The Job Description Has the Tasks. Where Are the Decisions?

Mike’s job description says he approves pricing exceptions, oversees supplier performance, reviews capital requests, and maintains several major accounts. The successor reads it and sees a demanding but recognizable role.

What the page does not show is why Mike lets one customer wait and calls another before the meeting ends. It does not explain why a late supplier shipment is sometimes noise and sometimes the first sign of a larger failure. “Reviews capital requests” says nothing about the assumption that makes him send a polished proposal back for another month of evidence.

The duties are accurate. The difficulty lives one level below them, where the same task can require a different decision because one detail changed its meaning.

Militello and Hutton describe Cognitive Task Analysis as a family of methods for identifying the cognitive skills and mental demands required for proficient performance. Their Applied Cognitive Task Analysis toolkit uses structured interview methods to surface those demands and translate them into practical products such as training scenarios or interface recommendations.[Applied cognitive task analysis (ACTA): a practitioner's toolkit for understanding cognitive task demands]

That distinction is useful in succession because a role can be procedurally clear and cognitively difficult. “Approve the exception” is a task. Deciding whether the exception is a one-time accommodation, a precedent that will travel through the sales force, or a warning about the underlying account is the cognitive demand.

The language need not become academic. Ask where experienced people slow down. Ask which cases look ordinary until one fact appears. Ask what a new leader is likely to take literally. The answers begin to reveal the parts of the role a job description was never built to hold.

Consequential decisions rarely stay inside a neat responsibility list. A pricing decision can carry customer history, plant capacity, a promise made by the founder, the sales leader’s credibility, and a risk the finance team sees differently. The person who signs may not be the only person whose judgment makes the answer possible.

Begin with one hard decision and reconstruct its route. Who noticed the issue? Which records mattered? Whose interpretation changed the discussion? Where did the formal authority sit, and where did the practical permission come from? Which stakeholder had to believe the answer?

The Map follows those traces across decisions, people, promises, and remaining dependencies. It does not attempt to turn an entire career into documentation. It makes the small portion of the terrain that would be costly to rediscover visible enough for someone else to use.

Most days support the process map. The unusual day explains why Mike is still in the loop. A supplier misses a threshold but has already protected the company twice. A customer’s request fits policy but arrives after a change in ownership. A familiar equipment reading appears beside an unfamiliar sound. The written rule remains true, yet no longer settles the decision.

Critical Decision Method begins with a difficult, nonroutine incident and uses structured probes to reconstruct the timeline, cues, expectations, alternatives, and turning points. In a neonatal intensive-care study, CDM interviews elicited more information than non-CDM interviews and surfaced assessment cues used in a sepsis guide that were absent from the literature then available.[Critical Decision Method: A Technique for Eliciting Concrete Assessment Indicators From the “Intuition” of NICU Nurses]

The clinical setting does not prove the same yield in an executive office. It demonstrates something narrower and still important: the shape of the question changes what an experienced person can tell you. “Describe your responsibilities” invites a summary. “Take me to the moment you realized the ordinary answer would fail” invites the decision itself.

Once a useful distinction appears, the temptation is to write a policy. Sometimes that is exactly right. A recurring, stable, well-understood decision should not remain personal merely because it once did. Clear authority and a better operating rule can remove unnecessary dependence.

Other cases need a different record. The decision may depend on conditions that continue to change, a relationship whose history matters, or a threshold that cannot be separated cleanly from consequence. Preserve a case, the cues that changed the interpretation, the rejected alternatives, and the boundary beyond which another specialist should be involved.

The goal is not to celebrate intuition or make the work mysterious. It is to leave the successor enough structure to recognize when the familiar path still applies—and enough humility to know when it may not.

A busy executive makes hundreds of small decisions. Trying to capture them all creates an archive nobody can maintain and a project nobody wants to finish. Selectivity is part of the method.

Look for decisions with an uncomfortable combination: meaningful consequence, reliance on one or very few people, a history that would be difficult to reconstruct, and a successor who has had little chance to encounter the case. That combination deserves attention before a complete list of routine duties does.

The article on deciding when enough judgment has been reconstructed explains the stopping discipline: cover the consequential decision families, use contrasting cases, let another person work with the record, and leave residual uncertainty visible.

The role document still matters. It assigns accountability, defines scope, and gives the successor a first outline. It simply should not be asked to carry a different kind of record.

For the few decisions where loss would matter, leave behind the incident, the cue, the exception, the people whose history shaped the answer, and the point where authority changed hands. The route will never contain the whole person. It can prevent the next person from beginning with only a title and a list of duties.

See The Map for the first question: how do we make those consequential decisions visible before the person everyone relies on leaves?