The Decision Was Made. The Organization Had the Last Word.
Decisions Under the MicroscopeLeaders make decisions.
Organizations translate them.
And those are not always the same thing.
That distinction matters because a decision can be thoughtful, clearly communicated, formally adopted—and still produce an experience leadership never intended.
Earlier this week, I wrote about why a silent room should not be mistaken for an aligned one.
Today, I want to take that idea one step further. Because the real test of a leadership decision isn’t what happens while you’re explaining it.
It’s what happens after the decision leaves the room.
And the Minnesota Department of Human Rights’ investigation into the City of Minneapolis and Minneapolis Police Department gives us a particularly stark example of why.
The formal organization can change before the operating organization does.
Following a comprehensive investigation, the Minnesota Department of Human Rights (MDHR) announced in April 2022 that it found probable cause that the City of Minneapolis and MPD engaged in a pattern or practice of race discrimination in violation of the Minnesota Human Rights Act.
But the finding I want leaders to pay attention to goes deeper than individual conduct.
MDHR attributed the pattern primarily to an organizational culture marked by deficient training, ineffective accountability systems, and a lack of coordinated and intentional action by City and MPD leadership.
That’s significant.
Because organizations often respond to problems by changing something formal.
A policy.
A procedure.
A training.
An expectation.
An organizational chart.
A reporting structure.
Those things matter.
But MDHR’s conclusion was unusually direct: without fundamental changes to organizational culture, reforms to policies, procedures, and training would not be enough.
In other words:
Leadership can change the formal organization while the operating organization continues producing something else.
The organization keeps translating the decision
Think about what happens after leadership says, This is how we’re going to operate now.
That expectation has to travel.
Through senior leaders.
Through managers.
Through training.
Through policies and procedures.
Through accountability systems.
Through incentives.
Through established norms.
Through what people see modeled.
Through what gets corrected.
And through what doesn’t.
Every one of those is a translation point.
And every translation point has the ability to strengthen the original decision—or compete with it.
That is where this case becomes instructive far beyond policing.
The issue isn’t simply whether leadership said the right thing.
The question is whether the organization surrounding that decision was capable of producing it.
This is The Experience Check™
The Experience Check™ follows a decision through four points:
INTENT → TRANSLATION → EXPERIENCE → OUTCOME/IMPACT
Leadership often has the greatest control over the first one.
Intent.
We know what we meant.
We know why we made the decision.
We know what we hoped would happen.
But then the organization gets involved.
And organizations are powerful translators.
Culture translates.
Managers translate.
Systems translate.
History translates.
Incentives translate.
Accountability translates.
Leadership behavior translates.
Eventually, people don’t experience leadership’s intent.
They experience what survived the translation.
And that experience begins producing the outcome.
This isn’t simply a communication issue. It’s an execution issue.
That’s the distinction I want senior leaders to sit with.
When the experience doesn’t match the intent, our first instinct can be:
Who didn’t follow the decision?
Sometimes that’s exactly the question that needs to be asked.
But when the problem appears repeatedly, across people, teams, or time, there’s another question worth asking:
What is this organization still doing—through its leaders, systems, incentives, norms, processes, or history—that is powerful enough to compete with the decision we made?
That question changes the diagnosis.
Because another email won’t fix an accountability system.
Another town hall won’t undo an incentive.
Another training won’t necessarily overcome what leaders model every day.
And another policy won’t automatically change what an organization has learned to reward, tolerate, or normalize.
The response has to match what is producing the experience.
Look at what the remedy required
What happened after the Minnesota investigation is instructive, too.
In March 2023, MDHR and the City reached a court-enforceable agreement, which a state judge approved that July. The agreement requires changes extending well beyond written policy: training and support, engagement with officers and community members, accountability and oversight systems, data collection, independent evaluation, and sustained organizational-culture change.
Even the structure of the remedy tells us something.
Changing the rule is an action.
Changing what an organization consistently produces is a system of actions.
There is a difference.
And the work continues: Minnesota’s state consent decree remains binding until the court determines that the City and MPD have reached full, effective, and sustained compliance.
Follow the decision past the decision
So after the announcement, the meeting, the policy change, the reorganization, the new strategy—keep following the decision.
Ask:
What are leaders modeling?
What are managers reinforcing?
What are our systems rewarding?
What are people actually doing differently?
Where is the decision being altered as it moves?
What old norms remain stronger than the new expectation?
What happens when someone questions how the decision is being interpreted?
And most importantly:
Is the experience this organization is creating capable of producing the outcome leadership says it wants?
Because making the decision is only the beginning.
Leadership sets the intent.
The organization reveals what actually got executed.
And sometimes, unless leaders are willing to examine that experience,
the organization has the last word.
Work with Kimberly
If your organization keeps producing outcomes leadership didn’t intend, the answer may not be another rollout.
I work with executives and leadership teams to examine the space between the decisions they make and what their organizations actually produce—across leadership, systems, culture, and employee experience.
