The Functions
in the Trajectory.

The Starting Point

The holder of the executive mandate is expected to meet several demands at once. They must decide, delegate, preserve the autonomy of the other mandate holders, take account of normative constraints whose value and scope differ, and remain the person who is asked to answer for the whole.

This is not simply a context. It is what makes the place of each function in the trajectory of the decision an object of work: each exercises its mandate legitimately, and the question of what becomes of the executive decision through their exercise remains open.

A norm, a threshold, a dashboard, a delay, a workflow, a process or a validation circuit may alter the trajectory of a decision. What the executive and operations can then observe: the decision slows down, forks or becomes illegible. Operations wait, work around it, escalate too late — or no longer know what they are supposed to execute.

Escalation is at the centre of what we look at: who can escalate what, at which threshold, to whom — and how a decision actually comes back to the level that must take it. Where escalation is unworkable, what should return to the level that decides is settled elsewhere, without anyone having decided it.

These observations do not, on their own, point to their cause. Two readings are to be examined, and they often combine.

Is it the place given to the function that produces this? The quality of what it produces? Or both?

The diagnosis determines the way in. Work on functions is not exclusively corrective: it is installed upstream, before an appointment or a reorganisation, just as it is carried out when a trajectory has moved away from the initial decision. A Review may offer a first reading; it is not a mandatory prerequisite.

To go further: Piloting & Trajectory Review · Corpus IV — Repairing the Trajectory.

Two Families, Two Places in the Trajectory

This page distinguishes two families of holders, who do not stand in the trajectory in the same way.

Both families concern the same object: the trajectory of the executive decision. They do not call for the same work.

A — The Position of the Function

When the place given to the function produces the problem, the work is on the organisation:

• the mandate and reporting line,
• thresholds and circuits,
• tools and processes,
• incentives,
• access to the decision,
• escalation: who escalates what, at which threshold, to whom.

When a function has become an alternative decision-making centre of gravity — a place where part of the decision forms, shifts or is in practice exercised outside the holder of the corresponding mandate — the configurations that follow make it possible to observe how this shift may occur.

Normative constraint exists independently of the functions that handle it: legal, regulatory, contractual and professional obligations, internal rules, standards. Decision-making comes under normative constraint as soon as these norms apply to the company's action.

The company then organises how they are handled: it builds into its operations roles responsible for reading, interpreting, applying, documenting or controlling norms, rules, thresholds, standards, procedures and validation mechanisms. This organisation changes the conditions in which the constraint is handled; it does not create the constraint itself.

These functions are necessary. Some decisions cannot be taken properly without their expertise.

The shift begins when the organisation calls on them more than action requires — or complains afterwards that they were bypassed — without any longer distinguishing the situations in which their involvement was actually required.

The function no longer simply informs the trajectory. It may begin to become a point of passage for the decision.

A normative function whose place in the decision is no longer explicitly governed may end up producing its own criteria for success, imposing its own calendar, recruiting according to its own prudential logic, governing action implicitly and becoming an autonomous decision-making centre of gravity. The executive decision may then find itself subject to conditions that neither its destination nor the arbitration of its holder has set.

This is not an individual failure. It is an organisational mechanism.

Lead or Follow intervenes so that the decision remains held by the person answerable for it, and so that the function remains in service of that decision.

Three Configurations of the Position in the Trajectory

The normative function is no longer called on.

One sometimes hears: “Legal always says no.” Operations may then work around the function; escalations disappear; decisions move forward without a normative framework. When requirements accumulate without hierarchy, people end up doing without them.

The function is still on the organisation chart. It is no longer really on the trajectory of the decision.

The normative function begins to take hold of the decision itself.

In this configuration, the executive is no longer really consulted. The norm steers on its own. The formal decision still exists, but the centre of gravity has shifted. Prudence becomes trajectory; cover takes the place of strategy; operations become secondary.

An expert function may thus produce a strategy that nobody explicitly decided.

The function moves away from the decision-making centre.

A function located in a subsidiary, another jurisdiction or a decentralised organisation naturally ends up working from its immediate environment: local constraints, local urgencies, local practices, local counterparts.

Geographical distance from the decision-making centre of gravity gradually produces its own reflexes, its own prudential thresholds, its own decision circuits. A distant function may begin to reformulate the strategic trajectory on its own, redefine acceptability thresholds or produce a purely local reading of the norm — without anyone having explicitly decided it.

The problem is not loyalty. It is structural. One strategy, two pilots: which of them holds the trajectory?

Holding the post at a distance belongs to the second family: N-1 and N-2 mandate holders →

What These Shifts May Produce

Constraints may lose their ranking.

A law is not a recommendation. A regulation is not an internal policy. An internal policy is not a system setting. A historical precaution is not a prohibition. A process does not have the same force as the norm it was originally meant to handle.

Yet as the organisation grows denser, all these constraints may end up being set against the decision in a single form: “We can't.”

The problem is not to soften norms. It is to preserve the distinction between what is genuinely binding and what the organisation has itself made rigid.

Options may no longer come up.

Some decisions have already been implicitly settled before they reach the executive table. A risk has become a prohibition. A preference has become a threshold. A threshold has become a process. A process has become a condition for the decision to exist.

The decision still exists formally, but it arrives already truncated. The person answerable for the decision must receive it while there is still something left to decide.

An internal dispute may precede the external one.

Organisations can generally identify a dispute once it becomes external: a client complains, a supplier objects, a regulator intervenes, an authority asks for an account. But the dispute may have begun well before:

• “You didn't read my PowerPoint.”
• “You should have filled in this file first.”
• “You were supposed to go through us.”
• “This rule prevents us from…”
• “The file is incomplete.”
• “The procedure doesn't allow…”

The organisation may then devote part of its energy to discussing its own conditions for action. Conflicts concern passage, competence, validation, procedure or authority before they concern the client or the regulator.

The external dispute may be only the visible part of an internal dispute that has long been in place. Before defending itself against the outside, the company may already have begun to defend itself against itself.

The process may come to run against the promise.

Processes were generally created for good reasons: to secure, standardise, reduce a risk, document, allow scaling. But when a process is no longer confronted with the promise it was meant to help keep, it may gradually produce the opposite effect.

The internal rule, the delay, the form, the control or the workflow becomes a constraint consolidated in the company's own operation. The client does not see the internal sophistication that produced it: they see that the promise is no longer kept. They complain, give up buying or wait for the competitor who will remove that friction. The company may thus turn its own promise into a constraint through the aggregation of the norms meant to implement it.

DECIDE A. GET B.

A has been decided. But between the decision and its execution, the trajectory passes through functions, thresholds, recommendations, precautions, validations, controls, tools and processes. Each may be defensible within its own perimeter. Yet the final result may no longer be A.

The decision may be amended by an identifiable arbitration. It need not be silently dismantled.

What Lead or Follow Does

The distribution of decision rights encourages the formation of decision centres within functions, professions and the different levels of the organisation. This is the very principle of delegation: each holder exercises, within the perimeter assigned to them, a decision-making power that belongs to them.

The difficulty therefore does not lie in the existence of these decision centres, nor in their autonomy. It arises when the exercise of a decision right within a silo collides with the trajectory of an executive decision belonging to another perimeter of competence, without that encounter giving rise to an identifiable arbitration.

A decision right assigned to a function does not, in itself, give it the power to redefine the executive decision. Conversely, the executive mandate does not make the decision rights legitimately assigned to the other holders non-existent.

Piloting means making the meeting of these perimeters governable, not removing their autonomy.

When decision centres meet on the same trajectory.

A legitimately established decision centre is not an alternative decision-making centre of gravity. The latter appears when a real part of the executive decision forms around the function that produces the dominant reading of risk, compliance or prudence, without that shift having been arbitrated.

It may stem from an absent or incomplete architecture: nothing defined what a function was to do with the strategic intention when it passed through it. It may also result from an architecture that distributes powers correctly, with clear mandates, but does not sufficiently provide for their articulation when they come into tension with the executive trajectory. This may occur around any function whose reading imposes itself on others, including steering or reporting functions.

In this case, the formal decision exists. It is no longer necessarily the one that determines the trajectory. Lead or Follow intervenes at this point.

No function decides the overall architecture from its own frame of reference alone.

Legal can qualify what the law requires. Risk can qualify a risk. Procurement can make a policy or threshold explicit. Compliance can qualify a compliance requirement. Some hold, under a legal, regulatory or organisational mandate, the power to set limits on the intervention of other functions, and these prerogatives cannot be freely redefined. But none of them can, from its own frame of reference alone, decide the overall architecture or the place the executive decision is to occupy within it, notably by determining on its own:

• the general articulation of mandates, with respect for the competences each has already received;
• the place of their respective interventions around the same decision;
• what is to remain at their level;
• what is to go up to the executive decision.

When several normative functions meet around the same decision, the overall architecture belongs to none of them. It belongs to command, with respect for the competences that the law or a mandatory rule assigns to each.

Lead or Follow intervenes under executive mandate in this space: boundaries, passages, overlaps, thresholds, escalation, margins and the return of the decision to the person answerable for it.

Restructuring is not enough.

Restructuring organises roles. It does not, on its own, solve the problem of how the decision circulates within an explicit architecture of command. Adding a department, a layer, a process, a validation, a committee or an extra report does not guarantee that the strategy reaches operations intact.

The question is who pilots, who informs, who decides, who holds the trajectory and what must come back to the executive table.

What Installation Produces

Observable states, not promises.

A workable escalation route. Operations know whom to approach, about what, at which threshold. Escalation is possible without anyone needing to avoid the process.

A legible trace. Decisions are documented — not only the procedures, but the reasoning: what was retained, what was set aside, why, by whom.

Decisions that someone owns. Each carries a legible intention, rather than cover: a reasoned recommendation, defensible before a regulator, a board of directors or over time.

An identifiable trajectory. A trajectory may legitimately change. What matters is that the change is identified, arbitrated at the competent level and explained, and that the decision has not lost its intention in the normative circuit without anyone having decided it.

A coherent account. The executive can still stand behind what they decided and mandated. Strategy stays at the executive table.

A strategy may have to give way to a mandatory constraint. An expertise may lead the executive to revise their decision.

The question is not who obeys whom, but who qualifies the constraint, who holds the power to arbitrate and at what point a new decision is needed.

To see how these mechanisms appear in concrete situations: explore the Framework Living →

What Lead or Follow Does Not Do

• Lead or Follow does not do the work of Legal, Compliance, Procurement, Risk Management or Data in place of those who practise those professions. It replaces neither the teams nor their external advisers.
• It does not assume that experts are weak. All may be perfectly competent, and no fault is needed for the phenomenon to exist.
• It does not seek to weaken norms. Some are binding and must remain so. It does not add a new controller to watch the controllers.
• It does not replace experts: it restores their role within the executive trajectory.
• It does not remove normative contradiction: it makes it governable.
• It does not govern in place of the executive: it restores the conditions in which the executive decides.
• It does not turn normative functions into decorative functions: it reconnects them to the real execution of strategy.

Organisational Implementation

When the model has to be made operational in the organisation, the work covers:

• the mandate of the functions;
• the expected output;
• escalation circuits;
• reporting lines;
• criteria;
• external advisers;
• tools and processes;
• insourcing;
• recruitment;
• the organisation.

Lead or Follow intervenes under executive mandate or formal delegation. When the problem calls for work on the function itself — mandate, organisation, expected output, recruitment, practices, tools, processes — it falls under organisational implementation, presented at The Quinta (Execute A).

B — The Quality of What the Function Produces

Legal · Compliance · Risk · Finance · Procurement · Data · Internal Control · other expert functions.

These functions do not hold their post in order to give the decision a second trajectory. They hold it to make the trajectory that has been decided workable within their field — and to bring up what genuinely requires it to change.

What is expected of their output is not to place the decision under escort, to make it rebound from one function to another until it is exhausted, or to create a fork that bypasses the person who must decide.

The expected quality lies in what the production does with the trajectory: it equips it, qualifies the constraint, keeps options open for as long as they remain so, builds a workable passage and brings up what must be decided again. When it does not, one may find the manifestations that Lead or Follow has described — the decorative decision, the stripping of margins and, at the extreme, the alternative centre of gravity (the manifestations →).

Strategy belongs to the executive. Expert functions handle the constraint within their own field. Lead or Follow works on how they are articulated within the decision.

The École des aiguilleurs.

The quality of production is the object observed. The École des aiguilleurs is one of the arrangements through which it can be worked on; it is presented in the sections that follow (§11 to §15).

Two situations that lead here.

The organisation is working and growing. The aim is not to repair: it is that the experts who arrive — or who are already there — hold their post starting from the decision, and not from their norm alone. We start from the minimum expected of any expert (Thinking Like Your Boss), define the post before recruiting, and test the capacity to hold it (recruiting the aiguilleur).

A diagnosis has established that the function is in its proper place, but that what it produces on the decision is not what was expected. The work then turns to the people present: sounding out the team, developing postures, reading a profile.

If, on the contrary, it is the place given to the function that produces the problem — its mandate, reporting line, thresholds, circuits — the work is on the organisation: the position of the function →

Thinking Like Your Boss

Thinking like one's executive.

The work does not begin with one's own norm, risk or file. It begins with what the executive is trying to achieve. The aim is not to think like a boss in general, but like one's own executive: what they see, what they regard as a good result, what they expect to be brought up, what they expect not to see closed off at one's own level.

To this is added what initial training has not always provided and, for a professional already in post, the habits that certain good practices have instilled and that the executive does not expect of their function.

This is the minimum expected of any expert: to start from the decision and the expected result, and not only from one's discipline. Not everyone is meant to become the principal aiguilleur. But no one can be content with simply reading their norm.

The Off-site, at Quinta do Griffo, may be one of the places where this work is put to the test. Discover Thinking Like Your Boss →

Work on Thinking Like Your Boss with my team →

Holding the Post

When the post holds, the decision still passes through the norm. When the post drifts, prudence may become trajectory, operations work around it, or the executive gradually ceases to pilot in practice.

Learning to work on a decision that is not one's own. Working with the norm so that it allows the decision to pass through it, and not so that it becomes a wall.

The professional minimum

Even when one is not the principal aiguilleur, an expert function cannot produce only a reading of a norm. It provides material the decision can use:

• prohibitions,
• conditions,
• options,
• dependencies,
• the consequences of each route,
• the points that require an arbitration.

Not only reading one's norm.

BE THE ONE

All organisations have experts. Very few have aiguilleurs. An expert function becomes an aiguilleur when it allows the decision to move forward in a normatively dense environment without taking its place.

Holding the post does not mean: neutralising, slowing down, covering oneself, or silently capturing the decision. Holding the post means:

• informing,
• making usable,
• signalling breaking points,
• keeping a workable trajectory,
• allowing the decision to cross the normative environment without disappearing.

Be the One: becoming the person the executive calls because they know they will receive a better-equipped decision — not a decision already taken in their place.

The École works on this holding of the post, on real situations, under executive mandate or formal delegation.

Holding the post: learn more → · Be the One: learn more →

From Experts to Aiguilleurs

For the organisation: developing a team or certain professionals already in post.

The following configurations describe what a function produces, without presuming the motivations of those who hold it. They are responses to a prudential brief installed by default.

A production oriented towards maximum prudence

It anticipates, protects, documents. Without explicit piloting of the trajectory, this prudence may gradually become the organisation's implicit strategy: a strategy of hyper-prudence that nobody decided.

A production limited to minimum cover

It covers exposure and does what is necessary. Without piloting, this minimum may gradually become the trajectory: a strategy of under-ambition that nobody decided.

A production that concentrates information and the power of orientation

The circulation of normative intelligibility passes through it, and it occupies the space that the architecture has not defined. The executive decision then receives only what this production lets through.

Developing these productions means changing the frame of reference from which expertise produces. The point is the fit between the production and the mandate received: it is a matter of executive order, not an assessment of the worth of individuals.

The aiguilleur may already be there.

The organisation must still know how to recognise their role. Some organisations are fortunate enough to recruit professionals who spontaneously understand strategy, rank constraints and know how to keep a workable trajectory.

But without an explicit doctrine, without a clear mandate and without an architecture of command, these same professionals may be used as mere producers of norms: interpreting, covering, documenting, validating. Doctrine makes it possible to share what would otherwise depend on the chance of a recruitment or the intuition of an individual.

Why pass this on if some do it naturally? Because an organisation cannot be left to the chance of temperaments and recruitments.

Sounding Out the Team · What We Observe in a Profile

Sounding out the team.

Observing how a team actually holds its post in the decision trajectory. This is not a hidden assessment of individuals. It is a use of the same work, commissioned by the executive: the team is placed in front of a decision and a constraint that must be articulated, and we observe what it produces. We look in particular at:

• who goes back to their norm;
• who looks for the objective;
• who closes things down;
• who opens up options;
• who brings things up.

Sound out my team →

Aptitudes, not an impression.

What makes a profile hold a given place in this architecture cannot be reduced to seniority, technical quality or a manager's impression. These are aptitudes that can be observed:

• understanding the objective before the technique;
• ranking priorities;
• not closing too early;
• distinguishing what goes up from what is dealt with locally;
• tolerating ambiguity;
• formulating options;
• reading the organisation, and not only the law.

These are working hypotheses, to be tested with senior practitioners. What is observed sheds light on the place a person can hold in the architecture. The École defines and passes on these aptitudes; their implementation in recruitment or repositioning belongs to the organisational work described in §09, presented at The Quinta (Execute A).

When the question is “can someone in my team become an aiguilleur?”, a targeted reading of the profile — career, what they produce, how they reason — is often enough, without an HR programme.

Describe the situation →

Recruiting an Aiguilleur · Mentoring

Recruiting the aiguilleur.

The organisation holds the job description and runs the selection. The work covers the shortlisting of profiles, then the final interviews, to test whether the candidate can actually hold the post in relation to the decision; it belongs to the organisational work described in §09, presented at The Quinta (Execute A).

Send my job description →

Mentoring.

A selective, individual application process, for a professional already exposed to real decision situations.

Submit an application →

The N-1 Mandate: Exercising One's Own, Contributing to a Decision That Is Only Partly One's Own

The holder of an N-1 mandate is not simply someone who must stay at a distance from the decision. They hold a mandate of their own: they take decisions that belong to them, within a perimeter that is theirs, while contributing to the realisation of an executive decision that does not belong to them entirely.

Their autonomy is legitimate, like that of expert functions. The question begins when it takes the place of a decision belonging to another mandate, or when it silently alters its trajectory.

The distance may be hierarchical, functional, organisational or geographical. It is not a grade below Be the One: it is a position in the decision trajectory. Holding this mandate means:

• fully exercising the decisions that belong to the mandate;
• contributing to the realisation of the executive decision without silently altering its destination;
• making legible to headquarters what is really happening on the ground;
• bringing up what exceeds the mandate, or what alters the trajectory of the decision;
• exercising all the autonomy that execution requires without becoming an alternative decision-making centre.

The organisational diagnosis of distance is worked on from the organisation's side: by distance → Holding the mandate at a distance is worked on at the École, under the name BE N-1.

BE N-1: learn more →

When the N-1 Delegates to an N-2

The N-1 who delegates to an N-2 stands, for a more circumscribed mandate, in the position of the person in charge: they entrust, they remain expected to answer for what they have entrusted, and they must be able to answer for the part of the decision that passes through them.

The injunction to delegate, to empower teams and not to concentrate arbitrations is then reproduced at that level, while the requirement to give an account does not disappear. The N-2 in turn becomes the holder of a decision-making power, and may be invited to delegate in turn. Such cascading delegation is not pathological in itself: it may be legitimate and necessary.

What deserves examination is the gap between this dynamic of redistribution and the permanence of a mandate whose holder remains expected to deliver on direction, arbitrations and the outcome of their part of the trajectory. The problem is the same as at the executive level, one level further down.

The question is qualitative. Which decision is entrusted? What is its content? What destination must it serve? How far can the person who receives it modify it? When must it come back up? Who arbitrates, and how are the arbitrations retained?

To go further: The Decision as an Object of Executive Piloting — What Delegation Does Not Make Disappear →

Where to Start

Installing. The right mandates, roles, circuits, expectations and profiles can be installed from the outset, upstream of an appointment or a reorganisation. This is worked on from the side of “Decide A. · Hold A. · Execute A.” Holding the trajectory does not mean freezing the decision: it may evolve, provided the evolution is identified and arbitrated. Quinta do Griffo — Decide A. · Hold A. · Execute A. → Recruiting an aiguilleur belongs here (recruiting →).

Re-establishing. When the trajectory has moved away, one must understand what has shifted, and reposition the function, its productions and, where appropriate, the people. The three configurations are described above (configurations →). Understanding may first go through the Piloting & Trajectory Review, though this is not a mandatory prerequisite. The team observation arrangement is presented at the École (sounding out the team →).

When the problem calls for work on the function itself — mandate, organisation, expected output, recruitment, practices, tools, processes — it falls under organisational implementation, presented at The Quinta (Execute A).

These interventions at The Quinta. Installing the pilot → · Finding and training the aiguilleurs → (here: production, recruiting) · Repairing the trajectory → · Governing the whole → · Seen from the executive's side: Why this work →

Describe my situation → · Corpus IV — Repairing the Trajectory → · Corpus III — The Architecture of Command → · Answerable for the whole? →