Train everyone to the same standard, and you can still end up with ten capable people responding ten different ways when it matters most.
For a long time, I assumed that meant some people understood the standard better than others. It seemed obvious: if people were delivering different experiences, surely they weren’t equally capable. The more organisations I’ve worked with, the less that explanation has held up.
Some of the greatest inconsistency I’ve seen has been in organisations full of highly capable people. People who genuinely cared and who could all explain the standard perfectly. The difference wasn’t what they knew. It was what they noticed.
Ten managers. One situation. Ten different reads.
Take something as ordinary as customer service. Ask ten experienced managers to watch the same interaction and explain what they saw. One notices how quickly the problem was solved. Another notices how reassured the customer felt. Another notices that an opportunity to build loyalty was missed.
None of them are necessarily wrong. They’re simply paying attention to different things. The inconsistency doesn’t begin when they decide what to do. It begins several seconds earlier, in what enters their awareness.
Attention shapes what we see
It’s tempting to think of noticing as little more than interpretation. It isn’t — attention is a limited cognitive resource.
Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons demonstrated this in their now-famous 1999 “Invisible Gorilla” experiment. Participants watched a video of basketball players passing a ball and were asked to count the passes. While concentrating, around half completely failed to notice someone dressed as a gorilla walking through the middle of the scene.
The gorilla wasn’t hidden. Their attention was occupied elsewhere.
The study has become famous precisely because it demonstrates something profoundly important: seeing isn’t simply a function of what’s in front of us. It’s also a function of what our attention has learned to prioritise.
Why this matters inside organisations
Organisations often assume inconsistency comes from different levels of knowledge. However, the evidence suggests another possibility.
Even when people know the same standard, they won’t necessarily notice the same cues when they encounter a live situation. Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), describes why: people build their read of a moment from whatever happens to be most salient at the time, not from everything they know. Two people holding identical knowledge can still walk away with two different readings of the same event, because only a fraction of what’s in their heads becomes the thing they’re attending to.
Knowledge tells us what matters. However, it’s attention that determines what reaches us in time to use that knowledge. These are not the same capability.
Experience changes what experts notice
Gary Klein’s research helps explain why. Studying experienced firefighters, military commanders and critical care professionals for his 1998 book Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, he found that experts rarely sat weighing up multiple options. Instead, they recognised patterns, drawing on situations they’d encountered many times before.
Years of experience had changed what they noticed first. Their expertise wasn’t simply stored as knowledge. It had become embedded in attention. They recognised situations that less experienced people didn’t even realise were significant.
The gap most organisations overlook
Traditional training is generally very good at helping people understand what good looks like. It’s much less effective at helping people recognise when that knowledge should come to the front of their mind during a live interaction.
Knowing the standard and recognising the moment it becomes relevant are different capabilities. Most organisations spend far more time developing the first than the second.
Isn’t this just a training problem?
It’s a fair challenge. Surely enough repetition, enough calibration, closes the gap eventually.
I don’t think it does — not on its own. Most calibration effort tests whether people can recall the standard. Almost none of it tests, or shapes, what people actually notice in the moment a real situation calls for judgement.
You can know a standard perfectly and still miss the exact second it applied, because nobody ever practised noticing that second with you. Only reciting the standard itself. It is one of the reasons continual observation and collective discussion is so important.
What changes on Monday?
Instead of only asking whether people know the standard, try asking something different — for example, what they noticed the last time they had to apply it:
- Ask three managers to review the same live or recorded interaction and write down the first three things they noticed.
- Compare their answers before discussing whether the decision was right or wrong.
- Use the differences to identify where the team lacks shared attention, not just shared knowledge.
Compare the answers across a team or group of capable people. If everyone notices roughly the same things, consistency becomes much easier to achieve. However, if everyone notices something different, more training on the same standard is unlikely to solve the problem.
Over time, organisations can make this more systematic. Structured observation, shared debriefs, and simple review prompts can all help teams compare what people noticed before they compare what they decided. That makes it easier to spot whether inconsistency is coming from unclear standards, uneven judgement, or attention being drawn to different cues.
The challenge isn’t necessarily knowledge. It’s attention. This will matter less in strict, heavily regulated work, where the rules are deliberately built to leave no room for individual attention or judgement at all. That’s why it’s always worth checking case by case, rather than assuming the same explanation applies everywhere.
A different way of thinking about consistency
For years I thought consistency was mostly about shared knowledge. Today I think it begins with shared attention. If ten capable people encounter the same situation tomorrow, what do they notice first?
If the answers are wildly different, inconsistency shouldn’t surprise us. We haven’t developed shared judgement yet. We’ve only developed shared knowledge. For organisations that depend on judgement, consistency improves when people are trained not only in what good looks like, but in what to notice soon enough to act on it.
