Written by SOURCE: Jo Balcaen on LinkedIn
In this post by ex-Belgian Air Force pilot Jo Balcaen on LinkedIn the weight of command, responsibility, and accountability is considered in the light of – and despite – shared decision-making.
Most decisions feel shared while they are being discussed. Their consequences rarely do.
We did not leave with information. We left with assumptions.
A child had been missing for hours. The last time anyone had seen him, he was in the surf in a small black rubber boat. By the time the alert reached us, nobody knew when he had drifted away or how far the current might already have carried him.
In search and rescue there is no moment where people sit around a table to think things through. When the call comes, you go. The helicopter lifts within minutes, and whatever additional information exists reaches you while you are already in the air. That day the search area slowly took shape during the flight, as fragments came in over the radio and we adjusted our picture of where the boat might be.
When we finally located it, the boat was drifting quietly. It was empty.
The first thought that crossed my mind was simple: we are too late.
Later, during the debriefing, the wider context became clearer. Some months earlier the procedures had been changed. Automatic helicopter deployment in situations like this was no longer standard practice. The decision had not been taken in a careless way. It had been discussed, considered and formally adopted. Everyone involved had acted within the framework that existed.
Even so, the outcome remained the same.
That experience stayed with me because it reveals something uncomfortable about the way we tend to look at decisions.
Inside most organizations, important choices usually grow out of discussion. People look at the situation from different angles, compare arguments and eventually reach a point where the reasoning feels shared. When that moment of agreement arrives, it often brings a quiet sense of reassurance, as if the responsibility has somehow spread across everyone who took part in the conversation.
Reality rarely works like that.
When the result of a decision becomes real, the weight does not spread across the room where the discussion once happened. It usually settles with someone.
Consensus matters because it strengthens the thinking that leads to a decision. What it cannot do is carry the consequence once events begin to unfold.
Looking back, it is tempting to believe that one more report, one more analysis or a little more time would have changed everything. Occasionally that may be true. More often decisions are taken carefully within the limits of what can be known at that moment, and the world simply turns out to be less predictable than the analysis suggested.
There is always a point where discussion reaches its limit and exposure begins. That is the moment when the protection offered by collective reasoning quietly falls away.
Leadership starts there…