Before a strategy misses its targets, someone inside the organization may already understand why. A customer-facing employee notices a recurring problem. A team manager sees that a new process creates more work than it removes. An experienced colleague recognizes that the assumptions behind a decision no longer match conditions on the ground. The insight exists. The question is whether it can influence what the organization does next.
For leaders, this is a consequential question about culture: can people bring what they know into decisions, particularly when that knowledge challenges the direction leadership has chosen?
Dr. Sharon Ravitch and I began exploring the distance between how leaders understand their organizations and how employees experience them. That inquiry continues through our work together and our forthcoming book, The Culture Between Us. It also connects to my doctoral research into how organizational learning opportunities may shape senior leaders’ strategic decisions in ways they perceive as contributing to competitive advantage.
At the center of this work is a question I believe deserves more attention: What do employees know that never reaches the leaders making decisions?
Culture Shapes What Reaches The Decision Maker
A leader may sincerely believe that employees are encouraged to speak openly. Employees may sincerely believe that raising certain concerns carries a cost. Both perspectives can exist within the same organization. Leaders know the invitation they extended. Employees know what happened after someone accepted it.
Perhaps a colleague questioned a deadline and was labelled uncommitted. Perhaps a team reported a problem, received a sympathetic response, and watched nothing change. Perhaps the person who consistently delivered reassuring updates appeared to advance faster than the person who surfaced complications. These experiences give employees information about what is worth saying.
Over time, leaders may receive an increasingly polished account of organizational life. Problems arrive with their urgency reduced. Uncertainty becomes confidence. A concern that requires a difficult decision becomes an issue someone says they are managing. The resulting picture can be accurate enough to feel credible and incomplete enough to undermine a strategy.
Ask What Employees Must Do To Make The Strategy Work
When implementation slows, leaders need to examine the work beneath the progress report. What must employees work around? Which competing priorities require them to improvise? Where have they developed unofficial solutions because the formal process does not work?
Consider a hypothetical organization introducing a new customer service system. Leadership sees a successful launch and strong training attendance. Employees discover that routine tasks now require duplicate entries. They create a spreadsheet to keep service moving.
The spreadsheet becomes evidence of knowledge the organization has not yet absorbed. Employees have identified a problem and adapted. Leadership may still be making decisions based on the assumption that the system works as intended.
A useful question is: ''What extra work does this require that we may be overlooking?''
The answer can reveal hidden effort, implementation barriers, and opportunities to improve.
Learning Must Travel Into Decisions
This is where culture and organizational learning meet - an employee can gain knowledge without the organization changing. A team can identify a better approach without having the authority, time, or resources to apply it. Leaders can receive feedback without revisiting the decision that produced the problem.
In what I call the Learning Economy, organizations face a continuing need to interpret change and adjust their response. Their ability to do so depends partly on whether knowledge can move across roles and become consequential.
My LEARN Framework - Listen, Examine, Activate, Reconfigure, and Navigate - helps organize that process. Listening brings information into view. Examining tests its meaning. Activating connects it to action. Reconfiguring changes the conditions needed to support that action. keeps the organization attentive to what happens afterward.
The practical test is straightforward: Which decision, process, or allocation of resources changed because of what people learned?
AI Adoption Makes This Question Immediate
AI gives leaders another reason to examine how information moves. Employees using a tool can identify where it saves time, where it produces unreliable results, and where checking its output creates additional work. Their accounts help leaders understand the value of adoption beyond usage figures. But those accounts depend on what employees believe they can disclose.
Can someone say that a tool is making a task harder? Can they admit uncertainty without being judged as incapable? Can they question an enthusiastic rollout and still be seen as contributing to its success? Leaders need these answers to decide where to invest, what support to provide, and which assumptions to revisit.
Turn Honest Feedback Into Action
When employees share a concern, what happens next shapes whether they will speak openly again. Leaders need to explain what they heard, what they will investigate, and what will change. If action is not possible, explaining why helps employees understand the decision.
That follow-through connects employees’ experience to leadership decisions. It gives leaders an opportunity to examine where their intentions are falling short and use what they learn to improve how the organization works.
This connection is central to my research with Dr. Sharon Ravitch and our forthcoming book, The Culture Between Us. We are exploring how leaders and employees can experience the same organization differently - and what leaders can learn by taking those differences seriously.