strangely slow. We often diagnose this as a communication problem or complain about too many meetings. I think the problem may be deeper. The organisation is using conversation to compensate for judgement that should already have taken place. There will always be decisions to make during execution, but employees should not have to continuously rediscover the organisation’s direction while trying to deliver it.
Then comes the third abdication: the how. I am sometimes uncomfortable with the fashionable idea that leaders should simply provide purpose and outcomes and then “get out of the way.” Yes, micromanagement suffocates initiative. But the opposite extreme is equally irresponsible. Good organisations make critical processes clear. Who decides? Who must be consulted? What are the non-negotiable standards? Where does one function hand over to another? What happens when something falls outside the normal process? Which decisions can be taken locally and which require escalation? The purpose of process is not to remove judgement; it is to prevent thousands of people from wasting judgement on questions that should already have been resolved. Senior and middle leaders therefore have a responsibility to create enough structure for people to move
confidently, while leaving enough discretion for them to respond intelligently.
The fourth abdication is perhaps the easiest to observe because it hides behind our performance-management systems. Many organisations set goals at the beginning of a year and formally revisit them months later. By then, the story has already happened. Performance management should not primarily be an annual appraisal mechanism; it should be a management rhythm. Every 15 to 30 days, depending on the nature of the business, somebody should be asking: Are we moving in the direction we intended? Are the initiatives working? What is slipping? What has changed? Where are resources being wasted? Are we merely producing activity, or are we producing outcomes? Effectiveness, efficiency, outcomes and eventual impact have to remain visible while there is still time to influence them. A dashboard cannot exercise this judgement for us. It can tell us that something has moved. Leadership must decide what the movement means and what to do about it.
This becomes even more important because performance can look healthy from inside an organisation while the customer is experiencing something entirely different. That is the fift h abdication: quality and customer reality. Whether the organisation is B2B, B2C or B2B2C, someone in leadership must remain obsessively interested in what eventually reaches the customer or consumer. Not merely the internal quality score. Not merely whether the process was followed. What did the customer actually receive? What did they experience? Where are
complaints recurring? Where are we technically compliant but practically disappointing? What compromises are gradually becoming normal? Quality deteriorates surprisingly easily when responsibility becomes fragmented. Everyone completes their part correctly, yet the whole somehow becomes mediocre. Judgement requires somebody to keep seeing the whole.
STRATEGY IS NOT MERELY ABOUT DECIDING WHERE WE WANT TO GO. IT IS ALSO ABOUT BECOMING CAPABLE OF GETTING THERE.
There is a Dharmic dimension to this that goes beyond conventional management. Power creates responsibility. The more authority we possess over direction, resources, people and consequences, the greater our obligation to exercise that authority consciously. A senior leader cannot say, “My team should have worked it out,” when the direction itself was ambiguous. A middle leader cannot endlessly escalate decisions that properly belong at their level. Nor should junior employees be blamed for confusion created by unclear strategy, poorly designed processes or contradictory priorities above them. Accountability must sit where the power to create clarity actually resides. That, to me, is one of the practical meanings of Dharmic Leadership.
The sixth abdication brings us back to where we started, because strategy is not merely about deciding where we want to go. It is also about becoming capable of getting there. An opportunity is useful only to an organisation capable of recognising and exploiting it. A technological shift matters only if we possess, or can rapidly acquire, the competence to use it. A new market is not an opportunity merely because somebody puts it on a strategy slide. Do we have the leadership depth, technical
capability, financial capacity, systems, partnerships, knowledge and organisational readiness to move when the moment arrives? Strategy therefore has two sides: choosing possibilities and preparing ourselves for them. Organisations that neglect the second often discover opportunities only after better- prepared competitors have converted them into advantage.
Artificial intelligence makes all of this more urgent, but it does not create the problem. AI can analyse, recommend, monitor and increasingly act. It can make leaders dramatically more capable. It can also provide the perfect new sentence behind which judgement can hide: “The system recommended it.” Yet, the deeper danger began much earlier with “the market changed,” “the team decided,” “the process says so,” “we are being agile,” or “we’ll figure it out.” Tools change. The temptation remains remarkably human: to retain authority while allowing responsibility for difficult judgement to migrate elsewhere.
Perhaps, then, the real challenge for leadership is not to make more decisions. It is to know which judgements must never be abandoned. Direction must be judged. Strategy must be translated. Processes must be made workable. Performance must be repeatedly interrogated. Quality must be experienced from the customer’s side. Capability must be built before opportunity demands it. None of this requires leaders to control everything. In fact, doing these things well should create precisely the opposite: an organisation in which people can act with greater autonomy because the important boundaries and intentions are clear.
That is the paradox. Good
judgement at the top should create more freedom below, not less. When the compass is clear, people can improvise intelligently. When outcomes are understood, teams can adapt their routes. When processes establish sensible boundaries, exceptions can be handled thoughtfully. When performance is discussed frequently, problems can be corrected without blame. When customer reality remains visible, quality becomes everybody’s concern. And when capabilities are deliberately built, uncertainty begins to look less like a threat and more like possibility.
So perhaps The Abdication of Judgement is not really about leaders making poor decisions. It is about something more fundamental: leaders gradually ceasing to occupy the spaces in which judgement is required. In a volatile world, that is not agility. It is abdication. The organisation of the future does not need leaders who pretend to know exactly what will happen three years from now. It needs leaders who can establish a credible direction, continuously read reality, make choices, build capability, correct course and remain answerable for the journey. The future may be uncertain. Leadership cannot afford to be.
References and intellectual foundations • Chandran, S. K. Strategy as Posture for Real Growth: Flexible, Fluid, Functional & Futuristic Leadership in Action. The HRM Nepal. • Chandran, S. K. Who Is a Responsible Leader? The HRM Nepal. • Chandran, S. K. Virtuous Integration of Strategy, Culture & Leadership. The HRM Nepal. • Chandran, S. K. Driving Digital
GOOD JUDGMENT AT THE TOP SHOULD CREATE MORE FREEDOM BELOW, NOT LESS.
Transformation with Long- Term Value Creation Strategy and Ethics. The HRM Nepal. • Chandran, S. K. Six Focus Areas to Ensure Business Mindset and Leadership Readiness. The HRM Nepal. • Chandran, S. K. Managing Business: A Fine Balance Between Leadership and Management. The HRM Nepal. • Chandran, S. K. Why Do Leaders and Professionals Need to Develop Their Capabilities? The HRM Nepal. • Drucker, P. F. (1954). The Practice of Management. Harper & Brothers. • Mintzberg, H. (1994). The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning. Free Press. • Porter, M. E. (1996). “What Is Strategy?” Harvard Business Review, 74(6), 61–78. • Rumelt, R. P. (2011). Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters. Crown Business. • Kaplan, R. S., & Norton, D. P. (1996). The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action. Harvard Business School Press. • Sull, D., Homkes, R., & Sull, C. (2015). “Why Strategy Execution Unravels—and What to Do About It.” Harvard Business Review, 93(3), 57–66. • Edmondson, A. C. (2019). The Fearless Organization. Wiley. • Heifetz, R. A., Grashow, A., & Linsky, M. (2009). The Practice of Adaptive Leadership. Harvard Business Press.
Chandran is the founder of OrbitShift . He is a coaching and consulting practitioner and an entrepreneur at heart. He can be reached at saikumarchandran@ orbitshift .com.
