People need freedom to act. Motivated, trained, and well-inculturated people don’t need to be “controlled.” Adults don’t need to be treated like children. People tend not to do their best work with someone looking over their shoulders.

Do people in your company—all people—have the authority (i.e., without approval from anyone) to make decisions that cost money? They ought to. Whoa! We bet that got your attention. Are we serious?

Yes. We’re very serious. Of course, we don’t mean that all people should have the authority to commit the company to million-dollar contracts, or that front-line clerks should be able to authorize the purchase of a new building. But people should have wide discretionary power to take responsibility to make sure something gets done fast, and done right.

The third level of judgment is not one particular voice but a set of collective voices. Fashion establishes hemlines, nationality establishes food and beverage patterns, social class establishes decorative taste, etiquette establishes which fork to use. These invisible voices also operate in your life as a source of judgment; you are likely to conform to their dictates blindly or feel guilty if you don’t.

Your defense is not necessarily to ignore or disobey these voices. Many such “rules” offer handy guidance and eliminate constant fussing. But it is necessary to recognize each collective voice for exactly what it is: an external standard of behavior. It is also necessary to know that a collective voice is only a pretender to power. You still have the freedom to govern your own behavior.

But what we forget is that while it’s easy for us to parse, others may not feel the same way. While we have spent lots of time thinking about something, or know a lot about it, we often fail to account for the fact that others may not be in the same position.

In their training, therapists learn that common sense is not always useful in counseling others. Human life is full of paradoxes and contradictions.

The person closest to the problem often has the most accurate information about it. What they tend to lack is a broader perspective. The person working on the line at McDonald’s knows how to fix a recurring problem at their restaurant better than a person merely analyzing some data. What they don’t know is how it fits into the bigger picture. They don’t know whether the problem exists everywhere, or whether the solution wold cause more harm than good if implemented globally, or how to roll the idea out to everyone.