Problem 01Defensibility
You Cannot Show the Basis for a Decision.
The decision may have been sound. The record no longer shows why.
Pay, grading and employee relations decisions get made every week by people acting in good faith on the information in front of them. Months or years later, someone asks why. By then the reasoning lives in an inbox, the figures live in a spreadsheet whose author has left, and nothing records who decided what, when, or on what basis. A challenge becomes reconstruction rather than retrieval, and leaders start to doubt whether their judgement will survive being questioned.
What It Looks Like
From the inside, it looks like this
Reconstruction, not retrieval
Answering one query means chasing three people, two mailboxes and a file whose owner has moved on. The answer is assembled, not looked up.
Undated and unattributable
The numbers exist, but nothing records when they were produced or by whom. In a hearing, evidence nobody can date carries almost no weight.
Versions that disagree
Two teams hold two figures for the same population, and neither can say which one the decision was actually based on.
The trail thins with age
The further back you look the less there is - which is precisely the direction scrutiny travels.
What It Costs
What it costs you
Not fines. Something quieter and more expensive.
Weeks of your most senior time
Preparing a single response pulls exactly the people you least want taken off their day job, for longer than anyone budgeted.
Settlements you did not need
Cases get conceded not because the decision was wrong, but because demonstrating it was right is no longer possible.
Managers who stop deciding
When the record cannot be relied on, the safe move is to defer. Good judgement goes unexercised because it cannot be evidenced.
The Test
Questions you should be able to answer today
If any of these takes more than a moment, the exposure is not theoretical.
- Who approved this grade, when, and against what criteria?
- What did our pay distribution look like on the day that decision was made?
- Which version of the policy was in force at the time?
- Could we produce all of it in a form a tribunal would accept?
- How long would finding out take us?
“A decision can be sound and still become indefensible once its basis can no longer be shown.”
The Other Four