An exception can look different from the other side.

A decision can feel like an exception to the person making it and still become information for everyone watching.

There are moments in organizations that seem too small to change anything.

A difficult conversation gets postponed because the timing isn't right. Someone behaves in a way that makes working together harder, but they are otherwise doing a good job. An exception is made because, this time, there is a good reason for it.

Individually, each decision can make sense. I've started to wonder whether the people around those decisions experience them quite as individually.

What feels like an exception to one person may already look like a pattern to someone else.

A leader may know why a difficult conversation had to wait. The people around them only know that the behavior continued. They may understand why an exception was necessary this time. Someone seeing the same exception for the third time has different information.

Neither perspective is necessarily wrong. They are simply seeing different things.

The person making the decision sees the circumstances around it. Everyone else also sees what happened before, what happened this time, and what seems likely to happen again.

That difference is easy to underestimate. An individual decision doesn't have to be unreasonable to send a signal beyond the situation it was meant to address. And the more often similar decisions happen, the less important the reasoning behind any one of them becomes.

The organization experiences the pattern they create.

This doesn't mean every exception becomes a rule. Organizations need exceptions. Circumstances are different, and treating every situation the same would create its own problems.

But exceptions aren't experienced in isolation either. Over time, people build an understanding of how things work from what they repeatedly see happen around them.

The reason for each decision may be different. What people around it experience is what keeps happening.