When Senior Teams Stop Debugging Their Decisions

Senior teams often stop debugging their decisions once alignment seems achieved, mistaking silence for clarity and shared understanding. This "interpretive drift" occurs when confidence replaces interrogation, compressing decision-making processes and hiding assumptions. The real risk isn’t misalignment but the invisible divergence of mental models, leading to downstream failures. Experience and efficiency paradoxically make senior teams more vulnerable to this, as they rely on intuition and compressed communication, reducing friction that tests assumptions. The solution lies in making thinking visible, even when decisions feel obvious, to prevent systemic drift.